An Angel In Stone

Opalized fossils were Raine’s professional specialty—and her personal obsession.

“Let’s throw a little light on this.” Cade produced a penlight from an inner pocket and flicked it on.

Coruscating with green and pink flames, then glimmers of coppery gold, the tooth flamed as Cade played the light over it.

Lia held the tooth up, the gently curved fang nearly twice as long as her hand. “Would you like to buy this?”

Cade, Raine’s professional rival, laughed under his breath, then glanced ironically at Raine—and held her gaze.

You against me!

Dear Reader,

June marks the end of the first full year of Silhouette Bombshell, and we’re proud to tell you our lineup is strong, suspenseful and hotter than ever! As the summer takes hold, grab your gear and some Bombshell books and head out for some R & R. Let us entertain you!

Meet Captain Katherine Kane. When she uncovers a weapons cache and a dangerous criminal thought to be behind bars, this intrepid heroine gets the help she needs from an unlikely source, in beloved military-thriller author Vicki Hinze’s riveting new novel in the WAR GAMES miniseries, Double Vision.

Don’t miss the incredible finale to our popular ATHENA FORCE continuity series. A legal attaché is trapped when insurgents take over a foreign capitol building—and she’ll go head to head with the canny rebel leader to rescue hostages, stop the rebel troops and avert disaster, in Checkmate by Doranna Durgin.

Silhouette Intimate Moments author Maggie Price brings her exciting miniseries LINE OF DUTY to Bombshell with Trigger Effect, in which a forensic statement analyst brings criminals down by their words alone—much to the dismay of one know-it-all homicide detective.

And you’ll love author Peggy Nicholson’s feisty heroine, Raine Ashaway, in An Angel in Stone, the first in THE BONE HUNTERS miniseries. Raine’s after a priceless opal dinosaur fossil—and to get it, she’ll have to outwit and outrun not just her sexy competition but a cunning killer!

Enjoy all four fabulous reads and when you’re done, please send your comments to my attention, c/o Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, Ste. 1001, New York, NY 10279.

Best wishes

Natashya Wilson

Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Bombshell

An Angel in Stone

Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

PEGGY NICHOLSON

grew up in Texas with plans to be an astronaut, a jockey or a wild animal collector. Instead she majored in art at Brown University in Rhode Island then restored and lived aboard a 1920s wooden sailboat for ten years. She has worked as a high school art teacher, a chef to the country’s crankiest nonagenarian millionaire, a waitress in an oyster bar and a full-time author. Her interests include antique rose gardening, Korat cats, ethnic cooking, offshore sailing and—but naturally!—reading romances. She says, “The best thing about writing is that, in the midst of life’s worst pratfalls and disasters, I can always say, ‘Wow, what a story this’ll make!’” You can write to Peggy at P.O. Box 675, Newport, RI 02840.

This one’s for Jimmy, James Grimes, little brother grown big—King of the Dinos back then; King of the Road now. All the hugs in the world!

And with infinite gratitude to Paula Eykelhof, for much wisdom, forbearance as needed and many a smile.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Epilogue

Prologue

10:00 p.m. September 23

P olice horses ought to come equipped with sirens. Galloping up West 79th Street in Manhattan, Raine found the heavy evening traffic was slowing her down. In the taxi ahead, the passengers turned around to gape and point at the horse and rider. Okay, so she wasn’t wearing much more than a swathe of red silk, a red thong bikini and red wedge-heel sandals. Next time I dress for a black-tie gala, I’ll choose jodhpurs, she promised them grimly. Now will you for Pete’s sake get outta our way? This is an emergency!

They were too busy staring. Now the cabbie had turned, as well. His brake lights stuttered.

“Blasted rubberneckers!” She reined the bay onto the sidewalk and kept going.

Up ahead, an awning stretched from the raised entrance of a swank co-op to the curb. A uniformed doorman ambled down its crimson carpet. “Coming through!” Raine cried, ducking to lay her cheek alongside the bay’s hot neck.

“Hey!” The doorman stumbled backward and sat down hard on the co-op steps. “What the hell d’you think you’re—”

“Call the cops! Over on 80th Street! Need ’em NOW!”

