“Don’t do that. Everything is significant. I have to catalog everything we find,” Evan scolded.
He shrugged and grasped the medallion in his hand.
“For a king, yes?” Cam asked.
“Yes. Or a tribal chief. See here? This indentation?” She placed her hand over his without touching and ran her thumb over the large, shallow indentation in the face. “A jewel would go here.” She drew in a deep breath. “Miguel, this is a significant find.”
She turned her face to his, and they froze. Inches apart, excitement coursing through their veins. She moved her face closer.
Cam stalled her with a finger to her lips. “Shh.”
Noises from outside their cave had them both jerking their heads to the storeroom. Cam moved like a cat, and in a second, was halfway out the opening pulling the steel storage cabinet back to conceal the hole, lifting it slightly to avoid the screech. He darted over to the lanterns and extinguished them, then returned to the passthrough and listened intently. He silently bounded back to his seat beside her.
“Who's there?” she whispered, her breath touching his cheek.
“The men from the last shift of the mining operation. I’ve seen food and trash in that room. They come in there to eat and, you know, relax. I guess they decided to hang out after their shift,” he explained.
Moments later, the distinct smell of marijuana wafted through the opening. Evan turned to face him. “Miners are getting high? That can’t be safe.”
Cam ran a hand through his dark hair. He didn’t want her to know these men weren’t miners. “They’re off duty.”
“So, what now?” she asked.
“I don’t want anyone finding you back here.” Cam could only imagine the suspicions raised if the men reported to Atlas—and Gemini—that Miguel Ramirez was skulking around the closed mine with a woman.
“So we just sit here? In the dark?” she asked in a throaty voice.
“Tell me more about yourself, little mouse.”
Three hours later, the adjacent storeroom had turned into party central, music blared and laughter and pot smoke filtered in through the opening. Evan had told Miguel her life story. Well, that had only taken about fifteen minutes. She grew up in California wine country. Her parents had married right out of college and divorced when she was three. Her childhood had been happy but lonely. Had that taken fifteen minutes? Probably closer to fifteen seconds.
Evan wasn’t one to talk about herself. She was shy, at times painfully so. Maybe it was the darkness, maybe it was the fact that this perplexing man seemed receptive, or maybe they simply needed to pass the time. Whatever the reason, Evan had opened like a blossom in their confinement.
She hadn’t learned much about Miguel except that he was secretive. He had grown up on the streets of a village near Bogota and spent most of his life there until he was hired by a man in Suriname to work as a handyman. She assumed it was a handyman; the job description of “fixer” was most likely a translation error.
It was clear he’d led a hard life, different in every way from her idyllic, if isolated, life on the family vineyard. It was also clear he didn’t want to talk about himself. That was fine. She was enjoying just being in his company. Whatever his life outside this cave, in this little cubbyhole, Miguel Ramirez was a kind, attentive, magnetic man. She didn’t want facts to shatter her image of him. So she filled the silence with her own stories.
“My dad was obsessive about the grapes, tending them, protecting them. A bad harvest could ruin us. I’d tag along, and I’d just dig in the dirt. My dad would joke that I looked like a potato he’d just pulled from the ground.”
Evan could see Miguel's teeth as he smiled, feel his fingers as he brushed her hair from her face.
“And the love for digging stuck,” he surmised.
She held up a finger, indicating that she was getting to the good part. “One day, I was out in the vineyard, and my hand ran across something sharp. I dug it out and showed it to my dad.”
“What was it?” he asked.
“A tooth.”
“That's it?” She could see Miguel touch his own incisor in the dark.
Evan took his hands in hers and held the palms several inches apart. “A tooth.”
She continued the story. “My dad knew enough to know we should take it to the natural history museum and have someone examine it. Turned out it was the tooth from a Cenozoic-era amphimachairodus.”
Her declaration was met with silence.
“A saber-toothed tiger. Well, not a tiger as we know it, but a saber-toothed cat,” she clarified.