Jurassic Heart (19 page)

“Are you still staying with Boner?” Hunter asked as I pulled away and reached for the handle to the door. I paused and shifted in my seat to face him.

“Yes,” I said honestly.

He made a face. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about him staking a claim on me. That was my neurosis, though, and he didn’t deserve to be punished for it.

“We’re not sleeping together,” I said. “Well, we share a bed, but we’re not having sex.”

“Could you move to another room? One with two beds?”

“It might hurt his feelings,” I said, then reevaluated. “I’ll talk to him.”

Hunter nodded. “Thanks. If you’re going to meet my mom, I should probably meet your Boner at some point too.”

I laughed and dropped my head to his shoulder, waiting for him to kiss my hair and loving it when he did. “I’m sure that can be arranged.”

“Okay. Good night, Nick.”

I dropped a quick kiss on his cheek and slid out of the car. “Night, Hunter.”

I
HELD
the Monday morning meeting from the steps of the trailer with the rest of the team gathered in front of me. It was a good way of keeping everyone up-to-date with one another’s projects, especially those working on opposite sides of the dig or people who didn’t check in with River so often.

It also meant I didn’t need to spend so long reading reports, which was just fine by me.

Nancy finished up her summary, and I nodded, deciding now was the time to shake things up.

“I want you to move away from the tree line,” I said. “I’m sorry, I know you’ve been on that area for a while, but I just can’t justify keeping you there when we’ve got good stuff going on in other parts of the site. In fact,” I continued, thinking on my feet, “let’s abandon that whole line. The results through that area aren’t great.”

There was a general mumbling and nodding of heads, which I took to be agreement. I assigned Nancy to start working next to Brad, who seemed pleased with this, and moved on.

Raven was on a conference call in the trailer with some specialist in LA, so she missed most of our discussion. When I was almost finished collecting reports, I stuck my head in and she held up two fingers, a promise she was nearly done, so I carried on for a few minutes longer.

She hopped out of the trailer and gave us all a sunny grin. I almost heard Boner’s jaw drop and tried not to laugh. She looked the same as always but had dressed for the heat in decidedly less clothing. Her black T-shirt bore the slogan
Geology Rocks
and had both the neck and sleeves cut off. I assumed her shorts had once been jeans because the fabric pockets dipped lower than the ragged hemline, showing off lean legs. Her knees were strapped with skater’s kneepads, and she wore heavy boots on her feet. Long black hair was twisted up and held in place with an assortment of items: a chopstick, a pencil, a bulldog clip, and several sparkly butterflies.

“I think I just came in my pants,” Boner murmured at my side.

Raven punched him on the arm, although I wasn’t sure anyone else had heard his comment. She was smiling, though, as she delivered her report in short sentences with her hands planted firmly on her hips—full no-nonsense mode.

I dismissed the team, watching Boner watch her leave, absently rubbing at his arm and keeping his eyes trained on her seductively swaying rear end.

“Boner? Hey, Boner?”

“I’m in love.”

“With
Raven
?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s new,” I muttered, wondering what the hell had gone on in the short weekend I’d been away.

He turned to me with big blue goo-goo eyes. “Don’t be sad, Nicky. I still love you. I just want to be in
her
.”

“Don’t call me Nicky,” I said, sulking a little.

“You’ve got Hunter now. You don’t need me anymore.”

“I don’t know if I’ve actually
got
him….”

“Then go and get him,” he said gently, throwing his arm around my shoulder. “Strange things are happening around here, Nick. Let’s make the most of them.”

“Do you know if she even has a boyfriend? If she’s interested in boys?” I asked as we started to walk down through the site.

“She’s definitely hetero,” he said. “River’s got a boyfriend, some Goth dude from London. He’s in a band. Raven is single, though.”

I saw Raven skid to a stop before I noticed the downed fences. A wave of nausea rolled through my stomach as I told Boner to call the cops (
again
) and walked straight past Raven toward the end of the site.

For a few minutes, as I checked out the trenches Boner and I had been working in, I felt a bit stupid. There were no obvious signs of damage, and I came to a tentative conclusion that it must have been the wind or some wild animal.

Out of curiosity, I walked over to the trench where Raven had been working, not expecting to find anything but wanting to check. It was then that I exploded with anger.

“For fuck’s sake!”

“What?” Raven demanded, coming down the hill toward me, apparently not caring about the cops. She looked into the trench, turned her head to rest against my arm, and sighed heavily.

Someone must have seen what Raven had been excavating, found the partially exposed skeleton, and decided to smash it up. Each delicate little bone had been stamped on, fracturing and splintering and making further excavation both pointless and heartwrenching. It was beyond saving.

Boner jogged down the hill with his phone still clutched in his hand and stopped dead at the foot of Raven’s trench. All sexual urges forgotten, he pulled her away from me and into a hug, turning her away from the ruined skeleton in the trench. She hadn’t even identified the species yet.

In selfish terms, it meant another day when digging was
abandoned and my time was spent with the police, methodically going through what had happened from when everyone had left the night before and arrived that morning. One good thing that had come out of the whole mess was I had been with Hunter all night, providing him with a pretty damn tight alibi. Unless he’d snuck out of bed in the middle of the night and driven all the way back here—and he hadn’t—there was no way they could continue looking at him as a suspect.

In unselfish terms, I was devastated for Raven. The impact of the sabotage hit everyone hard but her worst. Part of me understood her fervent insistence to excavate everything that was left, under the careful supervision of the police, who photographed constantly while she worked.

