Читать книгу An Angel In Stone - Peggy Nicholson - Страница 13

“H ow did Cade know that I love the Brooklyn Bridge?” Raine wondered as she approached its first tower. Or was this simply another sign that their minds marched in step?

Whenever Raine passed through New York, she walked the bridge. She hadn’t done so yet, this trip. And always before she’d come at dawn or sunset. Now she shivered with anticipation as its massive suspension cables curved upward to either side of the boardwalk. “Don’t look back,” she encouraged herself. “No-ot yet. You can do it.”

Already she’d walked almost a quarter mile up the gradually rising ramp from street level. She was out over the East River itself—must be at least ten stories up in the air and still climbing. Beyond the bridge’s first tower, Brooklyn was a molten glow on the opposite shore, while Raine could feel Manhattan, looming at her back.

On the roadway some twenty feet below the pedestrian walk, a car rushed past, fleeing the city. Tires growled on concrete, a radio wailed. A cool glissando of sax and trumpet drifted back on the salty air and Raine shuddered with pleasure. Rubbing the goose bumps on her bare arms, she took a deep breath—and turned. “Sha-zamm!”

Palisades of light scraped a buttermilk sky—a jagged dazzle of gold and silver, blinking red and strobing white. Diamond rivers of headlights; streaming ruby taillights. While serene in its own beauty, a fat saffron moon smiled above this electric city of neon-crazed cliff dwellers.

The shout of “Hey! Bike on your right!” brought Raine back to her senses. The rider whizzed past, helmeted head tucked to his handlebars, massive calves pumping. “Damn tourists!”

“Sorry!” Raine laughed after him.

On she strolled, swinging occasionally to drift backward like a child leaving the movie theater, shaking her head with incredulous delight. Born and raised in the wide-open West, she’d never make a city girl. Yet at times like this she could see why New Yorkers thought the sun revolved around their own special little island.

Like the rough granite face of a cathedral, the bridge’s first tower reared into the dark. The boardwalk split and flowed to either side of the central stone column, then rejoined on its far side. Rounding it, Raine almost bumped into a desperately kissing couple.

Her thighs tightened in reflex. Her nipples brushed against the silk of her dress. Aftermath of adrenaline, she admitted ruefully as she skirted the clinch—that and the knowledge that she should meet Kincade anytime now. “If he could get away from the police,” she muttered to herself. They might keep him half the night.

But Raine didn’t believe it. He’d come. Something about the man told her that for better or worse he kept his promises. “A fossil of great rarity and interest,” she repeated, her blood surging with the thought. If he really had one to sell, she meant to acquire it!

Ashaway All wasn’t a nonprofit museum that could throw its money around, but a business, with a business’s constant need to score. But would the attraction she’d felt for Cade survive a half–hour of hard-nosed negotiations? He didn’t look as though he’d be a pushover, when it came to bargaining. She was no cream puff herself, while cutting a deal. “Whatever.” If it came to a choice, rare fossils were in shorter supply than sexy men.

Yet nobody waited on the boardwalk ahead. “Still time,” Raine comforted herself.

Beyond the first tower, the view of the East River opened out to either side—a black velvet shawl crinkled with moonlight, spangled with gliding navigation lights. A tug trudged upstream against the monstrous outgoing tide. Nimble as a water bug, an airfoil ferry spun out from a pier below Wall Street. It rumbled off toward the outer harbor, trailing a widening wake of creamy foam.

“Whoa—baby! Check it out!”

Raine bobbled a stride, then walked grimly on. Up ahead on her right, three young men had balanced their way out one of the iron beams that stretched above the traffic lanes on the deck beneath. This idiot feat took them out to the actual edge of the bridge, where they could look straight down to the water, some hundred and fifty feet below—or jump, if they were so inclined.

They looked more the type to push somebody else, than to jump. “Hey, bitch! Want some company?”

“Sure she does! She dressed up just for me!”

Without a word, Raine walked on, passing the point where their beam intersected the waist-high side rail of the footbridge.

They weren’t the type to take a hint. Here they came, catcalling and clowning as they wobbled back along the girder with their arms outstretched.

Not a bicycle cop in sight, nor anybody else. Raine sighed as she stopped to skim her gown up to midthigh. Definitely a side zipper next time.

Behind her the chorus rose to gleeful hoots—then missed a couple of beats as she unsheathed her knife.

The heavy silk slithered back to her ankles. Holding the dagger up by its point, Raine turned—and tipped her head inquiringly. You’re sure this is a good idea?

