Chapter 11 #2
“I’m sure you will. In the zombie apocalypse, Ripley Adams will be strolling the countryside, dispatching the undead, surviving perfectly well.
” He cracks a barely there smile, nothing but a twitch, not even on both sides of his mouth.
Its warmth hits her like a spring breeze that makes people dig out their summer clothes when there’s still a foot of snow on the ground.
She wonders if he’d bloom like summer if she gave him a little sunshine.
“If you’d like company, though,” he goes on, “I could dry.”
“Suit yourself,” she says with a steadiness she wishes she actually felt.
“Aprons are on the hook.” He joins her at the sink, smelling like warm skin and that grassy scent she doesn’t know the name of; layered under that are whiffs of pencil shavings and Montana clay.
She busies herself checking the water so as not to see him fastening the apron with the same loop-and-tug movements he used on her shoelaces.
There’s something too tight about her breathing.
She reaches for a pot at the wrong moment, and his elbow bumps her arm in a firm, electric brush of fabric on skin that makes her twitch.
His body tenses almost like he’s in pain. “Sorry.” He steps away to finish the knot, then turns his attention to unbuttoning his cuffs.
“Don’t worry about it,” she chokes out. She’s seen his sleeves rolled up, but never the act of rolling. Each graceful, unrushed turn of his cuff precedes a crisp snap of an elegant wrist. Long, lean muscles ripple under his skin like water.
Oh God. James Smithson has slutty forearms.
This is Smithson, she reminds herself. He embarrassed her in Atlanta. He’s not simply a paleontologist; he’s one of the most famous paleontologists in the world. At summer’s end, he’s going back to London. Presumably forever.
She’s too old to catch dig fever, and if she does, there are a million reasons it shouldn’t be for him.
She plunges the nearest pan into the soapy water. “Don’t run the water into the drain,” she tells him. “Use the basin.”
He pulls a sink-size teal basin from the cabinet she’s tapped with her toe. “This is for…”
“Geraldine’s flowers.”
“Ah.” He looks out the picture window. There’s a modest pond a couple hundred yards away, the water level already markedly lower than the banks. “We have water shortages in England these days too.”
Ripley passes him the pan. He dips it in clean water, turning it until the bubbles are gone.
“After last night, I thought we were done avoiding each other.”
She stiffens, clutching the scrub brush. “I’m not avoiding you. We just don’t coincide.”
“I tried to coincide with you at breakfast. You pretended you were finished eating and left. And you walked away from my teaching session this afternoon. Again.”
“As long as people get their work done, you’re welcome to teach them.”
“But not welcome to teach you.”
“You approached me because I’m an expert in my subject area. I should be teaching you about Beauty, not the other way around.”
“I accept,” he says with that sexy half smirk of his. Then: “Beauty?”
Ripley rolls her eyes at him, and herself. She walked right into his trap. Goddamn, he’s smart. “All right, you win. Beauty. That’s her nickname.”
His eyebrows fly up. “Like the fire lizard? From the Anne McCaffrey novels?”
“You’ve read them?”
“I was quite keen on dragons as a child. That’s why my…why my parents thought I might make a successful paleontologist.”
She snorts softly. “You sound like David Attenborough narrating a nature documentary. ‘One hundred percent of cute baby turtles get eaten. This is the circle of life.’ Come on, Smithson. Show some spirit. You must have loved dinosaurs.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” His tone is dry to the point that she can’t tell whether he’s serious. “Where do you think you’ll find the rest of Beauty?”
Ripley likes to think she’s immune to flattery, but his confidence in her is terribly seductive. “Well, you know that unhealed fracture in the wing tip? The story I’m telling myself is, she was fishing in a stream and a rockfall trapped her wing. Her body was pulled underwater, covered with silt—”
“And started fossilizing,” he finishes.
“Exactly. It’s possible the rest of her skeleton was pulled away and ended up downstream. Hard to say which direction the water was running a hundred million years ago, but we’ve covered most of the canyon north of where we found her.”
