Jurassic Heart (4 page)

“H
EY
,
SEXY
,”
someone whispered in my ear, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I whirled around and all the irritation drained out of me. I smiled. “Hey, Boner.”

He caught me up in a huge embrace, swung me around, and planted a sloppy kiss on my mouth. My three days had been up a week ago, and I was still on-site in my little corner. I’d stopped pretending I was going to leave when my kit arrived, courtesy of my mom, and I had negotiated a longer stay with the owner of the motel.

“Did you miss me?”

“Always.”

Boner was a nickname, believe it or not. I always forgot his real name, which made signing his paycheck interesting. The part of my brain that stored useless trivia told me it was George, although that recollection was unreliable at best and dangerous at worst. But I, and the rest of the paleontology community, knew him by the nickname Miriam had given him years ago during our first year at college. He’d earned it by wandering around naked far, far too often. The boy was
hung.

We’d bonded over the fact that we were both into guys and then started a game of cat and mouse that had lasted nearly ten years. The thing was, we knew we would make a terrible couple. We knew we weren’t meant to be together. But fuck, did we have fun.

Boner was famous for not giving a shit about anything. He’d grown up in a hippie community somewhere out west, where he’d been involved in digs since he was ten, or so legend had it. Wearing his hair in long, dirty-blond dreads down his back, Boner was stick thin with sparkling blue eyes, and pretty much all his clothes were various shades of
dust
.
He had his nose pierced. He’d never quite fit in anywhere, looking the way he did, which strangely made him fit in everywhere.

When I pulled out of his delicious kiss, tasting red licorice and his menthol cigarettes on my lips, I surveyed his outfit of the day—heavy work boots, khaki pants, and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt. He was beautifully predictable, and I loved him for it.

I smoothed my thumb over his eyebrow and flicked the little silver hoop he wore there. It was new. Thinking back, I realized I hadn’t seen him for nearly a year, and I’d missed him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Hopefully working for you,” he said, giving me another quick grin.

“It’s not my party,” I said. “But I’m happy for you to stick around. I’m mostly doing my own thing anyway.”

He nodded and smiled, his eyes shining. “I’ve missed you, Nick.”

“I was just thinking the same thing. Where are you staying?”

He wriggled his eyebrows suggestively, and I laughed. “Okay. You can stay with me.”

“Thanks, gorgeous.”

“Go down to the lab and find a grid ref. Then start work.”

“Oh, no tour of the facilities?” he grouched. “No ‘Welcome to the dig, Boner. Let me show you around, Boner.’”

“I’m digging up a dinosaur, Boner,” I said, matching his tone. “Hoping to find its head to confirm the species, Boner.”

He laughed and held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I get it. I’ll catch up with you later, yeah?”

“Sure. You owe me dinner.”

I
T
WASN
’
T
quite dinner, but he found the deli in town and got two enormous sandwiches made up, bought chips and soda and two little jars, one full of olives, the other with sun-dried tomatoes and mozzarella balls in some flavored oil. It was delicious.

“Thanks,” I said, tucking into the sandwich and realizing I hadn’t eaten anything since a slice of toast and cup of coffee nearly six hours before. It was too easy to get caught up in things and lose track of time. Especially when I’d found something interesting.

“So,” Boner said. “What’s the deal here?”

I cocked my head to one side. “It’s a dig, Boner. Not a very well-organized one, not a lot going on, loads of amateurs and volunteers and students who need guidance, but there’s not enough people here on the payroll who can give them that.”

He shook his head. “Are you being paid?”

I gave him a withering look. “What do you think?”

“Shit,” he drawled.

“I got paid for the first weekend,” I said. “But right now I’m funding myself.”

“Why?”

That wasn’t an easy question. “Because this kid, Brad—he was here when I arrived―he dug up the partial skeleton. And it’s got some marks on it, some bite marks, and it follows the pattern of what I’d expect raptor bites to look like.”

“Oh, Nick,” he sighed and popped an olive in his mouth.

“What?”

“You know how I heard you were up here?”

