Birthright by Nora Roberts Page A

While you’re working on it, Digger can set up camp here. I’ll get my field pack, then you can show me around. We’ll get to work.”
    She drew a deep breath when he strode back toward hisfour-wheeler. She counted to ten. “I’m going to kill you for this, Leo. Kill you dead.”
    “You’ve worked together before. You did some of your best work, both of you, together.”
    “I want Nick. As soon as he’s available, I want Nick.”
    “Callie—”
    “Don’t talk to me, Leo. Just don’t talk to me right now.” She gritted her teeth, girded her loins and prepared to give her ex-husband a tour of the site.
    T hey did work well together. And that, Callie thought as she showered off the grime of the day, was one more pisser. They challenged each other, professionally, and somehow that challenge forced them to complement each other.
    It had always done so.
    She loved his mind, even if it was inside the hardest head she’d ever butted her own against. His was so fluid, so flexible, so open to possibilities. And it could, it did, latch on to the tiniest detail, work it, build on it, until it gleamed like gold.
    The problem was they challenged each other personally, too. And for a while . . . for a while, she mused, they had complemented each other.
    But mostly they’d fought like a pair of mad dogs.
    When they weren’t fighting, they were falling into bed. When they weren’t fighting or falling into bed or working on a common project they . . . baffled each other, she supposed.
    It had been ridiculous for them to get married. She could see that now. What had seemed romantic, exciting and sexy in eloping like a couple of crazy teenagers had turned into stark reality. And marriage had become a battlefield with each of them drawing lines the other had been dead set on crossing.
    Of course, his lines had been absurd, while hers had been rational. But that was neither here nor there.
    They hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other, she remembered. And her body still remembered, poignantly, the feel of those hands.
    But then, it had been painfully apparent that Jacob Graystone’s hands hadn’t been particularly selective where they wandered. The bastard.
    That brunette in Colorado had been the last straw. Busty, baby-voiced Veronica. The bitch.
    And when she’d confronted him with her conclusions, when she’d accused him in plain, simple terms of being a rat-bastard cheater, he hadn’t had the courtesy—he hadn’t had the balls , she corrected as her temper spiked—to confirm or deny.
    What had he called her? Oh yeah. Her mouth thinned as she heard the hot slap of his words in her head.
    A childish, tight-assed, hysterical female.
    She’d never been sure which part of that phrase most pissed her off, but it had coated her vision with red. The rest of the argument was a huge, boiling blur. All she clearly remembered was demanding a divorce—the first sensible thing she’d done since laying eyes on him. And demanding he get the hell out, and off the project, or she would.
    Had he fought for her? Hell no. Had he begged her forgiveness, pledged his love and fidelity? Not a chance.
    He’d walked. And so—ha ha, what a coincidence—had the busty brunette.
    Still steaming from the memory, Callie stepped out of the shower, grabbed one of the thin, tiny towels the motel provided. Then closed a hand around the ring she wore on a chain around her neck.
    She’d taken the wedding ring off—yanked it off, she recalled—as soon as she’d received the divorce papers for her signature. She’d very nearly heaved it into the Platte River, where she’d been working.
    But she hadn’t been able to. She hadn’t been able to let it go as she’d told herself she’d let Jacob go.
    He was, in her life, her only failure.
    She told herself she wore the ring to remind herself not to fail again.
    She pulled off the chain, tossed it on the dresser. If he saw it, he’d think she’d never gotten over him. Or