“Sometimes a warning works,” Trey had told her more than once. “And sometimes it gives away your best advantage—the element of surprise.”

Holding the stupefied gaze of the leading punk, Raine flipped the knife straight up in the air. Without seeming to watch its whirling rise, she caught it as it spun back to earth. Blade first.

Her audience stood on the beam, uneasily silent.

She tossed the knife again—caught it casually. Their size had misled her. They were younger than she’d thought, still in their teens, which if anything, made them more dangerous. Overdosed on testosterone, and probably they’d yet to learn how to shift into reverse. Still, the second one in line was actually shuffling his feet. The third had developed a sudden interest in the cars passing below. Raine gave their leader a confiding smile; it was best not to challenge. You’re prowlers of the night—but so am I. And it’s a big bridge. Who needs trouble?

She turned and strolled on, her ears tuned for overtaking footsteps. All she heard was a buzz of earnest mutters.

Then there, up ahead, sauntering to meet her from the Brooklyn shore, came Kincade! Raine laughed aloud. He must have driven over to the far side, where parking was better. She gave the knife a final jaunty flip, sheathed it, then met him at the halfway point.

He scowled over her shoulder. “Did they bother you?”

“No more than I could handle.”

“Ah.” Amusement softened that look of glinting danger. “Then I guess I’ll let ’em live.”

They turned as one to rest their forearms on the railing, and gaze southeast toward the outer harbor. Miles away, the twinkling spikes and curves of the Verrazano Bridge marked the start of the beckoning ocean.

“Trenton was all right?” she asked as the sea breeze rippled her hair.

“Seemed to be,” Cade agreed without turning. “They tried to whisk him off in an ambulance, but he wasn’t having any. By the time I ducked out, he was busy buying your police horse. Claimed he and a couple of teammates own a racing stable in Maryland, and any horse that saves his life, belongs in high clover, not breathing traffic fumes.”

“And as for you?” Cade laughed under his breath. “Ten-ton said if it takes his last nickel, he’s naming your Carnotaurus ‘Rainy.’”

“Oh, please!” Raine swung around with a comic groan.

“And as for me…” Cade’s smile faded to intention.

Her lips parted in surprise—she turned her head aside as his mouth descended.

Another guy who couldn’t take a hint. He smelled of bay rum, tasted of champagne. Easy and slow, his kiss teased the quivering corner of her mouth, till she smiled in spite of herself. Warm lips brushed her cheekbone, then trailed deliciously away. “That’s…for saving my neck, there at the end.”

“After I’d gotten you into the fix,” she reminded him, swearing inwardly at the way her voice had gone all fuzzy—all of her had gone hot and fuzzy. “He was my friend, not yours.”

“Well, yeah,” Cade allowed with a glimmer of mischief. “But still—”

She flattened a hand on his chest and locked her elbow, holding off a second demonstration of gratitude. “How about we get to business? What’s this fossil that you want to sell me?”

“I want to—” Cade’s brows flew together. “Then you didn’t send me—” from an inner pocket of his suit, he fished a familiar white envelope “—this? You said you had a date at midnight. Once I read this, I assumed—”

Raine shook her head. “I got an invitation, too, delivered at the party.” She’d dropped hers somewhere in all the excitement.

“Then—” Cade snapped a glance left, then right. No one approached from either direction. “Hmm.”

He really hadn’t sent it, Raine concluded, noting his wariness. “It’s clear why somebody would offer to sell me a fossil—they do it all the time. But why would someone think you’d be interested in buying bones?”

“Ever heard of an outfit called SauroStar?” Suddenly Cade’s smile wasn’t all that friendly.

Raine’s hand twitched toward her mouth, then she fisted it. Too late to wipe that kiss away. “You’re connected to SauroStar?” The company had materialized out of nowhere last year. If it even had a headquarters, so far Trey and Ash hadn’t been able to find it. SauroStar seemed to be simply a Web site backed by a very deep pocket. But it had been competing with Ashaway All in a way that was increasingly disturbing.

Sure, there were half-a-dozen commercial fossil-collecting and supply houses like her family’s around the world. They vied fiercely for significant discoveries with each other—and also with the staffs of museums and academic teams fielded by the paleontology departments of numerous universities.

But though feuds did arise from time to time, generally the competition was nothing personal. Advances in science made by a rival were to be applauded, as well as envied; they were comrades in the same exhilarating quest for knowledge. And considering that one commercial firm might dig up the back end of a Stegosaurus—while another found a front—well, in the long run, cooperation simply made sense.