“You better believe I’ll call ’em, blondie! And when they catch up with you—”

But Raine was peering ahead to the next awning. “Look out! Coming through!”

Not exactly the way she’d envisioned this evening. Cocktails, they’d said. Then dinner, after which she’d make a short speech—that was the worst ordeal she’d figured on facing tonight. Then they’d hold the auction, and her half of the bargain would be fulfilled. To celebrate, she’d planned on taking a nice walk home from the museum by moonlight.

As they neared the intersection with Amsterdam, she slowed the horse. “Easy, sweetie.” No sense wiping out, turning the corner.

Hooves clattering on concrete, they wheeled right—and bore down on a woman, who stood, peering intently into a shop window. A leash stretched from her lax hand all the way across the sidewalk to the curb, where a Scottie dog was equally absorbed in anointing a lamppost. “Drop it!” Raine called, waving the pistol she held at the leash. “Drop it now!”

The woman whirled, shrieked, and raised both her hands in surrender.

“What? No, I don’t mean—Oh, never mind! Call the police, would you?” Holding her horse to a controlled canter, Raine swept past the packed tables of a sidewalk café. Forks froze halfway to rounding mouths.

But at last, there ahead lay the crossing of West 80th and Amsterdam. The bay shied violently as a man came staggering around the corner building. “Gun! Gun! He’s gotta gun!”

Well, that sure wasn’t firecrackers she could hear popping now, above the traffic noise. Sidestepping and snorting, the bay danced around the corner as Raine surveyed the scene.

A third of the way down the block, an SUV had been abandoned. Its back bumper was crumpled against the flank of a parked car; its passenger door swung wide.

Then beyond that—she gasped in relief. Trenton was still alive! Kneeling midstreet, the big man swayed with exhaustion, while his captor ranted and raved above him. Spinning to face the curb, the gunman took aim at the nearest parked car—or somebody sheltered behind it?

Bullets flew, smashing glass, punching through sheet metal. She couldn’t see Kincade, but he must be the shooter’s target. So he was still in the game, hanging tough.

“Distract him for me just a minute longer?” Raine prayed, as she tucked her gun into the NYPD saddlebag. No way could she hope to make a precision shot at a full-tilt gallop, and she sure didn’t want to accidentally shoot Trenton.

Raine crouched over the bay’s withers and tapped his ribs with her heels. “Sweetie, let’s take him down.”

Chapter 1

8:30 p.m. September 23

F ramed by the murderous claws of the Allosaurus, the man stood. Looking at her.

Whoa. The hairs stirred at the nape of Raine Ashaway’s neck. Here was something…different. His impeccable black dinner suit fit in with this glitzy Manhattan crowd, but his utter stillness…

“See somebody you know?” inquired Joel Whittaker. An assistant fund-raiser for the Manhattan Museum of Natural History, he’d been assigned to smooth her path through the evening’s gala. It was Joel’s job to see she met the right people and stroked the right egos.

“No-o. But who is that guy? He sure seems to know me.”

Joel scanned the drifting guests on the far side of the museum’s most famous dinosaur exhibit. “Which one, that oh-so-distinguished blond to the left of that fabulous diamond choker?”

“No, no. Mr. Tall, Dark and Forgot-how-to-smile. See the woman with the ruby earrings? Just to her—arrr, he’s turned away.”

Which was just as well. They were neglecting their current prospect. Raine smothered a sigh. God, did she hate fund-raising! But the deal she’d cut with the museum had included her coming to New York to help make this event a success.

Judging by the sapphire necklace that draped Mrs. Lowell’s ample bosom and matched her blue hair, the old girl could afford to bid in the benefit auction tonight. Minimum opening bid was a million dollars.

“Now Raine,” said Mrs. Lowell, waving a plump little hand at the rearing dinosaur skeleton beneath which they stood. “Could a Brontosaurus really stand up on her hind legs like that?”

The MMNH’s most spectacular exhibit featured a five-story-tall mother Barosaurus rearing to defend her baby from the attack of an Allosaurus. The tableau was heart-stoppingly dramatic. It was the first thing a museumgoer saw, after pushing through the big bronze revolving entrance doors and into the echoing rotunda. The fossil castings stood on a knee-high dais that filled the middle of a hall the size of a basketball court. Raine adored the display.

