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Birthright by Nora Roberts
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(Hardcover)
- Pub. Date: March 2003
- 480pp
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: March 2003
- Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
- Format: Hardcover, 480pp
- ISBN-13: 9780399149849
- ISBN: 0399149848
Synopsis
On a hot July afternoon, a worker at an Antietam Creek construction site drives the blade of his backhoe into a layer of soil — and strikes a 5,000-year-old human skull. The discovery draws plenty of attention and a lot of controversy. It also changes the life of one woman in ways she never expected...
As an archaeologist, Callie Dunbrook knows a lot about the past. But her own past is about to be called into question. Recruited for her expertise on the Antietam Creek dig, she encounters danger — as a cloud of death and misfortune hangs over the project, and rumors fly that the site is cursed. She finds a passion that feels equally dangerous, as she joins forces in her work with her irritating, but irresistible, ex-husband, Jake. And when a strange woman approaches her, claiming to know a secret about Callie’s privileged Boston childhood, some startling and unsettling questions are raised about her very identity.
Searching for answers, trying to rebuild, Callie finds that there are deceptions and sorrows that refuse to stay buried. And as she struggles to put the pieces back together, she discovers that the healing process comes with consequences — and that there are people who will do anything to make sure the truth is never revealed.
Publishers Weekly
Set in and around rural Woodsboro, Md., a small town drawn with affection and familiarity, Roberts's latest is the literary equivalent of a big delicious meal whipped up by a talented home cook. She offers a dash of exoticism and innovation-a Neanderthal settlement is discovered on the site of an unwanted housing development, prompting gorgeous young archeologist Callie Dunbrook to race to Woodsboro to take charge of what promises to be the dig of her career. After dollops of detail about archeological work, Roberts dishes up huge servings of comfort food, and it is all the more satisfying for being so straightforward. When the owner of the Antietam Creek development turns up murdered on the site, Callie is thrown into closer contact than she'd like with her ex-husband, who also happens to be the anthropologist sharing responsibility for the dig. Jacob Greystone is a hunk-"long bones, long muscles, all covered in bronzed skin...." Meanwhile, Suzanne Cullen, the hugely successful proprietor of a Mrs. Field's-like baked-goods business, tracks down the archeologist after seeing her on the evening news. Callie, the woman claims, is the baby daughter who was snatched from her stroller when she was just a few months old. Callie hires a beautiful young lawyer, Lana Campbell, who happens to be involved with Doug Cullen, Callie's long-lost brother. Another murder, arson and attempted murder heat up the chase until all the young lovers are drawn in. As in other delectable entertainments by Roberts, it is not the wild denouement but the pursuit itself-studded with scrumptious romantic encounters-that is the real dessert. Expect the usual huge sales. Author tour. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
One of the most prolific and popular writers in the world, Nora Roberts (who also writes as her edgier alter-ego J. D. Robb) publishes multiple books a year. Not that it’s enough for her fans, who tear through her unconventional romances. With her trademark mix of fantasy, mystery, and romance, Roberts has created her own genre -- and romance fans are grateful for it!
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
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- Ratings: 65Reviews: 43
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Fun and Thrillingby Sapph0
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December 27, 2009: Fun read, with two interesting characters that are well developed and have some wonderful chemistry.
I Also Recommend: Hidden Riches, Morrigan's Cross (Circle Trilogy Series #1), Dance of the Gods (Circle Trilogy Series #2), Valley of Silence (Circle Trilogy Series #3).
Liked Itby Anonymous
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August 23, 2008: The story was complicated and drew me in. The ending wasn't so great though.
Fact File
Name:
Nora Roberts
Also Known As:
J. D. Robb; Sarah Hardesty; Jill March; Eleanor Marie Robertson (birth name)
Current Home:
Keedysville, Maryland
Date of Birth:
1950
Place of Birth:
Silver Spring, Maryland
Awards:
Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame, 1986; Romantic Times Career Achievement Award, 1991; Romance Writers of America Centennial Award, 1997; Romance Writers of America Golden Medallion Award (seven times); Quill Award for Blue Smoke, 2006
Biography
Not only has Nora Roberts written more bestsellers than anyone else in the world (according to Publishers Weekly), she’s also created a hybrid genre of her own: the futuristic detective romance. And that’s on top of mastering every subgenre in the romance pie: the family saga, the historical, the suspense novel. But this most prolific and versatile of authors might never have tapped into her native talent if it hadn't been for one fateful snowstorm.
As her fans well know, in 1979 a blizzard trapped Roberts at home for a week with two bored little kids and a dwindling supply of chocolate. To maintain her sanity, Roberts started scribbling a story -- a romance novel like the Harlequin paperbacks she'd recently begun reading. The resulting manuscript was rejected by Harlequin, but that didn't matter to Roberts. She was hooked on writing. Several rejected manuscripts later, her first book was accepted for publication by Silhouette.
For several years, Roberts wrote category romances for Silhouette -- short books written to the publisher's specifications for length, subject matter and style, and marketed as part of a series of similar books. Roberts has said she never found the form restrictive. "If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations," she explained. "If this doesn't suit you, you shouldn't write it. I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure."
Roberts never violated the reader's expectations, but she did show a gift for bringing something fresh to the romance formula. Her first book, Irish Thoroughbred (1981), had as its heroine a strong-willed horse groom, in contrast to the fluttering young nurses and secretaries who populated most romances at the time. But Roberts's books didn't make significant waves until 1985, when she published Playing the Odds, which introduced the MacGregor clan. It was the first bestseller of many.
