Birthright Read online

  wouldn’t leave a ring on the desk. “And if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of seeing me socially while I’m representing Callie, I’ll respect that.”

  She took a small sip of the Coke. Very small, as the gesture was for effect rather than thirst. “Even though I consider it stupid and shortsighted.”

  “You’re an operator,” he muttered.

  “Calling a lawyer an operator is redundant. And I’ve heard all the jokes. Do you want to retract your request for a date tomorrow at seven?”

  Frustration shimmered around him. “Then I’d be stupid and shortsighted.”

  She smiled, very, very sweetly. “Exactly. And of course, you’d deprive yourself of my very stimulating company.”

  “Do you carry a ribbon around so you can tie on a bow after you box a guy in?”

  “What color would you prefer?”

  He had to laugh, just as he had to take a step back. “I’m attracted to you. That’s a no-brainer. I like you,” he added. “I haven’t quite figured out why. But because I do I’m going to be straight with you. I’m not relationship material.”

  “Maybe I just want mindless sex.”

  His mouth fell open. He swore he felt his jaw hit his toes. “Well . . . huh.”

  “I don’t.” She picked up his drink again, handed it to him. He looked as if he could use something a great deal stronger. “But it’s sexist and narrow-minded of you to assume that because I’m female I’m trying to structure a relationship out of a couple of casual dates. Or further, that being a young widow with a small child, I’d be looking for a man to complete my little world.”

  “I didn’t mean . . . I thought I should . . .” He stopped, took a long drink. “There’s nothing I can say at this point that won’t jam my foot further down my throat. I’ll see you at seven tomorrow.”

  “Good.” She held out the papers again.

  He’d hoped she’d forgotten about them. “What the hell are they?”

  “Very self-explanatory, but if you’d like to read them now, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have.” She solved the matter by pushing them against his hands until he had to take them.

  Without his reading glasses he had to squint, but it didn’t take him long to get the gist. It was right there in black and white, and clear as glass despite the legal wordsmithing.

  Lana watched his face harden, those dark eyes narrow and glint as he read. Anger suited him, she decided. Odd how temper sat so sexily on a certain type of man.

  A difficult man, she thought, and one she was probably foolish to become involved with. But she knew, too well, that life was too short not to enjoy being foolish from time to time.

  Her own tragedy had taught her to be careful about taking anything for granted, even if it was a burgeoning friendship with a complicated man.

  Life, and all the people who passed through it, was work. Why should he be any different?

  He lowered the papers, and that angry glint blasted her. “You can tell your client to kiss my ass.”

  She kept her expression bland, her voice mild. “I’d prefer you relayed that yourself.”

  “Fine. I’ll do that.”

  “Before you do.” She laid a hand on his arm, felt the muscles quiver. “I don’t think it’s a breach of client confidentiality to tell you that my impression of Callie is of a strong, compassionate woman who is, at the moment, in a great deal of turmoil and trying to do what’s right for everyone involved. I think that would include you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Maybe you don’t. Maybe you can’t.” Lana closed her briefcase. “You might find it interesting that when Callie met Ty, talked to him for a few minutes, she called him Ty-Rex. Just as you did.”

  He blinked at her, and something moved behind his eyes that had nothing to do with temper. “So? He’s talking dinosaurs, his name’s Ty. It’s an easy jump.”

  “Maybe. Still interesting though. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head, put her hand on the door. “A deal’s a deal. Seven o’clock. Roger has my address.”

  Callie worked with Jake, wrapping exhumed bones in wet cloths and plastic to preserve them. They’d been photographed, sketched and logged. Tests would reveal more.

  Other scientists, students, specialists would study them and learn.

  She knew there were some who would see nothing but a tibia or a humerus. Nothing but bones, remains and the dead. That was enough for them, knowledge taken was enough for them.

  And she found no fault with that approach.

  But it wasn’t hers.

  She wondered. And in her mind from a bone she could build a human being who had lived and died. Who’d had value.

  “Who was he?” she asked Jake.

  “Which?”

  “The femur.”

  “He was a man, about thirty-five. About five feet, ten inches tall.” But he knew what she wanted. “He learned how to farm, how to grow food for himself and his tribe. How to hunt for it, fish for it. His father taught him, and he ran the woods as a boy.”

  She swiped an arm across her damp forehead. “I think the humerus, those finger bones are his, too. They’re the right age, the right size.”

  “Could be.”

