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

Not when you're standing up there on a stage and you're trying to convince a hundred people to sell you their homes so that they can move into new homes, and get one of the five hundred new jobs that you're going to bring with you.

Not when you get off the stage, and the next speaker they've got on is a community leader who tells them a bunch of stuff about how she's going to bring in foreigners to work the factory, about how she's just like all the others, about how they're not going to see a nickel of that money returned to the community.

Lowe Industrial has always prided itself on giving back to the community, wherever it could feasibly be done. And Morgan has always been careful to uphold that, even forward it where she could.

But none of it matters to people, because in their minds, corporate factories like Lowe are all the same. Morgan takes a breath and looks around.

"Any questions?"

He seems to think about it for a minute. He looks around.

"You hiring local, or are you just bringing your boys up from Colorado or wherever?"

That's a question that she's always hoped someone would ask, but the second she hears it, for an instant, she freezes up. Then the words start to come back to her, and she's back in her element.

"We've got a policy of hiring as many local workers as possible. However, it often proves necessary to provide on-the-job training to make sure that our new locations offer the same high standards of quality and the same high efficiency as our prior locations.

"It can be difficult to do that without having management end up as overbearing and controlling. We aim to have a high rate of manufacture because our workers are driven to work harder, rather than simply threatening their jobs if they don't work hard enough.

"For that reason, the first year or two, we will have to have previously-trained Lowe Industrial management staff working alongside local workers, until the management style has, you know, rubbed off on them."

She finishes the speech breathless and with a practiced smile. That might have won him over. It's a good speech and she's only had a few chances to use it. The past four months, she's been to a half-dozen town-halls and almost nobody asks her to her face if they're going to hire locals.

They either believe her when she says they plan to, or they believe the guys who say that they absolutely won't. So she doesn't get a chance to give the more-details version of the little speech.

But in reality, it gives a great overview of how Lowe Industrial differs from their competition. As far as Morgan's concerned, maybe they should be using it as the beginning of all their corporate speeches.

Then she looks at Phil Callahan's face, and the way he looks so thoroughly unconvinced…

She lets out a sigh. This was a mistake.

She should just give up, but she can't afford to now. Not after two days of work. If she doesn't get the Callahan ranch, she'll tear her hair out.

She's going to get it, if it's the last thing she ever does as President of the company.

Chapter Seven

Phil Callahan closed the truck door and got onto the highway before he knew what he was doing again. Talking about a damn factory? What interest did he have in anything to do with it?

He knew it would be a waste of his time. It always would be, because it wasn't moral opposition to the project that stopped him from selling his land. She must have decided that was it, though.

The truth was, it was a lot of little things. There's no way around it—yes, he needed the money. He needed to keep the property renovated properly. He needed to keep the horses fed.

But he wasn't going to leave the place that his wife had loved, the place where she'd been buried, so that he could get a paycheck.

He wasn't going to give up ranching just because of some financial difficulties. If he could get some of these horses sold off, like he should have already done, then… that would be different.

But he hadn't been able to so far. Every time that he reached for the phone and tried to set up a meeting, tried to get something moving with the Stallion, he hadn't been able to do it.

A three-year-old horse is already old enough to be making money on the track. Now he's got to be broken, trained up, they've got to find him a rider… there's probably another year's worth of getting him ready for racing.

Which means that by then, he's a four-year-old horse, and only five or six years of racing ahead of him. That will hurt the price, no doubt about it. Which is why he should've been gone already. Should've been sold off. It was Philip's own stupidity.

He takes a deep breath and holds it a little while. Eases off the interstate and then five minutes later he's pulling into the big yard out front of the ranch. Looking at the clock tells him before he even needs to ask why the boys are all piled into the bed of their old, beat-up Ford.

"How'd your whatever-it-was go, boss?"

"Waste of time. Should've been here."