As Laurel headed outside to find Robin, or more likely, as CEO of Little Willow Farm Holdings Limited, shovel the shit herself, she reasoned that Nate Daley turning up was really just another management challenge. Another learning opportunity. Another way to help her grow as a person.
Rebecca wouldn’t see this until after her meeting. It would make her laugh, hopefully to offset the worry that Laurel had probably caused with the ridiculously needy text she’d sent earlier.
Perhaps a bit of manual labour in her very nice summer work dress would do her good. If not, at least people would be able to park.
Yes, that would be the perfect end to Laurel’s shitty day.
Chapter Two
Nate
Little Willow Farm was really quite nice, Nate realised, as the farmhand that Ivor had commandeered led them up to the site. It was welcoming and homey, with well-tended flower beds and wooden signposts that pointed to ‘Little Willow Petting Zoo’, ‘Little Willow Windmill’ and ‘The Secret Lake’, although how a lake could be secret in a landscape with no hills, Nate failed to grasp. The name served a purpose though. It was cute.
The plant machinery was already up at the site and the breeze was full of buttercups and summer. His students were milling around and once again, no one had taken the initiative to even bring up the plans on any of their devices, and Nate knew they had the site maps because he had personally emailed them out. He had also uploaded them onto the Archaeology Department app that he’d remodelled from one of Lucia’s digs in an attempt to drag the department into the twenty-first century.
Instead of scouting the fields, they were milling around like sheep. Waiting.
Ivor could deal with them, give them a pep talk, inspire them, promise them a life of discovering gold hoards or ancient Roman relics. Which, by the way, were very few and far between. Very. Nate would give them the cold, hard realities of working on a dig site.
There wouldn’t be an awful lot for them to do today, but it would be good for the students to be there from the start, to see the entire process.
Bypassing Ivor holding court, Nate grabbed his plans from the masters student that he’d dumped them with earlier, and headed over to the men laughing by the plant machinery.
One of them was obviously in the middle of a story and Nate slowed his steps so as not to arrive mid-punch line.
‘You know what Rebecca’s like, there was nothing left of him once she’d finished.’ They roared with laughter. Nate stopped a couple of feet away.
‘I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of your Rebecca. She’s a force to be reckoned with, Jack.’ The older man’s accent was round and thick.
‘No, neither would I.’ Jack laughed, turning to Nate and pulling his threadbare t-shirt straight. ‘You must be that fancy professor Laurel keeps banging on about. I’m Jack, Laurel’s big brother.’ His smile was warm and disarming, hand shoved out expectantly.
He didn’t have the same glossy hair as Laurel. In fact, unless he was told, Nate wouldn’t have put them as siblings. He grasped Jack’s hand and gave it a hearty shake.
‘No, I wish, I’m only a doctor. Nate Daley, nice to meet you.’
‘You too,’ Jack said. ‘You’ve seen Laurel, yeah?’ Nate nodded. ‘She’s so excited you’re here, thinks it’s “her time” or something like that.’
‘What do you mean?’
Jack pushed a hand through his hair and surveyed the field before speaking.
‘She’s got a degree, like you,’ he said.
Well, notquitelike Nate, because he had a Masters and PhD, not just a degree, but he wasn’t about to correct Jack.
‘And she’s always wanted to dig stuff up, so there we are.’
‘Ah, right.’ Nate made a mental note to involve Laurel, if only to see if he could figure out why she was so, well, her.
‘You got the plans? I’ve finished lambing for the day, so I’ll hang around and help if you like,’ Jack said. It wasn’t so much a question, more a ‘I’ll stay here to make sure you don’t ruin my farm’.
‘Yeah, okay, that would be great.’
It would also be great to have someone around who wasn’t early twenties, i.e., his students. Yeah, he got on well with them, but still. They wereyoung, and mildly annoying, especially in large numbers. The more buffers he could have around him the better and anyway, Jack seemed like a nice guy.
Nate could tell by the way that Jack surveyed the land, brushed his hand through the hedgerow, smoothed the collecting mud by the gate with his foot, that this was his life, this was his heart (apart from Rebecca?), this was Jack’s archaeology and Nate respected that.
Jack was so different to Laurel, so at ease with where he was and what he was doing. Laurel was combative and prickly, as if everyone was challenging her. But either way, he was here to do a job and so what if she looked at him like he was the devil incarnate.
