The Rancher's Wedding - Diana Palmer Page 0,4
around Dallas. There’s a place called Dinosaur Valley. . . .”
“With thousands of bones,” he added with a glimmer in his eyes. “Yes. I’ve been there. My father was trained as a paleontologist. He taught at a college in Dallas.”
She caught her breath. “I’d love to study that,” she said. She laughed self-consciously. “I only had two years of college,” she confessed. “I minored in Spanish. We have a large Hispanic population in Georgia. I thought of teaching. But I couldn’t decide, so I just took core courses.”
“I majored in business,” he said. “You need to know economics to run a ranch profitably.” He didn’t add that the ranch wasn’t his main source of income. His fortune was the result of an inheritance from his grandfather that included several million dollars plus thousands of acres here near Benton, Colorado, and a thriving Black Angus purebred ranch. He’d parlayed that fortune into a much larger fortune by investing in oil stocks and buying up failing exploration companies and refineries. His inheritance plus his business sense had made him a multimillionaire.
It didn’t show that he was rich. Right now, he was glad. This little violet was good company. He had a feeling that she’d have run right out the door if he’d shown up in a stretch limo wearing designer clothes and a Rolex—all of which he had.
“I’ve never been around ranches,” she confessed, staring out the window. “We have big farms in Georgia, but not so many ranches, especially not in the Atlanta suburbs. We’re very metropolitan.”
“But you know about chicken farms,” he teased.
She laughed self-consciously. “Well, yes. I love animals.”
“So do I,” he added. “We use old-timey methods around here. The livestock are treated like part of the family. They’re all purebred. We breed for certain traits that they’ll pass down to their progeny. We don’t run beef cattle,” he added when she looked perplexed.
“You don’t?” she asked, surprised.
He shrugged. “Hard to kill something you raised from a baby,” he said. “I’m partial to fish and chicken. I don’t eat a lot of beef.”
She was fascinated. It showed.
He laughed. “Not that I mind a well-cooked steak,” he added. “As long as it’s not one of my prize Angus.”
“There are always pictures in the local cattle journal of cattle sales.”
“We have a production sale here in February,” he told her. “It’s a big deal. We entertain a lot of out-of-state buyers. We feed them great barbecue and hope they’ll spend plenty of money.”
“You sell off the little cows, then?” she asked.
He chuckled at her terminology. “Yearlings, mostly,” he said. “Some open heifers, some pregnant ones, a few bulls.”
She was out of her depth. “It sounds very complicated.”
“Only to an Eastern tenderfoot,” he teased gently.
She smiled back, a little shyly, and sipped her coffee.
“I like your house,” she said after a brief and vaguely uncomfortable silence. “It looks just like I’d expect a western ranch house to look.”
He frowned slightly. “Never been out west?”
She shook her head. “No. Mom and Dad lived in New York and I went up to visit a lot, but I’ve only seen the states back in the East.”
“Does your father still live there?”
“No.” She sipped coffee, wincing at her blunt reply. “He came out here because he had a cousin who worked at the local equipment store,” she added hurriedly. “His cousin had already moved on, but he gave him a good reference. Daddy’s worked there for about a month. Like I have, at the restaurant.”
“Big-city people,” he mused, studying her. “The culture shock must be extreme.”
She flushed and fumbled with her coffee cup. “It is, a little, I guess. I got used to traffic noises and sirens in Atlanta. The small house Dad and I rent is close to a railroad, so that’s nice at night.” She laughed. “It’s like home.” She didn’t add that she’d moved into a luxurious house on the lake north of Atlanta, to get away from those traffic noises. She missed the lake.
“What did you do in Atlanta? Another waitressing job?”
She couldn’t tell him that. It might lead to embarrassing questions about why she’d left such a lucrative position to get a minimum wage job out in Colorado. “I did feature stories for a newspaper,” she said finally. It wasn’t so far from the truth. She’d started out as a newspaper reporter after college, working her way up to news editor before her father introduced her to some people in New York. She’d ended up doing screenplays, a much more profitable