by Merry Farmer
Ready, at least, until Roscoe held her at arm’s length and asked, “Why won’t you date my son?”
A whole other kind of shock left her speechless, jaw dropped. “I…what…how….”
“Ted’s a good guy,” Roscoe went on, his voice gravely with leftover emotion. He cleared his throat, then said, “A girl could do worse.”
“I’m sure she could.” Laura struggled to recover. Her brain felt cornered, on the spot, but her body was still limp with the grief she’d indulged in moments before. The combination left her no room to think. “I don’t know.”
Roscoe hmphed and narrowed his eyes. “We went through this with Casey earlier this year.”
“Went through what?” Anxiety rippled down Laura’s spine.
Roscoe’s scrutiny resolved into a kind look. “Just because your brother is gone doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to be happy.”
Laura blinked, then understanding dawned on her. “No, it’s not that.” She let out an airy laugh. “I know that Blake would want me to be happy. I never doubted it. I just think that Ted would be better off with someone who could give him more time, who wasn’t up to her eyeballs in rocket design and fossil excavation.”
Roscoe snorted and shook his head. “That’s for Ted to decide.” He shifted his weight and crossed his arms. “You sure you’re not holding out on him ’cuz you’re scared of losing someone else?”
He hit the nail on the head so hard that prickles raced down her arms and legs. “No,” she answered, blushing and unable to meet his eyes.
Roscoe snorted again, this time with a smile.
Laura was spared the pain of him chastising her for being a dork by the back door opening.
“Look who I found in the driveway,” Ted called out as he strode into the room. Dr. Ashford was with him.
“Dr. Ashford.” Laura broke away from Roscoe and her emotions and bounced across the room to wrap her friend and mentor in a bear-hug. “It’s so great to see you again.”
“And you,” Dr. Ashford squeezed her back. She could only be described as ruggedly academic. With her khaki pants, button-down shirt, salt-and-pepper hair, and glasses, she would have looked equally as at home at a Middle Eastern archeological dig as in a classroom. “I’ve missed you so much, Laura, and I’ve been so worried about you.”
“Worried about me?” Laura took a step back, her brow shooting up.
Dr. Ashford fixed her with a motherly expression. “Last time I talked to you was after the ten-year anniversary of Blake’s passing.”
Old grief and new embarrassment brought heat to Laura’s face. “That was ages ago.”
“I know.” Dr. Ashford crossed her arms.
Laura let out a nervous laugh. “Sorry. But things are okay now. Really okay.”
Dr. Ashford pursed her lips, half teasing, half concerned. Laura darted a quick glance to Ted and Roscoe, who stood watching the scene intently. Ted’s expression was unreadable, but Roscoe looked particularly interested in knowing who Dr. Ashford was. Laura took that excuse to shift attention away from her and ran with it.
“Dr. Ashford, you have to meet Ted’s dad.” She steered her old mentor in Roscoe’s direction. “This is Roscoe Flint.”
Roscoe extended his hand with a smile unlike anything Laura had seen from him before. “How’d’y’do?”
“Cheryl Ashford.” Dr. Ashford took his hand with a wide smile of her own. “I’m doing well. And I can’t wait to see this fossil you’ve uncovered.”
“Me too,” Roscoe said, focused on Dr. Ashford. “Can’t say I’ve seen much of it yet.
“It’s pretty amazing.” Laura’s relief at being able to switch focus away from her was so great that she giggled and nearly tripped over her feet as she started for the door. “I’m almost certain we’ve got more than one skeleton at the site.”
She was so eager to get everyone out of the house and out to the fossil that she forgot to feel self-conscious. She grinned and wiggled her eyebrows at Ted as his dad and Dr. Ashford fell into step together once they left the house.
“Looks like you might not be the only Flint to pester someone by asking them out,” she whispered as they strode across packed dirt and tufted grass in the field.
“What?” Ted twisted to glance over his shoulder at the couple just behind him. He looked forward, a strange look on his face, then shook his shoulders.