But SauroStar didn’t seem to be hunting bones, so much as hunting Ashaway bones. At least it was starting to feel that way, the family had agreed in a cross-country conference call only last month. This summer alone they’d lost three licenses to dig on private property out West, productive and profitable quarry sites that the firm had worked for two generations. And oddest of all, once SauroStar outbid them for these collecting rights, it hadn’t bothered to dig. Dog in the manger tactics, Ash had labeled that.

Trey with his military background had offered a more ominous term. Scorched earth. Where one army burns or steals everything in its path, so the pursuing army can’t survive. “You’re with SauroStar?” she repeated. “We’ve been trying to talk to you guys!” Messages to the company had been met so far with stony silence. The only contact given on the Web site was—she winced as it hit her—“You’re OAKincade@tiac.net?”

“Yes. And I’m not with SauroStar—I own it.”

“Well, you’ve got a funny way of doing business, Kincade.”

“Really?” His amber eyes mocked her. “Up till now, it’s been an amusing hobby. But now that I’ve got time to give it my full attention…”

Raine bristled. Behind that sardonic smile, he was threatening her. Threatening Ashaway All. But why? And with what—financial ruin? Her family’s firm was the biggest, best-known fossil supply house in the world. He wouldn’t find it easy to knock them off the top of the hill. But, he looked cool, confident, dangerously capable. A man who accomplished his goals.

“Excuse, please. You are Miss Ashaway? And Mr. Kincade?”

They spun at the softly accented words—to find a slender young woman standing before them. Bundled in a tightly belted trench coat, she hugged a cardboard box to her stomach. A box that was either heavy or precious, judging from the way her gloved fingers gripped it.

“I’m Kincade.” Offering his hand, Cade smiled warmly. “You have a fossil you’d like to sell me?”

Hey, not so fast! “And I’m Raine Ashaway of Ashaway All. My company is always in the market for fine fossils.” Stepping up beside Cade, she gave him a subtle hip check, then added in Tagalog, “And what is your name?”

The girl’s almond eyes narrowed for an instant, then widened as she tossed her head prettily. “That is not my language.”

And you’re not saying what is, Raine noted. “Sorry. My mistake.” But she wasn’t far off. The girl came from somewhere south of the Philippines. Quite possibly, like Raine’s own sister Dana, she was of mixed race; the southeast Pacific was the crossroads of the world. Well, whatever had gone into this one’s genes, the results were certainly pleasing.

And clearly she knew it, the way she batted her lashes at Cade when he asked her name. “You…may call me Lia.”

Yeah, but who are you at home? There was something about her, a certain watchfulness, a certain smugness in the way the corners of her plump little mouth curled, that scratched at Raine’s nerves. Also, what was with those gloves, on a balmy September night? And if her tropic blood was really thin enough to need them, then why choose gloves that had been chopped off at the first knuckles? Pickpocket gloves. Is that what she’s come to do, pick our pockets?

“Lia, what a pretty name. And how did you find us tonight?” Cade asked smoothly. He’d turned on the charm full blast, but was he as smitten as he appeared—or flattering for his own ends?

“Oh, that was easy. I learn on the Internet that you both have interest in this sort of thing.” Lia’s fingers caressed the box. “Then I look up your names on LexisNexis to see where I find you.”

Now there might be a clue. LexisNexis was a specialized search engine, for tracking citations in print. The browser was much too expensive for the average user, but newspapers subscribed to the service, as did some colleges. Raine studied the girl’s honey-colored face. A student from abroad? New York was full of them, many sent here on scholarship.

The cleverest girl from a very small pond. That might account for her air of self-congratulation.

“The New York Times say that you will be here in the city, tonight. At the natural history museum how-do-you-call-it? Gala? And so I invite you both to come and bid on something much more special than a Carno—” Lia wrinkled her nose and laughed “—a big ugly lizard.”

That was my ugly lizard and I bet you know it. Wherever Lia came from, it must be one of those cultures where the women knife each other in the back, when a good-looking guy comes around. But oh, so daintily.

Well, more fool she. Though Raine would have to give her credit. Lia was an enterprising kid, to set up her own auction in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. “So, could we see what you have?” she asked briskly.

“But most certainly,” Lia agreed, directing her answer at Cade. She led the way to one of the benches that were spaced at intervals along the edge of the walkway. Cade promptly sat beside her, with an arm stretched along the backrest behind the girl’s shoulders. Raine gritted her teeth and hovered above them. She almost hoped it was some trashy little dime-a-dozen trilobite! In which case she’d leave Cade to win his auction of one—and bid on whatever else he wanted—and she’d head on home. To a nice hot bath, she promised herself, rubbing her arms.

