by V. L. Locey
“Perhaps you should get your ass in gear, old man,” I muttered to myself then chucked a roll of yellow flagging tape into the passenger seat. Best get to it before someone dreamed up something else that needed tending to.
Chapter Two
Generally, the only people on the ranch up before me were the great horned owls that lived and called to each other during the night. This morning, however, someone was pounding on my door at four in the morning. I normally rolled out at four-thirty and valued my sleep so whoever this was knocking had better be missing a limb.
“Fucker,” I grumbled, threw a hand out, and managed to locate the bedside lamp. My fingers grazed the base and the room was illuminated. I groaned, rolled over, and came face to face with a set of hairy red balls.
Bane was snoring, lying on his back on the pillow that I never used. The tip of his bent tail flicked a time or two. No one was sure what had happened to his tail. We assumed a horse or cow had stepped on it as he was always prowling the barns looking for a mouse or a lover.
“Not the first thing I need to see,” I grunted as the hammering continued. Fearing it was an emergency—we had those on the regular when it was calving season but that was now over—I kicked at the blue cover and stumbled out to the door in my boxers. The cabin was dark as night, clinging to the ranch like a needy toddler. I skirted around the sofa and coffee table. “Lighten the fuck up! I’m coming!” Wrong foot day number two had arrived.
The hammering subsided. I reached the door without stubbing my toes on any furniture or the two short steps leading out of the sunken living room, flicked on the light on the front porch, and flung the door open after flipping the deadbolt. I hated locks. When I first arrived here at the Prairie Smoke Ranch a thousand years ago, nothing had ever been locked. There had been no need. Now, with the influx of people coming here to hunt and fish, everything had to be padlocked. It was a sad testament to humanity and far too big of a reminder of the city life that I’d left behind.
I expected to see a young Native American man standing there with a stricken look. That was usually what I found when I’d been roused from my bed. What stood on my front step was not a Native American ranch hand. It was a...what the hell was the term they were using now? Yuppie? No, that’s not it. Hell, the word had fled my sleepy brain. The blond man on my stoop looked more like a reject from a Beach Boys video. Did they make videos or were they done and over before MTV became a thing? Shit, who knew. He was tall, angular, tanned, and dressed in a tank top that read SMILE LIKE A DINO that had a grinning T-rex on it, baggy black board shorts, and sloppy leather sandals. His lean cheeks were coated with new golden whiskers and he had a bun. A bun. A man with a bun had woken me up. What the ever loving fuck? Was someone pranking me? It wasn’t April first but still Kyle was known for his stupid ass practical jokes.
“Are you lost?” I stuck my rumpled head out the door to see if I could spy Kyle hiding behind my chicken coop. I saw nothing but an old Subaru. I leaned back inside and gave the bun man my most intimidating glare.
“Hey! You look incredibly surly. I’m sorry to have woken you up so early, but I couldn’t wait to get here and see what you found.”
“Who the fuck are you?” I scratched at my bare belly. His big blue eyes darted downward then flew back to my face.
“Oh, shit, sorry. Bishop Haney. Associate Professor of Paleontology at the University of Western Wyoming.” He held out a hand.
“You got any ID to back up that claim?” If this guy was a professor then I was the Queen of England.
“Oh sorry. Yeah let me...” He twisted around to shove a hand into the rucksack on his back. He pulled out a lanyard with a UWW ID, some keys, and a big green dinosaur wearing yellow shorts riding a surfboard dangling off it. I studied the picture on the laminated card then looked at him. Yep. He was who he said he was.
Guess I better start liking sipping tea and playing with corgis.
“You’re a professor?” My brain was too low on coffee to make sense of any of this. Bane slipped around my bare leg and out the door, stopping only long enough for Professor Beach Bingo to drop down to scratch his chin.
“Newly minted,” Bishop Haney replied, his smile so bright my eyes watered. He shoved his hand at me again and kept talking. “I couldn’t believe it when Professor Twitch called me last night and told me we had a new find. I’d been setting up a display at the Dinosaur Center. I work there part-time now that school’s out for the summer. A man has to pick up some cash somewhere, right? Nice cat by the way.”
