Page 47 of The Cowboy Who Looked Again

“I thought you talked to that wildlife officer about the owls.”

Dawson’s face scrunched up as he tried to remember such a conversation. “What?”

“A few weeks ago,” Duke said as he frowned at his phone. “Her name is Caroline Thompson, and she said the paperwork for the endangered owls on our ranch never got filed.” He lifted his eyes. “We have endangered owls on our ranch?”

“No.” Dawson stood among all the bovines, his mind sparking at him. “And I met with a guy named Ryan Murphy. He said they’d had sightings of burrowing owls here, due to our large population of prairie dogs. It was nothing.”

“Well, it’s not nothing to Caroline Thompson. You need to call her and figure out what form she needs. Then file it.”

Irritation sparked through Dawson. If he’d needed to file a form, he would’ve. The last wildlife officer who’d been out to the ranch had said no such thing. “Yes, sir,” he said as he turned his back on his brother to return to work.

After lunch—which his sister-in-law Zona did feed him—Dawson went to work in the detached office next to the main barn. He’d built it himself with the help of his daddy, and while it wasn’t huge, it suited him perfectly.

A big desk waited for him, with a view of the ranch beyond the only window in the building. Four filing cabinets flanked the desk, two on each side, and Dawson knew every file in every folder in the drawers. He’d hung a whiteboard on the right-hand wall, where he kept track of deadlines and dates, websites where he needed to file various taxes and forms, and his own notes from his thoughts.

He closed the door behind him and reached to flip the air conditioning up higher. He kept it on seventy-five when he wasn’t working in the office, and seventy when he was. It wouldn’t take long to cool down, but it did run continuously most afternoons.

By some miracle Dawson didn’t understand, his father didn’t complain about the cost of air conditioning the small office.

He settled at his desk and looked at the list from yesterday. He made sure to keep a meticulous to-do list, and he paged back in his desk planner until he found the day he’d met with the Wildlife Officer Ryan.

It had been the same day of the electrical fire—well, the day after. They’d all gone down to Shiloh Ridge Ranch, where they’d hosted a big luncheon for the people who’d been displaced, and Dawson had taken the call from there.

He’d pulled his brother away from talking with Link’s girlfriend and Misty’s best friend, and they’d come back to the ranch to talk to the man. Only Dawson had met with him, but he’d taken notes.

Sightings of burrowing owls in prairie dog colonies. Watch for them and report them to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department if seen. That was it.

“And I haven’t seen any owls,” he said, flipping back to today, a little over a month later. In fact, Dawson hated the prairie dogs that holed up the farmland here on the ranch, and he’d consulted with Daddy and Duke over the years about removing them from Hidden Hills.

Duke had forwarded the text from Caroline Thompson, a woman Dawson had never heard of nor met, but he’d deal with her after he finished today’s to-do list. He added her to the bottom of it and went back to the top to get through the tasks that needed doing today.

After setting his phone to play classical music through the Bluetooth speaker on his desk, he pulled the ledger with the ranch’s finances toward him. Duke had turned in receipts for payroll, the water bill, and more, and he needed to get everything entered for June so they had an accurate picture of their money for July.

They weren’t all billionaires like the Glovers, after all.

Hidden Hills did well for its size—it produced enough to support him, Brandon, and Duke, as well as a tidy retirement amount for Dawson’s parents. They all worked hard around this place, and with some of Arizona’s money, they’d expanded the ranch on the western edge and added three hundred more cattle to their herd.

Duke partnered with the Glovers in everything, from when they drove the cattle into the hills, to splitting the manpower required to watch over them there, to the round up, branding, planting, harvest, all of it.

Dawson lost himself inside the pretty music notes and a series of numbers, and before he knew it, someone had opened the door behind him. It took him a moment to pull himself from the computer screen and what dominated his thoughts, so he hadn’t turned around before a woman demanded, “Why have you been ignoring my messages?”

He turned then, blinking at the person who’d interrupted his peace. Who was letting in all the hot air and releasing all the cool air conditioning.

A blonde woman stood there in a pair of sexy khaki shorts with a matching shirt with buttons running up the front. She wore the insignia of Texas above her breast pocket and a pure tornado in her expression.

“I—who are you?” he asked as he stood up. He didn’t want to be attracted to her, but plenty of fizz fired through him as she took another step toward him.

“Caroline Thompson,” she spat at him. “We spoke on the phone this morning.”

Dawson returned her glare, the only thing on his mind how stunningly gorgeous her blue eyes were. He’d forgotten his own name. What he’d been doing. Why he hated being interrupted, and how the heat of a Texas July bothered him.

Something nagged in his mind, and his eyebrows drew down. “We talked this morning? Are you sure?”

She scoffed, which only made his heart beat faster. He couldn’t wait to find out who she was, if she was single, and if she might go out with him.

Chapter Sixteen

Caroline Thompson glared at the handsome cowboy who wouldn’t look away from her. He could be categorized as all-brown, from his hair to his eyes to his skin. He wore a full beard that somehow made him feel more like a con-man to Caroline than the cowboy hat suggested.

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