“Well,” she said diplomatically, “if a circus elephant can stand on its hind legs with only a rope of a tail for balance, then why couldn’t she, with a forty-foot caboose for a cantilever?” Raine was more troubled by the fact that the baby dino, huddled behind his defending dam, stood astride her massive tail. In the coming battle, mama would surely whip her tail around, and her horse-size baby would go flying.

“And who do you think won the fight?” Mrs. Lowell worried.

Knowing what she did about Tyrannosaurus rex’s older, nimbler cousin, Raine hadn’t a doubt who’d triumphed. “Hard to say. She’d outweigh him four to one. If she lands a punch…”

“And what are you going to name our new dino, Mrs. Lowell, if you win the bidding tonight?” Joel broke in with a twinkle as he squeezed Raine’s elbow.

Mrs. Lowell chuckled. “I’ll name him Erwin Elwood, of course, after my dear papa. He was the fossil hunter in our family. My sister and I collected ostrich eggs, and my brother…”

Once Joel had eased them off through the crowd, Raine muttered, “Your patrons are bidding tonight for the right to name the specimen—this particular dinosaur that I gave you guys. You’ve got to make sure there’s no confusion.” She nodded at her distant find, the object of tonight’s auction.

In the far corner of the gallery, they’d stacked the six-foot-square wooden crates in which she’d packed the fossil bones, months ago in Patagonia, into a pleasing jumble. A giant child’s fallen tower of building blocks. Out of the top box thrust the massive skull of the beast—all that the museum’s preparators had had time to clean so far. He was as fearsome as his carnivorous cousin across the room, and more exotic with his horns. Couples stood below him, gazing up as they gestured earnestly with their champagne flutes.

“Somebody’s buying the right to name the museum’s example of the already named species—Carnotaurus. There’re going to be some hurt feelings if you don’t make the difference clear.”

“We will, we will, Raine. Now here’s someone you absolutely have to meet. Mr. Fish? Have you met Raine Ashaway of Ashaway All?”

“You’re the little lady that collected that ol’boy there?” demanded Mr. Fish, in a West Texas drawl.

Little lady? He barely came up to her chest! And he’d made his fortune in oil, Raine remembered.

“I picture me a bone hunter tromping around Patagonia, I see some kinda Indiana Jones. I don’t see a leggy blond filly,” Mr. Fish assured her.

“Picture it.” Raine showed her teeth as she reclaimed her hand. “And when I meet a Texas oil tycoon, I expect a ten-gallon hat—if not a twelve.”

Fish hooted as he rubbed his age-spotted dome. “My girl’s been workin’ on me. Alice says boots and a Stetson just don’t cut it with a tux. That if I want to step out on the town with her, then I better look sharp.”

“You name my dinosaur after Alice, and I bet she’ll let you wear whatever you like, Mr. Fish.”

“Might be worth a try,” the oilman allowed, his shrewd eyes crinkling.

“That’s the most complete Carnotaurus skeleton ever discovered,” Raine assured him. “Once she’s prepared and mounted, she’ll stand two-stories high. People will come from all over the world to ooh and ah over her.”

“Alice’d like that, all right.”

“There’s only one to compare her with,” Joel chimed in. “The T. rex Sue, at Chicago’s Field Museum. And when Sue was auctioned off at Sotheby’s, she went for almost eight and a half million.”

“That was to buy the entire dino, not the right to name it!” Raine hissed as they moved on, stopping to shake a hand here, or make a pitch there.

“True. But that was ten years ago. Think about inflation.”

Raine was thinking about what time it was. Half an hour max for cocktails, they’d told her, before they went in to a sit-down dinner, served in the Hall of African Mammals. The museum was charging twenty-five thousand a table. Then, after that pricey meal and before the auction, she’d promised to rev up the crowd. A short speech on My Adventures in Patagonia, more or less. She’d give the patrons more on the genuine thrill of making a major fossil find—and less on the choking dust, the constant gales, the scorpions that kept snuggling into everybody’s boots.

“Getting tired?” Joel asked.

“Hanging in there.”

