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In the far corner of the gallery, they’d stacked the six-foot-square wooden crates in which she’d packed the fossil bones, months ago in Patagonia, into a pleasing jumble. A giant child’s fallen tower of building blocks. Out of the top box thrust the massive skull of the beast—all that the museum’s preparators had had time to clean so far. He was as fearsome as his carnivorous cousin across the room, and more exotic with his horns. Couples stood below him, gazing up as they gestured earnestly with their champagne flutes.
“Somebody’s buying the right to name the museum’s example of the already named species—Carnotaurus. There’re going to be some hurt feelings if you don’t make the difference clear.”
“We will, we will, Raine. Now here’s someone you absolutely have to meet. Mr. Fish? Have you met Raine Ashaway of Ashaway All?”
“You’re the little lady that collected that ol’boy there?” demanded Mr. Fish, in a West Texas drawl.
Little lady? He barely came up to her chest! And he’d made his fortune in oil, Raine remembered.
“I picture me a bone hunter tromping around Patagonia, I see some kinda Indiana Jones. I don’t see a leggy blond filly,” Mr. Fish assured her.
“Picture it.” Raine showed her teeth as she reclaimed her hand. “And when I meet a Texas oil tycoon, I expect a ten-gallon hat—if not a twelve.”
Fish hooted as he rubbed his age-spotted dome. “My girl’s been workin’ on me. Alice says boots and a Stetson just don’t cut it with a tux. That if I want to step out on the town with her, then I better look sharp.”
“You name my dinosaur after Alice, and I bet she’ll let you wear whatever you like, Mr. Fish.”
“Might be worth a try,” the oilman allowed, his shrewd eyes crinkling.
“That’s the most complete Carnotaurus skeleton ever discovered,” Raine assured him. “Once she’s prepared and mounted, she’ll stand two-stories high. People will come from all over the world to ooh and ah over her.”
“Alice’d like that, all right.”
“There’s only one to compare her with,” Joel chimed in. “The T. rex Sue, at Chicago’s Field Museum. And when Sue was auctioned off at Sotheby’s, she went for almost eight and a half million.”
“That was to buy the entire dino, not the right to name it!” Raine hissed as they moved on, stopping to shake a hand here, or make a pitch there.
“True. But that was ten years ago. Think about inflation.”
Raine was thinking about what time it was. Half an hour max for cocktails, they’d told her, before they went in to a sit-down dinner, served in the Hall of African Mammals. The museum was charging twenty-five thousand a table. Then, after that pricey meal and before the auction, she’d promised to rev up the crowd. A short speech on My Adventures in Patagonia, more or less. She’d give the patrons more on the genuine thrill of making a major fossil find—and less on the choking dust, the constant gales, the scorpions that kept snuggling into everybody’s boots.
“Getting tired?” Joel asked.
“Hanging in there.”
She assured a prince of Wall Street that his brokerage could buy no finer marketing image for itself than a Carnotaurus. “That’s Latin for ‘meat-eating bull,’” she told him. “Your firm could style itself the top predator of the next bull market.”
“Dynamite pitch, but why’d you duck his invitation to dinner?” Joel grumbled as they drifted on. “His eyes just give me the shivers. So masterful!”
“I promised my sister Jaye that I’d check out her dig this weekend. She’s struck a major vein of amber in southern New Jersey, can you believe it? Besides…” If there was one thing Raine demanded in a man, it was competence in the natural world. Forget how he handled the bulls and bears of the stock exchange. She wanted a man who could deal with a water buffalo, or face down a grizzly. Her father had spoiled her for indoortypes forever.
“Well, I’d have dated him if he’d asked.”
“Then go back and chat him up. I’m doing fine on my own.”
“I…really shouldn’t. I’m supposed to take care of you.”
“So be a sweetheart and get me another drink. And take the looong way round, okay?”
Circling the island of battling dinos, Raine stopped for some girl talk. A fashion designer wanted to know where she’d gotten her stunning gown?
“Like it?” Raine smoothed her palms down the clinging sheath of red silk, with its intricate gold-thread patterns and its delicately gathered bodice. A split between the two halves of the front showed a slice of skin almost to her navel; it couldn’t be worn with a brassiere. But actually it was quite modest—all promise and wild surmise.