Roberts soon made a name for herself as a writer of spellbinding multigenerational sagas, creating families like the Scottish MacGregors, the Irish Donovans and the Ukrainian Stanislaskis. She also began working on romantic suspense novels, in which the love story unfolds beneath a looming threat of violence or disaster. She grew so prolific that she outstripped her publishers' ability to print and market Nora Roberts books, so she created an alter ego, J.D. Robb. Under the pseudonym, she began writing romantic detective novels set in the future. By then, millions of readers had discovered what Publishers Weekly called her "immeasurable diversity and talent."
Although the style and substance of her books has grown, Roberts remains loyal to the genre that launched her career. As she says, "The romance novel at its core celebrates that rush of emotions you have when you are falling in love, and it's a lovely thing to relive those feelings through a book."
Good to Know
Roberts still lives in the same Maryland house she occupied when she first started writing -- though her carpenter husband has built on some additions. She and her husband also own Turn the Page Bookstore Café in Boonsboro, Maryland. When Roberts isn't busy writing, she likes to drop by the store, which specializes in Civil War titles as well as autographed copies of her own books.
Roberts sued fellow writer Janet Dailey in 1997, accusing her of plagiarizing numerous passages of her work over a period of years. Dailey paid a settlement and publicly apologized, blaming stress and a psychological disorder for her misconduct.
Feature Interview
Excerpted from the March/April 2002 issue of Book magazine.One afternoon when Nora Roberts was four, her two oldest brothers broke into a violent argument while they were baby-sitting her. "I peeked out of the bedroom, and they're beating the hell out of each other," Roberts says. Then her mother walked in, with a grocery bag in each hand. "One bag goes here, one bag goes there, she steps right in the middle of these two six-foot guys and she goes, boom, bam. Two backhands. And both of them go, 'Maaaaaawwwmm.' I thought right then, There's the power. She's the power."
Elly, as her family still calls her, the youngest of five and the only girl, was a quick study. "She bossed her brothers around," says her mother, Eleanor; today, "her brothers have got her on a throne." Roberts reigns over more than her family, which now includes her husband and two sons. Since her writing debut in 1981, she has helped lead American romance away from its clichés of simpering heroines and heroic rapists toward more complex characters and contemporary, multifaceted plots. Of course, sex -- passionate, tender, delayed, avoided, forced, in castles, in fields, in treetops -- continues to be a central hook. And often, the prose remains purple; Roberts herself has a propensity for phrases like "she rocked them both toward madness." But the genre with which her name is synonymous is one -- the only one -- that always puts women at the center of the universe.
***
Two Mercedes -- a Kompressor convertible and an M-Class SUV -- and a Chrysler PT Cruiser are parked outside the rural Keedysville, Maryland, home Roberts shares with her husband. Inside, several gauzy photographs of nude models hang above the bed in the ground-floor master bedroom, and a rendition of the Casablanca movie poster -- with the couple painted in as Ilsa and Rick -- is prominent above the fireplace. Three ebullient dogs and one gnarled old mutt track in dirt and litter the house with deer bones that they've found outside.
Since moving here twenty-nine years ago, Roberts has divorced her first husband, raised their two sons (Dan, now twenty-nine, lives with his wife down the lane; Jason, twenty-six, is just over an hour away) and remarried. She has also added on a few rooms and an indoor pool; a few years ago, she bought twenty adjoining acres so she could continue to shoo deer out of the garden in her underwear without worrying about neighbors. She and her husband own a tiny bookshop in nearby Boonsboro, but Roberts spends most of her time in an upstairs office where she types, smokes and drinks diet colas eight hours a day, five days a week. It's a routine that's produced an average of seven books a year since 1981, many of them bestsellers.
Roberts knows that her work is commercial fiction and doesn't lose any sleep waiting for National Book Award nominations. The high-art literary tradition isn't what's gotten her to where she is; what has is her "real talent for storytelling," as author Jennifer Crusie (Fast Women; Welcome to Temptation) says, and a commensurate skill with plot and pacing. Readers are pulled into her story lines (which often bounce from one continent to the next) and her well-drawn characters. Fans especially admire Roberts' tough, independent heroines. "When they fit with your own circumstances," says Elizabeth Mayfield, a database administrator from Norwalk, Connecticut, "you think, Gee, there's hope for me." Roberts, however, contends that she's not writing to provide role models for anyone. "I'm gonna tell a good, entertaining story," she says. "I'm not looking to change the world."
Roberts was born Eleanor Marie Robertson, and she grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, about an hour from where she lives now. Her father worked as a projectionist at the local movie theater and as a stagehand until 1964, when he started a lighting company -- which is where most of the Robertson family still works. Her mother ran the family. "Mom was a very strict disciplinarian," says Roberts' brother Buzz, who is now the president of his dad's company, "but as long as you followed the rules and were polite, you didn't have a problem." He says Nora had it a little easier than her brothers. "Us boys, we knew we were low men on the totem pole. Mom was tickled pink when she had Nora."
"Her daddy worked two jobs all his life, and during the Depression, I took in roomers," says Eleanor Robertson, who at eighty-five still lives in Silver Spring and is now secretary-treasurer of the company her husband started (Bernie Robertson died in 2000). "She knows how hard we worked to give them an education and a nice home." Roberts went to Catholic schools as a child and credits much of her success to the nuns who taught her -- the discipline and guilt in her formative years did her a lot of good.
In her sophomore year of high school, Roberts transferred to public school, where she met Ronald Aufdem-Brinke; she married him at seventeen, in 1968, right after graduation. The young couple moved to Keedysville and had a small house built in the woods. While Aufdem-Brinke worked at his father's sheet-metal business and later the Robertson lighting company, Roberts took care of their two children and the house. "Oh God, I had craft addictions," Roberts says, taking a drag on a cigarette. (She runs through a pack of Winstons at a pace that doesn't quite catch up to chain-smoking but runs several steps beyond casual.) "You name it, I made it. I macraméd two hammocks once. I did ceramics, I sewed the kids' clothes. I even put flies into overalls -- that is sick. I was a sick woman. I baked bread once a week. I canned jellies and made my own spaghetti sauce using my own tomatoes."