“Twitter?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “I don’t follow you on Twitter.”

“Bastard.”

“Mim called.”

I waited to hear why this was a big deal. I couldn’t think of one.

“She wanted to make sure I got you out if you started doing something stupid, since she couldn’t be here to do it herself.”

“Oh, Mim worries too much,” I said. “That only happened once.”

Boner quelled me with a look
.
“Nick,” he said gently, “there’s only one person in the world more obsessed with finding raptors on this continent than Eric White, and that’s you.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “I’ve spent the past year or so doing educational pieces, Boner,” I said. “I haven’t even been digging. It’s not about that for me anymore. You know where my career is taking me just as much as I do.”

“And you’re doing a great job,” he said sincerely. “But don’t get caught up in old obsessions.”

“It’s not an obsession,” I argued. Other people would side with him and Miriam, though.

My doctoral thesis was on North American predators. In particular, after spending four seasons digging up Velociraptors in Mongolia, I wanted to find those animals on this continent. I had a good theory, too, about the different types of raptor-like species and how they had become such efficient and dominant predators. All I needed now was the evidence to back that up.

We finished our lunch and worked until the light got poor, Boner mostly watching and catching up on gossip, then returned to the trailer to file our reports alongside the others. On my digs, this was the time when I would usually run a debrief for the day, getting the team to share what they’d been up to and what we’d learned so far. But Eric was, once again, absent from the site, and the team was leaving in twos and threes.

I caught up with Boner, who had been charming the pants off Nancy, and helped him carry his few bags back to the car.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

“A motel,” I admitted. “It’s good, though. I can’t afford to say there long term. But until I decide what I’m doing, it’s good.”

“It’s pretty far away from the dig,” he commented.

“Yeah. Part of the basis of its appeal.”

I shot him a grin, and he responded in kind.

After parking in the small lot at the back of the motel, I took one of his bags and led him up to my room. Housekeeping had been in and put fresh sheets on the bed and extra towels in the bathroom.

Boner whistled through his teeth as he looked around. “Pretty fancy for a motel, Nick.”

“It does the job,” I said.

He dumped his bag on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed to unlace his boots. “Do you mind if I go shower?”

“Knock yourself out.”

I turned on the small, crappy TV and leaned against the headboard, knowing Boner would take his time. There wasn’t much on, so I tuned in to a game show and instead watched Boner soaping himself up through the open doorway and clear glass shower cubicle. I was suddenly pleased I hadn’t bothered upgrading to a room with a tub.

When he was done, we switched, and since it was only fair he got to perv on me too, I left the bathroom door open as I showered off the dirt from the day and thoroughly washed my hair. When I had finished, I saw Boner had already dressed in just a pair of pajama pants, so I guessed we weren’t going out again.

“We should order in something for dinner,” I said. “I’ll get it—you bought lunch. What do you want?”

He shrugged. “Don’t care.”

“Are you still on that vegetarian whim?”

“It wasn’t a whim, Nick. It lasted fourteen years.”

“That’s a no, then,” I said, teasing him.

He looked at me solemnly. “Blame the bacon.”

I dressed in pj’s but put a T-shirt on over the top and socks on my feet. “Pizza?”

“Works for me.”

Since there was a pizza place right in town, it meant not having to wait for our food to be delivered. I’d already called them once before, so I found the number in my phone and placed an order for a large pie with everything. Then I slipped onto the bed and easily into Boner’s arms.

Pretty much no one knew, but once, we’d tried dating. Friends knew we fucked each other―that wasn’t exactly a state secret―but dating was something else. Another dimension. It had lasted almost two months and it had been awkward as hell. We’d both assumed that romance would be a natural extension of our friendship. It turned out romantically, we were hysterically incompatible.

Our friendship had survived, which was the most important thing, and we agreed things were better for having tried it. I would never wonder “what if” with Boner. However much I liked a good Judy Garland moment, he wasn’t my Man That Got Away.