The bones that were salvageable went to the lab for possible identification. The remaining splinters were bagged as evidence. I went from sad to angry to furious and back again several times throughout the course of the morning, disgusted at the mindless destruction and more determined than ever to stay here and continue working, just to piss off whoever was behind this.

In the days that followed, we ramped up security on the site yet again, installing cameras and security guards that prowled and watched the video feeds and generally got in the way. Sam threatened to come out himself and look at stuff, and I spent at least twenty minutes on the phone explaining to him why that would be a
bad idea.
When I managed to convey to Boner who I was talking to and what that person wanted, he joined me in the persuading, writing down reasons on a scrap of paper for me to recite back. Thinking of enough excuses to keep him away by myself would be one hell of a job.

Technically Sam employed each and every one of us, and he held an unusual place in all our hearts. I knew what I had with him wasn’t a standard employer/employee relationship. I knew his wife and played ball with his kids and got drunk with him at regular intervals.

I also fought with him on how much I thought I should be paid and made veiled threats about bonuses and negotiated like a madman on business expenses and what constituted them. Half of the time, he was like a welcoming father figure; the other half he was the devil in IRS clothing.

So we didn’t want him around. He’d just get in the way and bitch about my filing system.

As soon as was reasonable, I passed him over to the police and let him berate them for a while. They probably didn’t deserve it, but it was a good way of killing two birds with one stone, leaving me with a bit of peace in which to reflect.

“H
EY
,” I
said to Raven, crouching at the edge of her trench next to the
police photographer. She’d refused any offer of help with the
excavation.

“Hi,” she said. For a moment she didn’t look up; then she sighed and stood, accepting the bottle of water I held out to her. It was hot as hell out here, and I didn’t want her getting dehydrated.

“How’s it looking?” I asked.

She drank deeply for a few moments and then wiped her mouth with the back of her arm. “Actually, it’s not as bad as it could have been. We’re never going to be able to call this a complete skeleton now, but you never know. The lab might be able to do some miracle in reconstruction.”

“You think you’ve got a complete animal?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe. It’s hard to determine exactly what’s what at the moment. I’m just concentrating on getting each bone out of the ground without causing any further damage.”

I nodded. “That’s good. There’s help here if you need it. Just holler.”

“I will,” she said. “Thanks, Nick.”

I wasn’t in the mood to dig. I was still brooding. It provided a good opportunity to work my way around the site, getting a firsthand view of everything going on. I made some notes, pleased with what Nancy and Brad were doing, slightly confused as to what Chuck was doing but happy enough to let him get on with it.

After I’d made a round of the site, then another one, it became clear that I wasn’t actually being helpful to anyone. My paperwork was filed, my team were doing what they should be, Hunter was working on a paper and couldn’t be disturbed for at least a few more hours.

With nothing better to do, I found myself in the lab with a mug of coffee, playing solitaire on River’s iPad.

“You know,” River said, her voice muffled from the face mask she was wearing, protecting her lungs from the acid baths, “I’ve got a pack of cards if you want to play real-life solitaire.”

“No, thanks.”

“Wow.”

“What?” I looked up. With the mask, her expression was strangely unreadable.

“You sound like a fourteen-year-old Hufflepuff after her first breakup.”

I laughed at that, loving how we all knew one another well enough to drop Harry Potter references into everyday conversation.

“We didn’t break up,” I said.

River sighed and pulled her mask down so it hung loosely around her neck. “I wasn’t talking about Hunter. But since you brought it up, how was your kinky sex weekend?”

“It wasn’t a kinky sex weekend,” I protested, even as images of Hunter’s cock danced in my head. “He just wanted to show me this cabin he built with his dad and brothers. It was nice.”

She “mhmmed” at me, telling me exactly what she thought of that. I didn’t care. River was just as much of a pervert as me.

“So you’re getting pretty serious with him now.”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

She took the lab stool opposite me and started pulling at the grips that were holding her hair in a bun. While we talked, she shook her long, glossy hair out, then went about securing it up again.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“We haven’t had that conversation.”

“Do you want him to be?”

I shrugged and swiped my finger across the screen, completing the game. “I like him a lot. There’s more to it than just liking each other, though.”

“That’s what I mean,” River said. “I get all the sizzling sexual tension, that’s hot. But actually making a relationship out of it? How can that work when you’re so different? He fucking
hates
us, Nick.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said, immediately jumping to Hunter’s defense.

“He used to,” she countered. “He’s spent the last five years, maybe more, getting involved in digs all over the place and fucking things up for us. We’ve lost a lot of money and time and resources because of this guy.”

I pulled up a new game of solitaire.

“He’s… I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “We don’t talk about work. We talk about a lot of other stuff—our families, you know, life in general. He’s different to other guys I’ve been with.”

“Just be careful, yeah? I’d hate to see you hurt by this guy.”

“He won’t hurt me. I think he likes me more than I like him.”

River smiled and came round to my side of the bench to give me a rare hug and kiss on the cheek before returning to her work. She was one of my more no-nonsense friends, and I knew she was only looking out for me and that her grilling came from a good place. If the tables were turned, I’d do the same for her.

We packed up early that afternoon. I was sick of cops and sick of the site and not really sure if I wanted to do it all anymore. Boner offered to take River and Raven back to their apartment, and even though they declined, he went with them in their car. That left his free, and I found myself heading out to see Hunter before I really knew what I was doing.