Chapter 11
Seventy-Eight Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Ripley braces one hand on the center console of the jeep and laces the other one through the oh-shit handle as Cara leans into another sharp turn, her pink beaded earrings swinging.
The car shoots out of the curve like they’re racing ahead of a hungry tyrannosaur in Jurassic Park.
Grassland bounces by in a blur, bales of golden hay dotting the rapidly regreening fields.
A hundred yards ahead, the dig’s second jeep, carrying the other members of the crew, speeds toward the ranch house, kicking up pale brown dust that crusts the windshield where the wiper blades don’t reach.
“I’m too old for this, Cara,” Ripley says, her voice bouncing with every pothole.
“On your twenty-eighth birthday, you get a form letter saying that shots, dares, and reckless driving are now canceled. Also, if you sleep wrong, your neck is allowed to murder you. Oh, Jesus, not the—” Ripley’s stomach swoops as the other woman floors it up a blind hill.
“Griff’s not complaining.” Cara jerks her chin toward the back seat.
Griff leans forward, popping out an earbud. “You summoned me?”
“We’re talking about Cara’s driving.”
“She’s smooth,” he says immediately. “Smoother than a lot of pilots I know.”
“Pilots of planes you’ve jumped out of,” Ripley points out. “Into wildfires. You might not be the best judge of smooth.”
He shrugs, then replaces his earbud and leans back. She shouldn’t have expected him to critique Cara. He won’t bite the hand he’s hoping to put a ring on.
“I’m not slowing down. You know Matteo will eat all the pepper jack if we’re not there to stop him,” Cara says.
“I’d rather not die for cheese, Cara.”
Every couple of weeks, Geraldine hosts what she calls Frybread Taco Thursday.
For Ripley, dinner will be a nice break from checking her empty inbox.
She’s emailed all the private collectors she knows, plus a few potential sponsors she vetted before signing with Maury.
So far, no one has volunteered a spare hundred grand to save her excavation.
“Fine,” Cara says. “I was trying not to point this out because of your irrational vendetta-slash-crush, but the crew has James.”
Ripley’s cheeks heat. “What? There is no crush. Those are also canceled.”
“That’s so weird,” Cara says, “because every time I look at you, you’re looking at him.”
“I have to make sure he’s trustworthy.” Smithson irritates her like a burr inside her sock. The more helpful and supportive he is, the more obsessed she becomes with catching him being selfish or self-interested. It’s like she can’t calm down until she knows which warning label to slap on him.
This morning, they acted like last night never happened. But all day, she’s felt that Do go on sound humming between her shoulder blades. She feels incomplete, like a knuckle that needs to be cracked.
“What exactly are you afraid of, Rip?” Cara shouts over the engine noise, half exasperated, half sympathetic.
“Same thing as always. That people will assume he’s leading the dig because he’s a professor and he’s a man.
Or that he’ll somehow weasel his way into taking credit for our work.
Hell, maybe he’ll decide to get a case of cravats overnighted and accidentally reveal our location and God knows what else. ”
“Cravats?”
“Doesn’t have to be cravats. Maybe he’ll run out of spectacles. Or tweed.”
Cara sighs, blowing out her cheeks. “What if you focused on the good things he could do? He’s working really hard, Ripley.”
He is, in his unbending way. From breakfast until midmorning, he brushes Cara’s specimens and sifts buckets of her soil.
After that, he parks himself at the picnic table with his laptop until lunchtime.
He takes calls in his cabin in the early afternoon, then comes back to the dig for a few hours before dinner.
“He’s just so pompous. It’s like he has to be the expert on everything.”
“He’s trying to impress you.”
“I’m the opposite of a person he’d want to impress.”
“I don’t know, Rip. Whenever you walk away from one of his teaching sessions, he loses the thread and has to ask Jordin what he was talking about. Maybe he lectures about everything because he’s searching for something that catches your interest.”
Ripley’s heart stutters. “Weird.”
“Sexy,” Cara retorts with a smirk.
“No one’s feeling sexy.”
“It’s a dig, Rip. Everyone’s feeling sexy about someone.”
“If you make a bone joke, I’m going to kill you.”
“Don’t have to when you do it yourself.”
Ripley rubs her eyes to dispel a vision of Smithson’s face.
His face above her, to be clear. He’s so careful with every little thing, brushing bones with a seemingly infinite supply of patience, drawing lovely little pencil sketches of the specimens in his notebook, captioning them with tiny, careful, almost calligraphic handwriting.
