‘Apple delivery. Where do you want them?’
She felt a blush rising through her sunburn. She was a moron when it came to good-looking guys. It didn’t really matter what the context was, she saw them, she blushed, she said something dumb, they left. At least, usually. Study of the sciences? She rocked at that. Study of human relations? Joanne Tan was a total washout.
She’d already forgotten his question, but it seemed like the ‘hello’ part of the conversation was over. Instead she blurted: ‘Are you the helicopter pilot who just blew my marker pegs and tape all over the place and peppered me with dust?’
The guy set down the box he carried. ‘Sorry. What do I need to fix?’
There was nothing about the man that needed to be fixed. He was lean but not too lean, not young but not old, his voice was deep and rumbly and delicious and … oh, shoot. He’d said something again and she’d forgotten what that was, too.
‘Um,’ she said. Don’t be anidiot, Jo. This is small talk. You can do it. ‘Step into this pit and the site boss will go off her nut,’ she said. Huh, not bad. ‘I wouldn’t say no to one of those apples, though.’
‘Coming right up,’ he said, digging into the box he’d been carrying out and pulling one out like a magic trick. The phrase ‘original sin’ whispered across her mind, which was totally ridiculous, and not just because she was a scientist firmly wedded to the notion of evolution.
Jo gave the marker tape a last tug and stood up to accept the apple, hoping her blush had calmed so she looked again like a scientist with a ferocious case of sunburn rather than a scientist who blushed like a lunatic for no reason whatsoever.
That was when her eyes finally focused properly on the face beneath the cap.
Oh. Helicopter guy was not just good-looking. Helicopter pilot was fiiiiine. Fine with a capital F. Fine with yellow highlighter rubbed all over it. Fine with arrows pointing to it and underlined and a few asterisks drawn with pink gel pen for good measure. His jawline was just that perfect grade of rugged with a shadow of beard catching the light. His eyes looked happy, smiley—fun!—as though they were no stranger to laughter. Even his hair was epic, curling out from beneath an old-fashioned grey hat in a darker version of the red soil she was standing on.
‘Hux,’ he said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s my name. Gavin Huxtable, if you want to be formal, or if you’re one of my many, many female relatives and I’ve ticked you off, but … you can call me Hux.’
Was he flirting? Flustered, she took a bite of the apple. It was delicious and sweet. Just like helicopter guy. And unless she was reading the situation wrong or her brain had gone wonky from the acid fumes in the workshop tent earlier that day, he was definitely flirting. Having all that charm directed at her was making her blush start up again.
‘You burdened with a lot of female relatives, Hux?’ Listen to her, that almost sounded like banter.
‘Sisters. So many. Mostly they’re older than I am so they treat me like I’m just there to take the rubbish out. Although if I called them a burden, even here, a long way from decent cell-phone reception, they’d find out about it and skin me alive.’
She laughed. It felt bubbly and nice. Too bad she had no time to practise flirty banter. She packed up her tool kit then cast a last glance over her quadrant. The light was losing its clarity and fossil excavation needed her best efforts. Time to call it a day for fieldwork and start on the drudgery she’d been dreading: trying to make the article she was hoping to publish on sauropod fragments sound like it had been written by someone who understood the basics of grammar.
‘You know,’ Hux said, ‘sometimes when I meet someone and tell them my name, they tell me their name back.’
She barely heard him, because her gaze had been caught by a bulge of darker stone peeking up from the soil that had not been visible before. ‘Holy heck,’ she muttered. Darker stone meant potential fossilised bone. This. Was. Awesome.
‘Um …’
She dropped to her knees and started scrabbling in the soil. ‘You got a phone on you, Hux?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but the service out here on the Harper place is patchy as hell unless you’ve got a satellite phone. You’d be lucky to get a signal. Up there it works a treat,’ he said, pointing up to the sky. ‘Not so much down here.’
‘It’s not a signal I’m needing, it’s your torch. Can you shine it here?’
‘Oh, sure.’
She heard rather than saw him drop down beside her, because she only had eyes for the fossil. The bulge was rounded and as big as her fist. Could it be a vertebrae or a partial vertebrae? It had to be … but how could she have not seen it before?
Hux’s phone light fell on the dark pitted surface and she couldn’t stop a bubble of laughter welling up. Of course, the wind from the helicopter blades must have exposed the fossilised rock.
She leant back on her heels. ‘Hux,’ she said, ‘I could kiss you.’
He grinned at her, and his eyes were so close to hers she could see hazel flecks in the blue.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘it’s always been on my bucket list to get kissed by a dinosaur hunter. So go right ahead. And then you’d better tell me your name.’
CHAPTER
