Birthright

by Nora Roberts

  “She didn’t take any drugs. She doesn’t take drugs. I’ve known her for years and I’ve never seen her so much as puff on a joint. She’s clean. Jake?”

  “She doesn’t use,” he confirmed. “I was working ten feet away from her most of the morning. She never left the area until lunch break. Then she went directly over to Callie’s sector.”

  “She didn’t take anything. She ate a half a sandwich, drank a couple glasses of iced tea. I was excavating. She took pictures for me. Then she said something about having too much sun, feeling woozy.” She leaned forward, gripped the nurse’s wrist.

  “Look at me. Listen to me. If she took something, I’d tell you. She’s one of my closest friends. Tell me her condition.”

  “They’re working on her. Her symptoms indicate a drug overdose.”

  “That’s not possible.” Callie looked at Jake. “It’s just not possible. It has to be some mistake. Some sort of . . .” When her stomach pitched, she reached out blindly for Jake. “It was my tea. She drank my tea.”

  “Was there something in the tea?” the nurse demanded.

  “I didn’t put anything in it. But . . .”

  “Somebody else might have,” Jake finished. He yanked out his own phone. “I’m calling the police.”

  She sat outside on the curb with her head on her knees. She’d had to escape the smells of sickness and injury, the sounds of voices and phones. The sight of the orange plastic chairs in the waiting area. The stifling box that held so much pain and fear.

  She didn’t look up when her father sat beside her. She sensed him, the scent, the movement, and simply leaned her body into his.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “No. No, honey. They’ve stabilized her. She’s very weak, but she’s stable.”

  “She’s going to be all right?”

  “She’s young, she’s strong and healthy. Getting her treatment quickly was key. She ingested a dangerous dosage of Seconal.”

  “Seconal? Could it have killed her?”

  “Possibly. Not likely, but possibly.”

  “It had to be in the tea. It’s the only logical answer.”

  “I want you to come home with us, Callie.”

  “I can’t.” She pushed to her feet. “Don’t ask me.”

  “Why?” Angry now, he rose, hurried after her, grabbed her arm. “This isn’t worth your life. It could be you in there. You’re ten pounds lighter than your friend. Maybe fifteen. You could have ingested that tea. Could have been working alone, slipped into a coma without anyone noticing. The dosage she took could have killed you.”

  “You’ve answered your own question. I’ve already started it, Dad. It can’t be stopped. I wouldn’t be any safer in Philadelphia. Not now. We’ve uncovered too many layers, and they can’t be buried again. I won’t be safe until all of it’s uncovered. I’m afraid now that none of us will.”

  “Let the police handle it.”

  “I’m not going to get in their way, I promise you. Hewitt’s calling in the FBI, and I’m all for it. But I’m not standing still either. Whoever’s doing this is going to find out I’m not a victim.” She watched Jake step out, met his eyes. “And I don’t quit.”

  It was nearly dusk when she stood with Jake on the now deserted site. “Leo’s going to want to shut it down. At least temporarily.”

  “And we’re going to talk him out of it,” Callie said. “We’re going to keep this going. And when Rosie’s back on her feet, she’ll go right back to work.”

  “You may be able to talk Leo into it, but how many people are you going to convince to stay on the dig?”

  “If it’s down to you and me, it’s down to you and me.”

  “And Digger.”

  “Yeah, and Digger,” she agreed. “I’m not going to be chased away. I’m not going to let whoever’s responsible pick the time and place to come after me. Not again.”

  She looked pale and drawn in the softening light, he thought. Honed down to worry and determination. And remembered how she’d looked in the moonlight when she’d risen over him in bed. The way her face had glowed with laughter and arousal. There’d been freedom there, for both of them, to simply be.

  And while they’d given themselves to each other, while they’d steeped themselves in each other, someone—close—had been planning to hurt her.

  “It was one of our own team.” He said it flatly, the anger dug too deep to show.

  “The site was crawling with people today. Towners, media, college classes.” Then she sighed. “Yeah, it was one of ours. I had the damn jug on the counter with the lid off. I’ve gone back over it. Leo came in with the present. I took it over to the table to open it. Back to the counter. We were all around somewhere. Everybody knows that’s my jug, and most days I work solo, at least through to lunch break. That’s my pattern. Whoever did it knows my pattern.”

  “You didn’t go for the tea this morning.”

  “No. The water jug was handier. Rosie—” She broke off, confused when he turned around and walked away. When he just stood at the edge of her sector, staring down, she walked over, put a tentative hand on his back.

