“I tried tocoincidewith 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 teachyou.”
“You approached me because I’m an expert in my subject area.Ishould be teachingyouabout 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 particularAmerica, WTFlook 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,admirationinto 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 inNature.” 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.”
