“Yup. Spring fed. Good stuff. I’m letting two of the fields nearby grow—keeping the cattle off it and fencing a new pasture. Gonna try to revive some grassland, and thought I’d build a workshop out where y’all’s campers will park. I removed the pipes feeding the circular troughs in those fields and diverted the flow over to your spigot.”
“Huh,” she remarked, a switch of genuine intrigue flipping in her eyes. “So you’re aware that before the arrival of cattle prior to the fifteen hundreds that much of this area wasn’t originally desertified but was a grassland biome?”
Ha,he thought to himself. She hadn’t heard him say anything beyond “grassland” before going off on some scholarly tangent. “I don’t know much in the way of archaeology, and fancy words annoy me.”
She looked down, a sheepish smile working its way onto her face. “Sorry, I’m pretty intense sometimes. I just love this stuff so much. Biome is just another word for ecosystem, and—”
“Yeah, no worries.” He was about to blow her mind. “I studied some agricultural science.”
She fell silent. “Oh. Okay, wow.”
He grinned, enjoying a chance to screw with her perceptions. Most people thought he was just another bumpkin. Not like he tried hard to convince them otherwise. If he acted like the screwup everyone thought he was, he didn’t have to compete with anyone for anything, didn’t have to live up to any grand expectations.
“I know what the land used to be like and what it ought to be like to be healthy. Soil erosion is a big concern of mine, and grasslands would hold the dirt together.”
“I’m so sorry. You just didn’t strike me as—” She cut herself off this time, but not soon enough, as he noticed her cheeks splotching with more redness as she mouthed to herself, Oh my God, I am such an asshole.
“What, the ‘smart’ type?” he teased, treating her to his lady-killing grin that he knew had made her stare at him. Except she didn’t swoon or offer herself up to him for sexual sacrifice like any number of other women.
“God no. Anyone running the Legacy is obviously smart. I meant the academic type.”
“I’m not. I’m a country boy. Couldn’t wait to get the hell out of College Station and Texas A&M.”
“Eew, you’re an Aggie?” she joked, crossing her fingers at him as if to ward off evil and, truth be told, lightening the mood. “I don’t think we can be in the same car together.”
He chuckled. Everyone knew the rivalry that existed between the University of Texas Longhorns and the Texas A&M Aggies—and the wealth of jokes people made at the other school’s expense. “Let’s get a couple things straight, Miss Morales.”
“Doctor. Morales,” she said with the same false pretentiousness that he’d used when saying great room.
He grinned and looked at the teasing glare she was leveling at him. “Okaaay, Doctor.—”
She started laughing again. “I’m just kidding. Call me Rose.”
He chuckled again, rolling his eyes. “All right, Doctor Smart Ass. A: This ain’t a car. It’s a truck. B: I’ve burned my fair share of longhorn effigies—”
“C: It’s not a truck. It’s a glorified SUV. I know how you boys like your trucks. Let’s be honest, but hey, tomato, to-mah-toe.” She grinned. “And D: Texas A&M falls under the same category as the University of Oklahoma.”
“Oh yeah? How so?” He was just egging her on now.
“It still sucks.”
A full-on laugh raked his throat. That old joke about OU sucking? Every longhorn he’d ever met used it at some point. And yet he had to admit it. She was awesome. And, he noted, she wasn’t sending out any come-ons, either. Rose was fun and laid back. But she wasn’t flaunting her body, which was rockin’ by the way—toned with slender muscles, hugged by clothes that had seen a lot of time in actual dirt rather than being distressed to look like it—and she seemed tough, too, as if she knew the way of this world, as if she could handle a jackhammer with one eye closed and an arm tied behind her back if that’s what it would take to make it in life.
“That’s how it is, the whole ‘OU sucks’ joke,” he added, nodding as his smile lifted into a lazy smirk. “Well, no one ever credited a longhorn with being witty.”
She tipped her head back and laughed, causing him to laugh, too, then amicable silence fell between them.
“So,” she finally said to fill the void, “you aren’t exactly what I was expecting.”
Hell, she wasn’t what he’d been expecting this morning, either. Not by a long shot.