  He whirled, grabbed her and held so tight she expected her rib cage to shatter. “Hey. Whoa. You’re shaking.”

  “Shut up.” His voice was muffled against her hair, then against her mouth. “Just shut up.”

  “Okay, now I’m shaking. I think I need to sit down.”

  “No. Just hold on, damnit.”

  “I am.” She locked a hand around her own wrist. “I’m starting to think maybe you do love me.”

  “You could’ve passed out down there. Who knows how long it might’ve been before one of us noticed?”

  “I didn’t. It didn’t happen. And Rosie’s in the hospital because of it.”

  “We’re going to take the team apart. One by one. We not only keep the project going, we keep the team intact until we find the one responsible.”

  “How do we keep the team intact?”

  “We’re going to lie. We’ll use the mummy’s-curse angle. Start the rumor. Some local rednecks want to pay us back for screwing up the development, and they’ve been sabotaging the project. We make them believe we believe it, convince them we have to stick together.”

  “Rah-rah?”

  “Partly, and partly for science, partly for personal safety. Everybody’s one big happy family. While whoever’s done this thinks we’re off on that angle, we narrow the field.”

  “We can eliminate Bob. He was on the team before I knew about the Cullens.”

  Jake shook his head. No chances now. “We can put him on a secondary list. We don’t eliminate anyone until we have absolute proof. This time, we’re working on the guilty-until-proven-innocent theme.” He brushed the back of his knuckles over her cheek. “Nobody tries to poison my wife.”

  “Ex-wife. We need to bring Leo in on this.”

  “We’ll have a closed-door meeting back at the house. Make it very obvious and official.”

  Leo argued, blustered, cursed and eventually caved in to the twin-pronged assault.

  “The police or the state are bound to shut us down in any case.”

  “Until they do, we stick.”

  He stared at Callie. “You really think you can convince the team, one of whom you believe is a murderer, to continue to dig?”

  “Watch me.”

  He took off his glasses, squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I’m going to go along with you, with both of you. But there are conditions.”

  “I don’t like conditions. You?” she asked Jake.

  “Hate them.”

  “You’ll live with these, or I’m going out there and telling those kids to go home. Kids,” he repeated.

  “Okay, okay,” Callie grumbled.

  “The conditions are that I’m calling in a couple more men. Men I know and trust. They’ll be fully informed of the situation. They’ll work, but their main purpose will be to watch and to form impressions. It’ll take
me a day or two to set it up.”

  “That’s agreeable.” Callie nodded.

  “I also want to speak with the authorities about the possibility of having a police officer join the team. Undercover.”

  “Come on, Leo.”

  “Those are the terms.” Leo got to his feet. “Agreed?”

  They agreed, and called the rest of the team in for a kitchen-table meeting. Callie passed out beer while Leo started things off with a booster speech.

  “But the police wouldn’t tell us anything.” Jittery, Frannie looked at face after face, never lighting on one for more than a finger snap. “They just asked a lot of questions. Like one of us made Rosie sick on purpose.”

  “We think somebody did.” At Callie’s statement, there was absolute silence. “We put a lot of people out of work,” she continued. “And some of those people are pretty steamed about it. They don’t understand what we’re doing here. More, they don’t give a shit. Somebody set a fire in Lana Campbell’s office. Why?” She waited a beat and, as Frannie had, watched faces. “Because she’s the Preservation Society’s lawyer and largely responsible for us being here. Somebody torched Digger’s trailer, blew the hell out of some of our equipment, some of our records.”

  “Bill’s dead,” Bob said quietly.

  “Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn’t.” Jake studied his beer and was aware of every movement, every breath around him. “Could be one of the people we’ve pissed off hurt him, hurt him more than they meant to. But that upped the odds. And it added to the disturb-the-graves-and-face-the-curse deal laymen like to spook each other with. Bad shit happens, they can start gossiping that the project’s cursed.”

  “Maybe it is.” Dory pressed her lips together. “I know how that sounds, but bad shit is happening. It keeps happening. Now Rosie . . .”

  “Spirits don’t dump barbiturates in jugs of iced tea.” Callie folded her arms. “People do. And that means we’re going to have to keep the dig clear of all outsiders. No more tours, no more outdoor classrooms, no more visitors past the fence line. We stick together. We take care of each other, watch out for each other. That’s what teams do.”

  “We’ve got important work to do,” Jake stated. “We’re going to show these local assholes we won’t be run off. The project depends on every one of us. So . . .”

  Jake stretched a hand out over the table.

