by Merry Farmer
“Should I shift over to this side to dig?” he asked.
Laura bit her lip, staring at the slightly rounded lump they’d managed to uncover. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Great. Just tell me where to dig and how much force to use.”
“Right here.” She patted the ground near to the hole she’d already started. “And not too hard.”
They went back to work, again in relative silence. The ground was reluctant to give way, even with Ted shoveling where Laura directed him. It wasn’t the soft, moist soil she had grown up with, that was for sure. Wyoming dirt was as stubborn as the people who lived on it. It was worth it, though. Within another twenty minutes, they had cleared the ground around the second part of the fossil. It was definitely a hip bone. That gave them a femur and a bit of pelvis. There was still too much dirt to see the ball joint properly, but the more they worked, the more confident she was that it was there.
“Do you think it’s a T-Rex?” Ted asked as they moved on to clear the ground on the side where she hoped to find vertebrae or a tail.
She laughed. “I doubt it. T-Rex get all the glory, but we’re far more likely to find a much smaller raptor, or even more likely, a plant-eater. See?” She brushed more dirt away from the side of the pelvic bone. “Way too small to be a T-Rex.”
“That’s small?” Ted paused in his digging to lean against his shovel and catch his breath. “It’s way bigger than a cow pelvis.”
She glanced up at him in surprise. Short-lived surprise. “Yeah, I guess you would have experience with animal bones,” she reasoned aloud. “What with growing up on the ranch and all.”
“Yet another advantage of being raised around cattle,” he said, wiping his brow, then getting back to digging. “I learned a lot about animals.”
She wanted to have something to say to that, but she just didn’t. The only thing to do was to work on.
At least until Ted let out a heavy, impatient breath and said, “Okay, you’ve got to tell me. How did you really get so interested in dinosaurs? I know you said it had something to do with your brother who died, so if you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll understand. But I’d really like to know.”
Laura rocked back in surprised. “You’re really interested?”
“Yeah,” he said with a sound that was equal parts laughter and exasperation.
“Oh.” She blinked, shrugged, and went back to digging and clearing dirt. It would be far easier to tell the story if she didn’t have to look at him while doing it. “So I mentioned Blake died of leukemia, right?” she began.
“You did.” Ted returned to shoveling as well, which made it almost okay to tell the story. She might not even cry.
She focused on the strain of her muscles as she dug. “It was tough, you know?”
“I can imagine.”
“The whole family went through his illness and treatment.”
“Like Mom,” Ted nearly whispered.
Laura paused to glance up at him, sending him a look of solidarity. Yeah, he knew.
“Do you have any other siblings?” he asked on when she stayed silent.
Laura shook her head and went back to work. “No, it was just me and Blake, Mom and Dad.”
“Shit,” he whispered. “That makes it worse.”
“Yeah.” She took a moment to swallow her emotion. She had a story to tell, after all, and it was about dinosaurs, not grief. “Well, Blake loved dinosaurs. That was the thing that he focused on through the whole chemotherapy ordeal. We read books about dinosaurs and visited natural history museums when he was well enough and all that. We even started a correspondence with this top-tier paleontologist, Dr. Cheryl Ashford from UC Berkley. And every time he had to go through some sort of treatment, he’d get a toy dinosaur as a reward. As the collection grew bigger, we would play with them all the time.”
“That’s…” Ted let out a breath. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Oh, it was really special,” she said, unable to look up and meet his eyes as old grief seeped out from the part of her heart where it lived. “Blake and I were less than two years apart in age. I was older. We did a lot together. I was with him for the best and the worst of it.” And the worst had been more terrible than she wanted to remember. More terrible than she wanted to repeat.
She took a deep breath, rolled her shoulders, focused on uncovering the fossil in front of her, and went on. “After Blake died, I kept all of his toys and things. I lined the toy dinos up in my room as a tribute to him. Most girls my age had posters of boy bands and stuff, but I had shelves and shelves of Blake’s menagerie.”
