The Cowboy's Texas Rose (The Dixons of Legacy Ranch 1)

Chapter Twenty

Toby grinned. “You want the job?”

“Yes, I want the job!” Rose squealed.

Toby chuckled. “Good. You can come out here when your stint with UT ends. Even…” He waited for her eyes to reconnect with him. He took a deep breath. “Your boy could, too. You guys could stay here if you want. Expenses covered.”

She silenced, and her initial excitement seemed to cool. Then her eyes darted away. Unease filtered into Toby’s stomach. What was happening?

“Yeah, Sage. I wasn’t thinking. This is something I need to think more carefully about. Who would watch Sage while I work?”

He shrugged again. “Me. He could hang out here or with Shirley when she gets back to town. She loves kids. Got her a brood of grandkids and would stay home and bake them cookies all day if she could.”

“But documenting those sites will take solid years, not just summers—doing it right, that is. I mean, it could be my whole career.”

He smiled. Years? Hell yes. That was fine by him. “Can’t say I’d complain, having you underfoot for years.”

She smiled at his backhanded joke but seemed to be withdrawing. His smile fell again. Dammit, had he overplayed his hand? Had he gotten too confident in too short amount of time? Thinking she’d jump so fast and so hard at the chance to get her hands on the rest of Ghost Canyon, that she wouldn’t look where she was jumping first? Toby squeezed her hand, urgency to pull her back to the moment coursing through him.

“Of course, I’d put you on the Legacy’s payroll, you’d get a salary, and you could get your own place in town if you wanted. I didn’t mean to, uh, you know, sound like I was taking things too fast…”

She squeezed his hand in return, but when she didn’t say anything, he continued, even though he could sense he was stuffing his foot in his mouth.

“I just figured while I’m making all these changes to the land, I could take you up on your offer to get these sites on the record, maybe expand my archive room to its own facility or something and turn it into a satellite research campus. Still gotta make an initial offer to your fine longhorn establishment about that, but I wonder, too, if they know I’ve hired one of their own, maybe they’d be inclined to keep you on their payroll instead as a lead researcher and you could be based out here. I mean, if they can have the McDonald Observatory for the astronomers near Marfa, why not have a satellite archaeological facility out here, too? Maybe there’s a grant I could apply for to get it off the ground. I just thought”—he was rambling; he hadn’t rambled since he he’d been a boy being forced to fess up to a crime against his brothers—“that between the two of us, we’d get my property where I want it to be and maybe you’d get some sweet research that could propel your career forward, get you published…”

He looked away, finally shutting himself up. After agonizing moments, she spoke. Her voice was scratchy. “This is a generous offer. But—”

He dropped her hand and pulled back. She stopped talking at his severance, while he stared woodenly at his desk. Fuck. He had no other word in mind except for that. He’d scared her off. He snatched his books and notepad and shuffled them into a haphazard stack as if to clean up.

“It’s okay.” He forced a strained smile but couldn’t look at her. God, was his neck creeping with redness? Yeah, he’d thought he was getting to know her well enough to make this judgment call, and he’d misjudged. “I came on strong. It wasn’t my intention. I misunderstood. If you don’t want to bring your son out here—”

“Toby.”

He looked at her.

She seemed amused, as if she suppressed a grin. “I wasn’t going to turn you down. God, no. What you’ve described sounds like a dream job. At least to me.”

He took a cautious deep breath. The talons of embarrassment squeezing his lungs eased a degree but didn’t relent because he could sense there was more.

“But?” he asked.

Rose nodded. “I have a lot of questions. But…what I was going to say is watching Sage isn’t that easy. He’s special needs.”

Toby held her gaze. “Like, a wheelchair or something? I can install a ramp so he can come and go.”

She shook her head. “He’s autistic.” She looked away, as if ashamed, and swallowed. “He’s so smart. But he’s got some quirks, and sometimes it’s hard getting through to him. A lot of the time, it’s hard for him to get through to us. He’s still learning how to talk and communicate. Sometimes it seems as if what I say goes in one ear and out the other, and other times he hears the inanest things that he repeats forever. He can be a handful during a meltdown. And thank goodness they’re rare now because when he was younger, they were constant, and I can’t always physically handle him now that he’s stronger. He gets a lot of services through school that help him improve his speech and socialize better with his friends. What would he do out here while I work? Temporarily change schools for several years, then switch back again when the job is over? I worry that he’d regress if I uproot him over and over again, plus I’d have to go through all the work of having him evaluated again so his IEP could be adopted into the schools out here, and I worry that there wouldn’t be enough resources here. And he has a goat he can barely stand to leave behind at my dad’s ranch for the year…”

Toby took in what she was saying. Now she was rambling, and it was clear her son made her self-conscious. He knew nothing about autism, but he knew now what he’d be Googling in the coming days. Still, he tried to play it off. Clearly, Rose was sensitive to the topic.

“He could bring his goat. It ain’t like I can’t take care of a goat—”

“Two, actually—one is his goat’s companion.”

Toby suppressed a smile. “I don’t know. You’ve seen the shortage of space around here. Hundreds of thousands of acres would be enough for one, but for two?”

She relented, chuckled at his sarcasm.

“Listen.” He took a deep breath. “If you stayed in town in your own place, the goats could board here. Sage could see ’em any day he wanted. We’re talking about two goats, and I know my wranglers could handle that.”