“Ew,Dad.”
He hangs up in the middle of a fit of laughter. Ripley knows it’s because he doesn’t want her to hear him cough.
If she got six figures for Beauty, her half of that would disappearinto the void of his medical debt. But half of eight figures would set him up for life. Maybe she can get funding from one of her own contacts, but if Smithson brings a better offer—or the only offer—she has to take it.
Her dad’s needs matter more than her wants. Not to mention Cara’s and Geraldine’s needs. Ripley will move on at summer’s end, but Yellowtail Ranch is Cara’s inheritance and Geraldine’s legacy.
She folds her chair and heads back to the game.
Smithson glances her way, then turns toward the group. Things have been weird between them since she left his impromptu lecture yesterday, but she’s not inclined to have a heart-to-heart about it.
Two weeks. She can coexist with him for two weeks.
10
June 10:
Seventy-Nine Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
In Ripley’s experience, there aren’t many problems in life that don’t improve with intense effort. She hates that her occasional bouts of insomnia are the exception to this rule.
She’s been sitting at the edge of the canyon for maybe twenty minutes, inhaling the summer air as if a stray scent might lead her to what she’s seeking.
“Whereareyou, Beauty?” she whispers, filled with big, painful wanting.
A scraping footfall brings her scrambling to her feet, fumbling for her bear spray. That’s not sixteen ounces of prairie dog tumbling a stray pebble; that’s a couple hundred pounds of confident animal.Fuck.She should have moved more slowly. She shouldn’t have—
“Ripley?” comes a raspier-than-usual voice.
She skitters sideways, muffling an undignified shriek, then pitches into the dark, foot firmly planted on the shoelace she was too tired to tie.
A firm chest materializes against her face, heroofmatched by a deeper version of the same sound. Long, sinewy arms come around her shoulders, pinning her to his torso. This prevents herfrom rebounding onto her ass, although that might be the less embarrassing option, given who’s caught her.
“All right there?” Smithson whispers.
He smells like a sunny meadow. His all-weather nylon pants rustle as he adjusts his stance to support her weight, the cool zipper of his riding jacket pressing into her cheek. Underneath the smooth fabric, the topography of his body might as well be a raised map of the Rockies, ridge after uncompromising ridge rippling under the hands she raised to break her fall.
Being this near his skin, feeling his muscles jump when her fingers unthinkingly investigate a contour—it makes something stir inside her. Not desire, exactly, though if he weren’t James Smithson, she’d be memorizing the feel of his chest against her face. It’s more a sense of dislocation, like she’s both terribly alone and achingly close to another person. A wing without its body.
“I thought you were a bear,” she says, pulling away until he has to let her go. “You damn near gave me a heart attack.”
He runs his hands down his riding jacket and over the places she touched.
“The bears weren’t interested in conversation tonight,” he says easily. “Unlike you and your dinosaur.”
“It’s only a conversation if the other person answers.”
“Ah. It’s unrequited, then.” His voice is giving BBC World Service Overnight, yet there’s an undercurrent she hasn’t heard before, as if he’s deliberately being clever to conceal something a proper Smithson scion wouldn’t lay bare.
“I guess it is,” she says, sitting back down on the edge of the drop, hoping he doesn’t catch the quick, looping knot she puts in her shoelace once her feet are out of sight. She wonders what he’s doing out here. What thoughts are layering that discordant low note underneath his words.
Why he can’t sleep either.
She looks over her shoulder, and the disjointed sensation rises again. Sleeplessness is the first uncomplicated thing they’ve had in common. And yet it’s not uncomplicated at all to see him weary, rumpled, softened by shadows.
Maybe that’s why she sounds so bluntly expectant when she pats the ground beside her and says, “Well?”
Over the crickets, the peepers, and the sigh of the breeze through the treetops, she can hear him thinking for the space of a long exhale.