“Wow.”
Laura ventured a look up at Ted. His eyes were focused on the ground he was digging, but she could see how deeply her story had affected him.
“Yep.” She sighed, closing her eyes to send her love to her brother, wherever he was. When she opened them and took a cleansing breath, she said, “I kept in touch with Dr. Ashford too. One thing led to another, and all that reading and research I did as a way to keep Blake close to me turned out to be really interesting. I started doing more in-depth research than me and Blake ever did. I took some college courses in paleontology, spent a summer helping Dr. Ashford with her research, and before I knew it, that was my focus while earning my associates degree. I did some internships out here in the West and other places. Then I joined the Army.”
“And got interested in rockets,” Ted finished the thought.
She chuckled. “Yeah. But in my defense, there are far more jobs available and more money to be made as an aerospace engineer than there is as a dinosaur hunter. It was a strategic move, designed to stop me from being homeless and living off of ramen noodles.”
“Practicality.” Ted nodded. “I like that. I like it a lot.”
As if someone had flipped a switch, Laura was back to feeling self-conscious again. He didn’t mean he liked it, did he? Liked her? “Um, well, oh, okay,” she fumbled.
Ted laughed and shook his head. “One of these days, you’re going to have to get used to the idea that you’re an interesting and attractive woman, Laura Kincade.”
“Who, me?” she joked by rote, heartrate speeding up.
Ted stopped shoveling for a moment and sent her a flat stare. “Am I going to have to organize a self-esteem intervention?”
“It’s not self-esteem,” she insisted, face burning. She chipped away at the fossil with her spade even harder. “I just know who I am and who I’m not.”
Ted hummed in doubt and stabbed his shovel into the hole he was digging.
“Don’t ‘hmm’ me like that.” She rocked back on her haunches and pointed her spade at him. “I know what I’m talking about.”
He cleared his throat, but still didn’t say anything.
“Stop it,” she said, brushing even faster at the fossil with the side of her spade. Fast enough to be careless. That was never a good thing.
“Stop what?” Ted teased her.
“Well, teasing me for one.”
He chuckled. A second later, he stopped and stood straighter. “Okay, I’ll stop teasing you if you agree to go out to dinner with me.”
“What?” She twisted to face him. “No.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and went back to digging. “I gave you a way out of it, but I guess this means I’ll just have to keep poking fun at you.”
“That hardly seems fair,” she grumbled. Although the entire conversation was doing funny things to her insides. Her low down insides. Holy crap, you aren’t flirting back at him, are you? She definitely wasn’t supposed to be doing that.
“Just say you’ll go out with me, and it will all be over. If not?” He tilted his head to the side as he tossed a shovelful of dirt to the side. “I’m going to have to keep telling you how fascinating you are, how everything you say makes me think, in a good way, how your eyes remind me of a clear, blue, winter sky, and how sexy you look when you’re covered with dirt.”
“I’m not—” Laur
a squeaked, unable to finish.
“What, covered with dirt? Or sexy? Because I’ve got news for you, you’re both.” He laughed.
“No one is sexy when they’re covered with dirt,” she insisted. Although Ted wasn’t too shabby with a fine layer of the stuff dusting him now.
“That’s so far from being true that I—”
He stopped suddenly, his entire expression changing. Laura knew why as soon as she heard the chink of his shovel hitting something that wasn’t dirt. It was a sound she knew well. Instantly, her pulse raced.
“What is it?” She pushed away from the hole she’d been digging, scurrying toward Ted, her spade in one hand.
Ted dropped to his knees as she reached him, and side-by-side they dug with their hands at the ground he’d loosened. Once again, the distracting dance of their hands bumping and overlapping threatened to pull Laura away from what was important. She refused to let it, though. She refused to feel anything as their shoulders brushed together and as she leaned heavily into him at one point when she lost her balance.
“Whoa,” she gasped as they pushed aside enough dirt to reveal what Ted had hit. “Oh my gosh!”
