Chapter 2 #2
Ripley pulled her hand away. “I was wondering if we could discuss whether I’d be a good fit for your lab. I’m almost ready to defend my dissertation, so I’d have plenty of time to support other projects, pick up teaching…whatever you needed.”
She bit her lip. Something was happening to his face. Some slow creep of…was it horror?
“I’m afraid I’m at a full complement of students at the moment.” He pushed off the railing, putting his curled-up hand in his pocket like he was protecting it from her.
Ripley wanted to spare herself the humiliation of begging, but sometimes disgraced Americans could get a toehold in England.
This was her last chance to be a paleontologist. “Is there any way you could squeeze me in for a couple of months? Or take me on as an adjunct first? I really want to finish my degree and—”
“I reached out to UEM recently,” he interrupted, his eyes dark and unreadable behind those square black frames.
Ripley got the feeling he wasn’t an interrupter by nature, that it hurt him a little to be so rude.
“They said you’d been invited to leave the program.
They also said your paper was withdrawn from Nature due to an authorship dispute. ”
“Oh.” Her face went numb. “And you believe them. You think I took credit for work that wasn’t mine.”
He didn’t answer. For a long moment, she stood motionless while he examined her like he was deciding where she’d fit in one of his famous taxonomies. She was having trouble realizing that it was over. Really, really over.
She’s pretty sure she apologized for wasting his time, but honestly, her memories from that point to when she boarded the plane home are not super-clear.
“Stay in the now, Adams,” she mutters, forcibly bringing herself back to the present.
Ripley can swallow the humiliation of meeting him again, but the bigger problem is that Smithson’s a walking violation of her fourth rule, the one about staying away from other paleontologists.
The difference between a good sale and a great one depends on her keeping this discovery a secret.
She needs him gone.
Smithson gives the horse—a gelding named Hoodoo with a taste for drama, if Ripley’s not mistaken—a soft command. The horse comes to a military stop, one front hoof cocked, ears turned toward his rider’s voice.
“Ms. Adams. Excuse me for dropping in unannounced. James Smithson.”
“I know who you are.” Ripley keeps her arms folded. She doubts he recognizes the words he’d served her outside the grand ballroom of the Atlanta conference center, but it’s satisfying to say them. “You don’t have to dismount. I’m sure we won’t need to talk for long.”
He has that enviable trait of turning slightly pale when he’s taken aback. Ripley guesses her cheeks are halfway to maroon, while his olive skin simply loses one shade of rosy tan for a few seconds.
“Doesn’t seem quite the thing, shouting at you from up here.
” He smiles gamely and swings one long leg over Hoodoo’s back.
On the ground, he looks at his weathered Blundstones for a second, pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger.
It’s adorably nerdy, and Ripley firmly squelches a flutter in her chest. The last thing she needs to dig up is her old crush on him.
He looks up, and she registers an impression of hesitation and…and hunger.
What the hell, Adams. Get it together.
“Your work’s going well, I hope?” he asks, peering inquisitively in the direction of the dig.
His voice still sounds like Charlie Hunnam’s after a night of drinking, the plummy accent warmed with a husky morning rasp even at five p.m. There’s a trace of California in there too—the occasional flat American vowel that he probably picked up during his PhD at Berkeley.
“Sorry I can’t give you a tour. Our sponsor prefers to keep the site closed,” she says, pleased at the evenness of her tone. “How did you find me?”
His Greek-statue mouth twists wryly. “It wasn’t easy, if that’s what you’re asking.”
It’s definitely what Ripley’s asking. Knowing Smithson was able to locate her dig feels like the ticking clock on finding her precious fossil has abruptly jumped ahead.
“I’m mostly surprised you sweet-talked your way past Geraldine.” The ranch’s matriarch is a weathered, square-jawed seventy-year-old who can still throw a bale of hay, ride any horse she pleases, and protect both the land and her family. She doesn’t take kindly to trespassers.
“Don’t blame Ms. Yellowtail,” he says quickly. “She said I should telephone you first, but…” He smiles ruefully, dipping his head to take his hat in hand. Slightly crushed dark waves ruffle poetically in the evening breeze. “I thought you’d tell me not to come.”
