by Unknown
Under Jericho’s supervision, she and the other thirteen students who comprised the dig team spent the ensuing three weeks preparing for excavation. There were nine guys to the six girls. Zoey was amused to learn that setting up fieldwork often took as long as the dig itself. They collected as much documentation as they could find from old maps, to soil surveys, to land records. Jericho had the students test their technical abilities with aerial photography, satellite imagery, and geographic information systems. After that, they moved onto gathering the equipment they would need—shovels, trowels, coring tools, augers, colorful flagging tape, machetes, copies of maps for everyone on the team, measuring tapes, rulers, compasses, waterproof markers, plastic bags, magnifying glasses, graph paper, clipboards, GPS units, tablet computers, first aid kits, insect repellent, sunblock.
They conducted surface and subsurface investigations, shovel testing, and core probing. Their efforts at a judgmental sampling—which meant they looked for places to dig where they thought archaeological sites might be—were somewhat hampered by Winz-Smith’s insistence they restrict their search strictly to Triangle Mount, but combined with probabilistic sampling, meaning they used math to give them a more objective guess, they located a promising spot.
The recording process seemed endless. Jericho’s mantra was “record everything” and he reminded them of it about five hundred times a day. They took photographs, filled out forms, and organized their research and wrote up a dig plan. Zoey forced herself to embrace the “boring” parts. After all, she was determined to prove to herself that she had the grit to stick to this.
Jericho was a stickler for both safety and field ethics. He insisted on a safety plan in case of accidents and safety rules to circumvent them. He held an archaeology day for the community to generate local support for the project and designated a day when the public could come help them dig, after running it past Winz-Smith first.
Finally, they made arrangements for earth-moving equipment and operators to come in to break ground and lastly, set up the eight tents where they would be living during the duration of field school, the end of which would culminate just before the Fourth of July weekend. They’d bunk two to a tent. Zoey’s roommate was Catrina Bello, a foreign exchange student from Portugal, who had a flawless command of English. She was as beautiful as her name; model tall with Angelina Jolie lips and a way of shrugging that made Zoey feel distinctly dismissed. But hey, she could get along with anyone.
At six A.M., on the morning of June 8, the dig began in earnest.
Zoey started out full of enthusiasm. She hadn’t been a cheerleader her junior year of high school for nothing, never mind that she’d quit the activity halfway through the school year to take up track and field, and that lasted only a few weeks before she decided to play the saxophone, until it turned out she wasn’t the least bit musically inclined, but no more of that nonsense. She loved archaeology and she was sticking with it.
Besides, it was fun when the guys took their shirts off in the arid heat. Especially Jericho. The last time she’d seen him shirtless they’d been teenagers, and he’d certainly filled out nicely since then.
His strong neck blended into powerful shoulders and muscle-packed chest that set her mouth instantly watering. When he strained at his work, gripping a shovel with his big hands, mammoth biceps bunched tight. A uniform dusting of dark hair highlighted his pecs before trailing down to rippled abs as tight as a trampoline. Naughtily, she allowed her gaze to stray to his crotch, where his jeans stretched taut.
She dipped the brim of her pink straw cowgirl hat down over her eyes so she could watch him surreptitiously without being caught ogling. Such a shame that he was off limits. The things she wanted to do to that man!
If that cautionary tale he’d told her about his disastrous, line-crossing teacher/student relationship with Mallory wasn’t enough to thwart her, the thought of getting him fired certainly did. Plus there was the whole screwing up their friendship thing to consider. As delicious as his washboard abs and squirm-inducing biceps were, a few moments of sinful pleasure would not be worth the price.
What if getting intimate strengthened your connection instead?
That provocative question had been circling her head from the moment she’d seen him again in the Sul Ross parking lot, and it had spurred her decision to stick with archaeology. She needed to know that she had the stuff to make a big commitment and stick to it.
By the third day of shoveling and troweling and peeling back layers of strata and screening soil when they still had not found a thing, Zoey’s zest was waning faster than beer at a frat house kegger. As she lay on her uncomfortable cot that night, exhausted to the bone and listening to Catrina snore—beautiful she might be, but the girl could give a buzz saw a run for its money—she couldn’t help thinking that if she quit the field school, Jericho would no longer be her instructor. That would open the door for something more to develop between them, but then Walker’s threat to cut off her trust fund entirely put a stop to those thoughts. She’d waited for Jericho for twenty years, what were a few more weeks?
“I’m no quitter,” she announced out loud, hoping that if she said it enough she’d start to believe it.
Catrina sat up on her cot. “What?”
“Nothing, never mind. Go back to sleep.”
On Thursday, the fourth day of the dig, Jericho left the dig site for a faculty meeting at the university. The second his pickup truck disappeared from view, the nine male students clustered around Catrina, offering to help her shift sand. Frustrated with both the fruitless dig and the Catrina worshipping and with no shirtless Jericho to hold her interest, Zoey climbed from the excavation site, wiped the sweat from her brow, and wandered over to the ice chest for something to drink.