  Callie laid hers on his. One by one, others put their hands out until everyone was connected.

  Callie skimmed faces once more. And knew she held hands with a murderer.

  Twenty-seven

  The call from the front desk announcing the delivery of a package from Lana Campbell interrupted Doug as he was plotting out his approach. He didn’t know why Lana would send him a package, or why the hell a bellman couldn’t bring it up, but he pulled on a pair of shoes, grabbed his room key and went down to retrieve it.

  And there she was. Absolutely perfect, every gorgeous hair in place. He knew he was grinning like an idiot as he strode across the small lobby, lifted Lana right off her feet and caught that pretty mouth with his.

  “Some package.” He set her down, but he didn’t let go.

  “I hoped you’d like it.”

  “Where’s Ty?”

  She lifted her hands to his cheeks, and now she kissed him. “You say exactly the right things at the right times. He’s spending a couple of days with his grandparents in Baltimore. He’s over the moon about it. Why don’t we go up to your room? I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

  “Sure.” He looked down at her feet where she’d set her briefcase, a wheeled carry-on, her laptop case. She was carrying a purse the size of Idaho. “All this? How long were you planning to stay?”

  “Now that’s not the right thing to say.” She sailed past him, pressed the Up button on the elevator.

  “How about if I say I’m really glad to see you?”

  “Better.”

  He hauled her bags inside, pushed the button for his floor. “But I also wonder what you’re doing here.”

  “Acceptable. First, I wanted Ty tucked away right now, and I felt Digger would do more good with Callie and Jake than with me. I also felt I might be able to give you a hand. You deserve a sidekick.”

  “I’d say I got top of the line, sidekick wise.”

  “Bet your ass.” She stepped out with him on his floor and walked down the hall beside him. “I could only clear my calendar for a couple of days. But I thought I’d be more useful here than there. So I’m here.”

  “So, it wasn’t because you were pining away for me and your life wasn’t worth living if you had to spend another moment away from me?”

  “Well, that factored in, of course.” She stepped into the room, glanced around. It had two full-sized beds—one still unmade—a small desk, a single chair and one stingy window. “You do live spare.”

  “If I’d known you were coming, I’d’ve gotten something . . . else.”

  “This is fine.” She set her purse down on the second bed. “I need to tell you what happened yesterday.”

  “Is telling me right now going to change anything?”

  “No. But you need to—”

  “Then first things first.” He drew the jacket she wore off her shoulders. “Nice material,” he said, and tossed it on the bed beside her purse. “You know one of the first things I noticed about you, Lana?”

  “No. What?” She stood very still while he unbuttoned her blouse.

  “Soft. Your looks, your skin, your hair. Your clothes.” He slid the blouse away. “A man’s just got to get his hands on all that soft.” He trailed a fingertip down the center of her body to the hook of her slacks.

  “Maybe you should put the Do Not Disturb sign out.”

  “I did.” He lowered his mouth, nibbled on hers as the fluid material pooled at her feet.

  She tugged his shirt up, over his head. “You’re a clear-thinking, careful man. That’s one of the first things I noticed about you. I find that kind of thing very attractive.” Her breath caught when he swept her up into his arms. “And there’s that, too.”

  “We’re practical, straightforward people.”

  “Mostly,” she managed when he laid her on the bed.

  He covered her body with his. “Nice fit.”

  She let herself go, let the anxiety and excitement of the past hours melt away. He smelled of his shower, the hotel soap. She found even that arousing. To be here, so far from home in this anonymous room on sheets where he’d slept without her.

  She could hear the drone of a vacuum cleaner being run in the corridor outside. And the slam of a door as someone went on their way.

  She could hear her own heart beat in her throat as his lips nuzzled there.

  The long, loving stroke of his hands over her warmed her skin. Her blood, her bones. So she sighed his name when his lips came back to hers. And yielded everything.

  He’d dreamed of her in the night, and he rarely dreamed. He’d wished for her, and he rarely wished. All that, it seemed, had changed since she’d slipped into his life. What he’d once stopped himself from wanting was now everything he wanted.

  A home, a family. A woman who would be there. It was all worth the risk if she was the woman.

  He pressed his lips to her heart and knew if he could win that, he could do anything.

  She moved under him, a shuddering, restless move as he sampled her with his tongue. Now the need to excite her, to hear her breath thicken and catch, to feel that heart he wanted so much to hold thunder, rose up in him.

  Not so patient now, not so easy. As her breath went choppy, he dragged her up so they were kneeling on the bed, struggling to