Sometime during the next decade (she calls the period her "Earth Mother" years), Roberts started to read Harlequin novels -- the short books were easy for her to finish while the kids were napping. During a blizzard in 1979, trapped inside with little more than her three- and six-year-old sons and a game of Candy Land, Roberts sat down with a pencil and wrote a manuscript of her own, a romance that she's since described as "very bad." In the next year and a half, while her kids were napping or at T-ball practice, she wrote at least six manuscripts in longhand. She submitted some of them to Harlequin, which at the time was using mainly British writers. Roberts didn't hear back, but her enthusiasm wasn't subdued. "I became a writing junkie," she says. Although she was rejected several times, she continued to write -- but started filing her manuscripts in a back drawer rather than submitting them.
Roberts then heard that a new romance publisher, Silhouette, was looking specifically for American writers, so she sent in her work. In 1980 she got a call from Nancy Jackson, a Silhouette editor, saying she had plucked one of Roberts' manuscripts -- Irish Thoroughbred, a slender love story about an Irish stable hand and her boss -- out of the slush pile. Jackson told Roberts she wanted to publish it. Eleanor Aufdem-Brinke changed her name to Nora Roberts because she says she assumed all romance authors used a nom de plume. The book "didn't make waves when it first came out," says Isabel Swift, her current editor, but it sold well in reprint. Roberts was hooked on the process, though, and published five more books the following year, eight the following and ten the year after that.
Roberts hit it big in 1985 when she wrote the first of her MacGregor family series, Playing the Odds. The book, which focuses on a matchmaking Scottish patriarch and his brood, became an immediate bestseller. Romance readers began associating the name Nora Roberts with multigenerational sagas: In addition to the MacGregors, she has written about the Donovans, a modern family of Irish magicians; the Calhouns, a family of pigheaded sisters in Maine; and the Stanislaskis, tempestuous Ukrainian immigrants.
***
From the beginning, Roberts' heroines were not content to wear aprons or take dictation. In Irish Thoroughbred, though Roberts' heroine was young (early twenties) and virginal (well, she was a virgin), she was a horse groomer with an independent streak. Roberts wasn't alone in giving her female characters more authority in the workforce; other American romance authors -- like Jayne Ann Krentz, Sandra Brown and Elizabeth Lowell -- were doing the same. "I think one of the great things the American writer has brought to the romance novel," Krentz says, "is a modern interpretation of women's roles and women's values." Author Janet Evanovich adds, "The genre reflects the increased power and opportunity afforded today's women. We see more variety in the genre in terms of heroine age and occupation. And today's heroine is stronger, more self-reliant. Of course, Nora was always ahead of the pack. Her heroines were always strong."
Rebecca Sullivan, a heroine in Roberts' latest romantic suspense, Three Fates, is a quintessential Nora Roberts lead: She runs the family business (giving boat tours off the western coast of Ireland) and engineers the search for the family's lost treasure. Rebecca's a smart, capable lady with a sense of humor. In the course of the story, she falls in love with a computer expert who eventually marries her -- the book ends in Ireland with the assumption that the husband will help her with the business. "I'm not interested in telling stories about weak women," Roberts says. "Or if they're weak, I want to show how they grow and how they become strong. I'm not writing about Cinderella sitting waiting for her prince to come and take her away. She'll get out of it herself. The prince is a bonus, a completion, another element -- but it's not the answer to all of her problems."
***
Perched on a stool next to her kitchen counter, Roberts doesn't look like a purveyor of dreams. She could be any of a million women, taking a break from a million jobs, looking toward the end of a million days. Right now, her husband is outside, working in the yard before heading to town. Later on, he'll pick up groceries, and Nora will cook dinner; favorites are pasta with red sauce or Cajun chicken. Around 7:30, the two will retire for the evening, probably settling down for a while in front of the television -- it's Thursday, so they'll probably tune in for some of Friends or ER. And that's a typical end to a typical day for the world's most popular romance author. "I always wonder if they asked Agatha Christie if she was homicidal," Roberts says with a laugh. "I don't have a romantic lifestyle."
Still, she says, it's romance books she turns to when she wants to escape reality, so maybe the queen of the realm is, finally, one of its true citizens as well. Roberts, after all, spends her days holed up in her office, writing, researching and investigating the backgrounds for her books. She loves it, she says, but it's work. And when she's done, she's done. "When I read for pleasure," she says, "give me a story."
If today's romance is escapism, millions of its readers would argue that it is also girl-power between pastel covers: adventures that belong to characters who are at their strongest -- and sexiest -- because they are women. So Roberts essentially shrugs off the contempt reserved for romance novels as sexist and ignorant. Still, she recognizes that the genre carries a lot of baggage -- even she finds herself sneaking reads when she's out in public. A lot of the embarrassment, she says, has to do with the way the books look. "It's mostly hard for me when she's falling out of her dress, and he has his mouth on her tit," Roberts says, describing what she calls "nursing mother" covers. She taps her lighter against the counter and rolls her eyes. "To sit on an airplane and read that?"
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble Review
Bestselling author Nora Roberts explores compelling connections between past and present in Birthright. When a construction worker discovers evidence of an ancient settlement in a small Blue Ridge Mountain community, archaeologist Callie Dunbrook is eager to start digging…even though it means working with her handsome ex-husband, Jake. When a local businesswoman claims that Callie is the child who was stolen from her in infancy, both the allure of the ancient past and violent disputes over development plans for the site are cast in stark relief. But Callie's determination to uncover the long-buried truth soon proves dangerous to her work, to her friends, to the strangers who are bound to her by blood, and to the beloved couple she always believed to be her parents. Nora Roberts has a matchless ability to blend romance and suspense, and this gift is on full display in Birthright. Sue Stone
From the Publisher
On a hot July afternoon, a worker at an Antietam Creek construction site drives the blade of his backhoe into a layer of soil — and strikes a 5,000-year-old human skull. The discovery draws plenty of attention and a lot of controversy. It also changes the life of one woman in ways she never expected...