“What’s wrong?” Laura asked.
“Nothing,” Ted began, rubbing his chin. “It’s just a little weird. I never imagined Dad being interested in someone again.”
“Ha!” Laura burst out, instantly feeling bad over how rude her reaction must sound. That didn’t stop her from going on with, “Now you know how I feel about this whole dating weirdness thing.”
Ted sent her a flat look. “Yeah, but you didn’t just lose your wife of thirty years a year and a half ago.”
Laura opened her mouth to argue, but arguing with a statement like that suddenly felt wildly inappropriate. She settled for saying, “True.”
They walked on, and eventually Roscoe and Dr. Ashford caught up.
“Laura’s been teaching me all about dinosaurs and fossil excavation,” Ted said as the four of them fell into step together.
“Because the fossils are on Ted’s property,” Laura rushed to clarify. Although she wasn’t sure why Dr. Ashford would care. Of course the fossils were on Ted’s property.
“I’m sure Laura is a good teacher.” Dr. Ashford nodded to her with a smile. “She’s got a good eye for important finds too. When we were in South Africa with Dr. Heller’s expedition, she was single-handedly responsible for locating a cache of dinosaur eggs.”
“Wow.” Ted’s brow went up almost to the band of his cowboy hat. “That is impressive.”
“Not really.” Laura brushed the compliment away with a loose gesture. “Anyone who was paying attention would have found it.”
Dr. Ashford laughed. “You never could take a compliment, Laura.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that.” Ted jumped on the comment before she could defend herself. “Has she always been that way?”
“As long as I’ve known her.” Dr. Ashford and Ted suddenly seemed to be best friends. “She always hated when people said nice things to her, especially when Blake was in treatment. She used to tell me he was the one who deserved the attention, not her.”
A hot rush of embarrassment struck Laura. “I don’t remember saying that.” She did, but it wasn’t the kind of thing she was comfortable with her old friend sharing.
Ted had the good grace to laugh as if Dr. Ashford’s words weren’t important. “That’s funny, because I’ve been trying to ask her out and she keeps saying no, like there’s someone else I should be asking out instead of her.” Ted stopped with a grunt as Laura stepped on his foot.
Dr. Ashford’s lips twitched as if she knew full well what was going on. “Interesting,” she said. And that was all she said.
Prickles of discomfort broke out down Laura’s back. “He keeps taking me by surprise when he asks,” she insisted. “You know I don’t handle surprise questions well.”
“You don’t,” Dr. Ashford agreed with a nod. She didn’t say anything more, but she glanced to Laura as if the two of them needed to have a serious talk.
The thought of what her old friend wanted to talk about was way too deep for Laura to consider while marching across Wyoming ranchland, the summer sun beating down. She shoved it aside, promising herself she’d mull it over later. Instead, she asked, “So what have you been up to these last few years, Dr. Ashford?”
They spent the rest of the fifteen-minute walk out to the fossil site hearing about the latest dig that Dr. Ashford was part of in Montana. Laura always found new discoveries fascinating, but what tickled her was the way Roscoe nodded and hung on Dr. Ashford’s every word. It was cute that Roscoe had taken a shine to her. Even if Ted wasn’t so sure about it.
“Here it is,” Laura said at last when they reached the site.
In the past couple of weeks, she and Ted had done a lot of digging. Where once the only distinguishing characteristic of the landscape was the dark fragment of femur sticking out of the hard, beige dirt, now there was a shallow hole, about ten feet across. Several sections had been cleared with more precision, giving way to the outlines of two dinosaur skeletons. They’d managed to uncover the hind legs of both animals—enough to hint to Laura that they were two different species—and parts of the lower ribcage of one of them.
“It’s been really interesting coming out here in the evening to dig these guys up,” Ted said as Dr. Ashford stopped and stared, rubbing her jaw almost absent-mindedly. “I’ve never been a part of anything like this. I had no idea that excavations like this were so precise.”
