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  “You want to carve out a place for yourself here.” The flush that ran up under her tan told him he’d hit the mark.

  “What’s wrong with that? Yes, I want to stay. Yes, I want to continue a career in this field, and if Scarr sends me away before the season is over, I’ll have zero chance of ever finding another posting. So, yeah, I’m going to do what I have to, to make this work for me.”

  Her jaw had hardened and her chin, which already had a determined jut to it, became more pronounced. Her expression had settled into bleak lines, exposing her desperation. He understood that emotion and he sympathized. Slowly he nodded. “Talk to Scarr, then. I’m willing to negotiate a compromise, but I’m not going to let him push me around.”

  A flicker of relief showed on her face, though a shadow of concern remained. “Thanks.” She held out her hand. “Partner.”

  Slowly, not sure he was doing the right thing, he reached out and closed his hand over hers. They shook. The deal was done.

  As she walked into the admin tent, Liz heard the sound of voices coming from the area Scarr had partitioned off for his office. The undergrad who had been cataloguing finds when she stormed out the day before looked up as she strode into the tent. Her serious expression brightened and she opened her mouth to say something, by way of greeting, Liz thought. She didn’t want Scarr to know she’d arrived, though, so she put her finger to her lips. The girl frowned and closed her mouth. Liz smiled her thanks and continued on to the office.

  The voices inside were male. She recognized Scarr’s light tenor, but not the deeper one that replied. That could only mean one thing—Zachary Doyle had arrived. It fit. He was supposed to arrive on the eleven AM plane today. Scarr must have used one of the other vehicles to drive into town to pick him up. She hid a smile. Zac’s presence suited her just fine.

  Reaching the partition, she lifted the flap that served as a door and stepped into Scarr’s office. The two men were huddled around the simple wood table that served as Scarr’s desk. They both looked up as she entered. There was momentary astonishment on Scarr’s face, then the emotion morphed into an annoyed frown that edged into narrow-eyed temper. The butterflies that had taken flight in her belly the moment she parked the pickup in Scarr’s special spot, rioted in panic at the look. She fought the nerves they expressed. She wasn’t going to be Scarr’s victim. This time she was going to win their confrontation.

  She smiled at Scarr, then she turned to Zac and held out her hand. “Hi, you must be Zachary Doyle. I’m Liz Hamilton. It’s nice to meet you.”

  Zachary Doyle did not look like a man in his mid-twenties. His thick hair was blond and curly, even though he wore it cut short. On his round face a dusting of freckles marched from his cheeks across his snub nose, and there was a guileless expression in his wide blue eyes that Liz knew had nothing to do with the personality of the man himself.

  He slid a look at Scarr before he accepted her hand. Liz glanced at Scarr too. He was watching the exchange with that same narrow-eyed look that promised painful repercussions, but he wasn’t making his move yet.

  “Zac Doyle,” Zac said, completely unnecessarily. His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “I understand you are going to give me a tour before you head off.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Liz said. “Do I have a tour planned.” Scarr was sitting behind his makeshift desk, while Zac had one of the two folding chairs on the other side. Liz grabbed the second chair and sat down.

  “I wouldn’t make myself comfortable,” Scarr snapped. “You’ll be leaving as soon as you pack your gear.”

  Now that she was into the confrontation, Liz was beginning to enjoy herself. The butterflies were still flapping around with more energy than she liked, but at least she could ignore them now. She grinned at Scarr. “You’ll want to come along, Dr. Scarr. This is a tour you won’t want to miss.”

  From the corner of her eye she saw Scarr and Zac share a confused look, then Scarr said, “You took my truck yesterday. I should have reported it stolen. You’re lucky I didn’t.”

  When she drove the long, roundabout detour from the washout back to the camp, she thought about how Scarr would react to her return and what he’d say. A less self-centered man would be frantic with worry about the absence of a team member during a storm of last night’s magnitude, but she knew Scarr and was quite sure he wouldn’t even think about the potential for danger. Scarr was a control freak. She figured he’d be angry that she hadn’t fallen neatly into his plans. She’d structured her whole defense based on that assumption. It looked like she’d been right.

