Becoming Jesse's Father (Dancing Moon Ranch Book 5) Read online

  "I wasn't thinking about me in the tub," Emily said, "I was thinking about you, that is, if you don't mind Mommy playing with Daddy's ducky."

  Adam raised his head from his hand, and after a moment to absorb what he'd heard, a slow smile began to spread. "Honey, can we skip the bath and go right to bed? Daddy's ducky just came wide awake."

  "Mommy's ducky did too." Emily took both of Adam’s hands and tugged him upright, and said, "I love you, sweetheart, but while our duckies are getting reacquainted you'd better watch what you say. There's a pair of little ears on the pad in our bedroom that might pick it up and add it to Jesse's growing vocabulary."

  "Like Daddy sucking on Mommy's milk juggies?"

  "That too." Unable to contain the wide grin, Emily took Adam's hand and led him into the bedroom. It was a long time coming, but life was good at last.

  ###

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  STORY DESCRIPTION: In the jungles of Central America, archaeologists Marc Hansen and Kit Korban are winding up a project. Marc walked away from his family after learning that all his life had been a lie. He hasn't seen them in four years and doesn't plan to return any time soon. Although Kit sees potential in the man, and his presence makes her pulse race, he's carrying far too much personal baggage, so a relationship with him is out. However, when she learns there's an unexcavated Indian mound on his family's ranch, Kit talks Marc into taking her there. But whereas Marc's mother welcomes him with open arms, it's not the same with his father. Marc walked away from a mother who'd loved him unconditionally, and Jack Hansen isn't ready to put that behind. But as Kit begins to peel back the layers of a very complicated man, she also finds in Marc a man worth loving. The problem is convincing Marc that, just because he's no blood kin, he's not the outsider in the family he's always believed himself to be.

  BITTERSWEET RETURN: CHAPTER 1

  Kulkulkan Archeological Site: Belize, Central America

  Kit Korban ducked beneath a tarp shading a sixteen-foot-wide excavation site from the tropical sun and stepped inside. Three weeks earlier, the site was little more than a hump covered with jungle growth, whereas twelve hundred years before, the house of a high-ranking Mayan stood. Now, the house was rising again, but in the form of stub walls and stone benches emerging from a multi-level excavation pit in the ground.

  Stepping over an array of trowels, whisk brooms and shovels, Kit spotted Marc Hansen, field supervisor for the project, crouched on one knee, eyes focused on something he held in his hand. He was a handsome dude, she gave him that, and there was no question he made her heart race some whenever he touched her for whatever reason, which would have nothing to do with a male making an intentional physical contact with a female, and gazes connecting, and breaths quickening, and miracle of miracles, the man becoming aroused because his underling was a pretty hot little number—at least she'd been told that by the guys on the archaeological team—because with Professor Hansen, as her teammates jokingly referred to him, no world existed above ground. The guys on the team called him other names too, which bothered Kit some, but not enough to challenge her peers.

  But as Marc stared with rapt attention at the object in his hand, Kit felt a little frisson of amusement. She could probably strip naked as he peered down at whatever he was holding, and if he happened to glance back he'd no doubt tell her to cover up because the mosquitoes could carry malaria or she could get bitten by a venomous spider. The man was like an archaeological automaton, so proficient at what he did he could probably rewrite the text-book in her tent and do it without reference material. But Marc Hansen also carried far too much personal baggage for her to think in terms of a romantic relationship and beyond.

  She had no idea what his hang-ups were, but his daily life was all about fieldwork and excavating and documenting every minute detail of the procedure, and having no personal involvements, so no one tried to get close to him and just let him be—a man obsessed with proving himself, she'd reasoned some time back—yet she had no idea what was driving him to do so, and with the project wrapping up in less than a week, the motivation behind the man would remain veiled in mystery, like the thousands of unexcavated pyramids rising as jungle-covered mounds from the forest floor.

  "So, what did you find?" she asked, as she watched him rub a toothbrush over the object.

  "A tooth," Marc replied. "A third molar, probably from a male between age seventeen and twenty." He turned, and looking beyond her said, "Hand me a Ziploc."

  Kit stepped into the excavation pit and walked between what had once been facing, plaster-covered stone benches in an upscale Mayan house, then grabbed a Ziploc bag from a box and handed it to him. "Something different about that tooth?" she asked.

  "Maybe," Marc replied.

  She peered over his shoulder, her eyes diverting from the yellow-white tooth he held between his thumb and index finger, to his large work-hardened hand and sinewy forearm and up to focus on a muscular sun-bronzed bicep. Forcing her attention back to the tooth, she said, "What's different? It looks like any other tooth we've found."

  "It pretty much is," Marc replied. He labeled the Ziploc and dropped the tooth into it, then dropped it in a box with jade beads and ceramic shards and other finds, and added, "By analyzing strontium isotope ratios in the enamel we'll find out what the guy living here ate and drank when his tooth was formed."

  "Might have been a woman's tooth," Kit challenged, just to get a rise out of the man.

  "It's a man's," Marc insisted. "There's beef jerky stuck in it."

  "You're kidding!"

