Excavated

by Noelle Adams

  She was about to go over and join them—figuring she might be able to get some good information from them on the site and maybe about Philip—when she saw him on the far edge of the dig by himself.

  He was on his knees, hunched over and busy working on something, so she walked over toward him instead.

  When she reached him, she saw he was brushing at something in the dirt.

  She squatted down next to him, genuinely interested. She saw a glimpse of polished black in the dark dirt.

  Philip slanted her a look but didn’t say anything. He was brushing very carefully around the polished black object.

  “What is it?” she asked at last, her curiosity overcoming her reluctance to begin the conversation herself.

  “A jet bead bracelet, I believe.” His eyes never left his task, and she couldn’t help but admire his intense focus and the precision of his brushing.

  She was silent for a minute, trying to recollect any knowledge at all about Neolithic jewelry. Finally, she gave up and asked, “Are they common?”

  He gave a half-shrug. “They’re common in the Bronze Age and later Neolithic. This is the first one we’ve found here on Erland.”

  “Oh. That’s cool.”

  “I’m surprised to find one in such an early layer.”

  She read between the lines of his quiet words and his intensely focused appearance. He was excited about the find. About what it might mean. “So you sent away all the grad students so they wouldn’t mess it up.”

  A flicker of a smile on Philip’s fine lips warmed something in Lucy’s chest—as if her humor had spoken to his, despite his distraction. “Of course.”

  She watched in silence as he carefully cleared the dirt away from the black bead bracelet. For some reason, she couldn’t help but remember him as he’d been during her freshman year—intense, serious, committed.

  He’d been committed his mother, changing his entire life plans because she’d needed his help. He’d been committed to his work, spending days and nights on even the most mundane of tasks necessary for the campaign.

  He hadn’t really changed. He was exactly the same way now.

  It made her feel close to him. The way she’d felt when she was seventeen.

  When he’d completely cleared the dirt from the bracelet, he turned to look at her suddenly.

  She couldn’t help but respond to the smile in his eyes. She smiled back, feeling a glow of connection, of memory.

  They held gazes for just a little too long. She suddenly felt self-conscious, uncomfortable.

  Dropping her eyes back to the bracelet, she said, “It’s so tiny.”

  “People were smaller back then.”

  “I know.”

  When she darted a look back up at his face, she saw he was peering at her the way he had last night—like he was trying to read her mind, read her soul, figure her out.

  Last night, she’d resented it, but now it just confused her. It felt intimate somehow, but they’d never been intimate.

  Despite what she’d believed back in college for a while, they’d never even been friends. He might have committed to other things, but he’d never been committed to her.

  She cleared her throat and stood up, her stiff muscles resenting being held in a squat for so long.

  Philip looked up at her, a silent question on his face.

  She didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand anything.

  She turned and walked back to the trailer.

  ***

  Philip didn’t understand Lucy at all, and he didn’t like what he couldn’t understand.

  At the moment, it was two o’clock in the morning, and Lucy was still wandering around the island with her cameraman.

  Philip couldn’t sleep, and two hours ago he’d come outside to sit in his doorway, staring out at the weird, shifting shadows of the island on a summer night.

  He wasn’t sure what Lucy had been doing all this time. She must be on the far side of the island, since she was out of his sight.

  For all he knew, she was screwing her cameraman.

  He didn’t really think so, though. He was pretty sure the cameraman was screwing Lucy’s assistant.

  He shouldn’t be thinking about Lucy in the context of sex anyway.

  It was absolutely ridiculous the way he kept swinging back and forth between feeling close to her and feeling annoyed with her, between wanting to strangle her and wanting to take her to bed.

  He led a very orderly and controlled existence—he’d made sure of it, after his early years had been so rocky—and her presence here obviously wasn’t good for him.

  She needed to leave. Soon.

  At last, he saw her approaching with the lanky cameraman. Lucy told the young man goodnight as he turned to his room in the second trailer.

  Lucy's eyes were on Philip as she approached.

  She stopped directly in front of him, looking absurdly pretty and appealing with hair slipping out of a clip and a frown turning down her full lips.

  “Are you really staying up all night to spy on me now?”

  “I wasn’t spying on you. I couldn’t sleep.” He was well aware that his tone was less than patient.

  “Are you normally afflicted with insomnia?” she asked tartly.

  Philip stood up, since he didn’t like the way she loomed over him. It put him at a disadvantage. “Are you normally this prickly?”

  “Just with you.” Her cheeks were flushed, and her breathing had accelerated.

  For some reason, she was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

  “Lucky me.”

  The flash of angry tension that had tightened her body suddenly slumped. She blew out a resigned breath. “This is ridiculous. We shouldn’t do this, Philip. I really am trying to be professional and cordial, and I don’t know why you always get on my last nerve.”

  He was glad that, at least, he wasn’t the only one so unsettled by their interaction. The only one without any good explanation for it. “It’s an awkward situation,” he said slowly, testing out the words as he spoke them.

  She nodded, dropping her eyelids and then slanting a look back up to him in that deliciously provocative way she had.