“Bane.” He pumped my hand, his grip strong, his fingers as rough as mine.
“I’m sorry?” A moth arrived, drawn by the light.
“The cat. His name is Bane.”
“Like the DC comics supervillain?”
“No, like he’s the bane of my existence.”
That amused him, the bubbly blond Cali surfer professor dude laughed aloud. It was an honest laugh. Clear and soothing.
“You love him, I can tell. So, do you have a name or shall I just refer to you as the sexy older man in the form-fitting reindeer boxers?”
Sexy?
I glanced down. Fuck. I was wearing my bright red reindeer Christmas boxers. I could feel a bit of heat tinting my cheeks. Good thing there was a short beard there to hide the blush.
“I need to do wash. Come in.” I freed my hand from his and stepped aside so he could enter my cabin. He stepped inside, dropped an old rucksack to the floor, and nodded.
“Nice place. Bet it looks even better when the lights are on.” Fuck. I slapped at the wall switch. The lamp by the door came on. He gave me a wink then meandered around the living room, easy as you please, checking out the mounts on the walls then ambling over to admire the carvings on the mantle over the fireplace. “These are beautiful.” He picked up the small wooden moose that Kyle had made me for my birthday last year. “Whoever did this has some real talent.”
“Yeah. I need pants.” I left him standing by the fireplace. When I came back a few minutes later, jeans and my lone clean T-shirt on, he was still looking at the carvings. “Coffee?”
He glanced at me. “Cool, yeah, please. Are these symbolic pieces? I know there are several tribes in the area. Did you purchase these from a local artisan?” He was inspecting an eagle now, its oaken wings spread wide. How the man whittled such intricate details into such small works of art I didn’t know.
“He works here.”
“Oh, wow. I’d love to talk to him. Was he part of the excavation team that discovered the bones?” He tenderly placed the eagle back to the thick wooden mantle then followed along behind me into my small kitchen.
“He was there, yeah.”
“Cool. So, I am sorry if I woke you up. I can never sleep well when I’m cranked up about a dig. Tell me all about the site. What did you find? How deep were the bones?” He tossed a long leg over one of two stools by the island as coffee flowed into a mug. Plain coffee. None of that flavored stuff that was so popular now. The old drip Mr. Coffee might not be fancy, but neither was its owner. All my pretension had stayed in Illinois. “I’ve only been on one dig so far, and that was when I was working on my masters. We were down in Patagonia and found a nearly complete Megaraptor, which were therapods that lived in the Cretaceous period. There’s some dissension about it as it was considered to be the biggest dromaeosaur, but now there’s speculation that it could be a tyrannosaurid. Although recent estimates are denying that possibility and are pointing to its lineage being a basal coelurosaur.”
“You don’t say,” I commented as I handed him a cup of coffee.
He flashed that smile again. Bright white teeth with a well-sunned face. “I did it again, didn’t I?”
“Did what?”
“Started talking dino. I do that all the time. Then people look at me with glazed eyes. I really love my work.”
“I can tell.”
He sniffed his coffee. “Got any flavored creamers?”
“Nope.”
His sleek eyebrows knitted. “Too bad. Hazelnut slaps.”
Slaps? I almost asked but didn’t. “So, how will this whole thing go?”
He took a tentative sip then placed his mug on the island. “Well, first I’d like to thank you for calling us in to excavate. If we do find a complete skeleton, it will be turned over to the natural history museum that’s on our campus, and everyone will be able to enjoy seeing it. Small colleges and museums don’t have the budgets that are needed to compete with the auction houses and professional dinosaur hunters. So, the fact that you decided to turn this possible find over to a public repository where it can be part of the scientific record is incredible.”
“Your thanks need to go to Landon Reece, the owner of this land. I’m just the foreman.”
“Well, we at the UWW Biology and Sciences Department thank everyone who was there when the discovery was made,” he said into his coffee. I inclined my head, my sight lingering on his hair. It was an interesting blond color, a mixture of wheat and sunshine. “How far away is the site?”
