Thank god, she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she looked back, flushed herself, like the lousy radiator had gotten to her too. It wasn’t unusual for people to stare at him, but it was unusual for Clark to feel seen.
“Listen.” She released his hand. “I don’t want to disturb you if you’re waiting for someone . . .”
“I’m not.” He’d taken every meal alone for the last month. And even before he’d come to Torridon, he hadn’t met mates at the pub in ages. He was poor company, even before the scandal. And Patrick—who had always smoothed the way for him socially—had gone.
“Okay, then,” Riley said, stepping a little closer, close enough that he got the whiff of a fragrance he couldn’t quite catch, something that made him think of summer even though the leaves had begun to change in Scotland, daylight growing scarce as autumn took hold. “Eilean, over there”—she raised her chin toward the bartender he recognized from his frequent visits—“said you’re an archaeologist?”
That threw him. He’d thought—had hoped—he read a different kind of interest in her approach.
“That’s right.” He changed his posture to better suit a professional inquiry. “Are you in the market for one?”
She curved her obscenely pretty mouth in a coy, closed-lipped smile. “Maybe.”
“Well.” He cleared his throat, trying to get ahold of himself. If she was looking to hire someone, he’d need more information about her objectives. “I specialize in ancient Roman civilizations in the Mediterranean region. There are a lot of different kinds of archaeologists, commercial, industrial, forensic . . . it depends on what you need.” He didn’t have the strongest set of contacts these days, but he’d do his best to get her a reliable referral, if he could.
“Oh, okay, no.” She brought a curled finger to her mouth, seeming to find something amusing in his answer.
Even though he didn’t know what it was, Clark liked the way her eyes lit up.
“That was my attempt to . . . I don’t actually know anything about archaeology,” she confessed. “I just watched this movie on the plane, Out of the Earth.”
“Oh.” Clark stiffened. Dropping his eyes to the bar top. Of course.
“Have you seen it?”
He grimaced. Was she joking?
“Not personally,” he said after a pause.
There had been a premiere, multiple actually, but Clark had only had to beg off the one in London. His father hadn’t put up a fuss. He wanted Clark there in theory, but in practice, this was cleaner. No whiff of scandal to take away from his big night.
“It’s about this famous dig from the 1970s—”
Wait. His eyes shot back to her face. Did she seriously think he didn’t know what Out of the Earth was about?
“—where they found this entire ship buried on some fancy English lady’s property.”
She looked sincere. A little nervous, speaking quickly. As if worried she’d bore him with the recap.
“I thought you might know about it because the main character, the archaeologist, is based on a real person—a British guy, and he’s still alive, I’m pretty sure.” She snapped her fingers. “Shit, what was his name . . . something with an A.”
“Alfie Edgeware,” Clark finally supplied, stumbling a bit on the vowels of his own last name.
“Yes!” She pointed and almost poked him in the chest in her eagerness. “That was it. Have you ever met him?”
This was surreal. People brought up his dad to him all the time—especially since the film came out—but not like this.
Clark took a deep breath. “I have.”
Even people who didn’t care about archaeology got weird when they found out he was related to England’s second-favorite scientist （after Sir David Attenborough—who, Clark had always heard, was actually nice）。
“Really?” Riley’s eyes widened. “Okay, that’s amazing. What are the odds? I guess the circle of British archaeologists isn’t that big. Can I . . . do you mind if I ask you something about him?”
“Sure.” He could be polite. It wasn’t her fault his dad was a tosser.
“Is he . . .”
As she paused to pick her words, Clark braced himself for the adjectives he encountered most frequently—brilliant, charming, single.
Better Clark than his mum at least, fielding that one.
Riley leaned in, lowered her voice to a self-conscious whisper. “。 . . kind of a jerk?”
“Pardon?” He coughed, choking on nothing but air.
“Sorry.” She bit her bottom lip. “I know he’s supposed to be the real-life Indiana Jones—and I guess he’s like best friends with Oprah ever since she picked his memoir for her book club—but he seemed really insufferable, even before he found the boat.”
The laugh built like a volcano in his belly, his chest. Until it was taking everything Clark had not to let it out.
“—and then after, it’s like, why doesn’t he give more credit to his team?” Riley continued, oblivious to how good it felt to hear someone, anyone, say what he’d been thinking for most of his life. “There’s no way he would have found the mast if that woman Emory hadn’t recognized the change in soil structure the day before.”
“Excellent observations.” Clark grinned like a fool.
“Sorry, again”—her blush was exceedingly becoming—“if he’s your friend.”
“He’s not.” Clark would have defended his dad against serious slander. He loved him, for all his flaws. But he felt confident Alfie would have found secret delight in such an incisive character assessment—though, to be fair, not as much as Clark.
He wanted to say, Who are you? Because her name wasn’t enough. But that didn’t make sense, so instead he said, “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Uh, yeah,” she said with a laugh.
The sense of relief that washed over Clark was as good as if he’d done it himself.
“I would really like that.”
He waved for the bartender.
“Wait.” Riley caught his arm, and that felt loud too, her hand on him. High volume. Everything else in the room—people shouting at the telly, glasses clinking, the hum of the radiator he’d developed a fondness for in the end—all muted.
“Actually, I’m sorry.” She grimaced, dropping her arm. “I shouldn’t have another drink. It’s not you,” she rushed to assure him before his brain could even go there. “Like at all.” Her eyes fell to his mouth and lingered a moment.
He wet his own lips, confused, but not enough that his body could ignore how close they stood to one another.
“You’re really se—” She cut herself off, opening her eyes like she hadn’t meant for them to fall half-lidded. “What I mean to say is, I would really like to accept, but I just had two generous pours of scotch on an empty stomach.”
Clark couldn’t get over how much he liked the way she spoke. Not just the accent, but the decisiveness of her statements. It was so refreshingly straightforward. So not English.
He thought for a moment. “In that case, would you let me buy you dinner?”