Something in his voice makes her reach for the desert-colored tarp she uses to protect exposed fossils from the elements. And from view. You never know who’s got a drone these days.
“What is it?”
“Someone’s coming. A dude,” he says—meaning a city person—“on a white horse.”
Ripley shakes her head. There’s no way someone found her dig. “He’s probably lost.”
“He doesn’t look lost,” Renzo says doubtfully. “He looks like…” His posture straightens into a perfect prep-school line, and with two picky fingers, he adjusts an imaginary collar that’s buttoned all the way to the top. He pushes his hair to the side, pursing his mouth with restrained distaste.
Renzo really should be working as an actor. His impression is…very British. Wealthy. Aristocratic. Some might sayfussy.
It reminds Ripley of a certain paleontologist she used to know. Well, she didn’t exactly know him. She met him once. Still…
She shakes out the tarp with a brisk snap and floats it gently over her excavation, then gives a piercing whistle, rotating her forefinger in the air:Wrap it up.Half a dozen bodies scramble to obey.
She can’t know for sure who’s charmed his way past Geraldine’s shotgun and onto one of her famous white horses.
But if it is indeed the man who hammered the last nail into the coffin of Ripley’s academic career, she’ll be sure to give him exactly what he gave her back then.
Nothing.
2
Ripley makes it up to ground level with enough time to catch her breath but not enough to wash her face. It’s fine; she’ll look like a working paleontologist.
Scratch that—she’ll look like areputable private collectorwith her battered boots, expedition shorts, and pale pink shirt with the sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm. She’s proud to have built this life. Proud of the wiry muscle she’s earned with a shovel and pickax. Shelikesthe hat hair and farmer’s tan and calloused fingers she can never scrub all the way clean.
She’s good. It’s this guy who’s breaking her fourth and most crucial rule of fossil hunting.
Rule 1: A crew excavates on its stomach.
Rule 2: Go to a place where, millions of years ago, sedimentary rock was forming.
Rule 3: Find a location where layers of that rock are exposed.
Rule 4:Stay as far away as possiblefrom anyone who’s looking for the same thing you are.
So instead of parking herself in the famous Hell Creek Formation in southeast Montana, Ripley dug herself in three hundred miles west, a stone’s throw from the Rockies. She thought she was safe.
Except Dr. James A. Smithson is riding onto her dig site like he’s her friend instead of the final person to turn his back on her when she needed help.
It’s definitely him. He’s broader and squarer than he was three years ago, but there’s no mistaking those cheekbones, that jawline, the rangy build of a man who’ll keep laying on muscle well into his thirties. His posture is somehow both stick-straight and snobbishly relaxed, as if he spent long, lovely childhood summers on polo ponies. Which he probably did, whenever he was at his family’s ducal estate. He’s basically three stiff upper lips in a trench coat: so preppy, so proper, so obviously rich.
During her paleo-fangirl phase, Ripley once read—and regrettably still remembers—that he’d rowed crew for Oxford, which explains those shoulders. He’s tall enough that even with the breadth up top, he looks almost slim in his navy-blue soft-shell jacket and…oh, Jesus, she thinks those narrow gray pants with the navy knee patches might be actual jodhpurs?
As the horse ambles closer, finer details come into focus. Smithson must be in a rush if someone as picky as he’s known to be didn’t shave that five o’clock shadow before paying a call. By contrast, his Superman haircut is fresh enough that he might have touched it up yesterday—short and thick underneath, deep side part at the crown, a single forehead curl escaping the white cowboy hat that he has one thousand percent borrowed from Geraldine.
He had that hairstyle the last time Ripley saw him. He’s probably had it since he went to boarding school at whatever horrifyingly young age scientific royalty send their babies to England’s most exclusive academies.
“Damn,” Cara whispers, eyeing his stirrup leathers, extra-long to accommodate his height.
“Fuck,” Ripley agrees flatly.
Cara elbows Ripley’s ribs. “Get your mindintothe gutter for once. I didn’t mean damn. I meantdamn.” Staring at the horseman, Cara smooths her glossy hair over one shoulder and arranges it so her ponytail points straight to her eye-popping curves. Standing nearly six feet tall herself, she’s blessed with smooth light brown skin, eyelashes so thick you could brush off a fossil with them, and a smile that makes people’s pants fall off at twenty paces. She’s also an idealistic twenty-three to Ripley’s cynical twenty-eight.
“I thought you and Griff…” Ripley whispers, checking whether the big, bearded Aussie is within earshot.
“It’s casual.”
