“Doeshethink so?”
Cara shrugs.
“Try not to break his heart, okay? We can’t afford to lose our most experienced crew member this early in the season. Besides,” Ripley says, “James Smithson isn’t our friend. He’s too busy being a brilliant, famous academic.”
“I’m always open to building friendships with people who can help launch Clever Girl.”
Cara’s dad left Montana for a career as an environmental lawyer in LA, but his daughter has the heart of a rancher. The Yellowtails have stewarded this sliver of Niitsítapi traditional territory since its allotment a hundred and fifty years ago. Cara envisions another seven generations of her family protecting it, but financial realities being what they are, she’s looking to diversify the ranch’s income streams. A big fossil find could secure Yellowtail Ranch’s future for the next hundred and fifty years.
“A word of wisdom for when you’re the boss of Clever Girlin”—Ripley checks an invisible watch—“a little over three months: Academics are no one’s friends but their own.”
Cara raises her eyebrows. She and Geraldine know how Ripley left academia, but the crew doesn’t, and Ripley prefers it that way. It’s not difficult to keep it under wraps. A woman disappearing from the male-dominated world of paleontology is so common, even the people who watched the scandal happen have probably forgotten about it.
Ripley’s betting James Smithson remembers, though. He’s not the type to forget a data point.
“Can you handle the end-of-day stuff while I get rid of him? And stash a couple slices of Renzo’s pizza for me somewhere Matteo can’t find them?”
Cara flips her ponytail behind her back like she’s holstering a weapon. “Sure. But don’t think you’re getting out of telling me the story later. Thewholestory, Ripley.” She sends a chastising look over her shoulder as she dips back over the lip of the canyon shouting, “Fun’s over for today! Matteo, we all know you borrowed Jordin’s tape measure and then misplaced it. Please help her look.”
Smithson watches Cara go, then turns his eyes back to where Ripley’s standing, her arms crossed. Any second now, he’ll be close enough to see her face, which is rarely successful at concealing her emotions.
Ah, there it is: He blinks once, then twice, his pleasant expression wavering for the briefest of moments. He’s quick to recover, but Ripley’s sure she didn’t imagine his shaken look.
She likes how it levels the playing field a smidge between her and a man who completed his PhD at twenty-four with a phenomenal two papers inNatureand three inScience.At thirty, hewas the youngest-ever full professor of paleontology at Oxford. And he’s still only thirty-four, which means six more years of Top Forty Under Forty lists. Worse, he’s so unfairly hot for a scientist that there’s an entire paleontology subreddit dedicated to photos of him at public appearances. Rumor has it he’s named for James Smithson, the British naturalist who founded the actual Smithsonian Institution. If you type his name into a search engine—which Ripley most certainly does not—he’s ninety-somethingth in the line of succession to the British throne and second in line to his family’s hereditary dukedom behind his older brother.
Ripley’s ex-boyfriend had hated how much she talked about Smithson’s work, Smithson’s genius, Smithson’s reputation for securing excellent academic placements for his grad students. In retrospect, Ripley should have known Will was an asshole the first time he said, “James Smithson is nothing special. He settled for taxonomy because he’s too British to move to a country with decent fossils.”
It’s embarrassing to have been one of the legions of wannabes crushing on Smithson. Ripley had dreamed of discovering a fossil that would complete a missing link in his work deconstructing body proportions in early dino-birds like archaeopteryx.Once or twice, shemighthave imagined him pushing his Clark Kent–style black glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, telling her she was brilliant, then sweeping papers off his desk with a look of smoldering promise.
This unforgivable fantasy might have been why, a few weeks before everything went to hell, she’d let the archaeology girls feed her too many shots at Tuesday Trivia, then convince her drunk ass that a woman who’d gotten her first paper inNaturehad a right—nay, aresponsibility—to invite her hero, James fucking Smithson, to be the external member of her dissertation committee.
James fucking Smithson had not accepted her invitation—had never even replied to the moonshot drunken email she’d sent that night. He’d had no obligation to help her, or even listen to her, when she’d smoothed her blouse with shaking hands and boldly, desperately walked up to him a few weeks after everything had fallen apart. Both of them had been at what she didn’t yet know would be the last American Paleontology Society conference she’d ever attend.
“Hi, Professor Smithson? I’m Ripley Adams.”
Right away, the atmosphere between them felt off. Ripley had seen a lot of people introduce themselves to him that day, but he hadn’t reacted to any of them with that strange, shocked expression. The way he was staring made her wonder if her skirt was tucked into her underwear, or if maybe something was caught in the hair she’d spent an hour straightening.
Ignoring his reaction, she offered her hand.
Cautiously, as if he weren’t quite sure what he was doing, he took it in his own large, warm hand. He blinked when their palms touched, his lips parting a fraction of an inch.
“I’ve been doing my PhD at the University of Eastern Montana.” That wasn’t a lie, strictly speaking. “I emailed you my paper on avian ancestors post-Pangaea, if you remember?” Her heart thrashed wildly beneath her new blouse. He hadn’t let go of her hand.
“I know who you are, Ripley Adams,” he said, so quietly she almost couldn’t hear him in the crowded Atlanta conference center. He was attractive in pictures, but up close he was ridiculous. He’d perched his long, athletic body against a railing, one leg cocked so his foot rested against the metal balusters, dark curly hair falling over his forehead. The sensation of his fingers enfolding hers was kind of electric. This guy had probably never had to hit on someone in his life.
And if he was going to be her professor, she could not have thoughts like that.
Ripley pulled her hand away. “I was wondering if we could discuss whether I’d be a good fit for your lab. I’m almost ready to defend my dissertation, so I’d have plenty of time to support other projects, pick up teaching…whatever you needed.”
She bit her lip. Something was happening to his face. Some slow creep of…was it horror?
“I’m afraid I’m at a full complement of students at the moment.” He pushed off the railing, putting his curled-up hand in his pocket like he was protecting it from her.
Ripley wanted to spare herself the humiliation of begging, but sometimes disgraced Americans could get a toehold in England. This was her last chance to be a paleontologist. “Is there any way you could squeeze me in for a couple of months? Or take me on as an adjunct first? I really want to finish my degree and—”
“I reached out to UEM recently,” he interrupted, his eyes dark and unreadable behind those square black frames. Ripley got the feeling he wasn’t an interrupter by nature, that it hurt him a little to be so rude. “They said you’d been invited to leave the program. They also said your paper was withdrawn fromNaturedue to an authorship dispute.”
“Oh.” Her face went numb. “And you believe them. You think I took credit for work that wasn’t mine.”