“It’s made from an antique sari. I managed a dig a few years back, in southern India. There’d been a drought there for years. We could give the men work, but I wanted to do something for the women of the village. I hired a young widow to do the camp mending, and it turned out she was a genius with a needle. I bought some silk and did a sketch and asked if she could sew me a simple dress? And she whipped up something I could have worn in Paris. So the other expedition women got envious and asked for clothes, and the next thing you knew, we realized—hey, this is a viable business.”
Raine had loaned Shoba and her two sisters the money to buy three sewing machines, her initial stock of fabric and a satellite-linked laptop. She’d connected her with a sharp marketing student at Parsons School of Design back in the States, plus a wonderful Web site designer. “This is Shoba’s latest design, which she’ll customize, of course, to size and material. She’s fast, utterly dependable and she can deliver in quantity. Here’s her e-mail address.”
As she drew the business card from a hidden pocket, Raine brushed the sheath of the knife strapped to her thigh. Weapons-grade plastic, so the museum’s metal detector had missed it. She’d been silly to wear it, she supposed. But the moon would be full tonight and she never got enough exercise, when she came to the city. After the fund-raiser, she meant to walk back to the firm’s apartment in the upper West Eighties. And if John Ashaway had taught his children anything, it was to be prepared. Always. For anything.
“Carpe diem!” was his credo. “Seize the day. Seize the moment. Seize the opportunity. Seize the damn carp. Live by your wits or die stupid.”
Smiling with the memory, Raine came back to the present—to find her gaze snagged by the same dark watcher. He must have circled the room as she had done; now they contemplated each other from reverse sides of the battling dinosaurs. Where had she seen him before?
And then the memory surfaced. That time in Wyoming when she was—what—twelve? She’d skipped out on her father’s dig, dreaming she’d top his discovery with one of her own. Up into the foothills she’d hiked, through a stand of trembling aspen.
The wind and the leafy commotion must have masked her steps as she rounded the bend in the trail. Hard to say who’d been more surprised, Raine or the young mountain lion coming down the path. He’d frozen with a big forepaw midair. Ye-es, that was what reminded her now. Here was that same coiled stillness—force interrupted, yet instantly available.
And the man’s amber eyes were just like the cat’s. Here it was again, total attention. She remembered the moment when attention had turned to intention. She’d been small for her age at twelve. She’d looked like lunch.
But being an Ashaway, she had pockets full of fossils. As the lion stalked closer, she’d lobbed a trilobite off his flank. He’d snarled, swerved—and kept on coming.
She’d had to sacrifice the best ammonite she’d ever found. Just as he gathered himself to spring, it struck him square on the nose. He’d shot straight up into the leaves in outraged astonishment. That gave her a moment to grab a fallen limb and charge him, shrieking like a banshee.
Her bluff would never have worked on a seasoned hunter. Wouldn’t work on this one, something told her. She gave him a slow smile. So here I am. What’s your intention?
He didn’t respond. A hand tipped in long red nails landed on his sleeve. With their eyes locked, Raine couldn’t see more of the woman. But he glanced down at those fingers, smiled wryly to himself—then turned aside.
Raine drew a breath, her first in a minute. What was that about?
So that…was Raine Ashaway.
Kincade supposed he’d seen photos before. The Ashaway All Web site contained expedition shots featuring various members of the family, as well as pictures of the dinosaur specimens they offered for sale. But he’d never seen this Ashaway without a wide-brimmed hat shading her vivid face. He hadn’t expected a huntress, with hair like moonbeams rippling on troubled water.
“Did you hear one word I said, Cade?” Amanda whatever-her-name-was fingered his lapel, as she pouted prettily.
“Nope.” Not that he’d have missed much. She’d latched on to him as soon as he’d arrived. He’d tolerated her prattling, because she made good cover. She let him appear to be mingling, while he studied his quarry.
“You’re almost…scary, when you look like that. What on earth are you thinking?” she teased.
He was thinking that vengeance might turn out to be more than a sworn duty. Taking Raine Ashaway down? That might also be a pleasure.
Chapter 2
“R aine-baby!”
Spinning, Raine found herself nose to nose with a ruby tie tack, and an expanse of white satin dinner jacket too wide to hug. “Trenton! What are you doing here?” She planted a kiss on his dimpled chin, which was as high as she could reach.
The sports world and his adoring fans knew him as Ten-ton Browne of the Pittsburgh Steelers. “There you are just strolling down the sidewalk—and WHAM! It’s like a big ol’ ten-ton safe falling out of the sky,” a sacked quarterback had once described their first encounter.
