Page 11 of Risking it for the Cowboy

She turned on red lights that glowed dark and murky around them.

“Welcome to my happy place.”

He stepped into the hidden world she’d created.

Chapter Four

The earthy smell hit first. Then, as his eyes focused through the light, rows of neatly aligned planters, growing … daisies?

He furrowed his brow, stepped through the door and, this time, didn’t insist on holding it for her, as she closed and sealed it. He was out of his league in here. This was what she did now instead of play music? This was the opposite of a starlet chasing Nashville. This was a wallflower hiding.

He looked over at her, as she took an iPad off the wall, tapped in a passcode, and began swiping through screens. Then turned it and held it out to him to see; a dose of sheepishness on her face and an equal amount of pride.

A jumble of words and images flashed out at him. Whoa … that was a lot. But she looked so nervous, sharing something special to her with him, he didn’t have the heart to tell her there was no way he could read all of that so fast. He leaned in and pretended to decipher instead, but his heart was racing.

He should leave her to her life and get his rocks off somewhere else tonight. She wasn’t a good-time girl but was a prize he wasn’t worthy of winning.

“They look like daisies.”

“That’s because they are. They’re an extinct ancestor to the aphanostephus ramosissimus.”

“Aphanstawhat?”

She laughed. “It’s the fancy name for doze daisies, a kind of wild daisy.”

“Why you gotta keep ’em locked up? Where no one can see ’em bloom?” As if she were one of them, hiding her talent from the world.

She opened an app, walked down the rubberized flooring, inspecting, a reverent softness on her face as she squatted and dipped her head to look beneath a leaf.

“These plants went extinct as development and ranching redefined the landscape. But a three-hundred-year-old expedition by Spanish explorers collecting specimens that just so happened to be in their reproductive phase saw them brought to Europe. Eventually they were donated to an herbarium in New York. And they were still viable, as it turns out.”

“So, you’re like a botanist or something?”

“Yeah. But I study fossilized flora and run an experimental paleobotany program.”

His pulse ratcheted up as she kept explaining, kept making it clear that she was much better than a farm foreman and shop mechanic and maybe wouldn’t even be interested in his proposition for her, if she was already building an accomplished career.

“I’m growing these specifically because their embryos and pollen are almost identical to a roughly sixty-five-million-year-old specimen I first learned about when I was seven.”

“Seven?”

She laughed, but then that wistful quietude that had exuded from her from the moment he’d spotted her, silenced her again.

“C’mon. I wanna know all about you,” he said softly. “What inspires you. What’s kept you hidden from me all this time I’ve lived out here.” Why I can’t seem to walk away.

She glanced at him as if wondering if she could trust him.

Naw, baby, you shouldn’t. He’d never hurt a girl, but he’d earned the notches on his bedpost and, if he were honest, that was all tonight had first been about, too, until she’d resisted his charm and picked up that banjo and then, she’d become much more than a notch. She’d become a … possibility. Maybe even a reason.

She motioned to a rolling case like a librarian’s book return cart. Pulled out a textbook from it and opened it to a page that seemed to simply fall open due to having been looked at so much.

She held the book out to him. Shit, all one side of the page, nothing but tiny columns of text. He loosened the neck on the sterile suit to get a deeper breath, when she pointed to the photographs on the opposite page.

The top photograph, a landscape he’d hiked lots of times in the nearby state park. And the one beneath it, a close-up of a massive … limestone outcrop?

“I’m lookin’ at rocks, Flower Girl.” McClintock leveled a teasing smirk at her to offset the nerves chewing through him to bolt, or to grab her and sink into her body and mind and distract them both.

“A-plus, Trouble,” she teased back, and he loved it, because she didn’t tease easily. A guy had to earn it. “But no, really, see them?” She stepped beside him, arm brushing his chest, and he placed a hand on her shoulder.