“Just checking out the scenery,” he quipped.
Yeah, I see something I like.He stared at his plate, brow furrowed, and for a moment felt guilty. She wasn’t a no-name girl. She was Rose. He’d just finished not-shagging some blonde in hot-pink undies named…named—aw, fuck it, her name was Blonde Chick from here on out—and already he was checking out Rose’s backside.
As for her impression of him? Well, she would have no way of knowing that he—at a mere thirty-one years of age—sat on several million dollars and owned one of the most prominent ranches in the area, if she’d even given him that much thought. His appearance marked him as just another Texas redneck driving a jacked-up Bronco. Hee-fucking-haw.
He gave Stella a lazy finger lift. The woman brought more coffee and refilled his mug, sliding a packet of ibuprofen across the counter, too.
“Ah, you know just what I like, woman,” he teased, winking, and she threw her head back and laughed a loud, husky laugh.
“Lord have mercy!” she exclaimed into the noise. “By the time I got done with the likes of you, Toby Dixon,” she continued, leaning onto her arm and causing her hefty breasts to squeeze upward while she muttered conspiratorially, “you wouldn’t be able to mount up for weeks.”
He chuckled languorously. “Is that a challenge?”
She shook her head. “That’s a fact.”
“Ah, that’s a fact,” he repeated, smirking, as she moseyed off to find her rag again when a shift in the air told him that he had company.
A waft of freshness and the faint smell of tea tree breezed against his face, and he inhaled reflexively.
“Yeah, but judging by your pathetic state right now, I’d say some lucky woman done wore you out already,” Stella said over her shoulder with a waggle of the eyebrow, before spotting the customer beside him and cutting herself off.
It was Rose. He knew it.
Any other day, he would have laughed off Stella’s harmless teasing. But it bothered him now. Rose must have heard, and she probably wasn’t impressed by his prowess. Or lack of prowess, if last night’s failed one-nighter was any indication. A stupid thought, too, because it wasn’t like her opinion of him mattered.
“It’s Rose, right?” Stella said with a smile as she came back to serve the young woman standing beside him.
“Yes, ma’am,” Rose replied good-naturedly with a mock salute. “You’ve got a good memory.”
“Like a steel trap,” Stella concurred with a wink, refilling another customer’s cup at the same time. “What can I do y’for?”
“Payin’ up, hitchin’ up, movin’ out. Giving you back your restaurant.” Rose grinned, and Toby couldn’t resist a sidelong glance that skimmed down her body. She pushed a mishmash of rumpled bills across the counter. “Sorry. We all pitched in. It should be more than enough.”
Stella pulled their ticket from her apron and counted the heap. “That’s thirty bucks change coming your way.”
“Nope.” Rose gestured. “We’re a rowdy lot. Keep it.”
A rowdy lot? Surely she was joking. Toby snorted, feeling Rose’s sidelong glance. “Rowdy” was when a biker lost at pool and snapped his cue over someone else’s head, inciting a brawl that shut down Amigo’s for a week to patch up damages, not a group of kids taking up space at a diner and talking a little too loudly for a man with a hangover.
Rose started to leave when Stella said, “Have you met Mister Dixon yet?”
Toby froze mid-sip. What the hell was Stella playing at, trying to introduce a woman to him at a time like this?
“Nope,” Rose replied. “I emailed him yesterday afternoon when I never got confirmation back from his office manager but didn’t get an answer.”
Toby slid his phone out from under the counter and tapped his email app. No. Way. Not. Possible. An email from R. Morales from the University of Texas at Austin sat at the top of his inbox. The subject line: Archaeology field school confirmation.
Crap.
Crap, crap, crap! And he had his crew of mini hikers coming by mid-morning. Shirley normally handled the field school details, too. Things were slipping through the cracks in her absence. The woman was getting a raise when she came back to work, and it would be worth every penny.
For the past two summers, the grad students had come out to excavate and record data in one of the ranch’s gorges, Ghost Canyon, at a rock shelter known among Texas archaeologists as the panther shaman site. It had first been discovered by his great-great-granddad in the 1910s, and three years ago, at his mother’s design before she’d fallen ill, a crew had come out to record the site’s degradation and conduct an excavation. When Shirley had told him they wanted to return this summer, he’d said sure, signed off on the contract, and not thought another thing of it. He’d probably been too busy falling off the wagon yesterday to hear his email ding.
“Well, you’re looking at Mister Dixon right now, rancher extraordinaire at the Legacy, Dixon Cattle Company.” Stella nodded to him with a shit-eating grin.
Screw. Her. Toby wiped a paper napkin across his mouth and looked up. “You’re R. Morales?”
“In the flesh.” She smiled with a cute shoulder shrug.