“You have time for a proper breakfast.” Geraldine puts the plate down in front of Ripley. “Leaving my granddaughter to manage Clever Girl Fossils alone, I see.” She turns a kitchen chair around so she can straddle it while she drinks her jet-fuel-strength black coffee. This is an invitation for Ripley to talk.
“It’s Saturday. Half the crew is still in bed. Besides, Cara’s got the operation down pat. Which was the point, I believe.”
“Pull your claws back in,” Geraldine says mildly. “You know I want you to stay on next season. Work with Cara.”
“That’s kind of you, but I’ll probably spend the summer with my dad.”
“Bring him too.”
“There’s no hospital in Hercules. He can’t come.”
“Is that what he says or what you say?”
“Geraldine.”
The older woman shrugs. “You’re the one keeping your dad in cancer jail while you spend your juiciest years with no one to warm up the other side of your bed. Did you even listen to that nice young man I sent your way yesterday?”
“Didyou?” Ripley asks.
“Oh, I don’t know fossils. That’s for you and Cara. But if I were twenty years younger, I’d definitely ‘work’ with him. Hell, thirty years ago I’d have fought you for him.” She grins, reminding Ripley where Cara gets her cheekiness from.
“I’m too smart to fight you. You’d kick my ass.”
“I’ll kick it anyway if it gets you out of your shell. You should have a little fun, Ripley. Lighten up.”
“Sure,” Ripley agrees, privately vowing to do nothing of thesort. “Speaking of Smithson. Do you happen to know where he’s staying? And when he’s flying back to California?”
“He spent the night in my guest bedroom.” Geraldine smiles slyly, her brown cheeks rising into tight apples. “He’s down at the museum. Why don’t you show him around?”
Ripley puts down her knife and fork. “It’s not like that.”
Geraldine prefers to get bad news in a rip-off-the-Band-Aid style, so that’s how Ripley gives it to her. The older woman absorbs it like a Native rancher who’s seen seventy years of births, deaths, floods, droughts, and struggles. She tosses back her coffee and sets the mug down with a solidthunk.
“Well. If you’re going to ask that young man for money, you’d better get down to the museum and give him a good show.”
The newly completed Clever Girl Museum sits on a low rise a few hundred yards down Yellowtail Ranch’s long driveway, just off the main road. With its angular white exterior and floor-to-ceiling windows, the building looks like a car dealership crossed with a spa. A tall fence shields the ranch house from view and provides selfie backdrops of cartoon dinosaurs for the tourists they hope to lure in next summer.
Through the windows, Ripley spies a tall figure browsing the aisles, examining the fossil-filled shelves. Smithson’s shifted back to his natural professor shape in a white oxford shirt that stretches across his shoulders. There really is no word other thantrousersfor a pair of pants as British as the brown tweeds he’s wearing, with their sharp creases and rolled cuffs.
He should look like someone’s grandpa, but he’s giving off the vibe of a black-and-white ad for a luxury watch.
Typical.
She pulls open the heavy wood door shamelessly copied from the Jurassic Park franchise, noting the large suitcase and matching weekend bag just inside. He packed like he expected to stay for a while.
At the other end of the long line of shelves, Smithson’s absorbed in the prepared specimens, his eyes roving almost greedily over Ripley’s bones. Geraldine’s kept a lot of the smaller, less valuable finds to make the shelves look full. A plaster reproduction of Beauty will take pride of place when the time comes, but for now, the roped-off display area remains empty.
Smithson reaches for a deinonychus vertebra despite theDo Not Touch the Fossilssign on every shelf. Watching him, Ripley feels the roughness of the bone against her own fingertips, smells the unmistakable signature of old earth under the pungent new scents of glue and sealant.
Paleontologists tend to be suckers for hands, and unfortunately, his are very, very nice. He holds his fingers like they’re poised over the neck of a violin while his thumb dips softly into a bony hollow. His bent head makes a desperately appealing line from his ear to his shoulder, the tender skin of his neck shadowed in the dim light.
His smile is not the polite expression of last night. Today, his mouth curves like a composite bow, its arc interrupted where the fullness of his lower lip pushes up at the center instead of down, like a sculptor pressed her thumb into that tender, pouty spot.
Ripley has the urge to put her thumb in it the way he slid his into the foramen of that vertebra.
Wait. No.
A flush of annoyance prickles through her. She’s supposed to be smarter than this. She’s not supposed to repeat history byfalling for another paleontologist on the way to getting bamboozled into all kinds of bad deals. She’s here to make an arrangement with this man that keeps him and any rumors about herself a thousand miles from her dig.