Cade glanced up at her; his brows knit together as their eyes met. A private awareness skated between them. He started to speak—then turned back to the box, where Lia was lifting away wads of crumpled newspaper.

“Here, let me take those.” Raine grabbed a double handful of paper as the breeze snatched at the packing.

“Those are nothing,” Lia muttered, intent on a bundle the size of a football that she was unwrapping. “It is this…”

As the last paper peeled away, Raine smothered a gasp. A dino tooth! The gently curved fang was nearly twice as long as Lia’s hand. Rounded like a lethal punch, it came from a member of the theropod family, for sure; quite possibly a T. rex. “Careful!” she murmured. Sixty-five million years after he’d shed it, you could cut yourself on the serrated edge of a Tyrannosaurus’s tooth.

“Let’s throw a little light on this.” Cade produced a penlight from an inner pocket, flicked it on.

And Raine grabbed for the railing as her knees went weak. Oh, my God! “Where did you—!” Where on earth could Lia have found this?

Coruscating with green-and-pink flames, then glimmers of coppery gold, the tooth flamed as Cade played the light over it. Chain lightning and rainbows, trapped inside bone!

Or replacing bone, actually. By some happy chance, mineralized water had trickled into the pores of the buried tooth over a million years or more, to create an opalized fossil.

Lia laughed on a shrill note of triumph. She turned the tooth in Cade’s light, setting off another explosion of fireworks. “You like?”

A T. rex tooth made entirely of fire opal? “It’s…pretty,” Raine admitted in a shaken voice. And if she fainted, would they hold up the auction till she’d revived?

Opalized fossils were Raine’s professional specialty—and her personal obsession. The circumstances that allowed them to form were so vanishingly rare. With two staggering exceptions, all the opalized fossils that had been discovered so far were invertebrates—small snails and shells, unremarkable except for their composition.

Then, rarest of the rare, came the only known opalized dinosaurs in all the world. Both of them had been discovered in the opal mines of western Australia. The larger specimen was a humdrum little pliosaur. It was fourteen feet long.

But a ten-inch tooth from the bottom jaw meant that Lia’s entire outrageous, unbelievable beast had to be close to…fifty feet!

And if by some miracle its entire skeleton was made of fire opal? Where, oh, where, oh, where did you find this? Raine fought an urge to grab the girl by her shoulders, try to shake the answer out of her.

The largest T. rex ever unearthed was Sue—just a plain vanilla fossil, forty-five feet long, eighty percent complete. But collectors adored T. rexes. They were scarce. They were sexy. At a Sotheby auction, Sue had brought nearly eight and a half million dollars.

Compared with Sue, what would a fifty-foot, fire opal dragon bring? Enough gold to sink a battleship? A ransom for Bill Gates? Could you trade it for the Great Pyramid at Giza?

Who could possibly say? A fire opal T. rex would be priceless. A wonder of the world. You’d just have to put it up for auction and see what bid was hammered down.

Lia held the tooth close enough for Cade to kiss. “Would you like to buy this?”

“Oh, yeah,” Cade admitted, his voice husky with desire.

“And you?” Lia challenged, deigning at last to notice Raine. “What would you give me for this?”

Off the top of my head? Raine’s stomach whirled. Valuing a unique object, with no sales history, she could only guess at its worth. Ashaway All could raise two million easily—three, scraping the barrel, but that was their total acquisitions fund for the entire year.

If they had time to broker the deal to a private collector, act as a go-between, they could raise much more than that. Or they might put together a consortium of civic-minded dino lovers, who’d pool their funds, then donate the prize to a museum, as had been done with Sue. “Well, that depends.”

On so many things. Like for starters, was Lia the real owner of the tooth? And did she have control of the rest of the skeleton—or even know where it was?

Lia made a clicking sound of impatience. “That is no answer!” She turned back to Cade. “And you? What will you give me?”

He laughed under his breath, then glanced ironically up at Raine—and held her gaze. You and me. Awareness sizzled between them.

You against me! The breeze caught a skein of her hair, rippled it across her mouth. But still Raine wouldn’t blink. Not before he did.

“How much?” Lia cried, swinging around on the bench to intrude between them.

“A lot.” Cade shifted casually to one side, and looked up at Raine with a duelist’s smile—a white glove slapped across her face. “Put it this way, Lia. Whatever Ms. Ashaway offers you? I’ll give you more.”