Chapter 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 a reputable private collector with 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.
She likes the 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.
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 mind into the gutter for once. I didn’t mean damn.
I meant damn.” 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.”
“Does he think so?”
Cara shrugs.
“Try not to break his heart, okay? We can’t afford to lose our most experienced crew member this early in the season. Besides,” Ripley says, “James Smithson isn’t our friend. He’s too busy being a brilliant, famous academic.”
“I’m always open to building friendships with people who can help launch Clever Girl.”
Cara’s dad left Montana for a career as an environmental lawyer in LA, but his daughter has the heart of a rancher.
The Yellowtails have stewarded this sliver of Niitsítapi traditional territory since its allotment a hundred and fifty years ago.
Cara envisions another seven generations of her family protecting it, but financial realities being what they are, she’s looking to diversify the ranch’s income streams. A big fossil find could secure Yellowtail Ranch’s future for the next hundred and fifty years.
“A word of wisdom for when you’re the boss of Clever Girl in”—Ripley checks an invisible watch—“a little over three months: Academics are no one’s friends but their own.”
Cara raises her eyebrows. She and Geraldine know how Ripley left academia, but the crew doesn’t, and Ripley prefers it that way.
It’s not difficult to keep it under wraps.
A woman disappearing from the male-dominated world of paleontology is so common, even the people who watched the scandal happen have probably forgotten about it.
Ripley’s betting James Smithson remembers, though. He’s not the type to forget a data point.
“Can you handle the end-of-day stuff while I get rid of him? And stash a couple slices of Renzo’s pizza for me somewhere Matteo can’t find them?”
Cara flips her ponytail behind her back like she’s holstering a weapon.
“Sure. But don’t think you’re getting out of telling me the story later.
The whole story, Ripley.” She sends a chastising look over her shoulder as she dips back over the lip of the canyon shouting, “Fun’s over for today!
Matteo, we all know you borrowed Jordin’s tape measure and then misplaced it. Please help her look.”
Smithson watches Cara go, then turns his eyes back to where Ripley’s standing, her arms crossed. Any second now, he’ll be close enough to see her face, which is rarely successful at concealing her emotions.
Ah, there it is: He blinks once, then twice, his pleasant expression wavering for the briefest of moments. He’s quick to recover, but Ripley’s sure she didn’t imagine his shaken look.
She likes how it levels the playing field a smidge between her and a man who completed his PhD at twenty-four with a phenomenal two papers in Nature and three in Science.
At thirty, he was the youngest-ever full professor of paleontology at Oxford.
And he’s still only thirty-four, which means six more years of Top Forty Under Forty lists.
Worse, he’s so unfairly hot for a scientist that there’s an entire paleontology subreddit dedicated to photos of him at public appearances.
Rumor has it he’s named for James Smithson, the British naturalist who founded the actual Smithsonian Institution.
If you type his name into a search engine—which Ripley most certainly does not—he’s ninety-somethingth in the line of succession to the British throne and second in line to his family’s hereditary dukedom behind his older brother.
Ripley’s ex-boyfriend had hated how much she talked about Smithson’s work, Smithson’s genius, Smithson’s reputation for securing excellent academic placements for his grad students.
In retrospect, Ripley should have known Will was an asshole the first time he said, “James Smithson is nothing special. He settled for taxonomy because he’s too British to move to a country with decent fossils. ”
It’s embarrassing to have been one of the legions of wannabes crushing on Smithson.
Ripley had dreamed of discovering a fossil that would complete a missing link in his work deconstructing body proportions in early dino-birds like archaeopteryx.
Once or twice, she might have imagined him pushing his Clark Kent–style black glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, telling her she was brilliant, then sweeping papers off his desk with a look of smoldering promise.
This unforgivable fantasy might have been why, a few weeks before everything went to hell, she’d let the archaeology girls feed her too many shots at Tuesday Trivia, then convince her drunk ass that a woman who’d gotten her first paper in Nature had a right—nay, a responsibility—to invite her hero, James fucking Smithson, to be the external member of her dissertation committee.
James fucking Smithson had not accepted her invitation—had never even replied to the moonshot drunken email she’d sent that night.
He’d had no obligation to help her, or even listen to her, when she’d smoothed her blouse with shaking hands and boldly, desperately walked up to him a few weeks after everything had fallen apart.
Both of them had been at what she didn’t yet know would be the last American Paleontology Society conference she’d ever attend.
“Hi, Professor Smithson? I’m Ripley Adams.”
Right away, the atmosphere between them felt off.
Ripley had seen a lot of people introduce themselves to him that day, but he hadn’t reacted to any of them with that strange, shocked expression.
The way he was staring made her wonder if her skirt was tucked into her underwear, or if maybe something was caught in the hair she’d spent an hour straightening.
Ignoring his reaction, she offered her hand.
Cautiously, as if he weren’t quite sure what he was doing, he took it in his own large, warm hand. He blinked when their palms touched, his lips parting a fraction of an inch.
“I’ve been doing my PhD at the University of Eastern Montana.” That wasn’t a lie, strictly speaking. “I emailed you my paper on avian ancestors post-Pangaea, if you remember?” Her heart thrashed wildly beneath her new blouse. He hadn’t let go of her hand.
“I know who you are, Ripley Adams,” he said, so quietly she almost couldn’t hear him in the crowded Atlanta conference center.
He was attractive in pictures, but up close he was ridiculous.
He’d perched his long, athletic body against a railing, one leg cocked so his foot rested against the metal balusters, dark curly hair falling over his forehead.
The sensation of his fingers enfolding hers was kind of electric.
This guy had probably never had to hit on someone in his life.
And if he was going to be her professor, she could not have thoughts like that.