As an archaeologist, Callie Dunbrook knows a lot about the past. But her own past is about to be called into question. Recruited for her expertise on the Antietam Creek dig, she encounters danger — as a cloud of death and misfortune hangs over the project, and rumors fly that the site is cursed. She finds a passion that feels equally dangerous, as she joins forces in her work with her irritating, but irresistible, ex-husband, Jake. And when a strange woman approaches her, claiming to know a secret about Callie’s privileged Boston childhood, some startling and unsettling questions are raised about her very identity.
Searching for answers, trying to rebuild, Callie finds that there are deceptions and sorrows that refuse to stay buried. And as she struggles to put the pieces back together, she discovers that the healing process comes with consequences — and that there are people who will do anything to make sure the truth is never revealed.
Publishers Weekly
Set in and around rural Woodsboro, Md., a small town drawn with affection and familiarity, Roberts's latest is the literary equivalent of a big delicious meal whipped up by a talented home cook. She offers a dash of exoticism and innovation-a Neanderthal settlement is discovered on the site of an unwanted housing development, prompting gorgeous young archeologist Callie Dunbrook to race to Woodsboro to take charge of what promises to be the dig of her career. After dollops of detail about archeological work, Roberts dishes up huge servings of comfort food, and it is all the more satisfying for being so straightforward. When the owner of the Antietam Creek development turns up murdered on the site, Callie is thrown into closer contact than she'd like with her ex-husband, who also happens to be the anthropologist sharing responsibility for the dig. Jacob Greystone is a hunk-"long bones, long muscles, all covered in bronzed skin...." Meanwhile, Suzanne Cullen, the hugely successful proprietor of a Mrs. Field's-like baked-goods business, tracks down the archeologist after seeing her on the evening news. Callie, the woman claims, is the baby daughter who was snatched from her stroller when she was just a few months old. Callie hires a beautiful young lawyer, Lana Campbell, who happens to be involved with Doug Cullen, Callie's long-lost brother. Another murder, arson and attempted murder heat up the chase until all the young lovers are drawn in. As in other delectable entertainments by Roberts, it is not the wild denouement but the pursuit itself-studded with scrumptious romantic encounters-that is the real dessert. Expect the usual huge sales. Author tour. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Archaeologist Callie Dunbrook believes she is responsible for bringing the past to life. So when she is confronted with her own possible past, she approaches the mystery the same way she would her work: she digs. The suspicion that she may not be Callie Dunbrook rocks her world. When people start dying, she must discover if the truth is always worth unearthing. Unfortunately, narrator Bernadette Quigley is not up to the task of bringing this novel's subtleties to life. She has one male voice-deep, gruff, and ancient, hardly ex-husband and hero material. She is also so focused on her diction that each word is given equal weight, making a mockery of the actual tone of the story. A solid work that deserves airplay even with a subpar narration; Roberts is too popular not to purchase.-Jodi L. Israel, MLS, Jamaica Plain, MA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Archaeologist finds a lost tribe: hers. Callie Dunbrook goes up against developer Ron Dolan, whose housing project has come to a halt because a bulldozer uncovered human remains. Though the site is near Antietam, Maryland, the bones predate the Civil War by thousands of years and are most likely from the burial ground of an unknown Neolithic tribe. The authorities force Dolan to lay off his crew, whose workboots and carelessness have already contaminated the site, before more damage is done. An excavation is planned, a process that will take months. So Callie makes the local news—and her face is seen by Suzanne Cullen, who’s sure that Callie’s triple dimples are identical to those of her long-lost baby girl. The sleeping infant was snatched from her stroller at a shopping mall only a few days after Callie was born, and, paying an unexpected visit, Suzanne insists that Callie is her child. Knowing that Suzanne is the CEO of a national firm reassures Callie that the woman is not a crank—though wrong. But a peek into a desk at her parents’ house uncovers adoption papers dated two months after her mother’s devastating miscarriage and a few days after little Jessica Cullen disappeared. Callie confronts her parents, who fess up at last, though insisting that the adoption was perfectly legal. Marcus Carlyle, a distinguished Boston lawyer, had arranged everything. He couldn’t possibly be a baby-seller and certainly not a kidnapper. Or could he? Callie looks for clues, with the help of her sexy ex, Jake Graystone. The trail leads back to nosy Nurse Poffenberger, who tells all; and then to Richard Carlyle, Marcus’s equally distinguished son, who isn’t talking. The plot thickens, withsuspects appearing—and supporting characters disappearing—as fast as mechanical ducks in a shooting gallery. Improbable plot is kept humming smoothly by Roberts (Midnight Bayou, 2001, etc.), whose fans oughta love it.
Loading...Product Details
- Pub. Date: March 2003
- Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
- Format: Hardcover, 480pp
- ISBN-13: 9780399149849
- ISBN: 0399149848
Interviews & Essays
Roberts Hits PaydirtIn the spring of 2003, Heart to Heart took the opportunity to speak with Nora Roberts about Birthright.
Heart to Heart: What was the inspiration behind Birthright?
Nora Roberts: I think you should always write what you enjoy, and I enjoy relationships and puzzles. I like figuring out what draws people together -- romantically, in friendships, in familial relationships -- or what pulls them apart. For the characters in Birthright the puzzle pushes them to work together, to learn not only what endangers them but about each other and themselves. And making the story's heroine an archaeologist -- someone who'd be digging into the distant past while uncovering her own dangerous personal history -- seemed too good to miss.
