Chapter 6
“What? No,” Ripley says, recoiling. “My site is private. You can fundraise from Berkeley.”
“I can hardly pitch you without knowing what you have,” Smithson says. He sounds coaxing. Wheedling.
Will used to coax her too. “What’s going on in that big brain of yours, Ripley?
” he’d say with a flirty grin. He’d known everything about her ideas, her work, her habits, her life.
He’d collected an arsenal of receipts—entries from her lab notebook secretly copied into his; pages of dates and times they’d discussed her projects.
He had steel jaws around her leg before she’d thought to wonder why she felt so trapped.
The idea of making the same mistakes again fills her veins with ice.
“You can’t go telling everyone what I have,” she says, working hard to control the wobble in her voice. “I’ll have drones flying overhead inside of a week.”
He turns his eyes up to the ceiling, frustration evident in the angle of his shoulders. “Honestly, Ripley. I have to convince someone to give you a sack of cash in the next fourteen days and I’m not allowed to tell them what it’s for?”
“Yes,” she says, feeling ridiculous. “Use some of your British words. Marvelous. Superb. Say them”—she waves at him—“the way you say them.” His voice would caress those words. He would ever so slightly pop the p in superb the same way he does when he says Ripley.
“The better I know your work, the better I can use my words. As you Americans say.” He pauses thoughtfully, his gaze sweeping from her no doubt flaming-red cheeks to her badly tied shoes. Whatever he sees, it makes him soften.
“I know you don’t want me there,” he says quietly.
“And I won’t force my way in. But imagine you’re a donor.
You receive a call directly from a fossil site in Montana from someone who’s genuinely excited, or you speak with a minimally knowledgeable person in an office building in California.
Which one would make you open your wallet? ”
His logic is airtight. Suffocating.
If Ripley brings him out to Clever Girl, she’ll have to trust him with her find, her secrecy, and her safety. She’ll open up her fragile reputation to insinuations about how she might have enticed him to support her.
He’ll have everything she cares about in the palm of his hand—just like Will did.
“I promise I won’t share anything without your authorization, Ripley,” Smithson says, a whispering vibration in his voice underlining I promise.
“But I can’t sell something I know nothing about.
That and I’d be a fool not to at least ask to see the work of one of the most brilliant scholars of her generation. ”
Even three years too late, his praise—James Smithson’s praise—pours down Ripley’s spine like warm honey. Her old self is too shallowly buried, still an easily fooled, applause-hungry ghost.
“I’ve licked a fossil before, you know,” he says, the beginnings of a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “I can help with excavation.”
“I work alone.”
“Clearly not,” he says, his eyes alight with something she can’t quite identify. “You work with the Yellowtails. You have a whole crew. I think you could work with me too.”
That’s the problem: She could. She might even want to.
Ripley crosses her arms over her chest. Through the window, she sees a black town car on the main road slow down, then turn in to Geraldine’s driveway.
A flash of something that might be resignation tugs Smithson’s mouth down. His hand brushes across his pants pocket, one finger absently tapping through the fabric. There’s a muffled metallic clink.
“That’s my driver,” he says, searching her face for a decision she hasn’t yet made.
“You didn’t just rent a car?”
“I don’t drive. It’s not necessary in London.” He extends the telescoping handle of his suitcase, shoulders the weekend bag.
“Oh. I see. When’s your flight?”
“I came by car.” He turns and rolls toward the exit.
“All the way from California?”
“It seems so.”
The driver taps the horn.
She has to choose. There’s not even a choice, really. But at least this time, unlike with Will, she knows what’s at stake.
“I have rules,” she says. “If you come to the dig.”
He stops. Looks over his shoulder. “Yes?”
“First, it’s my dig. You’re not in charge. You don’t take a single drop of credit for anything I find.”
“Done.”
“You tell no one where it is, ever. You don’t talk about me and what I’m doing.”
His eyes kindle with interest, but all he says is “That’s fine. Anything else?”
“One more thing. You and I will maintain a strictly professional relationship. Nothing that could prompt even a glimmer of an idea of a rumor. No tête-à-têtes. No working inside each other’s cabins. No unnecessary touching.”
He recoils. “Jesus Christ, Ripley. I would never—” He’s so horrified, he has to take a moment to calm down. “I would never cross the line with you. Or any of your crew.”
His driver taps the horn twice.
“What’s in your bags?” Ripley asks. “More clothes like”—she twirls a finger at his pants and shirt—“these?”
“This is what I like to wear. And I have my riding clothes.”
“You need not to look like you just finished a polo match.” She pictures him a little sweaty after a game, his cheeks flushed, wearing that double-curved grin. This is a mistake. She plows onward, heat climbing her neck. “You can’t be so…” She waves an irritated hand at him. “Pretty.”
“Why not? You’re pretty,” he shoots back, then blinks. His cheeks take on a post–polo match shade of dusty pink. It makes him look younger than thirty-four. Appealingly unsure of himself. “I mean…I didn’t…sorry.”
Ripley ignores the swoop in her stomach. She doesn’t like being called pretty. Usually.
“If you’re coming to the dig, you need proper clothes. And tools.” Nobody on her site fucks around with stupid shit like Will’s Bowie knife. “Come on. Let’s get you something to wear,” she says, jerking her head toward the Jurassic Park doors.
“Right now?” He seems sort of stunned.
“Well, the stores are closed tomorrow, so it can’t really wait. Tip your driver and send him home, Smithson. You and I are going to town.”