If he even looks at her lips, she’ll break into pieces like a fossil in the rain.
Bright color on his thigh catches her eye. A tiny, vengeful blue-and-black dragon flaming a path along his leg where his scar runs. She can tell the design is his—the sweep of wing, arched neck, and jeweled eyes are each distinctive, but together they’re unmistakable.
Something beautiful; something painful. On anyone else, it might read as defiance, but on James, it looks uncomfortably like penance.
“Good morning.” James clears his throat again. “I apologize for sleeping so late. I’m not usually this rude a guest, Mr. Adams.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ripley replies, wanting to spare him from having to explain anything about yesterday.
“Absolutely don’t worry about it,” her dad agrees, looking at him with narrowed eyes. “Worry more about your intentions toward my daughter. And call me Steve.”
“Dad.I told you James and I work together. We’re friends.” Ripley shoots him the death stare she perfected in adolescence. He laughs.
James looks at the floor, then back up at Steve, his finger reaching to push up the glasses that aren’t there. Ripley thought she was immune to that move. Maybe she didn’t get enough sleep last night, and that’s why her stomach is flipping now.
“My intentions are to be as helpful to Ripley as I can for as long as I can in any way I can.” His diction is exceptional.
“Excellent,” Steve says. “I’ll get the shotgun.”
“Dad,” Ripley growls, prompting a laugh from her father. “Wehaven’t—” Her face heats. When it comes to roughly half the bases, theyhave.
Steve chortles with undisguised glee. “How do you feel about kids, James? You want a few? Not right now, of course,” Steve clarifies. “But not too long from now either. Right?”
James’s cheeks take on that barely pink shade that means he’s wishing for a proper British death, but his eye contact with her dad never wavers. Ripley feels her heart swelling dangerously.
“Please stop tormenting our guest,” she says. “Are you hungry, James?”
His sunrise eyes flash in the dim, windowless living room. For a moment, he looks so achingly ravenous that her nipples pull tight under her shirt, but the look is gone in the time it takes her to cross her arms over the evidence.
“If you’re eating, I’d love to join you.”
“I’m making bacon and eggs,” Steve says cheerfully. “Coffee?”
“That would be lovely. Although, if you have tea?”
Steve raises a brow at Ripley. “Tea, huh? You betcha.” Arms filled with eggs, butter, and highly processed meat products, her dad leans over to whisper in her ear.
“I like this one, Pip. He’ssweet.”
22
Eastern Alberta looks unnervingly flat to someone raised with the Rockies firmly at her back. The long, straight highway and lush squares of farmland are interrupted only by the odd oil derrick and, once, a coyote dashing across the road. In the distance, the planet falls away sharply against the sky.
Drumheller is a deep scar in the smooth skin of the prairies, a river valley carved out over fourteen thousand years. It’s greener here than in Hell Creek, but you can’t mistake the characteristic humped cliffs of the Badlands. Itfeelslike a fossil kind of place.
On any other day, Ripley would be overflowing with excitement on the switchbacks toward the town.
Today, she’s spent a deeply weird three hours in the car with James. He’s been super-dismayed ever since he realized he forgot to pack his hair products. She can’t stop sneaking glances at the way his Superman hair has morphed into a wildly tousled mop. He’s compensating by holding his spine so straight, Ripley imagines his vertebrae clicking together like a tower of Lego blocks. Every so often, she gets a whiff of rain and vetiver no matter where she redirects the vents in the Charger.
Both of them are obviously avoiding contact, snatching their hands back whenever they stray too far toward an invisible linepainted down the middle of the car. He’s twitchy, repeatedly taking breaths like he’s about to say something, then staying silent.
Nobody has brought up the kiss.
Along a dusty stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway, he finally manages to ask, “So your trips home—they weren’t simply to visit? They were so you could take care of your dad?”
She swallows. “Yeah.”
“And the money you’ll get from Beauty, that’s for him too?”