  Marc looked at her with irony. And Kit realized he'd overheard her telling the guys on the archaeological team, when she refused to sleep with any of them, that they were nothing but a bunch of oversexed carnivores who probably got that way from subsisting on beef jerky. She sincerely hoped Marc hadn't heard the rest of the exchange because when one of the guys accused her of having the hots for the professor, her response had been to laugh, and say, "Why would I have the hots for a guy who probably sits in his tent and plays with himself at night?" She'd said it to nip that whole line of thinking in the bud.

  "So, Korban," Marc asked, "what are your plans after we finish here?"

  For an instant, Kit wondered if he might be interested in her. Then she realized he was just making small talk. When he wasn't talking archaeology that's what he did, though it was always on a non-personal level. Inquiring about her future plans deviated from the norm.

  "I want your job," she said.

  Marc picked up a pointed trowel and began prodding at something embedded in the sidewall of an excavated layer, while saying, "In other words, you want to spend a crapload of time trying to get grants so you can sit in the mud and use the smallest tools available to move craploads of dirt to get to something buried under yet more craploads of dirt, and if you don't find anything, you're effectively nothing more than an extremely overeducated ditch digger."

  "Sounds pretty jaded," Kit said. It was also an answer that threw her some. She'd expected an educated accoun
ting of what a field supervisor's job entailed.

  "Just giving you a reality check," Marc replied. While scanning a low section cut into the excavated wall, he said, "So, do you plan to hang around here with the mosquitoes and snakes and tropical diseases, or go find a cushy site somewhere else?"

  "Still sounding jaded." Kit slapped at the umpteenth mosquito to land on her in the last five minutes. "Actually, I've had my fill of these things—" she flicked the dead mosquito off her arm "—along with tarantulas, poisonous snakes, venomous scorpions, and all the other jungle creatures I've shared this pit with. I'm ready to cross the northern border again."

  "All in a day's work," Marc said. "So what does the US have that guarantees a sterile excavation site?"

  "I don't mind ordinary bugs," Kit replied. "It's the ones that stick their pointy abdomens in me and squirt venom that I'm opposed to. There are too many here. But bugs aside, I'm interested in the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest and I'd like to supervise the excavation of a midden or an Indian mound, maybe uncover the site of a village."

  For the longest time Marc said nothing, just remained crouched, his hand with the trowel motionless, but the look on his face was distant, and troubled.

  After an inordinate amount of time, Kit said, "If you stay like that too long, the world will turn on in the lathe of time and cover you up, and some futuristic archaeologist will have the tedious burden of using tiny lasers to move craploads of dirt a grain at a time to dig you out."

  "The world will turn on the lathe of time," Marc mused, repeating a line she'd just said. "So, you know the poem too." He looked up at her with curiosity.

  Kit was more than just a little intrigued, not only with the man, who'd just thrown her a curve in the form of knowing a poem, but with the look on his face. It actually indicated a hint of interest. "I memorized it for a poetry reading competition a decade ago," she said.

  "Can you recite it?" Marc asked.

  Kit shrugged. "Probably the first few lines."

  "Go ahead."

  "Are you serious?" When Marc said nothing, she realized he was. "Umm, it starts... When you were a tadpole and I was a fish in Paleozoic time, side by side on the ebbing tide we sprawled through the ooze and the slime. Or skittered with many a caudal flip, through the depths of the Cambrian fen, my heart was rife with the joy of life… for I loved you even then..."

  She paused, distracted by the intense look in Marc's eyes, and their color. It was unusual, gray-green that seemed to darken into greenish-brown as she'd recited. Until then, she'd never looked directly at him long enough to notice his eyes. It wasn't only the color, but the intensity, like he was peering into her soul. Which, if anyone could, it would be Marc Hansen.

  The man was an enigma.

  When she didn't continue, because she'd completely lost track of the lines, Marc picked up where she'd left off, saying, "Mindless we lived and mindless we loved, and mindless at last we died, and deep in the dirt on the Caradoc drift, we slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time, the hot sands heaved amain, till we caught our breath from the womb of death and crept into light again." Returning to dragging his trowel, he said, "So, you want out of the rainforest."

  Kit slapped at another mosquito. "Definitely. I've applied for the job as curator of archaeology at the Museum of Indian Arts in Santa Fe, but it's a long shot. Minimum qualification’s a masters, which I have, but a PhD’s preferred, and they want five years field work and I'm short on that. So, to be ready next time an opportunity like that comes along, I need supervisory work overseeing an excavation. If I can find an Indian mound in a region where there isn't 140 inches of rain a year, at least I won't be trailing my tail through the ooze and the slime."

  "Yeah, but if you start excavating an Indian mound you'll piss off the locals by digging up their forebears' graves and shipping the good stuff off to a museum somewhere."

  "No," Kit replied, "I'll be an efficient field supervisor and get my team to move the museum to the dig site to make things easier." To her shock, Marc smiled. She didn't know he could. And man, did that smile heat things up.

  "There's a washcloth in a bucket by the entrance," Marc said. "You look hot."