HtoH: What do you think Callie and Jake's previous relationship adds to this story?
NR: Birthright plays on the past on several levels. Callie and Jake have the choice of building on their history, or allowing past mistakes to bog down any chance of a future together. I liked bringing these two people together who'd had passion, who'd loved each other, but who hadn't worked hard enough -- or understood how to work hard enough -- to make their marriage solid the first time around. This time, Callie and Jake dig into themselves to add understanding, compromise, patience, and open communication to their passion and love.
HtoH: Why did you explore the stolen child/illegal adoption story line from so many points of view?
NR: I think history is one of the essential elements that cements family. The connection that's stronger than blood is the heart, not the genes. In Birthright, I wanted to explore a heartbreaking and horrible trauma where the people most involved are innocent of wrongdoing. For me, there's nothing more painful and wrenching than the loss of a child -- and nothing more joyful than finding one. I wanted to address the perspective of everyone connected -- most especially the child herself as an adult.
HtoH: What made you decide to use the issue of disputes over development of open space in Birthright?
NR: Development is one of the ways archaeological sites like this are discovered, and I felt that exploring small-town conflicts, politics, and economics contributed something essential to the story I wanted to tell here. The character of a place is, generally, what draws people to it. Change happens, but too much change, too quickly can alter forever the quality of life the people have come to expect. Certainly the history of Woodsboro in this story -- going back to Neolithic times due to the dig -- was as vital a character as Callie.
HtoH: Can you tell us anything about your next book for the Penguin Group?
NR: In the fall of 2004, Penguin will publish Remember When. Part One will be a contemporary romantic suspense, written under my name. Part Two will leap into the future I write about as J. D. Robb, where Eve Dallas will investigate a case that connects to Part One. I hope people will find it as interesting to read as I found it to write.
Read an Excerpt
One
The Antietam Creek Project came to a rude halt when the blade of Billy Younger's backhoe unearthed the first skull.
It was an unpleasant surprise for Billy himself, who'd been squatting in the cage of his machine, sweating and cursing in the vicious July heat. His wife was staunchly opposed to the proposed subdivision and had given him her usual high-pitched lecture that morning while he'd tried to eat his fried eggs and link sausage.
For himself, Billy didn't give a rat's ass one way or the other about the subdivision. But a job was a job, and Dolan was paying a good wage. Almost good enough to make up for Missy's constant bitching.
Damn nagging had put him off his breakfast, and a man needed a good breakfast when he was going to be working his tail off the rest of the day.
And what he had managed to slurp up before Missy nagged away his appetite was sitting uneasily in his gut, stewed, he thought bitterly, in the goddamn wet heat.
He rammed the controls, had the satisfaction of knowing his machine would never bitch his ears off for trying to do the job. Nothing suited Billy better, even in the god-awful sweaty clutch of July, than plowing that big-ass blade into the ground, feeling it take a good bite.
But scooping up a dirty, empty-eyed skull along with the rich bottomland soil, having it leer at him in that white blast of midsummer sunlight was enough to have 233-pound Billy scream like a girl and leap down from the machine as nimbly as a dancer.
His co-workers would razz him about it unmercifully until he was forced to bloody his best friend's nose in order to regain his manhood.
But on that July afternoon, he'd run over the sitewith the same speed and determination, and damn near the agility, he'd possessed on the football field during his high school heyday.
When he'd regained his breath and coherency, he reported to his foreman, and his foreman reported to Ronald Dolan.
By the time the county sheriff arrived, several other bones had been exhumed by curious laborers. The medical examiner was sent for, and a local news team arrived to interview Billy, Dolan and whoever else could help fill up the airtime on the evening report.
Word spread. There was talk of murder, mass graves, serial killers. Eager fingers squeezed juice out of the grapevine so that when the examination was complete, and the bones were deemed very old, a number of people weren't sure if they were pleased or disappointed.
But for Dolan, who'd already fought through petitions, protests and injunctions to turn the pristine fifty acres of boggy bottomland and woods into a housing development, the age of the bones didn't matter.
Their very existence was a major pain in his ass.
And when two days later Lana Campbell, the transplanted city lawyer, crossed her legs and gave him a smug smile, it was all Dolan could do not to pop her in her pretty face.
"You'll find the court order fairly straightforward," she told him, and kept the smile in place. She'd been one of the loudest voices against the development. At the moment, she had quite a bit to smile about.
"You don't need a court order. I stopped work. I'm cooperating with the police and the planning commission."
"Let's just consider this an additional safety measure. The County Planning Commission has given you sixty days to file a report and to convince them that your development should continue."
"I know the ropes, sweetheart. Dolan's been building houses in this county for forty-six years."
He called her "sweetheart" to annoy her. Because they both knew it, Lana only grinned. "The Historical and Preservation Societies have retained me. I'm doing my job. Members of the faculty from the University of Maryland archaeology and anthropology departments will be visiting the site. As liaison, I'm asking you to allow them to remove and test samples."
"Attorney of record, liaison." Dolan, a strongly built man with a ruddy, Irish face, leaned back in his desk chair. Sarcasm dripped from his voice. "Busy lady."
He hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. He always wore red suspenders over a blue work shirt. Part of the uniform, as he thought of it. Part of what made him one of the common men, the working class that had made his town, and his country, great.
Whatever his bank balance, and he knew it to the penny, he didn't need fancy clothes to show himself off.
He still drove a pickup truck. American-made.
He'd been born and raised in Woodsboro, unlike the pretty city lawyer. And he didn't need her, or anybody else, to tell him what his community needed. The fact was, he knew better than a lot of the people in the community about what was best for Woodsboro.
He was a man who looked to the future, and took care of his own.