He twirls the pan with one hand, forearm flexing astonishingly, then applies the dish towel to the bottom. It’s nice, standing next to someone while she works. And having him ask questions about her favorite thing in the world is…pleasant. Lovely. Kind of hot, actually.
“Why haven’t you looked farther south?” he asks.
“You know where the creek crosses the canyon floor? That’s roughly the property line between Yellowtail and the Shipman farm next door.
You don’t want to cross that line. Or Mr. Shipman.
There have been serious incidents between ranchers and fossil hunters in this state.
Like, gunfire-serious.” Smithson’s eyes widen with that particular America, WTF look common to people from other countries.
“Also, Mr. Shipman yells a lot.” At least he had when she couldn’t promise he’d get a guaranteed payout for leasing her his fossil rights.
“Noted. Between you and me, I may have had a few nibbles on the funding. How likely are you to find the rest of her, in case potential donors ask?”
“I’m optimistic.” She attacks a crust of refried beans. “I mean, we’d better find her, or I can’t pay for—” She clamps her mouth shut. Her dad is none of his business. “Things,” she finishes. “But fingers crossed.”
“Oh.”
Ripley stops scrubbing to fix him with a look. “For potential donors, say ‘We’re optimistic.’ Lean on your popularity, and people will give you money.” Please, please, please let them give him money.
“I wouldn’t say I’m popular.”
“Fishing for compliments, Professor? You want me to insist that you are, in fact, very popular among dinosaur geeks?”
A drop of pink spreads like watercolor in his cheeks. “People admire my work. It’s not the same as popularity.”
“Oh, no. It must be terrible to be admired.”
“Yes, well. It would be nice if I could parlay the, er, admiration into a bigger crew for Clever Girl. You need a paleobotanist, more infrastructure, better equipment. If you had a LiDAR drone—”
“I found Beauty without any of those things.”
“That’s not what I meant. You should have better equipment because you’re not merely pulling bones out of the ground.
For God’s sake, Ripley, you’ve uncovered a fossil that’s never been seen on this continent, if anywhere.
It should be the lead article in Nature.
” He pushes a pot into the rack with a clang of steel on steel.
“Science is losing priceless data every day because you’re not sampling the soil or planning for secondary analysis.
Beauty belongs in a museum, not in a billionaire’s vault. ”
“Easy there, Indiana Jones.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t imagined her in the London Natural History Museum. A line of people waiting for hours, all longing for a glimpse of her.”
Ripley has imagined that. But those days are gone—and, like her dad said, they won’t be back.
“This time in your life doesn’t come around twice, Pip,” he told her, carrying her fossilized-seashell collection—girlie enough to be mistaken for decor, she hoped—into her freshman dorm at the University of Eastern Montana.
“Make sure you spend it on your own dreams, building something you’ll be proud of forever. ”
She wasted her first, best chance at her dreams, at making him proud, at proving his sacrifices weren’t for nothing. She can’t blow another chance.
“The fossil rights at Clever Girl are split between me and Geraldine. I need my half of Beauty’s sale price, and I imagine Geraldine wants to recoup her investment. If a museum wants Beauty, they can buy her.”
He rakes a hand through his hair with a wordless sound of frustration, like he doesn’t understand why anyone would put money over glory.
Maybe he can’t understand after the privileged life he’s led.
The only trace of hardship on him is the scar on his thigh, like a healed-over tooth mark on a tyrannosaur femur that says it lived to fight another day.
“But…but you’re here,” he says.
“Usually, yes,” she says dryly. “My territorial range extends as far as Herc. Occasionally I migrate to Bozeman for a change of pace.”
He sighs, impatient. “What I mean to say is, you could have looked for a tyrannosaur. That’s where the real money is.
You could have been in Hell Creek, tripping over fossils left and right.
You could be working for a company like Black Hills.
But you’re out here, where the bones are few and far between, looking for birds,” he says.
“For the thing you love. Still. Do you know how rare that kind of passion is? In my entire career, I’ve met no one who would have persisted the way you have.
I have to believe that means something, Ripley.
You could be one of the great paleontologists of the twenty-first century. ”
“I’m a thief and an opportunist, according to quite a few of your colleagues,” she counters in the calmest voice she can manage.