An Angel In Stone

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.”

Chapter 6

Y et neither of them was ready to name a price, Raine realized. Though Lia was doing her utmost to start a bidding war between them, they refused to be stampeded.

Each insisted on examining the tooth, since the first issue was: could it possibly be a fake?

But when—ladies coming decidedly second—Raine was allowed to take the tooth from Cade and turn it in the light, her hands trembled with excitement. By God, it was the real thing! She could think of no way to fake its eerie opalescence. Like the northern lights dancing on polar snow. Sunrise shining through a turquoise glacier. I’ve got to have it! Simply got to. Here was glory and fame, as well as a fortune. This was the find of the century! “Nice,” she murmured, carefully neutral.

“Then how much you give me for it?” Lia cried, almost stamping her foot with impatience.