“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