“About fifteen minutes on four-wheelers,” I replied as I noticed that the sky outside the window had a few fingerlings of magenta creeping into the ebony night.
“No horses?”
I pulled my sight from the window to the professor. “We can certainly saddle up a few if you’d like to do that but the four-wheelers would be—”
“Nope! No, that’s good. Fine. No need to saddle anything. Wheels are good. I do have a Subaru that’s not scared of roughing it.” He jerked his golden head toward the front of the cabin. He had a smooth way of moving and talking. And sweet magnolia did the man talk. I was too low on caffeine for this. Jabbering men with buns were not my cup of tea. Jabbering any person grated on me. I’d never been overly talkative and the past twenty years alone only made me worse.
“I’ll have chores to attend to when we’re done, so I’ll need my own transportation,” I rushed to say then lifted my cup to my lips.
“Totally fine. I’ll be there all day. So, is this where I’ll be sleeping?” I choked. Coffee went everywhere. His eyes widened as I gagged. “Are you okay? I know the Heimlich. Never had to use it but...no, wait. I did! Some dude in a tiny bar in Rio Negro had been eating olives and one got stuck in his windpipe. I jumped up, grabbed him, and squeezed. The olive popped out and landed in his glass of Malbec. He was so grateful he bought a bottle of red wine for everyone from the university. I have no recollection of leaving that bar. Wine kicks my ass. I’m more of a St. Archer Blonde kind of man.”
I wiped at the coffee on my shirt, my head packed full of words like “dude” and “slap” and “St. Archer Blonde” whatever that was.
“I’m good. No, you do not sleep here. We have guest cabins for guests.”
“Hence them being called guest cabins,” he merrily tossed out then chugged down the last few sips of coffee. I stared at his throat as he drank, head back, lips resting on my mug. He had a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple. When he lowered the mug, he wet his lips. A kernel of something crackled to life in my belly. Then he started talking again. “Right. Coffee and small talk are done. How about we get to the site?”
“It’s still dark out.”
“Oh, yeah.” He slapped his hands to his thighs. “Well, guess we’ll just have to have another cup of cowboy coffee and shoot the shit.”
“We’ll use flashlights.” I placed my mug into the sink, took his and did the same, then made a beeline for the front door. Stuffing my hat down on my head, I waited for Bishop to come sauntering out. He did and he was talking. Not sure about what. Some sort of game he and his Cali friends played when he was a kid that involved flashlights.
“...tag all the time. Of course, our folks always knew when we’d snuck out because the batteries were always dead in all the flashlights. Oh, thanks.” I shoved his rucksack into his chest. He merely smiled and threaded his arms into the straps. “Of course, we were usually on the beach because that was where we lived or so our parents said, so the flashlights were not only dead but full of sand.”
He laughed. I gaped. Then I opened the door. “Let’s go.”
***
He talked all the way to the bones.
It was, in some ways, amazing and in other ways utterly infuriating.
How the shit did a man have that much to talk about with a complete stranger? It was probably a good thing that the sun hadn’t risen fully yet, this way he couldn’t see me rolling my eyes as we bounded along on my Polaris, the headlight bouncing. He had wanted to bring his Subaru so I had had to explain that Wyoming pastures weren’t the same as sandy dunes. The exhaust system of his car would have been torn off in no time. So, he was behind me, arms tightly around my waist, thighs clamped to my hips, mouth going steadily.
“There are bugs,” I warned him numerous times hoping that would shut him up, but he would just chuckle and continue along with whatever story he was telling. I’d never been so happy to find that old dry creek bed in my life. Bishop Haney agitated me. The press of his body into mine was too much, too tight, too firm, too sharply painful in so many ways. When he did lapse into quiet, to breathe, his chin rested on my shoulder. That was also too painful. I’d not been held by a man in far too long. I couldn’t recall the last trip I’d made to Jackson Hole to find some quick relief.