“What?” Ted dug twice as fast, uncovering the dull, dark fossil. “What is it?”
“It’s….” Laura bit her lip, digging a little more before she felt comfortable floating the theory that had instantly come to her. “It’s another pelvic bone.”
Ted’s brow inched up, but he didn’t know the half of it. Or at least the half of what it could be. “Two dinosaurs?”
“Two is better than one,” she said.
As soon as she was certain of what she was seeing, she rocked back and sat with a thump in the dirt. She glanced to the pelvis and femur she’d already started to uncover, then to the one Ted had just discovered. They were close together. That could mean all sorts of things. It could be a family group, or it could be something else. Either way, her instincts told her they were on to something special.
“Should we keep digging?” Ted asked. His focus was entirely on the fossils once more.
“Yeah,” Laura said, slowly. “We definitely should. But I’m starting to think we might also want to call in a professional to take a look at this.”
Ted shifted to sit by her side, his handsome features made somehow more charming by the surprise they now displayed. “Is there such a thing as a professional dinosaur identifier?”
“Uh, yeah, they’re called paleontologists.” She elbowed him in the arm.
“Right.” He nudged her back. “And I suppose you know a bunch of them.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
Ted laughed. “Do you have them on speed-dial?”
“I thought you weren’t going to tease me anymore.” She arched a brow at him.
“Only if you agree to go out with me.” He winked at her.
“Okay.” She sighed, trying and failing to ignore the rush of bantering with him.
He brightened up like the sky after a storm. “Really? You’ll go out with me?”
“No! All right, I guess that means you’re going to tease me,” she said with a smirk. That smirk quickly turned sheepish. “Because yes, I do actually have a couple of paleontologists on speed-dial.”
Ted laughed out loud. He rocked back with the gesture, and as he did, he lost his balance. He grabbed Laura for support. She had to hold onto him to keep herself from tumbling over too. Her heart was already tumbled enough as it was.
Ted didn’t seem to notice. He righted himself, but kept his body way too close to hers. “All right,” he said with a shrug, picking up a handful of dirt and letting it sift through his fingers. “Call one of your paleontologist friends and have them come out.”
“I’ll call Dr. Ashford. Although she’ll probably kill me for not calling to catch up with her sooner,” she said. “In the meantime, we can keep digging.”
“Of course we can keep digging.” He nodded, sending her a look that went beyond teasing. It was sultry, borderline seductive. “I know one thing at least.”
“What?” Her voice threatened to give out.
He nodded to the piles of dirt and holes they’d made, but his eyes stayed locked to hers. “We’ve really got something here.”
Chapter Six
It didn’t matter how many times Laura told herself her continual visits to the Flint ranch were against her better judgement, she couldn’t bring herself to stop going. There was a fossil, a real live, fossil, just waiting for her to draw it out of a million years of slumber. And if digging it up meant hanging around Ted in situations where he might get the wrong idea about the possibilities between them, it was worth it.
Because really, at the end of the day, even she had to admit that her reticence about Ted’s interest in her had nothing to do with him, what league he was in, or his “type.” It had everything to do with the fear that lived deep in the pit of her stomach. Even the possibility of falling in love was a terrifying prospect.
That thought hit her extra hard a couple of weeks after the initial find as she bummed around the Flint’s living room, waiting for Dr. Ashford, to show up. Dr. Ashford had jumped at the chance to come visit Laura, not just to check out the dinosaur, but to catch up on years’ worth of news and stories. Ted was finishing up his morning work with the cattle while Laura waited. His dad was working with him. That left her alone in the house.
Okay, Laura, don’t break anything, that voice in her head warned her.
She rolled her eyes at herself as she looked around. Her awkward perusal of generations’ worth of Flint family pictures and artifacts led her to a wall of wedding pictures. Some were brittle, 19th century prints in ancient frames, showing poker-faced brides and straight-backed grooms. Others showed beaming couples in early 20th century finery. The most recent one was a charming, 1970s photo of a much younger Roscoe and a beautiful and feisty bride with long, straight, hippie hair who could only be Ted and Casey’s mother, Hester.