“We’ve been working slowly so that we don’t accidentally damage the site,” Laura added. “Otherwise we’d have more for you to look at. I think that one is some sort of raptor.”
Dr. Ashford was silent. She continued to rub her chin, then stepped closer to the hole, crouching to get a closer look. Ted sent Laura a confused look, but Laura’s heart was beating too fast and her breath coming in too short gasps to do more than meet his eyes and smile before looking back to Dr. Ashford. She knew Dr. Ashford well enough to know when something caught the woman’s attention. The fact that she hadn’t started in on the usual “Most fossil finds are no more than conversation pieces for you to put on your mantel” had Laura’s skin prickling.
Dr. Ashford leaned in to brush away a few fragments of dirt and rock that had blown over the fossil since the last time Laura and Ted had worked on it. She got up and moved a few feet to the left, then crawled a few more yards to look at it from another angle. Laura swallowed her urge to ask what she thought, nerves bristling with the need to know. It wasn’t until Ted stepped closer to her, the anticipation practically rolling off of him, that Laura remembered to breathe.
At last, she couldn’t take the pressure any more. “So, what do you think?”
Dr. Ashford blinked at the fossil, then let out a long laugh. She glanced up at Laura and Ted, then Roscoe. “I think you might just have something extraordinary here.”
Excitement burst through Laura with orgasmic force. “Really?” she gulped.
Dr. Ashford stood and came around to stand by her side. “See the angle of the first one’s body? And see how it lies in relation to the second specimen?”
“Yeah?” Roscoe’s simple response was laced with excitement as well.
“It needs more excavating to be sure, but at first glance, I’d say the two were engaged in some sort of contact at the moment of death. More than that, I’m willing to venture that what you have here is a carnivore and an herbivore.”
“Together?” Ted’s brow wrinkled. “That seems weird.”
“Not if one was the hunter and the other the prey,” Dr. Ashford went on. “Not if, somehow, they were both killed in the interaction and ended up being preserved together. It’s possible that this isn’t just a portrait of death, it’s an action scene.”
Laura let out a breath. “Whoa.”
“Is that unusual?” Ted asked.
Laura’s brow flew up in incredulity, but Dr. Ashford answered first with a wry laugh. “Highly unusual. There have only been a few other fossils that fit the description. A lot more work needs to be done here to reveal the whole story, but I can have a team put together to work on it by the end of the week.”
“You’d do that?” Ted asked.
“Are you kidding? I’d give my eye teeth to be part of the team to excavate this site,” Dr. Ashford answered.
Ted frowned. “It’s Laura’s find. I don’t want anyone barging in here and stealing this accomplishment from her.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Laura said. “I just want to see what we’ve got.”
“I can assure you, full credit for the discovery will go to Laura and to you,” Dr. Ashford said. “And the full profits will be yours too.”
“Thanks, I—wait, profits?” Ted’s voice cracked in surprise.
Dr. Ashford sent him an amused grin. “Laura didn’t tell you? Any fossils you find on property you own are yours in entirety.”
“She told me that.” Ted removed his hat and ran his free hand through his hair. “How much are things like this worth? A couple thousand dollars?”
Laura’s jaw nearly dropped at the idea of a fossil of this kind only being worth a few thousand. Then again, Ted didn’t know.
“For something like this,” Dr. Ashford went on, a Santa Claus-like glint in her eyes, “if it is what I think it is, and if we can excavate it and preserve the fossil in its entirety, we’re talking millions.”
“Millions?” Roscoe choked. He went on coughing before he could recover.
“Tens of millions, depending on the level of completeness of both skeletons.”
“You’re kidding,” Ted croaked.
Laura thumped him on the back to help him recover, overdoing it in her excitement to the point where Ted staggered forward a step. “This is so cool,” she said. “This is so, so cool!”
“Ten million dollars.” Roscoe recovered slowly.
Ted glanced to Laura, then burst into a laugh. “Okay, for ten million dollars, you have to go out with me.”
