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