  “No,” she said, drawing the word out and smiling. “You’re lucky you didn’t.”

  Scarr was so enraged by that cocky and, yes, cheeky, statement that his face flooded a bright red. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again without speaking. He half rose from his seat, a threatening move meant to prove dominance. Liz stayed where she was and kept her smile in place.

  Zac said, “I’m new here and out of the loop. Can you fill me in?”

  Scarr subsided into his chair, though his expression remained thunderous.

  Nice gambit, Liz thought. Zac’s question had defused the situation and saved his mentor’s dignity at the same time. “Sure. If Dr. Scarr had notified the cops that the truck and one of his team members was missing, they might have found me last night before the storm made travel impossible.”

  She paused to survey her audience before she delivered her punch line. “And that would have been a shame.”

  Her statement didn’t make much of an impact on Scarr. His expression hadn’t changed. He was still furious. She suspected he wasn’t listening at this point. Zac, on the other hand got it. The guileless blue gaze sharpened, though his facial expression was still one of polite interest, nothing more.

  “You see,” she continued, “I wouldn’t have found the washout this morning.” She watched understanding dawn on both their faces. Washouts were a gift from heaven, nature’s way of shifting layers of soil and exposing the strata beneath without any effort on the paleontologist’s part.

  Zac sucked in a breath and Scarr frowned. “You found something?”

  She nodded slowly, still smiling. Smugly now, she thought. “One full skeleton, maybe more.”

  “Congratulations!” Zac said.

  “You’ll take us there now,” Scarr said. He pushed back his chair, this time with the intent of leaving the office.

  Liz didn’t move. “There’s a problem.”

  Scarr hesitated. “What?”

  “The washout is huge. It stretches from federal land across the boundary.”

  “Into Discovering Dinos’ permit area,” Scarr said flatly.

  “Discovering Dinos?” Zac said. “The paleo pirates?”

  Scarr nodded. He pulled his chair back to his desk, then drummed his fingers on the rough wooden surface. He stared blankly, lost in thought for a moment, then he shot her a penetrating look and said, “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “Yup. We took measurements and GPS readings.”

  “We?”

  That was Zac and Liz thought he had once again caught on faster than Scarr had. She said, “Mike Edmonds and I.”

  “Mike Edmonds!” Scarr sounded shocked and furious at the same time.

  “The pirate himself?” Zac said. He looked amused. There was a sneer in his tone.

  Liz resented that. She resented that these two men had dismissed Mike Edmonds so summarily. She’d worked with him for hours this morning and he’d been meticulous in his documentation as he explored the extent of the find, careful to damage nothing. Yes, he worked in the private sector, funding his excavations through the sale of the bones he found, but he wasn’t a pirate. He didn’t steal the finds of other paleontologists.

  “How much of the skeleton is on our side of the line?” Scarr snapped, still tapping the desk with his fingers.

  “Probably half, maybe a third.”

  “The head?”

  She shru
gged. “We couldn’t find it.”

  More tapping, then Scarr pushed back his chair again. “We need to go out there and take a look.”

  Liz nodded. “Sure. The skeleton is almost completely intact. It’s a huge beast. We’ll have to work with Mike Edmonds to excavate. A joint project, with joint reporting.”

  “We?” Zac said. His tone was innocent. The word itself was a bombshell.

  Scarr shot him a speculative look, then he nodded and said, “Zac is right. There’s no ‘we’ here. You’re headed home tomorrow.”

  Liz expected Scarr to pull something like this. She thought she was prepared for it, for how she would feel when he tried to snatch the find of a lifetime out from under her. She wasn’t. She had to fight the rage that flooded through her and threatened to subvert her careful planning with a temper tantrum of epic proportions. She sat very still, breathed deeply and slowly.

  She turned fire into ice before she said, “I’m not going home.”

  “Sure you are,” Scarr said. “A find like this is too important to mess around with. Zac will be heading up this team.”