“Hey, that dig last year? I still dream about it. Stars so big I thought they gotta be flying saucers, and finding that Stegosaurus? What a kick! I’ve been collecting ever since.”
While recuperating from a knee injury, Trenton had signed up as a volunteer documentation assistant on an Ashaway dig in Montana. He’d caught the dinosaur-hunting bug, for which there was treatment, if no cure. But along with the bone-fever, he’d caught something much worse.
“I heard you were talking tonight ’bout Patagonia,” he rumbled in her ear as they strolled arm in arm toward the boxed Carnotaurus. “But I didn’t know if any of the rest of your family were…”
“Nobody else is coming tonight,” she said gently. “Jaye’s digging down in New Jersey, Gianna’s doing prep work back at headquarters. Ash is cursing and swearing and suffering through his paleontology doctorate at Stanford. And Dana?” Dana was all he wanted to hear about. “Dana’s excavating a fossil whale in Peru.”
“I see.” He heaved a gusty sigh. “Didn’t know she was out of the country. Guess that’s why she never returns my messages.”
“Mmmm.” That wasn’t why, but it wasn’t Raine’s place to tell him so.
“Well.” He sighed again and nodded up at the Carnotaurus. “That’s surely something you found there, Rainy. What d’you think? If I beat out all these fat cats and win the auction tonight, then I name your dino after Dana?”
Raine shook her head. “Don’t do it for that reason. The museum would love your contribution, but as for Dana…”
“Yeah…Yeah, I sorta thought not.” He pulled his lilac brocade tie through the enormous fingers of one hand, then the other. “Then I guess I oughta ask you this. Nothing’s worse than not knowing. Is it because I’m…” He made an oddly graceful gesture, taking in his massive black body.
“No. It is absolutely not that. You are prime husband and brother-in-law material—and considering your feather touch with a pickax? Dad would clasp you to his bosom, believe me.” Why couldn’t he have fallen for gentle Gianna? Another year or two and surely she’d be over Jack’s death. Ready to love again.
But Dana? It would be disloyal to tell him that Dana kept a tray of ice cubes, where other people stashed their hearts. “Dana doesn’t get…involved. Not with anyone.” From the day they’d found her at roughly age five, she’d been like that. Friendly—but friendly like a stray cat who’d move on if the food ran out. It was Raine’s guess that she wanted nobody irreplaceable in her life.
Raine left Trenton gazing glumly up at the Carnotaurus, and prowled on.
She hooked another flute of bubbly off a caterer’s tray, stopped to let a woman exclaim over her opal necklace.
“That is absolutely fabulous! Do you mind if I ask where you got it? I own a shop down in the Village, and I’m always on the lookout for—” She paused with a look of disappointment as Raine shook her head.
“It’s one of a kind, I’m afraid. I made it myself, over a period of years.” She touched the rough opals, strung together into a wide ragged sunburst, with bits of beach glass woven in for contrast. “Every time I find a new stone, I find someplace to fit it in.” Since precious and semiprecious stones were often uncovered during excavations, Ashaway All sold uncut gems as well as fossils. John Ashaway had encouraged each of his children to specialize in a particular mineral. Opals were Raine’s professional—and private—passion.
Circling toward the front of the gallery, Raine didn’t spot any opals. Still in this crowd there were plenty of other gems to admire. She saw a pair of tourmaline earrings she’d have to describe to Ash; that was his stone. Pearls galore, though Ashaway All didn’t deal in pearls. A man’s signet ring with a square-cut emerald that’d be the envy of a rajah.
“Raine, there you are!”
With an inward groan and an outer smile, she turned as Alden Eames, curator of vertebrate paleontology, caught her arm.
“Sorry to neglect you, darling, but I had to smooth some ruffled feathers. The security guard running the metal detector is an ass. Can you believe he was refusing entry to a cousin of the Kennedys? Some sort of steel plate in his leg from a skiing accident, I understand. But if these morons can’t distinguish between an honored guest and a mugger wandered in from the Park, then I say…”
He said it at length while Raine struggled not to yawn. To think that when she was seventeen Eames had bruised, if not broken, her heart! She’d met the rising young curator that summer when Ashaway All had shared a salvage dig with the Manhattan Museum of Natural History. They’d been granted three months to rescue as many bones as they could from a mass grave of hadrosaurs, discovered during construction of a dam in Venezuela. When the waters rose, the site would be submerged forever. During those months of fevered camaraderie, Raine had fallen hard for the bronzed and pith-helmeted young Ivy Leaguer. Though he was twelve years her senior, she’d taken him for her first lover.