  “And the hand ax we found here.” She squatted down. “That’s what killed him. Not that one—they wouldn’t have buried him with what killed him, but with one of his own. That slice in the humerus, it’s a blow from a hand ax. Was there a war?”

  “There’s always a war.” There was one in her now, Jake thought. He could see it on her face, and he knew she was using the picture of the man they were building together to keep it at bay.

  “Another tribe,” Jake said. “Or maybe a more personal battle within this one. He’d have had a mate, children. He could have died protecting them.”

  She smiled a little. “Or he could’ve been an asshole, gotten himself hyped up on fermented juice, picked a fight and got himself killed.”

  “You know, Dunbrook, you’re too romantic for your own good.”

  “Ain’t it the truth. Macho jerks aren’t a modern phenom. They’ve been around since the dawn. Guys bashing each other’s brains out with a rock because it seems like fun at the time. It wasn’t always for food or land or defense. Sometimes it was just for sheer meanness. Respecting remains, studying, learning doesn’t mean painting our ancestors in pretty pastels.”

  “You ought to do a paper on it. ‘The Macho Jerk: His Influence on Modern Man.’ ”

  “Maybe I will. Whatever he was, he was someone’s son, probably someone’s father.”

  She circled her head to relieve the tension in her neck, then glanced over at the bullet shot of a car door slamming. Her lips twisted into a sneer. “And speaking of jerks.”

  “You know this guy?”

  “Douglas Cullen.”

  “Is that so?” Jake straightened as Callie did, measured the man, as Callie did. “He doesn’t look very brotherly at the moment.”

  “Stay out of this, Graystone.”

  “Now, why’d you have to go and say that?”

  “I mean it.” But as she boosted herself out, so did Jake.

  Doug strode across the site like a man striding into a battle he had no intention of losing. He noted the man standing beside Callie, and dismissed him.

  He had one purpose, and one only. If anybody wanted to give him grief about it, that was fine, too.

  He was in the mood.

  He stalked up to her, bared his teeth when she tilted her chin up, planted her hands on her hips. Saying nothing, he yanked the legal papers out of his back pocket.

  He held them out so she could see what they were, then ripped them to pieces.

  Nothing he could have done would have earned her anger—or her respect—quicker. “You’re littering on our site, Cullen.”

  “You’re lucky I didn’t stuff it in your mouth then set fire to it.”
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br />   Jake stepped forward. “Why don’t you pick up the pieces, champ, and try it.”

  “Stay out!” Callie jammed an elbow into Jake’s belly and didn’t move him an inch.

  Work around them stopped, reminding her of her confrontation with Dolan. It passed through her mind that she and Douglas Cullen might have more in common than either of them would like.

  “This is between her and me,” Doug said.

  “That much you got right,” Callie agreed.

  “When we’re finished, if you want to go a round, I’m available.”

  “Assholes through the ages,” Callie grumbled, and solved the problem by stepping between them. “Anybody goes a round, we go a round. Now pick up the mess you made and take a hike.”

  “Those papers are an insult to me, and to my family.”

  “Oh yeah?” Her chin didn’t just come up, it thrusted. And behind her shaded glasses, her eyes went molten. “Well, accusing me of being after your mother’s money was insulting to me.”

  “That’s right, it was.” He glanced down at the scraps of paper. “I’d say we’re even.”

  “No, we’ll be even when I tramp around where you work and cause a stink in front of your associates.”

  “Okay, right now I’m putting in some time at my grandfather’s bookstore. That’s Treasured Pages, on Main Street in town. We’re open six days a week, ten to six.”

  “I’ll work it into my schedule.” She tucked her thumbs in her front pockets, stood hip-shot, using body language as an insult. “Meanwhile, get lost. Or I might just give in to the urge to kick your ass and bury you in the kitchen midden.”

  She smiled when she said it—a big, wide, mean smile. And the dimples winked out.

  “Christ. Jesus Christ.” He stared at her as the ground shifted under his feet.

  His face went so pale, his eyes so dark, she worried he might topple over at her feet. “What the hell’s wrong with you? You probably don’t even know what a kitchen midden is.”

  “You look like my mother. Like my mother with my father’s eyes. You’ve got my father’s eyes, for God’s sake. What am I supposed to do?”

  The baffled rage in his voice, the naked emotion on his face were more than her own temper could hold. It dropped out of her, left her floundering. “I don’t know. I don’t know what any of us . . . Jake.”

