She walked closer, falling silent as she read the scripty letters framed in dark, polished wood, awarding Toby Brian Dixon a bachelor of science in agricultural science and a doctorate in agribusiness. Summa cum laude. Much more than just a few college courses under his belt.
Silence expanded between them as he stared at her backpack slouched on one shoulder, her hair so soft, hanging partway down her back. She turned back around, unreadable light in her eyes as if she was trying to make sense of him.
“Aren’t you proud of them?”
He shrugged. Jammed his hands into his pockets.
“At the time, no. It seemed like just one more requirement my dad forced on me. But now, I suppose. I just…” Open up to her. He recovered from faltering, glancing away. “I was never the smart one growing up. Ty was the overachiever. I was the screwup. Girls liked a rebel, and I suppose it got attention. Always felt like the reason my dad made me do these things was because he hoped to set me straight. ‘Why can’t you be like Tyler and just give a shit for once?’ In hindsight, I gotta wonder if maybe he did think I’d be good at it and he was trying to get me to pull my head out of my ass. But it would have been nice if just once he’d said he was proud of me instead of giving me hell all the time. I guess it was just easier to lock horns with him. At least that way I was doing exactly what he expected.”
“It’s not like anyone forced you to endure years of academic torture, Toby. He didn’t make you do it. People like us”—she glanced back at his wall of achievements pensively—“don’t go that extra mile unless there’s a passion deep down within us that just won’t shut up. I don’t doubt that you and your dad locked horns—it sounds like you guys had reasons to. But I’d say he might have hit the nail on the head and knew you better than you thought, and I’d say you gave in to that pressure because, deep down, you knew you needed that kick. Maybe it was the only way he knew how to tell you he loved you.” Her gaze continued to rove over the diplomas. “Girls like a smart guy, too, Toby. The rebels are the ones who charm the hell out of us, put stars in our eyes, then burn us and leave our hearts in tatters.”
Toby’s chest clenched. Dammit. He didn’t want Rose to see him that way.
“I had my closet turned into archival storage.” He changed the subject and succeeded in drawing her attention away from his past. He slid his palm up the wall to hit the light switch. “See?”
It illuminated a stack of metal drawers just beyond the doorway, installed from floor to ceiling, as well as a shelf of archival boxes. Her mouth went slack.
“No. Way.” She pushed past him, entering the confines of the former walk-in closet, turning in a slow revolution, taking it all in. She pulled open a drawer, revealing three intact spear points embedded in foam, one still hafted to the wood of a detachable head, the string fraying and browned by age and the wooden haft delicate and fragile. “Oh my God, this one might be Early Archaic…”
“Early Archaic?” he asked.
She shook her head as if clearing stars from her eyes. “Yeah, it’s a temporal period. Pretty old.” She cast her gaze up at him. “These came from the panther shaman shelter?”
He nodded. “Among others.”
“Among others? As in…other rock shelters?”
He looked at her, vacillating between telling her about the string of shelters up and down the canyon or keeping it vague, when his head betrayed him. He nodded.
“You mean to tell me there are other sites?”
“Yeah. My dad chose to keep quiet about them. A lot of these things were sloughing out of the ground over the years as critters burrowed and our sheep grazed for a time. There was no way to tell what part of the ground they’d come from, so I took a photo of each spot where I found them and marked it with a numbered dot. The dots correspond to each artifact. Here.”
She looked to where he was pointing. The projectile point was marked by a blue sticker dot beside it with the number twelve in the center.
Her jaw, still dropped, dropped farther. “That was…that was really thoughtful to use so much foresight. Most people don’t think about the context in which the artifact is found as important, just the item itself, and when they pick them up, we’re never able to learn where they came from. Did you consult a specialist who told you to do it?”
He shook his head. “I took the photos and labeled the artifacts in boxes until I had this closet renovated by a design team. I figured someone, someday, might want to know about ’em. Turns out that someone is you.”
She contemplated him. Then she shook her head again, disbelief recapturing her face but this time not because she was skeptical of him, and he was thankful to have diverted her attention from his whining about Harold Dixon. He’d had a good life. What reason did he have to complain?
She pulled open another drawer, this one containing broken netting and woven fibers, intact with bright red-and-orange-ochre paints.
“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered to herself, a shimmer of energy wavering in her voice.
Toby’s pride swelled. He couldn’t help it. He hadn’t anticipated how good it would make him feel to give her something no other guy could, and he smiled cautiously. “Say you won’t go and advertise it. If word gets out about intact pottery or rare spear points, I worry that folks would trespass and snoop in hopes of looting.”
She dragged an invisible zipper across her lips and locked them, then flicked away the imaginary key. “Not only that, but careless digging would disturb the deposit layers and ruin untold amounts of information. It would be helpful to review the photos you have with each artifact in situ.”
He nodded once. “I keep them on a stick drive, with backup on my main hard drive.”
She looked around again and this time reached for his arm, sliding her fingers around his wrist and squeezing. “Toby, this is amazing. Wow. I can’t believe you did all of this, but I’m so grateful you did—and that you decided to share it with me.”
His whole hand tingled. A shiver shot up his arm at her touch—a gesture Rebel Toby had always considered banal and expected before—the sensual feel of soft skin upon his, given with a depth of trust, made for sweet icing on an already delicious cake. But as her hand began to slip off him, he felt his fingers capture it, not wanting her touch to disappear. He wasn’t ready to lose the sensation and needed more time with her skin upon his to make sense of it.
She glanced up at him, her brow furrowing in question, but didn’t withdraw from his unsolicited clasp. He kept his eyes locked on their fingers. And now that he was in this enclosed space with her, he could smell his pine soap emanating off of her, not her tea tree. Had she used his soap when he’d laid out other soaps for her to use? Why did that revelation cause a surge of heat to rush through him? Had she liked the smell of it?
The thought of Rose Morales rubbing that bar of soap all over her skin, the gentleness of her female curves, around and over those pretty nipples flipped a primal switch, just as her distressed cry had done. It made his ever-eager prick begin to thicken at thoughts of this woman choosing his scent to bathe in, as if she’d marked herself as his. It was stupid. What was he, a caveman marking his territory?