He’d touch her so precisely. With such control. And the smallest smile.
The thought gives Ripley a twist of surprise and fear in her stomach, like she’s breezed past a cop and realized she’s going way over the limit.
“I really don’t want that kind of speculation to catch on, C. Not even at camp.”
Cara pulls up in front of the ranch house, wheels skidding across the last few inches of gravel. She squints a critical eye at Ripley. “Be honest, Ripley. Are you afraid of what he might take from you, or are you afraid it’s you he could take or leave?”
Ripley swallows an uncomfortable pang of recognition. “He can take or leave all of us, Cara.”
“Fine,” the younger woman sighs. “Don’t bang him, then.
But even if he can’t get us the money, he can talk us up in the paleontology world.
He can be an ally for Indigenous-led fossil exploration.
And I’m just saying, what if you didn’t make it so obvious that you wish he’d fall into a hole and die?
He’s doing a lot of shit he’d rather not do, you know.
” She looks pointedly at Smithson, who’s gotten out of the jeep and is leaning—sort of sagging, actually—against it, much to the amusement of the crew.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed he hates cars. ”
“He said he gets motion sickness.” Although—did he say that? Thinking about it now, Ripley’s not sure.
Cara reaches back to shake Griff awake. “A man who’s trying to impress you might not reveal his phobias on day one, I guess. You are his boss, after all. As such, you should probably get over there and make sure your subordinate is okay.”
Griff clambers out of the back seat and pats her on the shoulder. “Good taste in crushes, Ripley. I’ve got a bit of a man crush on James myself.”
Ripley’s jaw drops. “You weren’t supposed to hear us. And I don’t have a crush.”
“Well, I did hear. And it’s all right to admit you like him. If a duck wants bread, might as well give it bread, yeah?” He trots off after Cara.
Fuck.
Ripley crunches a lot of gravel underfoot so Smithson knows she’s coming.
“You okay?”
“Quite all right, thanks, only I’ve dropped my mobile somewhere. My phone, I mean.” He’s leaning into the passenger door, doing a killer impression of an overcooked noodle. His voice has the muffled, hiccuping quality of someone yelling I’m fine through a bathroom door.
And yet the totality of him is suddenly overwhelming, from the strength of his back and thighs outlined by his clothes, to the catch in his Good morning, darling voice, to the brave front he’s trying so hard to put up.
“Do you need help looking?”
He tilts his head at the ranch house. “No, you go ahead. I’ll be along.”
“You sure?”
“Go ahead, Ripley.”
“Okay,” she says, holding up her hands in surrender. Walking past, she spies a phone-size rectangle in his pocket.
She’s sure he knows it’s there. Smithson would’ve double- and triple-checked.
She hesitates, then walks on. Dignity is the least she can give him, even if it makes her feel the same way she did last night.
Like she’s surrounded and completely alone at the same time.
An hour later, Geraldine’s dining-room table looks like a pack of raptors has stormed through the frybread and grated cheese.
Shredded lettuce dangles from the floral centerpiece.
Ripley’s told Geraldine not to bother with the pretty tablescapes, but the older woman insists she’s shaping the younger generation whether they know it or not.
“I’ll clear the dishes.” Jordin always volunteers first, taking one of the harder chores.
“I call leftovers,” shouts Matteo. He definitely plans to eat at least as much of the remaining food as he puts in containers.
“Dishwasher,” chorus the twins, earning a suspicious look from Matteo for their synchronization. Griff waits to see what Cara will pick, then takes mopping to go with her sweeping.
“You get the sink again, Rip,” Cara observes.
“It’s lonely at the top.” The kitchen’s not big enough for everyone, so Ripley waits for the crew to finish before she starts filling the sink. They need their own space sometimes so they can call her a hard-ass and air their petty complaints. If she’s lonely, that’s the price of being the boss.
“Do you always do the washing-up alone?”
Smithson should never be allowed to say words like always, with that falling note that makes him sound like he ate smoke.
He dressed for dinner again tonight, like this is an English country manor instead of an Indigenous farming outpost. His tan is deepening despite the sunscreen Ripley pushes on everyone.
He’s undone a whole two buttons on that robin’s-egg-blue shirt, and the V of exposed skin is as golden as an August field against a June sky.
There’s no excuse for how hard she has to work to tear her eyes away from the dip and swoop of his collarbones.
“I’ll survive a few pots and pans.”