  She shook her head, slowly, emphatically. “No, Dr. Scarr, he won’t, and I’m not going home, because the only person Mike Edmonds is willing to work cooperatively with, is me. If I’m not the one supervising our side of the dig, then you’ll only have half a dino when you’re finished.”

  Chapter 7

  The building that housed Discovering Dinos was somewhere between a warehouse and a gigantic barn. It loomed on the outskirts of Roaring River, the closest town to both dig sites, and its size was silent testimony to the importance of dinosaur excavations to this tiny community. Mike parked his truck in the lot beside the building and strode inside.

  The lobby of Discovering Dinos was a small space. There was a desk and filing cabinets, but no visitor chairs. People who came to Discovering Dinos either had an appointment and were immediately ushered into the guts of the building, or they simply wandered through after a quick wave to Barb Conway, the woman who was the lobby’s sole occupant.

  The room itself currently sported three lavender walls. An accent wall was papered with a scene of a flower filled country garden, complete with an arbor drenched in trailing vines, and a swing on which a girl in a poofy dress and a straw hat was being pushed by a silly looking boy in breeches. Mike thought the whole scene ridiculous, but Barb sighed with pleasure when she looked at it and said she loved it.

  And if Barb loved it, the absurd scene was fine with Mike. He didn’t care what his lobby looked like, as long as the appearance made Barb happy. Not only was she the mother of his best friend, but she organized his life, made sure all the correspondence that went out of Discovering Dinos was professional and correct, and she had a shrewd sense of when to push and when to back off that had secured him more than one lucrative contract.

  A middle-aged woman with thick glasses and short, well-cut hair that was dyed a dozen colors, of which lavender was most prominent, she looked up as Mike pushed open one side of the double entry doors. The oversized oak partners’ desk where she sat didn’t fit with the décor of the room, but like the wallpaper mural, Barb loved it. “Morning boss,” she said, with a smile. “Or should I say, afternoon?”

  He grinned at her, not at all put out. Barb Conway was the general manager of Discovering Dinos. At least, that was what he called her and what appeared beside her name on the company website. She called herself his secretary and office dogsbody. “I spent the night in my truck, so I’m running late.”

  She frowned. “In that dreadful storm? What happened?”

  “I was working the trackway, then rescued one of the diggers from the federal lands. The storm broke and we had to take shelter. When we set off this morning, I found the mother of all bone beds. Proof that good deeds do not go unnoticed.”

  Barb’s eyes widened. “Where?”

  “A washout on highway 25. Which is why I am so late. The girl—whose name is Liz Hamilton, by the way—and I did a quick survey of the find, then I had detour ten miles to get back here.”

  “Does Don know?” Don Conway was Barb’s son and the county surveyor. He was also Mike’s best friend.

  “I called him on my way in, but he wasn’t answering. I’m going to try him again now. The site is on the border of my uncle’s property and federal land. I took GPS readings, but I want a proper survey. I wouldn’t put it past that bast…rat Scarr to try poaching my find.”

  “If you can’t get hold of Don, I’ll find him,” Barb said, as aware as he of the importance of having Ts crossed and Is dotted. Alfred Scarr had a big name university behind him. He could play fast and loose with legalities and argue every little point, and even if he lost any legal challenges, he’d still have a job and continue to dig dinos. Discovering Dinos was a private company, with limited backing. All they had behind them was their reputation for doing business in a legal and ethical way. Smirch that reputation and their clients would disappear like water down a drain.

  Mike nodded his thanks. “Anything I need to know about before I get settled?”

  “Josh is playing with a new look for the website. He says ours is looking tired. Well, that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s what he meant. He wants to do something chill.”

  Mike raised his eyebrows. Josh was their computer guru, an eighteen-year-old techno wizard who worked part-time at Discovering Dinos while he coasted through high school. Like Barb, who redecorated the lobby at regular intervals, Josh liked to play with the website. As long as both remained happy, no walls came down and the website provided their information in a professional manner, Mike let them make whatever changes they wanted. “Any special reason this time? Or is he just bored?”