"We're both busy people, so I'll come straight to the point." Lana was dead sure she was about to wipe that patronizing grin off Dolan's face. "You can't proceed on your development until the site is examined and cleared by the county. Samples need to be taken for that to happen. Any artifacts excavated won't be of any use to you. Cooperation in this matter would, we both know, go a long way toward shoring up your PR troubles."
"I don't look at them as troubles." He spread his big workingman's hands. "People need homes. The community needs jobs. The Antietam Creek development provides both. It's called progress."
"Thirty new homes. More traffic on roads not equipped to handle it, already overcrowded schools, the loss of rural sensibilities and open space."
The "sweetheart" hadn't gotten a rise out of her, but the old argument did. She drew a breath, let it out slowly. "The community fought against it. It's called quality of life. But that's another matter," she said before he could respond. "Until the bones are tested and dated, you're stuck." She tapped a finger on the court order. "Dolan Development must want that process expedited. You'll want to pay for the testing. Radiocarbon dating."
"Pay-"
Yeah, she thought, who's the winner now? "You own the property. You own the artifacts." She'd done her homework. "You know we'll fight against the construction, bury you in court orders and briefs until this is settled. Pay the two dollars, Mr. Dolan," she added as she got to her feet. "Your attorneys are going to give you the same advice."
Lana waited until she had closed the office door behind her before letting the grin spread across her face. She strolled out, took a deep breath of thick summer air as she gazed up and down Woodsboro's Main Street.
She refrained from doing a happy dance-too undignified-but she nearly skipped down the sidewalk like a ten-year-old. This was her town now. Her community. Her home. And had been since she'd moved there from Baltimore two years before.
It was a good town, steeped in tradition and history, fueled by gossip, protected from the urban sprawl by distance and the looming shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Coming to Woodsboro had been a huge leap of faith for a born and bred city girl. But she couldn't bear the memories in Baltimore after losing her husband. Steve's death had flattened her. It had taken her nearly six months to find her feet again, to pull herself out of the sticky haze of grief and deal with life.
And life demanded, Lana thought. She missed Steve. There was still a hole in her where he'd been. But she'd had to keep breathing, keep functioning. And there was Tyler. Her baby. Her boy. Her treasure.
She couldn't bring back his daddy, but she could give him the best childhood possible.
He had room to run now, and a dog to run with. Neighbors and friends, and a mother who'd do whatever needed to be done to keep him safe and happy.
She checked her watch as she walked. It was Ty's day to go to his friend Brock's after preschool. She'd give Brock's mother, Jo, a call in an hour. Just to make sure everything was all right.
She paused at the intersection, waited for the light. Traffic was slow, as traffic was meant to be in small towns.
She didn't look small-town. Her wardrobe had once been selected to suit the image of an up-and-coming lawyer in a major urban firm. She might have hung out her shingle in a little rural dot of less than four thousand people, but that didn't mean she couldn't continue to dress for success.
She wore a summer blue suit in crisp linen. The classic tailoring complemented her delicate build and her own sense of tidiness. Her hair was a straight swing of sunny blond that brushed the jawline of a pretty, youthful face. She had round blue eyes that were often mistaken for guileless, a nose that tipped up at the end and a deeply curved mouth.
She swung into Treasured Pages, beamed at the man behind the counter. And finally did her victory dance.
Roger Grogan took off his reading glasses and raised his bushy silver eyebrows. He was a trim and vigorous seventy-five, and his face made Lana think of a canny leprechaun.
He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, and his hair, a beautiful mix of silver and white, exploded in untamed tufts.
"You look pretty full of yourself." His voice was gravel spilling down a steel chute. "Must've seen Ron Dolan."
"Just came from there." She indulged herself with another spin before she leaned on the counter. "You should've come with me, Roger. Just to see his face."
"You're too hard on him." Roger tapped a fingertip to Lana's nose. "He's just doing what he thinks is right."
When Lana merely angled her head, stared blandly, Roger laughed. "Didn't say I agreed with him. Boy's got a hard head, just like his old man did. Doesn't have the sense to see if a community's this divided over something, you need to rethink."
"He'll be rethinking now," Lana promised. "Testing and dating those bones is going to cause him some major delays. And if we're lucky, they're going to be old enough to draw a lot of attention-national attention-to the site. We can delay the development for months. Maybe years."
"He's as hardheaded as you. You managed to hold him up for months already."
"He says it's progress," she mumbled.
"He's not alone in that."
"Alone or not, he's wrong. You can't plant houses like a corn crop. Our projections show-"
Roger held up a hand. "Preaching to the choir, counselor."
"Yeah." She let out a breath. "Once we get the archaeological survey, we'll see what we see.
I can't wait. Meanwhile, the longer the development's delayed, the more Dolan loses. And the more time we have to raise money. He might just reconsider selling that land to the Woodsboro Preservation Society."
She pushed back her hair. "Why don't you let me take you to lunch? We can celebrate today's victory."
"Why aren't you letting some young, good-looking guy take you out to lunch?"
"Because I lost my heart to you, Roger, the first time I saw you." It wasn't far from the truth. "In fact, hell with lunch. Let's you and me run off to Aruba together."
It made him chuckle, nearly made him blush. He'd lost his wife the same year Lana had lost her husband. He often wondered if that was part of the reason for the bond that had forged between them so quickly.
He admired her sharp mind, her stubborn streak, her absolute devotion to her son. He had a granddaughter right about her age, he thought. Somewhere.
"That'd set this town on its ear, wouldn't it? Be the biggest thing since the Methodist minister got caught playing patty-cake with the choir director. But the fact is, I've got books to catalogue-just in. Don't have time for lunch or tropical islands."
"I didn't know you'd gotten new stock. Is this one?" At his nod, she gently turned the book around.
Roger dealt in rare books, and his tiny shop was a small cathedral to them. It smelled, always, of old leather and old paper and the Old Spice he'd been sprinkling on his skin for sixty years.