She assured a prince of Wall Street that his brokerage could buy no finer marketing image for itself than a Carnotaurus. “That’s Latin for ‘meat-eating bull,’” she told him. “Your firm could style itself the top predator of the next bull market.”

“Dynamite pitch, but why’d you duck his invitation to dinner?” Joel grumbled as they drifted on. “His eyes just give me the shivers. So masterful!”

“I promised my sister Jaye that I’d check out her dig this weekend. She’s struck a major vein of amber in southern New Jersey, can you believe it? Besides…” If there was one thing Raine demanded in a man, it was competence in the natural world. Forget how he handled the bulls and bears of the stock exchange. She wanted a man who could deal with a water buffalo, or face down a grizzly. Her father had spoiled her for indoortypes forever.

“Well, I’d have dated him if he’d asked.”

“Then go back and chat him up. I’m doing fine on my own.”

“I…really shouldn’t. I’m supposed to take care of you.”

“So be a sweetheart and get me another drink. And take the looong way round, okay?”

Circling the island of battling dinos, Raine stopped for some girl talk. A fashion designer wanted to know where she’d gotten her stunning gown?

“Like it?” Raine smoothed her palms down the clinging sheath of red silk, with its intricate gold-thread patterns and its delicately gathered bodice. A split between the two halves of the front showed a slice of skin almost to her navel; it couldn’t be worn with a brassiere. But actually it was quite modest—all promise and wild surmise.

“It’s made from an antique sari. I managed a dig a few years back, in southern India. There’d been a drought there for years. We could give the men work, but I wanted to do something for the women of the village. I hired a young widow to do the camp mending, and it turned out she was a genius with a needle. I bought some silk and did a sketch and asked if she could sew me a simple dress? And she whipped up something I could have worn in Paris. So the other expedition women got envious and asked for clothes, and the next thing you knew, we realized—hey, this is a viable business.”

Raine had loaned Shoba and her two sisters the money to buy three sewing machines, her initial stock of fabric and a satellite-linked laptop. She’d connected her with a sharp marketing student at Parsons School of Design back in the States, plus a wonderful Web site designer. “This is Shoba’s latest design, which she’ll customize, of course, to size and material. She’s fast, utterly dependable and she can deliver in quantity. Here’s her e-mail address.”

As she drew the business card from a hidden pocket, Raine brushed the sheath of the knife strapped to her thigh. Weapons-grade plastic, so the museum’s metal detector had missed it. She’d been silly to wear it, she supposed. But the moon would be full tonight and she never got enough exercise, when she came to the city. After the fund-raiser, she meant to walk back to the firm’s apartment in the upper West Eighties. And if John Ashaway had taught his children anything, it was to be prepared. Always. For anything.

“Carpe diem!” was his credo. “Seize the day. Seize the moment. Seize the opportunity. Seize the damn carp. Live by your wits or die stupid.”

Smiling with the memory, Raine came back to the present—to find her gaze snagged by the same dark watcher. He must have circled the room as she had done; now they contemplated each other from reverse sides of the battling dinosaurs. Where had she seen him before?

And then the memory surfaced. That time in Wyoming when she was—what—twelve? She’d skipped out on her father’s dig, dreaming she’d top his discovery with one of her own. Up into the foothills she’d hiked, through a stand of trembling aspen.

The wind and the leafy commotion must have masked her steps as she rounded the bend in the trail. Hard to say who’d been more surprised, Raine or the young mountain lion coming down the path. He’d frozen with a big forepaw midair. Ye-es, that was what reminded her now. Here was that same coiled stillness—force interrupted, yet instantly available.

And the man’s amber eyes were just like the cat’s. Here it was again, total attention. She remembered the moment when attention had turned to intention. She’d been small for her age at twelve. She’d looked like lunch.

But being an Ashaway, she had pockets full of fossils. As the lion stalked closer, she’d lobbed a trilobite off his flank. He’d snarled, swerved—and kept on coming.

She’d had to sacrifice the best ammonite she’d ever found. Just as he gathered himself to spring, it struck him square on the nose. He’d shot straight up into the leaves in outraged astonishment. That gave her a moment to grab a fallen limb and charge him, shrieking like a banshee.