  Which was true, but not in the sense he thought. Then maybe Marc Hansen wasn't used to women getting the hots when he was around. Nothing about his demeanor hinted of a male come-on. Ever. After mopping her face with the washcloth she said, "So then, what are your plans when we're done? Do you want to stay around here sharing your space with snakes and spiders and killer bees, or move on to a cushier site?"

  "Stay around here." Marc stood, and her attention was drawn to the sizeable amount of bare muscular chest exposed by his unbuttoned shirt.

  "Stay around here and do what?" Kit asked. At least the man was talking.

  Reaching for a shovel he said, while slicing off a sliver of dirt, "I've applied to head a team of archaeologists working with a group of physicists at Cahal Pechto. If I get the position, it'll pave the way for heading digs all over Central and South America and other parts of the world."

  "I take it you don't plan to put down roots anywhere," Kit said, and tried not to sound disappointed. But after three weeks of observing and studying the man she'd hoped to spark his interest. Actually, she'd hoped to generate a lot more than that, but time was running out.

  "I have put down roots," Marc replied. "It's a storage unit in Austin, Texas."

  Definitely not a family man, Kit decided, but that didn't necessarily mean he was a lost cause. "So what's going on at Cahal Pechto?" she asked.

  Marc shrugged out of his shirt and tossed it aside. "The head of the project believes the pyramid there has rooms and chambers inside and he plans to use muon tomography to map them."

  Kit moved around to the opposite side of the excavation to where she could watch Marc from a distance, not because she wanted to put space between them, but because she simply liked the way he looked. "I've heard about muon tomography, but it's too technical for me," she said, intrigued by the play of muscles in Marc's abs each time he shoved his foot against the shovel. His chest wasn't half bad either, and with the sheen of perspiration on his skin bringing his torso into high relief, she noticed there wasn't an ounce of flab on him. Anywhere.

  "It's not all that complicated," Marc said. "Cosmic-ray muons are penetrating particles that rain down from the upper atmosphere to sea level as they're created in the decay of light hadrons that get produced in energetic collisions between primary cosmic rays and the nuclei of nitrogen or oxygen of air."

  "Pretty basic stuff," Kit replied, with irony.

  "Yeah," Marc agreed, seeming oblivious to the fact that she was being sarcastic. "The team's building particle detectors that will track the muons and reconstruct tomographic images of the structures, which will enable the archaeologists to know what's there before starting in."

  "Interesting," Kit said, while staring at the hunkiest guy she'd ever seen, wishing he wasn't such an android.

  "The way it works," Marc continued, "since the energy frequencies of muons change, depending on the density of the material they've encountered, muons tell a story about what’s in the layers of the ground."

  "Remarkable," Kit said, wondering if he lifted weights in the evening while the rest of the males in the crew were hunting females.

  "Yes it is remarkable," Marc replied, failing completely to get it, which had Kit smiling.

  He set the shovel aside and walked over to the bucket. Dragging the washcloth from the water, he mopped it over his face, and around his neck, and down his chest, making a swirl over it, then dipped the washcloth again and ran it across the hollow beneath his ribs, drawing Kit's eyes to the beads of water collecting along the waistband of his khakis and down to a dampen a masculine bulge that was getting dark from the dribble. "It's pretty exciting," he said.

  "Definitely," Kit replied, wondering what he'd be like in bed. If he put all that enthusiasm into, well... her, it could be more th
an just exciting.

  Marc dipped the washcloth and made one last pass across his chest, then tossed the washcloth into the bucket, and said, "Maybe you'd be interested."

  "I could be," Kit replied, while watching droplets of water run down his chest.

  "Well, we'd better wrap things up for the day." Grabbing the handles of three shovels in one hand and a couple of trowels in the other, Marc carried them around the excavation pit and set them off to one side. Kit joined in by collecting the rest of the hand trowels and picks, while Marc grabbed the multiple buckets with dirt yet to be screened and set them near the rest. An array of dental picks and toothbrushes were scattered across the top of the excavated bench, so Kit gathered those and returned them to a plastic storage container with a snap-on lid.

  She joined the other team members nearby in gathering the mapping equipment, transits and boxes of the day's artifacts and other important pieces they wouldn't be leaving at the site, and in several trucks, the archaeological team of four men and three women, and one field supervisor, left the excavation site. Once back at base camp—a tent village arranged around a cluster of folding chairs, a field lab housing long tables with bagged artifacts, benches lined with buckets, and the entire area covered by a huge canopy—the team dispersed to shower and head for town.

  The showers were crude arrangements, open on top and made minimally private by the use of several sheets of plywood that were propped against, and hanging from, trees. But, other than occasional encounters where plywood sheets moved with the wind or the sway of the trees, and someone happened to be walking past at the time, no one seemed to care. Marc, of course, probably wouldn't notice her if she walked naked from the shower to her tent.

  It was Friday, so they'd planned in advance to go to a nearby town where a couple of the guys would prowl around looking for willing females, and she and the two other women on the team, along with the guys the women had paired off with during the past three weeks, and whose tents they were now sharing, would find a place to eat. But just as they were about to leave, she spotted Marc standing beneath the canopy of the field lab, cleaning off a transit.