  “Why don’t you take this into Digger’s trailer?” He laid a hand on her shoulder, ran it down her back and up again. “I’ll finish up here. Go on, Cal.” Jake gave her a nudge. “Unless you want to stand here while everybody on-site laps all this up.”

  “Right. Damn. Come on.”

  Jake bent down to gather up the torn papers. He glanced to his left, where Digger and Bob had stopped work to watch. Jake’s long, cool stare had bright color washing over Bob’s face, and a wide grin spreading over Digger’s.

  They both got busy again.

  Shoulders hunched, Callie stalked toward Digger’s trailer. She didn’t wait to see if Doug followed. His face told her he would, and if he balked, Jake would see to it.

  She swung inside, stepped expertly over, around and through the debris to reach the mini-fridge. “We’ve got beer, water and Gatorade,” she said without turning when she heard the footsteps climb up behind her.

  “Jesus, this is a dump.”

  “Yeah, Digger gave his servants his lifetime off.”

  “Is Digger a person?”

  “That’s yet to be scientifically confirmed. Beer, water, Gatorade.”

  “Beer.”

  She pulled out two, popped tops, then turned to offer one.

  He just stared at her. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to handle this.”

  “Join the club.”

  “I don’t want you to be here. I don’t want you to exist. That makes me feel like scum, but I don’t want all this pouring down on my family, on me. Not again.”

  The absolute honesty, the sentiment she could completely understand and agree with, had her reevaluating him. Under some circumstances, she realized, she’d probably like him.

  “I don’t much care for it myself. I have a family, too. This is hurting them. Do you want this beer, or not?”

  He took it. “I want my mother to be wrong. She’s been wrong before. Gotten her hopes up, gotten worked up, only to get shot down. But I can’t look at you and believe she’s wrong this time.”

  If she was walking through an emotional minefield, Callie realized, so was he. She’d gotten slapped in the face with a brother. He’d gotten kicked in the balls with a sister.

  “No, I don’t think she’s wrong. We’ll need the tests to confirm, but there’s already enough data for a strong supposition. That’s part of how I make my living, on strong suppositions.”

  “You’re my sister.” Saying it out loud hurt his throat. He tipped back the beer, drank.

  It made her stomach jitter, and again engaged her sym-pathies as she imagined his was doing a similar dance. “It’s probable that I was your sister.”

  “Can we sit down?”

  “We’ll be risking various forms of infection, but sure.” She dumped books, porn magazines, rocks, empty beer bottles and two excellent sketches of the site off the narrow built-in sofa.

  “I just . . . I just don’t want you to hurt her. That’s all.”

  “Why would I?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, okay.” She took off her sunglasses, rubbed her eyes. “Make me understand.”

  “She’s never gotten over it. I think if you’d died, it would have been easier for her.”

  “A little rough on me, but yeah, I get that.”

  “The uncertainty, the need to believe she was going to find you, every day, and the despair, every day, when she didn’t. It changed her. It changed everything. I lived with her through that.”

  “Yeah.” He’d been three, Callie recalled from the newspaper articles. He’d lived his life with it. “And I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t. It broke my parents apart. In a lot of ways, it just broke them. She built a new life, but she built it on the wreck of the one she had before. I don’t want to see her knocked off again, wrecked again.”

  It made her sick inside, sick and sorry. Yet it was removed from her. Just as the death of the man whose bones she’d unearthed was removed. “I don’t want to hurt her. I can’t feel for her what you feel, but I don’t want to hurt her. She wants her daughter back, and nothing is going to make that happen. I can only give her the knowledge, maybe even the comfort, that I’m alive, that I’m healthy, that I was given a good life with good people.”

  “They stole you from us.”

  Her hands clenched, ready to defend. “No, they didn’t. They didn’t know. And because they’re the kind of people they are, they’re suffering because now they do know.”

  “You know them. I don’t.”

  She nodded now. “Exactly so.”

  He got the point. They didn’t know each other’s family. They didn’t know each other. It seemed they’d reached a point where they would have to. “What about you? How are you feeling about all this?”

  “I’m . . . scared,” she admitted. “I’m scared because it feels like this is an arc of one big cycle, and it’s going to whip around and flatten me. It’s already changed my relationship with my parents. It’s made us careful with each other in a way we shouldn’t have to be. I don’t know how long it’ll take for us to be easy with each other once more, but I do know it’s never going to be quite the same. And that pisses me off.

  “And I’m sorry,” she added, “because your mother didn’t do anything to deserve this. Or your father. Or you.”