Her bluff would never have worked on a seasoned hunter. Wouldn’t work on this one, something told her. She gave him a slow smile. So here I am. What’s your intention?

He didn’t respond. A hand tipped in long red nails landed on his sleeve. With their eyes locked, Raine couldn’t see more of the woman. But he glanced down at those fingers, smiled wryly to himself—then turned aside.

Raine drew a breath, her first in a minute. What was that about?

So that…was Raine Ashaway.

Kincade supposed he’d seen photos before. The Ashaway All Web site contained expedition shots featuring various members of the family, as well as pictures of the dinosaur specimens they offered for sale. But he’d never seen this Ashaway without a wide-brimmed hat shading her vivid face. He hadn’t expected a huntress, with hair like moonbeams rippling on troubled water.

“Did you hear one word I said, Cade?” Amanda whatever-her-name-was fingered his lapel, as she pouted prettily.

“Nope.” Not that he’d have missed much. She’d latched on to him as soon as he’d arrived. He’d tolerated her prattling, because she made good cover. She let him appear to be mingling, while he studied his quarry.

“You’re almost…scary, when you look like that. What on earth are you thinking?” she teased.

He was thinking that vengeance might turn out to be more than a sworn duty. Taking Raine Ashaway down? That might also be a pleasure.

Chapter 2

“R aine-baby!”

Spinning, Raine found herself nose to nose with a ruby tie tack, and an expanse of white satin dinner jacket too wide to hug. “Trenton! What are you doing here?” She planted a kiss on his dimpled chin, which was as high as she could reach.

The sports world and his adoring fans knew him as Ten-ton Browne of the Pittsburgh Steelers. “There you are just strolling down the sidewalk—and WHAM! It’s like a big ol’ ten-ton safe falling out of the sky,” a sacked quarterback had once described their first encounter.

“Hey, that dig last year? I still dream about it. Stars so big I thought they gotta be flying saucers, and finding that Stegosaurus? What a kick! I’ve been collecting ever since.”

While recuperating from a knee injury, Trenton had signed up as a volunteer documentation assistant on an Ashaway dig in Montana. He’d caught the dinosaur-hunting bug, for which there was treatment, if no cure. But along with the bone-fever, he’d caught something much worse.

“I heard you were talking tonight ’bout Patagonia,” he rumbled in her ear as they strolled arm in arm toward the boxed Carnotaurus. “But I didn’t know if any of the rest of your family were…”

“Nobody else is coming tonight,” she said gently. “Jaye’s digging down in New Jersey, Gianna’s doing prep work back at headquarters. Ash is cursing and swearing and suffering through his paleontology doctorate at Stanford. And Dana?” Dana was all he wanted to hear about. “Dana’s excavating a fossil whale in Peru.”

“I see.” He heaved a gusty sigh. “Didn’t know she was out of the country. Guess that’s why she never returns my messages.”

“Mmmm.” That wasn’t why, but it wasn’t Raine’s place to tell him so.

“Well.” He sighed again and nodded up at the Carnotaurus. “That’s surely something you found there, Rainy. What d’you think? If I beat out all these fat cats and win the auction tonight, then I name your dino after Dana?”

Raine shook her head. “Don’t do it for that reason. The museum would love your contribution, but as for Dana…”

“Yeah…Yeah, I sorta thought not.” He pulled his lilac brocade tie through the enormous fingers of one hand, then the other. “Then I guess I oughta ask you this. Nothing’s worse than not knowing. Is it because I’m…” He made an oddly graceful gesture, taking in his massive black body.

“No. It is absolutely not that. You are prime husband and brother-in-law material—and considering your feather touch with a pickax? Dad would clasp you to his bosom, believe me.” Why couldn’t he have fallen for gentle Gianna? Another year or two and surely she’d be over Jack’s death. Ready to love again.

But Dana? It would be disloyal to tell him that Dana kept a tray of ice cubes, where other people stashed their hearts. “Dana doesn’t get…involved. Not with anyone.” From the day they’d found her at roughly age five, she’d been like that. Friendly—but friendly like a stray cat who’d move on if the food ran out. It was Raine’s guess that she wanted nobody irreplaceable in her life.