Birthright by Nora Roberts

think he’d be here until tomorrow. We need him, Callie. The project needs him.”
    “Fuck it, Leo.” She squared her shoulders as a boxer might before the main event. “Just fuck it.”
    He even walked smugly, she thought now, in that damn cowboy swagger. It had always irritated the hell out of her.
    His companion stepped out of the truck. Stanley Digger Forbes. A hundred and twenty-five pounds of ugly.
    Callie resisted the urge to curl her lip and snarl. Instead,she put her hands on her hips and waited for the men to reach her.
    “Graystone.” She inclined her head.
    “Dunbrook.” His eyebrows lifted between the tops of his sunglasses and the brim of his hat. His voice was a drawl, a warm and lazy slide of words that brought images of deserts and prairies. “It’s Dr. Dunbrook now, isn’t it?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Congratulations.”
    Deliberately she looked away from him. One look at Digger made her lips curve. He was grinning like a hyena, his smashed walnut face livened by a pair of spooky black eyes and the glint of his gold eyetooth.
    He wore a gold hoop in his left ear, and a dirty blond rat’s tail hung beneath the bright red bandanna tied around his head.
    “Hey, Dig, welcome aboard.”
    “Callie, looking good. Got prettier.”
    “Thanks. You didn’t.”
    He gave her his familiar hooting laugh. “That girl with the legs?” He jerked his chin toward the students. “She legal?”
    Despite his looks, Digger was renowned for being able to score dig groupies as triumphantly as a batter connecting with a high fastball.
    “No hitting on the undergrads, Digger.”
    He merely sauntered off toward the shovels.
    “Okay, let’s run through the basics,” Callie began.
    “No catching up?” Jake interrupted. “No small talk? No ‘what the hell you been up to since we parted ways, Jake?’ ”
    “I don’t care what you’ve been up to. Leo thinks we need you for the project.” And she would devise several satisfactory ways to kill Leo later. “I disagree. But you’re here, and there’s no point wasting time debating that or bullshitting about old times.”
    “Digger’s right. You’re looking good.”
    “If it has breasts, it looks good to Digger.”
    “Can’t argue.” But she was looking good. Just the sightof her blew through him like a storm. He could smell the eucalyptus on her. He couldn’t smell the damn stuff without having her face swim into his mind.
    She wore the same clunky watch, pretty silver earrings. Her open collar exposed the line of her throat where the skin was damp with sweat.
    Her mouth was just a bit top-heavy, and naked. She never bothered with paint on a dig. But she’d always slathered cream on her face morning and night no matter what the living conditions.
    Just as she’d always made a nest out of whatever those living conditions might be. A fragrant candle, her cello, comfort food, good soap and shampoo that had the faintest hint of rosemary.
    He imagined she still did.
    Ten months, he thought, since he’d seen her last. And her face had been in his mind every day, and every night. No matter what he’d done to erase it.
    “Word was you were on sabbatical.” He said it casually, without a flicker on his face to show his thoughts.
    “I was, now I’m not. You’re here to co-coordinate, and to head up the anthropological details of the project now known as Antietam Creek.”
    She angled away as if to study the site. The truth was it was too hard to stand face-to-face with him. To know they were both measuring each other. Remembering each other. “We have what I believe to be a Neolithic settlement. Radiocarbon testing on human bones already excavated from the site are dated at five thousand, three hundred and seventy-five years, plus or minus one hundred. Rhyolite—”
    “I’ve read the reports, Callie. You got yourself a hot one.” He glanced around, already assessing. “Why isn’t there any security?”
    “I’m working on it.”
    “Fine.