“You know Aristotle discovered the earth was round from a lunar eclipse?” he said.
She snorted, still tugging her hair tight. “Aristotle was a misogynist, but it sounds like Hercules here has a nerd streak, too?”
He harrumphed a laugh. “One I don’t try to hide but fully embrace.”
“And party girl? I’m wounded.” She fake-stabbed her chest, grinning that hot grin again like a model on a photo shoot. She seriously could model. Fuck, he didn’t want to think about models. “You think so little of me just because we screwed in a bar bathroom…”
So there was the elephant in the room. She’d just thrust it into the spotlight as if talking about the weather.
He cleared his throat, dug his cell phone out to use as a crutch to scroll through increasingly alarming texts about farm damage from T.R. and avoid eye contact, not noticing in his periphery the way she stripped her hiking button-up and tied it around her waist so that her black strappy blouse littered in bright sunflowers fluttered upon the valley between her breasts, making the golden hues of her eyes ignite in the sunlight, so cheerful, as if a storm had never happened.
She, too, fished in her backpack, before pulling out her phone and punching the home button. “No, it’s dead. Of course it’s dead.” She groaned and dropped her head back, inadvertently opening her face to the sun.
She huffed and settled her hands on her hips, turning around—
Her eyes fell wide.
“Oh my God!” She gripped the sides of her face. “Oh no…” She palmed her mouth, scrambling over the farm road to the smashed Sierra on the other side of the culvert, making a wide, flabbergasted circle around it. He dropped his phone to watch her. Her things were in a heap beneath the flipped truck bed, blessedly not strewn around the county. “All my equipment. Oh God…it’s like a tipped cow,” she breathed. He couldn’t resist a grunt. “All my specimens! My—my research!” This last word eked from between her lips on a wisp. “Total suckage…”
Leaning on the upturned tailgate for leverage, she pulled a heavy satchel to freedom from underneath. The vehicle groaned ominously and lurched.
“Careful!” Tyler barked and bolted over the road, yanking her out of the way. “That truck ain’t stable. Get out from under it.”
“No cell. No vehicle. My theodolite might be broken,” she muttered, shooting him a perturbed glare and extricating her arm from his grip. She opened the satchel.
“My books!”
She dropped to her knees, and he gazed at her back openly. Tendrils fell loose from her knot resting on her back. That butterfly tat. So pretty and whimsical just like she was. It was a monarch butterfly, but arbitrarily colored in pastels, with dreamy shading, as if the tattoo artist had painted her skin rather than inked it.
He squat down behind her, resting a hand on one of the wings spanning her shoulder blade.
“Look at it,” she breathed, drawing the top book open, the pages swollen with water.
Tyler cleared his throat. He needed to get back to his guys. His back stung from the shattered glass. But hell if this didn’t tug the heartstrings.
He read the book title over her shoulder. “Weches Formation Shale and Ancient Marine Life.”
It looked like a dusty title from a forgotten library stack. Precisely the thing a nerd would geek out on. She definitely struck him as a nerd now, albeit a hot, confident one. Maybe he’d been wrong to peg her as a party girl? Naw, her hair, so flawless even when trying to look messy, her unblemished skin that spoke of expensive facial products, tats, wristbands, bathroom bar hookups…this girl lived in the fast lane and also happened to be really smart.
“That’s not astronomy,” he teased.
He glanced around the heap of machinery with GIS logos on the padded zipper cases. Odd that she apparently had about twenty grand of equipment in this mix, and yet, a bag of books was what she was crying about.
“No, I decided astronomy would never pay the bills so I went into the much more lucrative field of paleontology.” Even in her distress, she laughed at her own joke and covered her mouth with her fingers…painted dark green?
Huh. The corner of his mouth quirked up again. What the hell was wrong with his mouth quirking? Maybe that explained her dino event tank last night? Did she teach or something?
She rummaged through another stiff leather satchel, opening the flap. She pulled out a small archival box the size of a large jewelry box. Lifted the lid. Another Oh no puffed from her lungs as she lifted out a piece of rock. But this garnered silence. A hard swallow. He watched the rolling motion of her throat, settling on his knees splayed around her backside, where his face had been buried drinking in her scent.
“This is just…” Again, she failed to find words, which he suspected was unusual for her.
His eyes dipped to the box. It wasn’t just a rock, he realized. It was a delicate fossilized leaf impression. And it was broken.
He thought about his boyhood collection, gathered on this very escarpment that cut through his land. “Fossils. They just fall outta the hills back there.” Each summer when he’d been a kid visiting his grandparents, rules hadn’t mattered. His daddy hadn’t been here to thump him with them.
She took a deep, centering breath. Rolled out her shoulders. Stretched her neck from side to side as if a boxer stoking herself for the next bell. “All right.” She exhaled. “No biggie. Epoxy will seal the ginkgo leaf back together, and you already have a 3D scan…” she was giving herself a pep talk, he realized, “so you can print a mold. A box fan will fix the books, even if they’ll be as warped as a Bridget Riley painting from here on out—”
He snorted at her little pep talk. She was a modern art enthusiast? She really was all over the place, wasn’t she? He spied her bent tailgate. A bumper sticker sat clear and crisp: I (cube) Donald Judd. His lips twitched into another amused smile at the modernist art take on the traditional “I ♥ whatever” sayings. The famed artist known for his cube sculptures had lived in Marfa, Texas, not far from Alpine where Tyler’d grown up. Everyone in his old neck of the woods knew about him.
A sticker of a little monarch butterfly was stuck to the other end of the chrome.
“This is not the worst thing to happen to you, Heart.”
The way she’d said that made him wonder: what was the worst thing to happen to her? Because nearly dying in a tornado would rank pretty high up on a normal person’s list of worst things. That scar on her belly crossed his mind.