“That’s the way we tell it. Mathilda, what do you say?”
Mathilda, who was a few yards ahead of them, slashing at vines with her machete in an insanely sexy way, just shrugged. “I’ve heard that story too. I also heard the whalers released the mosquitoes as revenge against the missionaries. But most likely they were brought here by accident, like a lot of things.”
A large plop of water landed on the back of Rory’s neck and slithered down his shirt. He looked into the upper canopy, where leaves the size of umbrellas glistened deep emerald from the rain. “It’s hard to imagine a jungle without mosquitoes.”
“Well, see, that’s the thing about Hawaii.” She hopped over a vine twining across the ground. “Everything came here from somewhere else. Not too long ago, it was just a pile of lava in the middle of the Pacific.”
“And when you say ‘not too long ago’…”
“About thirteen million years, give or take a century.”
He narrowed his eyes to keep sight of her as she slashed her way through the thick jungle growth. She seemed so comfortable with that machete, very swashbuckling. “What are you, an Indiana Jones type?”
From behind him, Robert gave a belly laugh. “Don’t get her started on Indiana Jones.”
Mathilda whirled around and faced them, machete still gripped in her fist. “I will hear no Indiana Jones slander, despite the inaccuracies and fallacies that riddle those movies.”
“Yes ma’am,” Rory said, while Robert just laughed.
“She wrote the director with some suggested changes,” Robert whispered, after they were all underway again. “He even answered.”
“The director. You mean Steven Spielberg?”
Robert shrugged; Rory could feel the entire backboard move up and down. “I don’t know. He said that she should consider archeology as her field of study. She wrote back that she was only nine and definitely wanted to be either a biologist or an ornithologist.”
Okay then. He was dealing with a full-bore science nerd. That was much better than looters. “So she’s one of those?”
“She’s a graduate student.”
“Studying what? Mosquitoes?”
“I hear your mockery and refuse to accept it.” Up ahead, Mathilda brandished her machete in the air. “Especially from someone who only cares about money.”
“You mean me—right. Me. The CEO.” He had to focus so he could keep his story straight. “Money makes the world go round, right?”
“Actually, the earth rotates because it was born that way,” said Robert, suddenly sounding like a guest lecturer at a science expo. “The nebula that predated the solar system started spinning when it collapsed. That created eddies of dust and gas, and those coalesced into the sun and the planets. The earth has always been spinning because there’s no resistance in the perfect vacuum of space to slow it down. The only thing that affects it is the gravitational pull of the moon.”
Rory nearly dropped his end of the backboard as he swung around to give Robert an astonished look. “Let me guess. You’re an astronomy grad student?”
“Archeoastronomy. Us Hawaiians have our own constellations, but the stars are the same for all of us.”
Okay then. Make that two full-bore science nerds. Were they a couple? He didn’t get that sort of energy from them, but maybe that was wishful thinking because Mathilda was pretty darn cute.
Up ahead, he could see Mathilda’s shoulders shake with laughter. Well, he probably deserved that. He’d seen Robert as some kind of bodyguard because of his size. Never go by first impressions.
For instance, if he’d met Mathilda anywhere else, he would have written her off as a pretty face. She was the kind of girl he would have crushed on in high school, maybe a little tomboy-ish, someone who played soccer and hung out with her friends and got good grades and was gifted a new car with a big bow on top for her sweet sixteen.
Maybe all that was real, and she’d taken a wild left turn somewhere along the way. Whatever the case, he was most definitely curious about her.
“How about you? What’s your field?” he called ahead to her.
“If I tell you, will you consider making a donation? We can always use more funding.”
Donation… As Rory Baker, he could spare a few thousand. But of course she was asking Lincoln Kerr, not Rory. “We have a team dedicated to philanthropic requests. I can put you in touch with them.”
Mathilda muttered something like “typical,” while Rory racked his brain for the name of the executive director of the company’s philanthropic wing. She’d flown on the Citation X a few times, trying to sell Lincoln on various projects. Her name wasn’t coming back to him, but hopefully it would by the time it really mattered.
He realized that it was getting darker. He kept tripping over roots. It was a good thing that Mathilda was blond and wearing light-colored clothing, because she was serving as a kind of beacon in the darkening jungle.
