Her arms ached with the desire to reach for Clark, even though she knew it would be unwelcome. Riley had never been anyone’s comfort—even her mom didn’t take well to coddling—but she felt in her chest the exact kind of wound that she heard in his voice.
The one that came from a blow you never saw coming. Because your older brother, like your father, was someone you believed would protect you.
“I’m sorry.” Riley didn’t know which part she was apologizing over.
For what had happened to him and his family? For breaking in here? Or for stumbling across a raw truth that he hadn’t offered her?
Setting the newspaper down on the bed, he crossed back to the kitchen, pulling something out of a drawer with jerky, urgent movements.
“Cut it,” he said, sitting down in the chair she’d abandoned and extending a pair of scissors handle-side toward her. “What I did yesterday, lying to you—well, now you know I understand how it feels to play both parts.”
“Clark.” She shook her head. “You don’t have to—”
“I do,” he cut her off. “Trust me, this side of treachery is just as awful. Like missing a step down the stairs and falling the rest of the way. If a lock of my hair will lessen the debt between us, take it. You’d be doing me a favor.”
After all the effort she’d gone to today, Riley didn’t want to. Things were always off balance between them. This never-ending battle for the upper hand more often than not left her with her head spinning. Desperately trying to remember her goals in the face of Clark’s relentless campaign to prove her wrong every time she thought she might understand how he ticked.
But she stepped forward.
Riley didn’t get to back off every time the circumstances surrounding a curse made her uneasy. Showing the supernatural forces her stress would be letting them win. Clark might not understand why their respective engagements at Arden seemed impossibly at odds, but she did.
Carefully, she clipped a few strands from where his dark hair curled against his nape before placing them in one of the small bags secured around her belt for gathering herbs.
“Are we even now?” he asked her afterward. “I’m afraid I haven’t been keeping proper score.”
“We’ll never be even.” Every time Riley moved against him, Clark found a way to catch her off guard, to slide under her defenses.
Even when he wasn’t trying, he made her job harder.
Chapter Twelve
Clark didn’t mean to call his dad.
After Riley left, he’d picked up his phone to contact the preservation society, to update them about the cave and the etchings that they (she, really) had found. It was exactly the kind of discovery he’d hoped for when he took this off-color assignment. If those symbols really did belong to an ancient people, the HES would look to secure external funding for an initial investigation. As the person who delivered the lead, Clark might get to spearhead the process or at least take part. Even though now he could hardly summon the exhilaration he knew he should feel at the prospect of such an opportunity.
He must have dialed on autopilot, the newspaper clipping in the back of his mind even as he tried to tuck memories of Patrick neatly away. As he strained to keep Riley at arm’s length, if not farther, and failed at that too.
When Alfie answered after two rings, sounding groggy, Clark realized with a jolt that he didn’t know where in the world his father was at the moment.
The movie was still launching in new markets. An assistant had emailed over the schedule a while back, but Clark couldn’t recall the specifics.
“Sorry,” Looking at his watch, he guessed Alfie must be somewhere in Asia. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“ ’Sall right. Give me a moment to find the light switch.”
Clark waited, listening to his dad’s mumbled curse as he bumped into the wall, then his yawn.
It was often difficult to get his father’s attention, especially now, when he was in even higher demand than usual.
Finally, he settled in with a sigh. “Give me the report.”
The words were said casually; his father might have meant anything, a simple sort of checkin. But Clark couldn’t help snapping to attention, skipping past niceties into a professional update.
It was a bit awkward, trying to recount the story of discovering the dagger, the etchings, without mentioning Riley, but Clark managed. Thinking about her made his head hurt, threatening to trigger a tension headache, but it was more important to show progress after a month of nothing. Clark had predicted Riley would infiltrate his carefully constructed Path to Professional Redemption? when he found out why she’d been hired, but he hadn’t expected her to dig so far into his personal upheaval. Maybe that wasn’t fair; after all, he was the one who’d gone into the family business, ensuring that there were no boundaries between blood and ambition.
“Good, that’s good,” his father said when he’d finished the summary of his progress. “I’ll admit I was getting a bit worried we’d sent you to those fancy schools for nothing.”
Clark weathered the graze, barely noticing it.
Alfie Edgeware had come up the son of a butcher and a schoolteacher and almost immediately become exceptional. There wasn’t a lot of money in archaeology. His dad had hustled from day one for speaking engagements and later the book deal, had insisted on consulting on the film even though they’d offered him more money to leave the California creatives alone. He’d risen at the same time as the golden age of Indiana Jones, when the world had hungered for a real-life standin to the action hero’s charismatic mythos, minus the cultural appropriation. Was it any wonder Clark’s meager accomplishments seemed like relative failure in comparison?
“You think the symbols are Pictish in origin?” His dad specialized in the broad region of the UK. He’d even done an adjunct stint at St. Andrews on Scotland’s ancient peoples when Clark was a boy.
They tossed a few theories back and forth—it was nice, easy—ground they were both comfortable treading. His dad was eager to come visit so they could go back and look at the cave together.
“Family project,” he announced absently, checking his calendar and tsking at what he found.
Clark closed his eyes. Family project. It’s what he’d said, proudly, when they were little—about everything from doing the dishes to building a tree house in the yard. It’s what he said when he found out Patrick had invited Clark to Spain.
His dad probably didn’t even realize the slip, was already shifting into goodbyes, but Clark couldn’t shake the timing of it. Patrick hovering like a specter in the room with him. His letters sitting undisturbed in the box Riley had pulled out earlier—most of them unanswered.
“Right.” The phone was hot where it pressed against his cheek.
On some level, maybe this was why he’d called. To remind himself about his dad’s expectations and the consequences of not meeting them.
“See you soon.”