Rode Hard, Put Up Wet: Cowboy Romance (Rebels & Outlaws 2)

"Don't call me that."

"What?" He heard her just fine, but it seems strange. Just manners, isn't it? Or would she prefer 'miss?'

"Don't call me 'ma'am.'"

"Sorry. Miss?"

"Look. Just don't patronize me." She slips the hard hat off finally. Her hair's cut a little short for Philip's taste, only to the jaw. Any longer and it might not be safe for the job site, though, and it's good that she's taken that into consideration. "Woman in construction, I get enough of that as it is."

"I didn't mean anything by it," he says.

She smiles with a resignation that says that either she already knew that, or it didn't matter in the first place.

"Shall we continue?"

Chapter Six

Morgan Lowe's heart is pounding in her chest. She's got to impress him somehow, and she can't see a single way that she's going to do that. Not after the colossal screw-up that she just got to walk in on.

First they'd walked right in on one of her guys, slacking on the job, and then, as if to make matters worse, Philip had decided to step in.

If she calls him on it, she's a bitch. If she lets it go, she's a wimp who lets outsiders talk down to her employees. Well, one of those is a quality she can live with. So she called him on it.

But that immediately puts them on the wrong foot. Immediately and irrevocably. And that's a whole mess of its own.

"This area here is going to be where the line starts," she begins. The sun's shining just wrong on them, getting in her eyes no matter where she looks, it seems. She starts walking back, the entire routine practiced. "It opens up into a few different areas, next. You get a few pieces of machinery that handle jobs that are too dangerous. Too hot, too big a risk of getting crushed by something heavy falling…"

"If there's such a big risk, couldn't you find another way? You don't need machines to do it where a person can't."

Morgan stares at him dully. Sure, they could completely retool their entire line. They could do everything by hand, double their costs, and for their clients, knowing it all had the human touch might be worth an extra dollar per unit.

They'd think it was a real big deal, too. They'd be bragging about how they ate the massive over-cost of human labor, when in fact that only goes to cover maybe a third of the difference.

Two more dollars per unit just comes out of profit. And while she's always been pleased with how well the company does for itself, two dollars per unit takes it from 'narrow margin' to 'razor-thin margin.'

If the price of a single item on the line went up, they'd have to

raise prices, or they'd have to go out of business, because they wouldn't be able to eat the price of aluminum going up like the price of, say, copper had the past decade or so.

"We'll think about it, definitely." Morgan tries to smile in a friendly way, but it's probably not working, and she doesn't much expect it to. She's not going to think about it any more than she already has.

They could have a completely automated factory, these days. With the level of complexity machines can work at, she's already putting as many people to work as she can afford. The truth is that they've already got the human touch.

Human assembly, humans work the line… but the metal cutting, the heat-treating… it could all be done by hand, at one one-hundredth the speed, and at several multiples of difference to the cost.

"Over here, we have assembly. It goes through several different stages, of course." The entire demonstration works better when you're inside a building. They've got girders up now, and in a few days they might start putting up walls.

But as it stands right now, they're standing in a big pile of dirt, surrounded by steel beams. It's hard to say that this area is assembly, because first of all, no it isn't—it's a patch of dirt. Second, they just don't see it in their heads, the way you do when you're standing on a factory floor, the machines silent for the night…

They don't see it the way she sees it. The way that she's always seen it, since she was five years old. They don't know these buildings.

They don't know the work. And quite frankly, whether they're an investor, or a corporate buyer, or a rancher who won't sell his land, they don't care. Not the way that she cares.

Morgan Lowe doesn't expect any miracles. She knows the type of guy who doesn't sell is out there. Someone who doesn't view money as all that valuable compared to other things in life.

There are plenty of people like that, and as much as she doesn't like to think that she's a bad person, no more than anyone else, it's not hard to hear people talking about how when a corporation comes in—corporations like Lowe Industrial, though they're still not big enough to be the first thing that comes to mind—everything goes to shit.

That's completely, patently false. She has seen towns prosper because Lowe came in. But facts don't matter, not in the long run.