  He was almost certain it was unconscious. If she used that look on men purposefully, then she would have any man in the world at her beck and call.

  “I’ll try harder to be nice,” she said, a note of irony in her tone that made him want to smile.

  He stared down at her, suddenly hit by the almost irresistible urge to kiss her. His whole body pulsed with it, and he had to clench his fist at his side to keep from reaching out for her.

  She sucked in a breath. For a moment, Philip thought she’d recognized what was on his mind, but then she said, “You might consider being a little nicer yourself, you know.”

  “I have been perfectly nice,” he replied, knowing as he said the words that they were a lie. He was smart and driven and occasionally obsessed.

  He was very rarely nice.

  “You haven’t been nice at all," she argued. "And, if you expect me to not snap your head off all the time, you’re going to have to reciprocate.”

  “I haven’t once snapped your head off.” For some insane reason, he was enjoying the almost whimsical give-and-take of the argument. It had been a really long time since he’d enjoyed banter for the sake of banter.

  “You’ve been cold and condescending, which anyone will tell you is worse than snapping one’s head off.”

  He knew her words were true, but he wasn’t about to acknowledge it. “I would like to see some evidence of this coldness and condescension you purport.”

  Her lips twitched helplessly as she tried to suppress a smile, her humor obviously tickled by his dry, lofty response.

  Unlike the previous night, she lost the battle. Her face broke into a glowing smile, and she turned her head to hide it behind the hair slipping out of her clip.

  “Damn it, Philip,” she gritted out, her voice shaking with what sou
nded like laughter. “You’re just impossible.”

  Philip was mesmerized—by the soft warmth in her face, by the laughter in her voice, and by the cleverness and wit that were utterly irrepressible in her.

  He took a step closer and, without thinking, brought a hand up to brush the hair out of her face so he could see more of her expression. “That claim is too abstract to be verified and can thus be immediately dismissed,” he murmured, something coiling tightly inside him.

  Laughter rippled out of her, clear evidence that he'd scored a victory. “Damn you, Philip,” she said at last.

  She hadn’t pulled away, even though he hadn’t lowered his hand. Her eyes slowly transformed from amusement to something hotter as she gazed up at him.

  Acting only on instinct, he leaned down and brushed her lips with his.

  He heard her quick intake of breath. Then he felt one of her hands flatten against his chest.

  But she wasn’t pushing him away, and her lips softened against his as he brushed them again.

  The kiss deepened so quickly Philip had no idea how it happened. Pleasure and need uncoiled inside him, and he took her head in both of his hands. One of Lucy’s arms wrapped around his neck, and he could feel all of her soft warmth against his body.

  She opened for him, and then their tongues tangled together. The whole world pulsed with pleasure, with hunger, as he gave himself over to the kiss.

  He heard her moan softly against his mouth, and his body tightened in response.

  He wanted her. He couldn’t remember wanting anything more.

  Then suddenly she pulled away from him, one hand going up to cover her mouth.

  Philip stood stiffly and blinked, muddle-headed and halfway aroused. He’d clearly lost his mind for a few minutes, and he wasn’t sure how to get it back

  She stared at him in silence for a long moment, something almost aching in her eyes, despite her panting breaths and her deeply flushed cheeks. Then she said in a hoarse whisper, “Damn you, Philip.”

  It wasn’t laughter in her voice now. He wasn’t sure what it was.

  He didn’t have time to find out before she turned around and walked into her room of the trailer, closing the door behind her.

  Four

  “So…”

  Lucy blinked at Dana. “So what?”

  “So are you going to tell me about that hot archaeologist or not?”

  Lucy actually felt her cheeks flushing a little—which was absolutely ridiculous—but she couldn't help but laugh at her assistant's wry impudence. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Don’t give me that. You knew him before. I know that much. And I’m definitely sensing some chemistry.”

  Lucy pulled on the jacket to her vintage suit. It was a dusty lavender color with a pencil skirt and a fur collar. It was feminine and flattering and entirely impractical, which was the point, of course. “If by chemistry you mean I’d be happy to claw his eyes out most of time, then guilty.”

  “Did you go out with him before?”

  “No. I knew him when I was in college. We were sort of friends for a while, and then we were nothing. That was it.”

  “Are you sure?” Dana asked, bringing over a choker of braided pearls she’d picked out for Lucy to wear for the shoot that evening. “Because it seems very sparkish between the two of you.”

  “It is not sparkish,” Lucy insisted. “I don’t even like him, and he was mostly a jerk back then. I was a teenager, and he was in his twenties. There was definitely nothing romantic between us.”

  She checked out her appearance in the mirror and then put her pearl drop earrings on. As she thought about her foolish feelings for Philip in the past, she felt all of the old hurt and humiliation simmering back up.

  “What did he do to make you hate him so much?” Dana obviously noticed something in the way Lucy was glaring into the small mirror.

  Lucy shook her head. “It’s a long time ago.”

  “It still seems to bother you. Did he break your heart or something?”