“Guess you’re as smart as they say. You must’ve fed her a hell of a line.”
He casts his gaze to the ground again, then looks up through a fan of ink-dark lashes, his eyes glowing like they’re resting on black velvet in a jeweler’s case. From a distance, they looked hazel, but up close they’re dark blue-green, the centers shot with gold.
“I told her we needed each other’s help. Urgently.”
Ripley has to hold back a laugh. James Smithson, needing help from someone like her? She’s about to advise him to stop wasting his time when his fractal eyes flick from her face to a spot somewhere over her left shoulder.
She turns to see Matteo, Jordin, Griff, and the pale, wispy O’Malley twins eavesdropping. The last thing Ripley wants is five more people in this conversation. Jordin—this year’s obligatory bright, overfunctioning undergraduate—wears a starstruck look that says she’s recognized Smithson.
Ripley’s aware that they make a romantic tableau—man, woman, and horse standing in golden grass dotted with Christmas-tree-size evergreens, blue mountains at their back.
It’s the kind of pretty picture that jump-starts the gossip mill.
And Ripley needs her name never to be linked with a male paleontologist’s again. Even if it’s just camp scuttlebutt.
“Let’s walk.” She brushes past him, scooping up Hoodoo’s reins.
The horse gives her an affronted head toss, but Ripley ignores his theatrics and starts down the rutted track toward the ranch house.
“So what’s such an emergency that you crossed the Atlantic for a social call?
” she asks mildly. She has no intention of engaging in whatever agenda he packed in his saddlebags.
“I’m a visiting professor at Berkeley this summer. I didn’t cross the Atlantic merely to speak with you,” he says tautly, his friendly tone dented where it’s bumped against Ripley’s brick wall.
“Usually an academic paleontologist wouldn’t lower himself to talk to a private collector at all.
” Academics consider themselves too good to cross the iron line between their respective professions; private fossil collectors simply don’t bother.
“And California’s not as far as England, but it’s still a thousand miles from here.
You didn’t trip over Colorado and then, whoops, accidentally fall into my dig. My private dig. What do you want?”
He takes a measured breath. “I need an expert in avian-dinosaur progenitors in the Americas. I believe no one is as perfectly suited to the task as you.”
It turns out there’s still a part of her that wants to squeal and kick its feet when the James Smithson gives her a compliment. It’s not as easy as Ripley would like it to be to keep that part from embarrassing her. “My days as an academic expert are long past, I’m afraid.”
“Regardless, Ripley Adams, you’re my last hope.” He compresses his mouth in what must pass for a smile at Oxford. “I’m directing the theropod stream at the American Paleontology Society meeting in September at Berkeley, and—”
“I should have guessed,” Ripley says on a sigh. Hoodoo harrumphs in agreement. The APS has probably been on its knees for years begging him to organize the content for theropods—dinosaurs that walked on two legs. That must be why he’s summering at his alma mater.
“I am the obvious choice,” he says defensively. “We’ve had an unusual submission to the conference. A discovery of a novel proto-bird near the Hell Creek Formation. It looks like a missing link between dinosaurs with feathers and birds that could achieve true flight.”
Ripley’s heart drops into her boots. Fuck. That’s exactly what she set out to find, exactly where she would’ve sworn it was stupid to look.
If Beauty isn’t the first of her kind to be discovered—if she’s not declared the holotype—there’s no chance at securing the species name for Maury.
He’d knock a zero off the offer for that.
And if this other group has a complete skeleton, no private buyer will look at a wing with no body. Knock off another zero.
Calm down, Adams. Unfocus your eyes.
Beauty lived in a forest. The other fossil is from Hell Creek, a former inland seaway. There’s a reasonable chance they’re different animals.
Even if they’re the same, Ripley’s will be the only one available for private purchase. Maury will still want to buy a very rare fossil, especially if it’s stirring up a lot of attention in the paleontology world. Maybe not for eight figures. But seven. Possibly.
She straightens her spine. “I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“Well.” He clears his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing tightly. “The thing is,” he says, twining his long fingers together in a movement just shy of wringing, “I need you to help me prove it’s a fake.”