She stood gulping down the water and looking out over at Widow’s Peak, which was a good two thousand feet taller than Triangle Mount’s forty-five-hundred-foot elevation. In the flat desert terrain that stretched between the two mountains was a small, oval-shaped lake that shimmered an enticing blue. It wasn’t far away, maybe a mile off, and while Winz-Smith had forbidden them to excavate anywhere but Triangle Mount, he hadn’t said they couldn’t go swimming in the lake.
The cool waters called to her. Come take a dip.
Zoey glanced over at her fellow students. They were either busy digging or bird-dogging Catrina. No one noticed when she picked up her backpack and slipped off.
Thirty minutes later, she was doing the backstroke in her underwear, savoring the refreshing swim and the stark, natural beauty of her surroundings. She could see why past McClearys had set aside this land for a nature preserve. Unless an airplane happened to fly over, it was easy to imagine she’d stepped into a time machine and gone back two hundred years.
She wished Jericho were here with her. He knew so much about history. She’d love to hear him talk about what life had been like those days. Although she could just hear him tell her, You wouldn’t like it, Zoe-Eyes. No cell phones. No iPads. No texting. No Twitter.
Maybe she would have liked it, though. That is, if Jericho could go back in time with her.
She floated, allowing her mind to wander. From this vantage point, she had a clear view of the top of Widow’s Peak and pictured her and Jericho building a log cabin together. It was probably harder than it looked, but Jericho was handy that way. Honestly, the man seemed to know something about almost everything. Speaking of Jericho, she better get back before he returned and caught her goofing off.
After she got out of the lake, shimmied back into her clothes, and tucked her wet hair up underneath her cowgirl hat—it would dry in nothing flat in the desert heat—for the first time she noticed two earthen mounds a few yards from the water. The mounds were covered with scrub brush and cactus and other inhospitable vegetation. Before she started taking archaeology courses she would never have looked at a mound of earth and thought, There’s something underneath there, but that’s exactly what she thought now. A prickly sensatio
n that was strangely akin to a static electric shock lit up her nerve ends and then settled with a hard jolt in the pit of her stomach.
She pulled a copy of the area maps from her backpack and studied them to see if the mounds had already been recorded. Nothing. Hmm, could there have been a settlement here at one time? What if she found a village that no one had ever heard of? Her pulse skipped a beat.
Her enthusiasm that had worn away came charging back stronger than ever. This was why she’d become interested in archaeology. The heady thrill of discovery. With trembling fingers, she took the collapsible shovel she kept stowed in her backpack and went over to the larger of the two mounds. Remembering everything Jericho had taught her, she started to dig.
“WHERE’S ZOEY?” JERICHO asked when he returned to the dig site to find her missing.
The students blinked and glanced around.
“She was just here,” said Avery Slocum.
Avery was a bit older than the other students and was working on his master’s at Texas A&M. He’d joined their field school as a volunteer. Because he had the most experience, Jericho made him second in command and they were sharing a tent. Avery had hot eyes for Catrina and she seemed interested in him as well. Jericho had warned the younger man about the perils of getting intimately involved with a fellow student on a dig, but his words of caution fell on lust-deafened ears. Since Avery was neither an employee of, nor a student at, Sul Ross, Jericho didn’t have much authority to forbid him to strike up a romance with Catrina, plus he felt like a hypocrite doing so. Every time Jericho looked at Zoey he was on the verge of breaking a dozen rules himself. They were all adults here. As long as Avery and Catrina’s budding relationship didn’t interfere with the work, he’d stay out of their business.
As for himself, well, he was not going to do anything about his deepening feelings for Zoey, at least not until the dig was over. Too much was at stake for them both.
But where was she?
Shaking his head, Jericho scanned the site. There really wasn’t anywhere to disappear to in the immediate vicinity. Maybe the relentless sun had given her a headache and she’d gone to lie down in her tent. He pivoted and headed down the incline to check her tent, when from the corner of his eye, he caught movement on the valley floor between the two mountains and near the small lake.
He stopped and narrowed his eyes. Something—or someone—was down there. He stalked to his pickup truck parked at the bottom of Triangle Mount, pulled a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment, returned to his vantage point, and focused in on the movement.
Yep. It was Zoey. What the hell was she doing down there? He narrowed his eyes, looked again. Digging. She was digging. Right where Winz-Smith’s contract had expressly forbidden them to dig.
Swearing under his breath, he started to reach for his cell phone to call her and chew her out, but then remembered cell service out here was nonexistent.
“What’s up?” Avery came to stand at his elbow.
“Slight problem, nothing to worry about. Stay here and supervise the dig. I’ll be back in a bit.” He thrust the binoculars at Avery, who promptly peered through them.
“What’s she doing down there?”
“That,” Jericho threw over his shoulder as he headed toward the lake, “is the million-dollar question, and knowing Zoey, it’s got a screwball answer.”
ZOEY WAS SO absorbed in her digging and the artifacts she was unearthing that she didn’t hear or see a thing until a pair of cowboy boots planted themselves in front of her.
Uh-oh. Busted.
Pulse thumping, she slowly raised her head, taking in the tips of those dusty boots to the frayed hem of faded Wranglers to the longhorn belt buckle that crowned his zipper—she stopped there a minute to admire the package—then moved on up to sinewy arms folded tightly over a chest so honed she could see the definition of muscles through his white cotton shirt.