  He had. She’d thought she was in love with him. For a while, she hadn’t thought there was any sort of hope, but gradually they’d gotten closer. He’d seem to open up with her.

  She’d let herself dream. Even after the kiss and his immediate, urgent attempts to make it clear it was an accidental aberration, she thought she would have gotten over it if they could have remained friends. Whether or not he wanted a romantic relationship with her, she’d still thought she genuinely meant something to him.

  But he’d dropped her. He’d gotten a new girlfriend, and he’d forgotten she even existed.

  One day they were friends. Then he’d kissed her.

  And the next day she was nothing to him.

  “I was stupid,” she admitted. “I thought I meant something to him. Not romantically—but just...just as a person.”

  Dana’s expression had changed. The teasing faded, and her eyes reflected sympathy and deep understanding. “And you didn't mean anything to him?”

  She shook her head with a long sigh. “I was a girl. I was stupid.”

  “I can’t imagine you ever being stupid.”

  Lucy laughed for real—the bitterness fading into the background of her mind where it belonged. “I was a model of stupidity. Believe me. But at least I learned my lessons young.”

  “What lessons?”

  Lucy bit her lip. She’d learned not to be led around by her feelings, not to trust that—just because a man acted like he cared for her—he actually did. She’d learned that it was better to hold back her heart until she knew for sure it was safe.

  After one failed marriage and three failed engagements, she was still convinced those lessons were valid.

  It sounded too bitter, though, and she didn’t want Dana to think she was like that. So she grinned brightly and said, “I learned that just because a man gazes soulfully at you, just because he kisses you, doesn’t mean he actually wants to hang out with you.”

  Dana laughed, as she was supposed to, and Lucy was relieved that the subject had dropped.

  It would have been nice to laugh it off for real—the memory of being rejected by Philip.

  She couldn’t. She didn’t think about it much anymore but, when she did, it still hurt.

  ***

  Philip should have just gone to bed, but he didn’t.

  No matter how uncomfortable the couch in the office of his trailer was, it at least provided a place to sleep, and he was tired after a couple of long days and sleepless night.

  But tonight was the first time Lucy and her crew would be shooting, and he was naturally curious. He wanted to know how they were going to portray his island and his dig.

  So he sat outside his office with his laptop on his lap, as if he was in the habit of working outside.

  He did have some work to do. He hadn't checked his email yesterday or today, and he hated to think how it might be piling up.

  He might as well clear out his inbox this evening, since he wasn’t going to get any sleep.

  He blinked when Lucy came out of the other room of the trailer, dressed in a ridiculous fur-trimmed skirt suit that cinched at the waist and showed off the lush curve of her ass. She had on another pair of four-inch heels like she’d been wearing when she arrived on the island, and her hair was styled around her face in a tumble of soft waves.

  The look she slanted him when she noticed him sitting close by, however, was anything but soft.

  The camera man, Sawyer, came loping over, and Philip listened as they briefly discussed where to start—on the east side or the west side of the standing stones.

  From what Lucy had told him earlier that day, it would take dozens of hours of shooting to edit down to her ninety-minute episode.

  He watched as Lucy walked over toward the ring of Erland’s impressive standing stones. She walked easily, despite her heels, and she didn't give him a second glance.

  He couldn't help but think about what she’d been like before—smal
l and bright and quicksilver, like a glint of light, transforming any room she walked into with her wit and glowing smile.

  He'd wanted that in his life far more than he ever should have.

  He shook the thoughts away.

  He was used to controlling himself better than this. The reappearance of one random woman from his past wasn't going to change that. Not even the way his body still reacted to the memory of their kiss the night before.

  He watched from a distance as they set up the shoot and Lucy narrated a segment, showing off the spooky shadows of the stones in the half-light of the summer evening. He couldn't hear what she was saying from this distance, but he didn't need to. He could interpret her gestures and the way she walked slowly from stone to stone.

  His fond memories faded to resentment as he watched. This site was rich with history, these powerful remnants left as silent witnesses to the lives of so many people who had lived so long ago.

  And Lucy was turning it into a ghost story.

  After a while, she stopped doing her narration, and she instead walked with Sawyer around the stones, pointing out various vantages to film.

  Philip eventually went back to his email, since there wasn't much to see.

  He glanced up regularly, though, to see if anything had changed.

  He actually stood up, more than an hour later, when he looked up to see Lucy talking and gesturing urgently.

  He walked slowly toward them, curious about what had so distracted her.

  As he approached, he heard her say, “There it is again. Did you get it?”

  “What is it?” Dana asked. “It sounds like someone is wailing. No wonder they think ancient warriors haunt this site.”

  “Shh,” Lucy ordered, waving her hand at the others. “Just listen so we can find where it’s coming from.”

  Philip was pretty sure he knew the source of the sound that had gotten them so excited—and it wasn’t a manufactured practical joke like the other night—but he didn’t say anything as he walked closer, smiling in private amusement when they started to hurry around the henge, stopping here and there to identify the direction of the high-pitched howling.