As it turned out, Eileen far preferred wrangling horses to wrangling slippery corporate eels.
She had tried her best - oh Lord, nobody could claim otherwise. For a solid ten years, the bleach-blonde knockout had poured blood, sweat and tears into corporate America, mostly for the sake of her father, may he rest in peace. The elder Maxwell had insisted that she not simply content herself with running the family's ranch, that she go out there, get into the cutthroat world of their family's petroleum empire, really put her best foot forward at being the new matriarch of the Maxwell clan. She had done her level best, and indeed, the company had done quite well under her leadership - it came as a shock to Board when she announced her retirement, right at what seemed to be the height of her success.
The reasoning for it was very simple. She was plain old tired Exhausted, really, with corporate subterfuge, with always having to watch her back, with being the kind of woman who talked herself into screwing over old friends if it meant bumping up this quarter's profits. It was draining, and at thirty-seven years old, when strict diet and exercise still had her looking fabulous and in good health, she had quit. Gotten out, sold off her shares, taken her personal fortune and settled down to spend her days working with equines in fields rather than yes-men in offices. Let it be someone else's soul slowly getting sucked away and drained into a shadow of what it used to be.
There was at least one person from that whole effort who had proved not to be a bother. On the contrary - she had come to enjoy the company of the twenty-three year old petite redhead currently brushing one of the stallions as Eileen took a load off for a while. Karen had bonded rather unexpectedly with the corporate matriarch in Eileen's last year at Maxwell Petroleum, forming a genuine friendship over their shared love of equines. Beautiful creatures, they both agreed, and Karen had soon found herself spending a great deal of free time on the ranch, throwing herself into caring for the majestic animals raised here.
Still, what had actually gotten Eileen's attention in the first place was Karen's sheer brilliance. The girl was a bona fide genius, scooped up when she'd graduated college before being old enough to vote, yanked into an MP child company dedicated to biomedical research, and she'd proved to be a lucrative catch from day one. Quite the rising star, with murmurs that some of her breakthroughs into advanced genetic recombination might net her Nobel recognition. Amazing accomplishments like that got you noticed, and ultimately, Eileen had liked what she'd seen in this girl - taken it upon herself to guide the eccentric young lady into success.
She wasn't technical enough to understand most of Karen's ramblings - discussions of nucleotides and protein folding flew right over her head. But Eileen was a good listener, smiling and keeping her attention on the redhead always, such as times like right now where a spaghetti mess of scientific babble flew out of her mouth in concert with her brushing of a prize show horse. The same line of study that had rumors of globally-recognized prizes swirling was the subject of her ranting, most of it sailing in one ear and out the other - right up until Karen turned on the heel of one foot, grin a mile wide, and shouted something that caught Eileen truly off guard.
"-and I can show you an example of the process in action, right here and now!"
Eileen blinked. "You... can?"
"Very easily!" Karen replied, excitement filling every word she spoke. "Now I gave you the technical explanation, but in layman's terms..."