Finally, she tipped her head all the way back and grinned nervously up at Jericho’s thundercloud face.
“Hi!” she chirped, and tried her best to look adorable.
“Care to explain yourself?” he asked in a spookily soft voice.
Zoey gulped. “I’m digging.”
“I can see that. What I want to know is why are you digging?”
She dialed her grin up a notch. “I’m an archaeologist. We dig. That’s what we do.”
He sank his hands on his hips, did not crack a smile. “Your extreme cuteness is not going to get you out of trouble.”
“No?”
He shook his head.
She measured off an inch with her thumb and index finger. “Not even a little bit?”
“Zoey, I’m just trying to do my job here. I didn’t think it would be that hard for you to follow the rules. Not when there’s so much at stake for us both.”
She pressed a hand to her belly. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble—”
“You never do.” His scowl deepened.
Her heart tripped over itself. The last time he looked this mad at her was that time at summer camp when she’d jumped off the cliff into a pool. She hadn’t even stopped to consider what she was doing. Just jumped in with both feet like always.
“Are you trying to ruin this dig?”
“No, no, quite the opposite. In fact, I’m making the dig. Look at this.” She made a move to stand, but she’d been squatting for so long that when she tried to get up, her head spun.
He put out a hand and she grabbed onto it and he tugged her to her feet. Her head was still reeling. He slid his arm around her waist. “You okay?”
His body heat intensified the noonday heat. Simultaneously, she wanted to press closer—burn out, flare out, flame out in a blaze of glory—and save herself by pulling as far away from him as she could get.
“Fine,” she whispered hoarsely and took a step back.
“Here.” He reached in his backpack, drew out a bottle of Gatorade, and pressed it into her palm. “Drink.”
It wasn’t until she’d downed the entire bottle that she realized how dehydrated she’d become and noticed that she had numerous scratches crisscrossed up and down her hands and arms. Her clothes were already dry, her hair too. How long had she been digging?
Jericho took the empty bottle from her and tucked it back into his pack. “Feeling better?”
“Yes.” She put her palms to her lower spine and stretched out the kinks.
His gaze strayed to the ground and the dirt-covered artifacts she’d piled up. “This isn’t proper procedure. Not to mention it’s a clear violation of the contract we signed with the foundation.”
Sheepishly, she ducked her head. “I know, I know. I didn’t mean to start digging. I came down here for a swim and then I saw these two mounds. My intention was merely to take a soil sample, but in the first scoop of sand, I found this.” With the toe of her hiking boot, she touched the blue and white crockery shard she’d unearthed. “I got so excited I kept digging and couldn’t stop because I just kept finding stuff.”
Arms draped over his thigh, Jericho crouched beside the artifacts she’d collected and examined her discoveries—the broken crockery, a piece of metal that could have been the tip of a knife blade, the sole of an old boot, the bones of some small animal, and another object about the size of a half dollar, but was more irregular in shape, and so encrusted with dirt and mineral deposits they couldn’t tell what it was.
“How old do you think this stuff is?” she asked.
“These items are obviously historic, so if Triangle Mount is a prehistoric pyramid, this settlement is not related to it. My guess? Two hundred years, give or take.”
“That was back when Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowa roamed the Trans-Pecos and at least a good fifty years before Cupid was founded.”
“Yes.”
“But here’s the really exciting thing.” She touched his shoulder, and immediately her fingers tingled. “This settlement isn’t on any map.”
He stood up, looking as disco
ncerted as she felt. Was it because she’d touched him or because of her find?
She fumbled for the maps, passed them to him. “And I’ve never heard anyone talk about a settlement being out here. Perhaps I’ve stumbled across something that no one knows about.”
Jericho unfolded the maps and she leaned across him for a better look. The simple smell of man and land tangled up in her nose, and for a second, she got dizzy again.
“Indeed,” he said, fire lighting up his voice.
“It’s not what we were looking for, but I think this is even better,” she went on. “The settlement could very well have been a Cupid precursor.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he cautioned. “The reason it’s not on any map might be because it was nothing more than a passing encampment or a single family dwelling.”
“Look at the size of these two mounds.” She waved a hand. “It’s more than that and you know it. Your cautious side just won’t allow you to take that leap.”
“Not yet. Not until we have more evidence.”
She clapped her hands. “I can’t wait to get the crew over here and get started.”
The light in Jericho’s eyes died. “You know we cannot excavate here. It’s out of the question.”
“You’re going to walk away from a find?”
Jericho pulled a palm down his mouth. He looked so torn. “We can’t do this. We have to walk away.”
“I’m a McCleary. This is McCleary land.”
“You’re not the legal owner.”
“Have you ever heard the expression that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission?”
“And have you ever heard of a legally binding contract? We signed one, remember?”
“Damn. I knew you were going to say that.”
“Because I’m right.”
“How about this? We could do a little research first, see if we can find anything that will tell us what this settlement was and then approach Winz-Smith and ask for permission to dig here. We don’t have to tell him I already found something. Just that I took a swim and spied the mounds and suspected they might be a settlement.”