With a faint, sad smile, Laura leaned in closer to the photo, studying Hester. She looked every bit as unique as her name, although she wasn’t quite what Laura expected. Hester wasn’t a beauty in the way that Sandy and Rita Templesmith were beauties. She had more grit than refinement, but still managed to look feminine. Her wedding dress was simple, without frills or bows, and Laura found herself imagining what the woman would have looked like on a day-to-day basis.
In fact, she didn’t have to imagine. On the wall next to the wedding photos were scads of family pictures, some of them candid shots. There was Hester again. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail for most of the pictures, and she wore jeans and work clothes in almost all of them. In every shot, she wore a huge smile, and more often than not, she was hugging one or both of her kids, or Roscoe. As the pictures advanced and their subjects aged, teenage Ted looked less willing to be photographed hugging his mom, while teenage Casey was almost always hugging her. Hester grew older, but her buoyant spirit shone through, even when lines appeared on her face and grey streaked her ponytail.
And then there was one photo—a small one, nearly tucked into the corner of the wall—of Hester in what had to have been her last days. Laura’s throat squeezed tight, and she had to blink away the stinging in her eyes. She knew all too well what a cancer patient looked like. Hester’s brilliant hair was gone—just like Blake’s had all fallen out—and her skin had that sickly, yellow, chemical tone from chemo. But her smile was still there, as bright and confident as in her wedding picture. Blake had maintained a similar smile up until the day he closed his eyes for the last time.
“Uhh.” Laura let out a long, ragged sigh, standing straight and brushing the tear that had escaped from her eye. Grief hung heavily on her heart. Some things you didn’t get over, even after fifteen years.
“We look that bad, huh?”
Laura gasped and whipped around to find Roscoe standing in the archway leading to the hall. His work clothes were dirty, and he wore a sad smile on his weathered face.<
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“What? Oh, no.” She tried to laugh, but the weight of the emotion looking at Hester’s pictures had brought to her wasn’t so easily brushed off. “I was just looking at everything.”
Roscoe let out a deep chuckle and strolled over to her side. “We must look pretty awful if you’re sighing like that.”
“I wasn’t—”
She stopped when she caught his teasing, sideways look. It was an older version of the same look Ted gave her. Well, except that Ted’s had all sorts of intent behind it. But that was the last thing Laura wanted to think about with Roscoe standing next to her, staring at pictures of his wife.
His expression melted from sly and mischievous to brimming with love and sadness. It turned down the edges of his eyes and made the wrinkles on his face seem deeper than they were. “Ted told me your younger brother died,” he said with more understanding than Laura would ever have been able to convey with words.
In an instant, there was a bond between her and Roscoe that only love and loss could create. “Yeah.” She sighed, hugging herself and inching closer to Roscoe. “Also cancer. Seeing that picture of your wife kind of brought it all back for me.”
Roscoe’s expression filled with more grief as he stared at the final picture of his wife. At last, with a sharp intake of breath, he turned away from it and looked at Laura. “Cancer sucks.”
Laura let out a surprised laugh at the incongruity of seasoned, old Roscoe saying something that sounded so modern. “It sure does.”
Roscoe nodded his head toward the last picture without looking at it. “I was against hanging that one, but the kids insisted. They say it’s important to remember her smile, to remember that she was herself to the end. Cancer couldn’t take that away from her.” His eyes were red-rimmed with emotion that Laura knew too well would never go away. She had to fight to hold her own tears inside.
“Yeah. Blake was still Blake up until his last—” She gasped with a sudden burst of grief, unable to finish her sentence.
Then, to her great surprise, Roscoe opened his arms and pulled her into a fatherly hug. The only thing that kept her from utterly falling apart at the gesture was shock. Everything she knew about Roscoe indicated he was not a hugger. But there she was, in his arms. The initial shock wore off, and her body tensed, ready to sob.