Chapter 9
Ren
Scott rocks forward on his polished black Oxfords, hands shoved into the pockets of his suit pants. One wave of hair sits perfectly in the middle of his forehead, brushing the rim of his glasses, and the average passerby might think he looks amused.
But I don’t miss the muscle ticking in his cheek.
“Scott.” Making a show of straightening the skirt of my dress, I roll out my shoulders and the phantom tugs from Miller’s fingertips on the silk bow hanging down my back.
I flash a bland smile that’s meant to be polite but really just feels like I’m clenching my teeth. “I hope you’re having a nice evening.”
A waiter weaves through the crowd, a tray of champagne sparkling in flutes held between two hands, and they’ve barely lifted it up in offering before I’ve snatched one and practically tipped it upside down against my mouth to finish the drink.
The bubbles burn the back of my throat, and my stupid, clenched, all-teeth smile stays in place when I exchange the empty flute for a new one.
“Thank you.” My voice rises to an alarming pitch.
I’m blinking too much. The eyelash clusters Imani painstakingly applied before we got here making each mechanical movement slower and more exaggerated than usual.
Miller clears his throat, brows coming together when his eyes swing back and forth between Scott and me. He reaches out, the sleeves of his tux shifting against the back of his forearms, not quite meeting the bottom of the inked M on his hand.
The back of his hand tenses when his fingers wrap around the stem of a glass, spanning the entire length.
His thumb brushes the curved edge of the crystal and I wonder what it would feel like dragging between my shoulder blades, if he’d actually touched me during whatever that friendly adult hug was.
Swallowing, I tear my eyes away from Miller’s hand and try to ignore the glint of superiority hardly hidden behind Scott’s stupid, pretentious glasses.
“Scott.” I wave the glass between them. “This is Miller.”
“I know,” Scott says, voice clipped. One of his brows rises when he assesses Miller with the same sort of appraisal I’ve seen him use on countless fossils. On me. The left corner of his mouth twitches, and I know he finds whatever he sees to be lacking. “Rough week.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but Miller’s fingers tense against the glass, and he nods along with a tight smile.
“Miller, this is Dr. Scott Saunders. He’s the new assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology.” My tongue has difficulty working around the words. I don’t bother waving the glass again, flicking my spare hand towards Scott instead so I can take a drink.
“Fancy,” Miller offers flatly.
Scott rocks forward on his feet again, thinly veiled amusement laced with cruelty carving across the planes of his face. “We can’t all spend our days on a field, rescuing pretty girls when they spill on themselves.”
He drags out the word pretty, all heavy with double meaning, and his eyes cut to me.
Miller Colson-Burke likes pretty girls.
Be careful. He’s only good at three things. And none of those things are you.
The other thing Scott said pops into my head, too. The one I’ve tried not to think about because it was none of my business, and certainly none of his.
And if the press is to be believed, getting his cousin killed.
“Pretty sounds right.” Miller brings the glass to the precipice of his bottom lip, and he gives a wry shrug. “But I don’t think she was the one who spilled. Heard that was someone else.”
More champagne bubbles burn when I empty this glass, too, and there’s something to be said for that idea of liquid courage, because I turn to Scott and give him a flat look. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
“Ren.” Scott’s eyes cut to the empty flute in my hand, my fingers slackening around the stem when his words slice through whatever confidence and courage that, fueled by champagne, made me feel like I could stand tall. “That’s two in less than ten minutes.”
“I can count,” I mutter, embarrassment scorching across my cheeks. Shifting back and forth on my heels, I watch where the hem of my dress meets the tile of the atrium floor.
Being able to have two glasses of champagne in as many minutes as you’d like feels like an adult thing to do.
But I don’t feel like an adult. I don’t feel like an established, thirty-two-year-old woman who could rhyme off the catalogue number of every fossil in this room and give you the unique preservation requirements for every single one, down to the decimal point on the thermostat for the necessary temperature control.
I feel the way I’ve felt for years. The way he made me.
The way I let him make me.
Small. Insignificant. Unworthy.
“Think she can have as many drinks as she wants.” I watch Miller’s jaw tense out of the corner of my eye, and he gives another errant shrug of a singular shoulder when he says, “She’s a big girl.”
The words place a firm hand on the small of my back and whisper, “Stand up straight.”
I try, but Scott keeps talking.
“That she is. But champagne goes right to her head.” Scott finally extracts one of his hands from his suit pants, and he taps a finger against his temple before flashing a smile that doesn’t meet his eyes.
It doesn’t even try, actually. The corners of his mouth barely flick up.
“Well, far be it from me to keep two new friends from enjoying each other’s company. ”
He doesn’t wait for either of us to say anything.
He turns on his heel, his hand finds his pocket again.
He tries to disappear into the crowd, but he doesn’t get very far before Graham pulls him away, introducing one of the most promising young minds in the field to the most important museum patrons.
“Sorry—” I start, at the same time Miller scrubs a hand across his face, stifling a scoff.
“Jesus. He fucking—”
“Sucks?” I finish for him with a wet laugh.
His mouth tips into a lopsided grin and he nods through a swallow of champagne. “Yeah. Sucks works.”
“One of the many adjectives you could use to describe Scott,” I say, taking a sip of my third glass of champagne while I try to straighten my shoulders so I can stand like an adult again.
“Do you . . .” he trails off, displeasure flaring in the deep blue of his eyes. “Work with him a lot?”
I snort. “Unfortunately. We go . . . way back. And he’s new here, and by reporting rules and technicality, he is, in theory, my supervisor.”
“In theory,” Miller repeats in an amusement that feels kind instead of cruel. “Is that something adults do? Theorize? You have a lot of those? Theories?”
“Sure.” I nod, and I think some of my petals stretch towards the sunlight of his voice. “We could talk about the Alvarez hypothesis.”
Full lips dip down, and he gives a slow shake of his head. “No idea what that is.”
“Or there’s the less popular but competing theory that the Deccan Traps eruptions were to blame for the K-Pg mass event.” Shrugging, I tap the flute against my bottom lip. “But that sort of went out the window a few years ago.”
Tiny lines dig in around his eyes when his mouth curves into a smile. A wave of hair crests over his forehead. “Don’t know that one either.”
“The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event,” I tell him from behind the curved glass.
He widens his eyes, chewing on the inside of his cheek with a dry laugh. “Still no.”
“What killed the dinosaurs.” I tip my glass towards the spinosaurus fossil behind him. “Well, not her. We think she lived to an advanced age. Her bones even show signs of arthritis. But there were no signs of instantaneous burial on her.”
“I know that one.” He nods as his smile shifts to a grin. “Asteroid did it.”
“That’s the Alvarez hypothesis.” I wrinkle my nose. “The most widely accepted, but like I said, not the only one.”
Miller jerks his head towards the crowd, a bit of ire rolling down his neck. “What do you think he believes?”
“I’d say he believes the predominantly accepted scientific theory, but I think Scott only believes in himself and his own hubris.”
A laugh, hoarse and rough, like he hasn’t had much reason to use it in a long while, parts Miller’s full lips. His grin spreads, softening the sharp edges of his jaw. “And what do you believe?”
“I can show you,” I offer, tentative. “We have a whole exhibit on it upstairs.”
He studies me, grip tightening on his champagne flute before he brings the delicate glass to a mouth that looks like it would be anything but and tosses the rest of it back.
The column of his throat works with his swallow, and he rolls out his shoulders, suit jacket stretching against the broad range of muscle when he gestures towards the stairs at the opposite end of the atrium. “Lead the way.”