“Holy hell,” he said at one point. I slowed down, certain he had seen a predator in the shifting shadows of dawn. We did have wolves, coyotes, grizzlies, and mountain lions roaming the Prairie Smoke Ranch on occasion. Which was why there was a rifle strapped to the rear of my four-wheeler. My gaze flitted across the rolling pastureland. “Look at that sunrise.”
Ah. We were close to the dig, but I shifted down and let the machine under us idle. There was no denying it. Nothing came close to a Wyoming dawn. The clouds were stacked thinly in a scarlet sky. Ribbons of purple and blue had been airbrushed along the bottom of the wispy cirrus clouds. The Tetons rose up to kiss the reds, purples, and blues. The snow still clinging to the peaks was pink and reminded me of cotton candy. It was a glorious sight.
His tight hold slackened, and his chin came to rest on my shoulder again. I turned my head, just an inch, and watched the wonderment dancing in his gaze. He was a handsome man, in a fashion. Minus the bun. The morning light did wondrous things for him though. His eyes darted to me, a smile pulling up the corners of his lips. Another flicker of awareness sparked inside me. Flustered, I shifted into drive, and we bounced and jounced along until the flapping strips of yellow tapes could be seen.
He was off the four-wheeler before it stopped.
With the rising sun behind him, he cut a masculine silhouette. Minus the bun. What the hell ever possessed a man to wear a bun? It was dumb and needed to be taken out immediately.
“Okay, so this is promising. I’ll be able to get a better read once the sun is up, but the layering of sediment looks pretty consistent with what we’d see in the mid to late Cretaceous period.” He crept up on the cordoned off area as if trying to sneak up on a rattlesnake. I cut the engine and watched the show from the comfort of the four-wheeler. “We’d be seeing a great deal of angiosperms. Ginkgoes, conifers, ferns, plants of that nature. Of course, the sedimentary layering will also tell us a great deal and—oh my God! What the hell happened to that fossil?!?”
He threw a long leg over the electric tape then stood looking down at the big chunk of calcified bone that we’d broken in half.
“Excavator,” I tossed out. He turned and threw a glower at me that should have knocked me off the Polaris. Then he dropped to his bare knees.
“Oh, the humanity!” he shouted as he shrugged off his rucksack and shoved a hand into it. He pulled out a pair of dark-rimmed glasses as he muttered along to himself. I couldn’t catch most of what he said, but I had to reckon the tirade was aimed at ranchers with heavy equipment. He did glance back at me once. The glasses looked good on his angular face. And ramped up his science nerd levels greatly. So
now he was an odd combination of bun wearing surfer guy and dinosaur geek. My brain was having trouble getting him plugged neatly into a niche.
“Okay, it’s okay.” He sat back on his heels as he extracted a rolled up kit of some sort. “I know you didn’t know she was here.”
“You can tell it’s a she from a fractured leg bone?” If so, he was damn good.
I could hear his eyes rolling and battled down a smile. “No of course not, but the site has a feminine feel to it.”
“Uh-huh.” I pushed the brim of my hat back just a bit.
“I have a knack for these things.” He gently unrolled his kit. The slow reveal seemed almost religious. I leaned forward a bit to spy on what he had brought. Looked to me to be a well thought out assortment of tools such as a rock hammer, a walkie talkie or two, a GPS, chisels, probes, brushes, a bottle of some sort of liquid, a tape measure, and a Swiss army knife.
“Feminine things?”
He glanced up over the top of his glasses. The sun was slightly higher now, giving his bare arms a rosy glow.
“Yep,” he replied as he extracted the GPS device and started feeding in information.
“Explains the bun,” I mumbled.
That made him chuckle. “Don’t diss the bun, dude.” After a moment or two, he slid the GPS back into his kit. “I have the site fed into my field notebook. Next time I won’t need an escort.” He flashed me a quirky smile. “I will need a lift back to those cabins you talked about.”
“I can send one of the hands out to get you around lunch.”
He blinked at me. “Lunch?”
“It’s the meal we eat at midday.”
His plump lips flattened. “I have my own food.” He waved at his rucksack. “Come get me in a few days.”
