“Oh, wow. I’d love to talk to him. Was he part of the excavation team that discovered the bones?” He tenderly placed the eagle back to the thick wooden mantle then followed along behind me into my small kitchen.
“He was there, yeah.”
“Cool. So, I am sorry if I woke you up. I can never sleep well when I’m cranked up about a dig. Tell me all about the site. What did you find? How deep were the bones?” He tossed a long leg over one of two stools by the island as coffee flowed into a mug. Plain coffee. None of that flavored stuff that was so popular now. The old drip Mr. Coffee might not be fancy, but neither was its owner. All my pretension had stayed in Illinois. “I’ve only been on one dig so far, and that was when I was working on my masters. We were down in Patagonia and found a nearly complete Megaraptor, which were therapods that lived in the Cretaceous period. There’s some dissension about it as it was considered to be the biggest dromaeosaur, but now there’s speculation that it could be a tyrannosaurid. Although recent estimates are denying that possibility and are pointing to its lineage being a basal coelurosaur.”
“You don’t say,” I commented as I handed him a cup of coffee.
He flashed that smile again. Bright white teeth with a well-sunned face. “I did it again, didn’t I?”
“Did what?”
“Started talking dino. I do that all the time. Then people look at me with glazed eyes. I really love my work.”
“I can tell.”
He sniffed his coffee. “Got any flavored creamers?”
“Nope.”
His sleek eyebrows knitted. “Too bad. Hazelnut slaps.”
Slaps?I almost asked but didn’t. “So, how will this whole thing go?”
He took a tentative sip then placed his mug on the island. “Well, first I’d like to thank you for calling us in to excavate. If we do find a complete skeleton, it will be turned over to the natural history museum that’s on our campus, and everyone will be able to enjoy seeing it. Small colleges and museums don’t have the budgets that are needed to compete with the auction houses and professional dinosaur hunters. So, the fact that you decided to turn this possible find over to a public repository where it can be part of the scientific record is incredible.”
“Your thanks need to go to Landon Reece, the owner of this land. I’m just the foreman.”
“Well, we at the UWW Biology and Sciences Department thank everyone who was there when the discovery was made,” he said into his coffee. I inclined my head, my sight lingering on his hair. It was an interesting blond color, a mixture of wheat and sunshine. “How far away is the site?”
“About fifteen minutes on four-wheelers,” I replied as I noticed that the sky outside the window had a few fingerlings of magenta creeping into the ebony night.
“No horses?”
I pulled my sight from the window to the professor. “We can certainly saddle up a few if you’d like to do that but the four-wheelers would be—”
“Nope! No, that’s good. Fine. No need to saddle anything. Wheels are good. I do have a Subaru that’s not scared of roughing it.” He jerked his golden head toward the front of the cabin. He had a smooth way of moving and talking. And sweet magnolia did the man talk. I was too low on caffeine for this. Jabbering men with buns were not my cup of tea. Jabbering any person grated on me. I’d never been overly talkative and the past twenty years alone only made me worse.
“I’ll have chores to attend to when we’re done, so I’ll need my own transportation,” I rushed to say then lifted my cup to my lips.
“Totally fine. I’ll be there all day. So, is this where I’ll be sleeping?” I choked. Coffee went everywhere. His eyes widened as I gagged. “Are you okay? I know the Heimlich. Never had to use it but…no, wait. I did! Some dude in a tiny bar in Rio Negro had been eating olives and one got stuck in his windpipe. I jumped up, grabbed him, and squeezed. The olive popped out and landed in his glass of Malbec. He was so grateful he bought a bottle of red wine for everyone from the university. I have no recollection of leaving that bar. Wine kicks my ass. I’m more of a St. Archer Blonde kind of man.”
I wiped at the coffee on my shirt, my head packed full of words like “dude” and “slap” and “St. Archer Blonde” whatever that was.
“I’m good. No, you do not sleep here. We have guest cabins for guests.”
“Hence them being called guest cabins,” he merrily tossed out then chugged down the last few sips of coffee. I stared at his throat as he drank, head back, lips resting on my mug. He had a long neck with a prominent Adam’s apple. When he lowered the mug, he wet his lips. A kernel of something crackled to life in my belly. Then he started talking again. “Right. Coffee and small talk are done. How about we get to the site?”
“It’s still dark out.”
“Oh, yeah.” He slapped his hands to his thighs. “Well, guess we’ll just have to have another cup of cowboy coffee and shoot the shit.”
“We’ll use flashlights.” I placed my mug into the sink, took his and did the same, then made a beeline for the front door. Stuffing my hat down on my head, I waited for Bishop to come sauntering out. He did and he was talking. Not sure about what. Some sort of game he and his Cali friends played when he was a kid that involved flashlights.
“…tag all the time. Of course, our folks always knew when we’d snuck out because the batteries were always dead in all the flashlights. Oh, thanks.” I shoved his rucksack into his chest. He merely smiled and threaded his arms into the straps. “Of course, we were usually on the beach because that was where we lived or so our parents said, so the flashlights were not only dead but full of sand.”
He laughed. I gaped. Then I opened the door. “Let’s go.”
* * *