With a teenager’s rosy optimism, she’d pictured them together forever, sharing bones, bliss and world-shaking scientific discoveries. But her dreams had shattered at expedition’s end, when she’d learned that—all the while—Eames had been engaged to a rich young socialite. His fiancée had stayed back in the States to plan their September wedding.
Still Raine had limped away from the experience with some valuable lessons. She’d learned to withhold her trust till a man had earned it. Learned also that polished charm was often the mask of selfishness, not a caring heart.
She startled now as Eames brushed a finger along her bare shoulder. “God, Raine. Have I told you yet that you’re twice as lovely as you were at seventeen? To think that we—”
“Let’s not, thank you. Let’s think about Ethiopia. I’ll be taking my usual crew, but I’ll scout for a site first, just me and a guide. Do you have any local connections you’d recommend?”
Raine hated to give up her Carnotaurus, but she was on the track of even bigger game. A richer prize.
The MMNH held a licence to dig in Ethiopia, but with the wars of the past decade, hadn’t dared exercise that right. But now there’d been another truce in the fighting, and Raine was ready to gamble this one would hold.
Apparently Eames was not.
So they’d traded, exchanging Raine’s sure thing—her neatly boxed Carnotaurus, perfect for a fund-raiser—for the museum’s wild card: the right to dig, with no guarantee that there’d be bones for the finding.
But, oh, if there were! Four years ago the shoulder blade of a gigantic new dinosaur had been unearthed in the Sudan, in the same geological stratum that was exposed in the gorge of the Blue Nile. Raine meant to be the first one in the world to bring home an entire specimen of Paralititan.
Given the right international auction, Ashaway All could sell a complete fossil skeleton for an easy five-million-dollar profit. Aside from the scientific notoriety, which was valuable in itself, the company could use a cash windfall. They’d taken some unexpected hits this past year. Lost three long-standing licenses to dig out West, that they never should have lost. Been outbid with several of their independent finders for specimens that once would have been theirs without question. Then Jaye had mounted an expensive amber-collecting expedition to Haiti that had come home empty-handed, when cholera broke out in the region. Add all those losses on to the breathtaking medical expenses of her father’s accident, and his attempts to recover…With an absent frown, Raine glanced beyond Eames’s shoulder—and blinked.
There he was yet again—Amber Eyes. Still keeping his distance. Still unsmiling. And still…attentive. So what do you want? If he was flirting, he’d get nowhere with her without showing some humor and warmth.
And if he wasn’t? Standing there like a tiger, peering through the bushes? Then—
“Miss Ashaway? Miss Raine Ashaway?”
One of the caterer’s tuxedoed staff loomed before her. He swung a silver tray of drinks under her nose.
“No, thanks. I’m all set.” She showed him her flute, still filled with icy bubbles.
“No, no, no, no. It is this! I was told to give you—”
She cocked her head as he pressed the small white envelope into her hand. An Indian accent, with its iambic inflection and hints of Britannia? “But who gave you this to—?”
He bowed, nodded emphatically and darted off through the crowd.
“What’s that about?” Eames murmured at her ear.
With a mystified shrug, Raine looked from the envelope—to her watcher across the room. From you?
His dark head dipped an inch in the barest of nods, the salute of a fencer at the first kiss of steel. He smiled at last—a white slash of teeth in a sun-darkened face—and turned away.
You, Raine concluded, ripping into the envelope.
On a square of folded paper, his message was penned in bold block letters.
I have a fossil of great rarity and interest for sale. If this beguiles you, then meet me in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight.
So. This was business instead of pleasure. Or, at least, before pleasure, Raine told herself. But why the weird rendezvous? Why not discuss it now?
On the other hand, the museum was Eames’s home court, and she certainly didn’t need the curator drooling over her shoulder, while she tried to cut a deal. A fossil of great interest was, by definition, a bone of contention. Careers as well as fortunes rose and fell with paleontology’s great discoveries.
Consider me beguiled. She looked up to send that silent reply, but Amber Eyes was speaking to the same Indian with the tray. Something passed between their hands—a tip for the man’s trouble, no doubt.
“You would be Mr. Ken…Cade?” the waiter asked with a nervous gulp.
“Kincade. Who wants to know?”
“I was told to give you…this.” He thrust a small white rectangle into Kincade’s hand, then retreated through the crush.