There was no doubt in my mind that having him around would increase my enjoyment of working for Eric White, even if he was only here because Mim had called him. When the pizza turned up, I set the open box between us on the bed and forced him to recount all the important information about his life for the past year—where he’d been, what he’d published, whom he’d been fucking—while I practically inhaled the pizza, ravenously hungry again for some reason.

“What’s Eric like?” Boner asked, taking the conversation back to work.

I shrugged. “We don’t see much of him. He stays out of the way most of the time. When it looks like someone has found something interesting, he turns up and helps to excavate, but he doesn’t like doing the grunt work.”

“That seems to tally with everything I’ve heard about him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s mostly left me alone since I told him the bones the kid found weren’t Velociraptor. They weren’t even carnivore.”

Boner snorted. “What were they?”

“Othnielosaurus, I think,” I said. “Partial find, hindquarters and femur. We’re still out there looking for a skull, but no luck so far.”

“Would be great if you could find the whole skeleton. This is pretty far north for an Othnielosaurus.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“A couple of small rodent-like mammals. Definitely post-Cretaceous, but we haven’t had confirmation of the age yet. Loads of teeth. And I think I’ve got an Orodromeus.” Orodromeus were small herbivores that lived in the late Cretaceous period, distinctive by their beaky mouths. It was an interesting find but the second herbivore. I wanted some meat eaters.

“Really? Cool.”

“Yeah,” I said, taking another slice of pizza, the long stretch of cheese finally snapping as I pulled it up and away. “I was hoping you might help me get it out, actually. It’s quite twisted.”

“Damage?” he asked. “Or time?”

“Time,” I said. “Other than that… not a lot.”

“It’s a weird spot to dig on,” Boner said. “He could have gone a few hours north and found a spot in Dinosaur Park.”

“You think Eric would get permission to dig there?”

“Okay. Probably not.”

I shifted on the bed, pulling the comforter up higher. It was getting cold. And late. Boner seemed to agree; he pushed the empty pizza box onto the floor, flicked the TV off with the remote and snuggled down into the bed. Despite the fact that he was a skinny motherfucker, he was still a good person to cuddle with, and we’d spent enough nights sleeping in a tent together for me to know how to get comfortable in bed with him.

“I’m really glad you’re here,” I whispered as he wrapped his arms around me.

“Me too,” he whispered. “Good night, Nick.”

I
T
TOOK
nearly a whole week to get the badly twisted Orodromeus I’d named Torrance out of the ground, by which point the whole site had been transformed into areas of deep trenches and long ditches. Eric had responded to Boner’s presence with a grim nod, seemingly resigned to the fact that another paleontologist had turned up and trumped him in the experience stakes.

The excavation of Torrance finally drew in some media interest, which was great, not least because my mom got to watch a segment on the news. Despite only being a short interview, it was enough to start drawing people to the site to look at what we were doing.

I left it to Eric to organize the informal chats and tours―that was his job, after all, and I was happy playing about in the mud while he dealt with the locals. The warmth of the summer was starting to pick up, drying out the topsoil and making the process a lot dustier.

Still, I’d worked in worse conditions and kept an old bottle of window cleaner filled with water next to me, ready to spray the dust away if I needed to. I was pretty sure I’d exhausted the grid reference I’d been working since arriving at the dig, but common sense told me to work outward from that area to see if I ran into anything else.

It was an ambitious site to work, with the trees lining one side and the hill to negotiate as well. If I’d arrived here first, I would have contained the area away from the tree line and set base camp farther south. To my eye, it looked like Eric had just thrown the team into the area and told them to start removing topsoil. That in itself could take weeks—and expensive machinery that was hired by the day.

I hadn’t seen the stratigraphic report of the site, but I knew one existed. Since Eric was so openly hostile of my presence, I’d started to go through Brad to get any information I needed. He was more than happy to send it over to me, and I only felt a little guilty at using him to satisfy my own curiosity. In return, I helped him with the excavation of the area where he’d found Mavis, showing him how to best work horizontally as well as vertically and talking through different theories about why only a partial skeleton had been found.