A rare bookstore wasn't the sort of thing expected in a two-stoplight rural town. Lana knew the bulk of his clientele came, like his stock, from much farther afield.
"It's beautiful." She traced a finger over the leather binding. "Where did it come from?"
"An estate in Chicago." His ears pricked at a sound at the rear of the shop. "But it came with something even more valuable."
He waited, heard the door between the shop and the stairs to the living quarters on the second floor open. Lana saw the pleasure light up his face, and turned.
He had a face of deep valleys and strong hills. His hair was very dark brown with gilt lights in it. The type, she imagined, that would go silver and white with age. There was a rumpled mass of it that brushed the collar of his shirt.
The eyes were deep, dark brown, and at the moment seemed a bit surly. As did his mouth. It was a face, Lana mused, that mirrored both intellect and will. Smart and stubborn, was her first analysis. But perhaps, she admitted, it was because Roger had often described his grandson as just that.
The fact that he looked as if he'd just rolled out of bed and hitched on a pair of old jeans as an afterthought added sexy to the mix.
She felt a pleasant little ripple in the blood she hadn't experienced in a very long time.
"Doug." There was pride, delight and love in the single word. "Wondered when you were going to wander down. Good timing, as it happens. This is Lana. I told you about our Lana. Lana Campbell, my grandson, Doug Cullen."
"It's nice to meet you." She offered a hand. "We've missed each other whenever you've popped back home since I moved to Woodsboro."
He shook her hand, scanned her face. "You're the lawyer."
"Guilty. I just stopped in to tell Roger the latest on the Dolan development. And to hit on him. How long are you in town?"
"I'm not sure."
A man of few words, she thought, and tried again. "You do a lot of traveling, acquiring and selling antiquarian books. It must be fascinating."
"I like it."
Roger leaped into the awkward pause. "I don't know what I'd do without Doug. Can't get around like I used to. He's got a feel for the business, too. A natural feel. I'd be retired and boring myself to death if he hadn't taken up the fieldwork."
"It must be satisfying for both of you, to share an interest, and a family business." Since Douglas looked bored by the conversation, Lana turned to his grandfather. "Well, Roger, since you've blown me off, again, I'd better get back to work. See you at the meeting tomorrow night?"
"I'll be there."
"Nice meeting you, Doug."
"Yeah. See you around."
When the door closed behind her, Roger let out a steam-kettle sigh. "'See you around'? That's the best you can do when you're talking to a pretty woman? You're breaking my heart, boy."
"There's no coffee. Upstairs. No coffee. No brain. I'm lucky I can speak in simple declarative sentences."
"Got a pot in the back room," Roger said in disgust, and jerked a thumb. "That girl's smart, pretty, interesting and," he added as Doug moved behind the counter and through the door, "available."
"I'm not looking for a woman." The scent of coffee hit his senses and nearly made him weep. He poured a cup, burned his tongue on the first sip and knew all would, once again, be right with the world.
He sipped again, glancing back at his grandfather. "Pretty fancy piece for Woodsboro."
"I thought you weren't looking."
Now he grinned, and it changed his face from surly to approachable. "Looking, seeing. Different kettle."
"She knows how to put herself together. Doesn't make her fancy."
"No offense." Douglas was amused by his grandfather's huffy tone. "I didn't know she was your girlfriend."
"I was your age, she damn well would be."
"Grandpa." Revived by the coffee, Doug slung an arm over Roger's shoulders. "Age doesn't mean squat. I say you should go for it. Okay if I take this upstairs? I need to go clean up, head out to see Mom."
"Yeah, yeah." Roger waved him off. "See you around," he muttered as Doug walked to the rear of the store. "Pitiful."
*
Callie Dunbrook sucked up the last of her Diet Pepsi as she fought Baltimore traffic. She'd timed her departure from Philadelphia-where she was supposed to be taking a three-month sabbatical-poorly. She saw that now.
But when the call had come through, requesting a consultation, she hadn't considered travel time or rush-hour traffic. Or the basic insanity of the Baltimore Beltway at four-fifteen on a Wednesday afternoon.
Now she just had to deal with it.
She did so by blasting her horn and propelling her old and beloved Land Rover into an opening more suited to a Tonka toy. The dark thoughts of the driver she cut off didn't concern her in the least.
She'd been out of the field for seven weeks. Even the whiff of a chance to be back in again drove her as ruthlessly as she drove the four-wheeler.
She knew Leo Greenbaum well enough to have recognized the restrained excitement in his voice. Well enough to know he wasn't a man to ask her to drive to Baltimore to look at some bones unless they were very interesting bones.
Since she hadn't heard a murmur about the find in rural Maryland until that morning, she had a feeling no one had expected them to be particularly interesting.
God knew she needed another project. She was bored brainless writing papers for journals, lecturing, reading papers others in her field had written for the same journals. Archaeology wasn't classroom and publishing to Callie. To her it was digging, measuring, boiling in the sun, drowning in the rain, sinking in mud and being eaten alive by insects.
To her, it was heaven.
When the radio station she had on segued into a news cycle, she switched to CDs. Talk wasn't any way to deal with vicious, ugly traffic. Snarling, mean-edged rock was.
Metallica snapped out, and instantly improved her mood.
She tapped her fingers on the wheel, then gripped it and punched through another opening. Her eyes, a deep, golden brown, gleamed behind her shaded glasses.
She wore her hair long because it was easier to pull it back or bunch it up under a hat-as it was now-than to worry about cutting and styling it. She also had enough healthy vanity to know the straight honey blond suited her.
Her eyes were long, the brows over them nearly straight. As she approached thirty, her face had mellowed from cute to attractive. When she smiled, three dimples popped out. One in each tanned cheek, and the third just above the right corner of her mouth.