“What? Oh…I….” She peeked at Dr. Ashford, ready to die of embarrassment.
Fortunately, Dr. Ashford was focused on the fossil once more. “I’ll call some people I know as soon as we get back to someplace with cell phone reception. I can have a team working out here—with you, Laura, playing a key role, of course—as soon as possible. We’ll keep assessing value as we go along.”
“Wow.” Ted also skipped right over her embarrassment.
“I’ll alert the museums and private collectors I know that we might have something worth bidding on too,” Dr. Ashford finished. “From there, we’ll get a reputable auction house involved to spread the news and open the bidding.”
“You’d do that?” Ted blinked.
“Of course.” Dr. Ashford smiled and thumped Laura on the back. “For Laura, I’d do anything. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to do a little digging myself.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
Dr. Ashford nodded, then stepped back into the hole, crouching to get another look at everything Laura had done. In spite of the twin tangle of excitement and self-consciousness, Laura turned to Ted with a wide grin. He returned her grin by reaching out to grab and squeeze her hand. And for a change, she wasn’t in any hurry to let it go. Whatever the hang-ups and discomfort she had about personal relationships, she and Ted were in something together now.
Chapter Seven
Ted had tried to squash his excitement about the fossil and what it could mean for the future of the ranch in the days that followed Dr. Ashford’s visit. He’d tried and failed. Miserably. The more excavation work Laura did—with his help, when he could get away from the everyday work of the ranch—the more he was excited by the whole thing. But when a whole team of experts showed up with their equipment, setting up cameras and sensors and other doohickeys he could only imagine a use for, it became clear that what Laura had discovered, what his family had been sitting on for generations, was significant.
Just how significant remained to be seen. Which was true not only for the fossil, but for him and Laura too. Laura had been acting…differently ever since her mentor’s visit. He knew the two of them had spent a lot of time together talking about “deep stuff”—which is exactly how Laura had described it when he’d asked—but he had no idea what that constituted. He would have given anything to find out, but finding a time when Laura wasn’t either at work or digging away with the professional paleontologists had been impossible.
Which was how he found himself strolling down Main Street in the evening a little more than a week after Dr. Ashford’s visit. He didn’t really need to visit Bernie’s General Store, just like he didn’t really need to be in town during the evening rush hour, as all the PSF
employees were making their way home to the apartments Howie had renovated for them. He walked slowly, not wanting to finish his errand too fast. That would defeat the point.
His pulse kicked up a notch and his mission’s true purpose was justified the second he spotted Laura walking over the station bridge on her way home.
He hopped up from the bench where he’d paused to sit in front of the General Store—just minding his own business, enjoying the hot summer night, and not loitering or deliberately waiting for Laura at all—and made a bee-line for her.
“Hey, Laura. Fancy meeting you here,” he greeted her with all the subtlety of a bug hitting a windshield. “And hi, uh, Natalie, isn’t it?” he waved to the coworker walking with Laura.
“Yeah,” Natalie said, a big, fat grin spreading across her face. “Well, I’ll see you, Laura, I’ve got to get home and, uh, put a potpie in the oven.”
Natalie zoomed off down the street so fast that Ted was surprised she didn’t leave burn marks. Laura gaped after her, cheeks pink, with a combination of bewilderment and panic. “I wonder what that was all about?” she squeaked as Ted fell into step with her.
Ted chuckled. “Apparently, it’s about potpie.”
She sent him a flat, sideways look. “Potpie my a-asparagus.” She cleared her throat and put on a smile. “What are you doing in town at this hour?”
Ted shrugged and slipped his hands into his pockets. The gesture led to him slowing his pace. Laura slowed down to amble along with him, which meant they’d have that much more time together before they reached her apartment.
“I had an errand to run at the General Store,” he delivered the excuse he’d practiced.
Laura looked at him. “Haven’t made it in yet, huh?”
“In where?”
“The General Store?”
“Oh. Yeah, I was in there earlier.”
She raised one brow. “So, where’s your bag?”