  “He thinks it would be great to document the trackway find on line. You know, record all the steps you do as you excavate. The detailed documentation you take. That sort of thing. He thinks it would be an added selling point.” She shot Mike a telling glance. “I think so too. Past time people started seeing you for the expert paleontologist you are.”

  Mike grunted, uncomfortable with the praise. “There’s no way to mend my reputation now. I’m still the dropout who’s a wannabe in the dino world, and I always will be.”

  Barb pursed her lips, her disapproval clear. All she said was, “Focus on the sales aspect, then. We’re selling relics. As in the art world, provenance is everything. The better the documentation, the bigger the client list and the higher the price we can charge.”

  She was right, and Mike knew it. He nodded. “We won’t start with the trackway, though.” He was possessive about that trackway. Dinosaur footprints that had hardened into rock were rare and he didn’t want to announce his find to the world until he knew what kind of creature had left its mark and how extensive the trackway itself was. “We’ll do today’s find. It’s massive. Looks to be almost a full skeleton. I think the neck and shoulders are on federal land, but the rest of the body is on our side of the line.”

  Barb’s eyes lit up. “Know the species?”

  He shook his head. “At first guess I’d say it was a herbivore, but I can’t be certain.” He paused. Let a little of the elation that had been trailing him all morning show through. “It wasn’t one I know on sight.” Herbivores had less value than a carnivore like T Rex, but if this creature was a new species the find would be huge.

  “Hot damn,” Barb said, reverently. “Shoo. Go get Don on the phone and tell him to get moving and not be a lazybones.”

  Mike had no intention of calling Don Conway anything of the kind, but he nodded and headed to his office to phone.

  Unlike Barb’s lavender garden, his sported white walls, a double pedestal steel desk—a castoff bought at an auction at the county seat—an equally old upright filing cabinet, bought at the same auction, and a large table on which the toe bone of an iguanodon currently rested. The only modern thing in the room was the luxurious leather-covered, well-padded and sprung, executive desk chair, which was his pride
and joy. It swiveled, had wheels that never failed to scoot him along the bare lino floor to whatever side of the office he chose, and his back never ached the way it did when he sat too long in his old desk chair.

  He settled in his big comfy chair and reached for his desk phone. He didn’t have to look up Don’s number, so he simply dialed and hoped he wouldn’t get another recorded message. He was in luck.

  “Don Conway, speaking.” The voice was brisk and sounded harassed.

  “Mike here. I’m calling to report a highway washout.”

  “You and half the county,” Don said with a sigh. “Where is it?”

  “Highway 25, where it crosses into federal land.”

  There was a pause. He could almost see Don straightening in his is chair and paying more attention. “Any special reason you were in that area?”

  “There is now. The washout uncovered a bone bed. A big one.”

  “Your permit or Scarr’s?”

  “Both.”

  Don whistled. “A jurisdictional nightmare in the making. You’ll want to be sure both sides know who gets what.”

  Alfred Scarr had never hidden his disdain for Mike Edmonds and Discovering Dinos and since he was an outsider and Mike was a favorite son, most people assumed Scarr would do whatever was necessary to put Discovering Dinos out of business. Mike thought it too. “You’re telling me. Don, the washout is huge. The rift must run a couple of miles or more and I don’t think the bed I found is the only one. I need a proper survey of the area, the sooner the better.”

  His friend didn’t disappoint. “I’ll pull my team together and go now. Is the road passable?”

  “No. It’s gone.”

  “Good. Gives me the excuse I need if anyone bothers to complain.”

  By anyone read Alfred Scarr. On his way back to town Mike had thought a lot about the deal he’d made with the shapely Liz Hamilton. The more he thought, the more he considered it unlikely to hold. Scarr had invited Zac Doyle into his camp and from what he’d heard of Zac Doyle, he was an even bigger academic shark than Scarr was. Between the two of them Liz Hamilton didn’t have much hope of keeping the rights to her find and sticking around to dig it. He figured Scarr would have her on the next plane out.