Chapter Eighteen
Toby licked the moisture from his lips and stared down at Rose’s blindfolded face. Her body felt perfect in his arms, her pretty breasts plastered to his chest, her rear in his hand. He could feel her heat, could feel her heartbeat against his chest. He could sense her willingness in the moment to go further if it weren’t for the poor choice of venue. Man, he’d feel at home if he could push within her, feel her warmth, make her moan into his mouth for more. Her lips were plump from the kissing, slightly parted, her breathing unsteady, and her hold around his neck tight and desiring while her pile of curls tickled his chin adorably.
Where the hell had any of this come from? She’d taunted a desperate bull, and he’d been game to deliver on her request. He’d been tight with need ever since their first kiss in the archive room. This girl was playing with fire as if she enjoyed getting burned.
It scared the crap out of him. It made him desperate to explore this strange feeling of falling without a safety net, trusting that he’d land on his feet while they sorted out what this attraction was. His other kisses with other women hadn’t been first kisses. “First” implied that there were more to come. Theirs had been “only kisses.” Kisses given with the promise of taking care of business, and adios. But after he and Rose had kissed and he’d shared with her about his mother and his past, he’d known it counted as a first kiss. He’d known he wanted to kiss her again and again, and last night, as he’d reviewed his books and plans for his grassland project while he listened to Rose and her crew watching their movie, he’d found a sense of direction. He’d felt inspired to form the project into a plan of action. And he’d fantasized like an idiot the whole time that Rose was his. Okay, so he was about to lure her with archaeological gifts. He wasn’t above bribery.
Unable to separate from her just yet, he leaned down and pecked her once again, then again. Then let go of her and caressed her hair, her eyes still blindfolded.
“Baby, we agreed to take this slow, but hell if the temptation to plow on pell-mell isn’t makin’ me stupid.”
She smiled beneath his faded kerchief. It was sexy, her trust in him. He knew she didn’t give it lightly. He knew she prided herself on having pulled herself up by her bootstraps, and her happy, infectious nature put a hell of a lot in perspective for him. Dare he tell her that and run her off by getting clingy? No chick loved a desperate guy. He’d seen men drowning their sorrows and drunk texting the ex-girlfriend from a barstool, and it was pretty pathetic—but never pretty.
“Then I suggest you lead me up to this grand surprise before my nose fries off.” She smiled.
He smiled, too. She knew how to diffuse tension with her lightness. “Yes, ma’am.”
He slid his hand down her arm and hooked his fingers around hers, then led her onward. They finished climbing and rounded a rock face on a wide ledge where ancient flash flooding had washed out the softer limestone beneath it. Shade offered sudden shelter, the temperature cooling by at least ten degrees. Toby looked up at the rock shelter he was about to reveal to Rose. She was going to lose her mind, and he couldn’t resist the self-satisfied grin that sprang to his face. This was an archaeologist’s dream. The shelter was nearly impossible to find with the naked eye and was shielded from the flatland above by desert scrub and a deceiving drop-off that looked like a sheer cliff face. That feature, no doubt, had offered this cave’s ancient inhabitants a measure of protection from invaders and wild animals such as cougars and coyotes—
“So, we’ve stopped. In the shade. Beneath a rock, if the smell indicates anything.” Rose stated the obvious. “I swear, Toby, I’m about to freak out from the suspense. Did you bring me to one of those other sites you mentioned?”
He circled behind her. “I give you the Legacy’s best kept secret: what we boys have always called the sun god.” He stripped off the blindfold.
She said nothing. Didn’t move. He peered around at her face, and her eyes, wide as platters, were staring at the massive shaman painted along the downward slope of the shelter from its mouth overlooking the canyon to the back wall where it met the ground.
“Oh my God…” she finally whispered, and tears sprang silently to her eyes, causing them to glisten. “Oh my God…”
She held her hand up to her mouth, her fingers noticeably trembling. She took a hesitant step, then her eyes darted down to ensure her footing wasn’t about to trample something important. Wide eyes never dropping, she took in the floor, littered in old bed matting, woven in the same fashion as the panther shaman site. At least twenty, scattered in various places around the floor of the shelter with the charred remains of small fires interspersed, likely thousands of years old. As if the people who had once lived here had simply gotten up that morning to go hunt.
A tear spilled from her eye and streaked down her cheek, and she turned to look up at him with such emotion in her eyes. Toby’s heart skipped a beat, and tingling shivered over his skin. He tried to smile, but Rose’s tear stayed him. He reached up and brushed the water away with the pad of his thumb.
“Hey there, I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he whispered.
He pulled her into his embrace, and she sniffed loudly and wiped her eyes herself. But she didn’t look up at him. Her eyes kept working over the artwork on the cavernous walls.
“You wanna look around?” he asked.
“Yes!” she blurted out, then laughed and sniffed and wiped her eyes again. “And yet I’m having a Twix moment.”
He barked a laugh. “What the hell does that mean? I swear, baby, you say the weirdest shit sometimes.”
She laughed at his teasing. “I need a moment. You know, the commercial. ‘Need a moment?’”
He chuckled and shook his head, petting back her hair lovingly. He loved the weirdness. “Come look at this.”
Dragging her by the hand, he forced her seemingly leaden legs to move.
He extended his arm and pointed to the shaman figure, the same style as the panther shaman site, but twice as tall and arching toward the mouth of the shelter with a figurative head of a deer and headdress of antlers. His finger traced along a painted line stretching toward the opening.
“When the sun sets on the summer solstice, it lights up this painting from the ground, over his feet, up over his extended arm, and to the upper part of the rock shelter, right up the middle.”
Rose, still speechless, had her hand over her mouth.
“It’s a sight, I’ll tell you that. The paint damn near glows, and it only does it right smack in the middle once a year. You know…” Should he say it? He chewed the inside of his cheek. Hell yes. Stella had said she was different, and that woman’s instincts were usually accurate. “It might be nice if, after your field school ends, you come on back to see it.”
“You’ve watched it?” she croaked.
“My brothers and I used to come up here to explore. Sat here and watched it a few different times.”