The gently curved chin didn't reveal what her ex-husband had called her rock-brained stubbornness.
But then again, she could say the same about him. And did, at every possible opportunity.
She tapped the brakes and swung, with barely any decrease in speed, into a parking lot.
Leonard G. Greenbaum and Associates was housed in a ten-story steel box that had, to Callie's mind, no redeeming aesthetic value. But the lab and its technicians were among the best in the country.
She pulled into a visitor's slot, hopped out into a vicious, soupy heat. Her feet began to sweat inside her Wolverines before she made it to the building's entrance.
The building's receptionist glanced over, saw a woman with a compact, athletic body, an ugly straw hat and terrific wire-framed sunglasses.
"Dr. Dunbrook for Dr. Greenbaum."
"Sign in, please."
She handed Callie a visitor's pass. "Third floor."
Callie glanced at her watch as she strode to the elevators. She was only forty-five minutes later than she'd planned to be. But the Quarter Pounder she'd wolfed down on the drive was rapidly wearing off.
She wondered if she could hit Leo up for a meal.
She rode up to three, found another receptionist. This time she was asked to wait.
She was good at waiting. All right, Callie admitted as she dropped into a chair. Better at waiting than she'd once been. She used up her store of patience in her work. Could she help it if there wasn't much left over to spread around in other areas?
She could only work with what she had.
But Leo didn't keep her long.
He had a quick walk. It always reminded Callie of the way a corgi moved-rapid, stubby legs racing too fast for the rest of the body. At five-four, he was an inch shorter than Callie herself and had a sleeked-back mane of walnut-brown hair, which he unashamedly dyed. His face was weathered, sun-beaten and narrow with his brown eyes in a permanent squint behind square, rimless glasses.
He wore, as he did habitually, baggy brown pants and a shirt of wrinkled cotton. Papers leaked out of every pocket.
He walked straight up to Callie and kissed her-and was the only man of her acquaintance not related to her who was permitted to do so.
"Looking good, Blondie."
"You're not looking so bad yourself."
"How was the drive?"
"Vicious. Make it worth my while, Leo."
"Oh, I think I will. How's the family?" he asked as he led her back the way he'd come.
"Great. Mom and Dad got out of Dodge for a couple weeks. Beating the heat up in Maine. How's Clara?"
Leo shook his head at the thought of his wife. "She's taken up pottery. Expect a very ugly vase for Christmas."
"And the kids?"
"Ben's playing with stocks and bonds, Melissa's juggling motherhood and dentistry. How did an old digger like me raise such normal kids?"
"Clara," Callie told him as he opened a door and gestured her in.
Though she'd expected him to take her to one of the labs, she looked around his sunny, well-appointed office. "I'd forgotten what a slick setup you've got here, Leo. No burning desire to go back out and dig?"
"Oh, it comes over me now and again. Usually I just take a nap and it goes away. But this time...Take a look at this."
He walked behind his desk, unlocked a drawer. He drew out a bone fragment in a sealed bag.
Callie took the bag and, hooking her glasses in the V of her shirt, examined the bone within. "Looks like part of a tibia. Given the size and fusion, probably from a young female. Very well preserved."
"Best guess of age from visual study?"
"This is from western Maryland, right? Near a running creek. I don't like best guess. You got soil samples, stratigraphic report?"
"Ballpark. Come on, Blondie, play."
"Jeez." Her brow knitted as she turned the bag over in her hand. She wanted her fingers on bone. Her foot began to tap to her own inner rhythm. "I don't know the ground. Visual study, without benefit of testing, I'd make it three to five hundred years old. Could be somewhat older, depending on the silt deposits, the floodplain."
She turned the bone over again, and her instincts began to quiver. "That's Civil War country, isn't it? This predates that. It's not from a Rebel soldier boy."
"It predates the Civil War," Leo agreed. "By about five thousand years."
When Callie's head came up, he grinned at her like a lunatic. "Radiocarbon-dating report," he said, and handed her a file.
Callie scanned the pages, noted that Leo had run the test twice, on three different samples taken from the site.
When she looked up again, she had the same maniacal grin as he. "Hot dog," she said.
--from Birthright by Nora Roberts, Copyright © 2003 Nora Roberts, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.
Read a Sample Chapter
BIRTHRIGHT
By Nora Roberts
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Copyright © 2003 Nora RobertsAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0399149848
Chapter One
The Antietam Creek Project came to a rude halt when the blade of Billy Younger's backhoe unearthed the first skull.It was an unpleasant surprise for Billy himself, who'd been squatting in the cage of his machine, sweating and cursing in the vicious July heat. His wife was staunchly opposed to the proposed subdivision and had given him her usual high-pitched lecture that morning while he'd tried to eat his fried eggs and link sausage.
For himself, Billy didn't give a rat's ass one way or the other about the subdivision. But a job was a job, and Dolan was paying a good wage. Almost good enough to make up for Missy's constant bitching.
Damn nagging had put him off his breakfast, and a man needed a good breakfast when he was going to be working his tail off the rest of the day.
And what he had managed to slurp up before Missy nagged away his appetite was sitting uneasily in his gut, stewed, he thought bitterly, in the goddamn wet heat.
He rammed the controls, had the satisfaction of knowing his machine would never bitch his ears off for trying to do the job. Nothing suited Billy better, even in the god-awful sweaty clutch of July, than plowing that big-ass blade into the ground, feeling it take a good bite.
But scooping up a dirty, empty-eyed skull along with the rich bottomland soil, having it leer at him in that white blast of midsummer sunlight was enough to have 233-pound Billy scream like a girl and leap down from the machine as nimbly as a dancer.
His co-workers would razz him about it unmercifully until he was forced to bloody his best friend's nose in order to regain his manhood.
But on that July afternoon, he'd run over the site with the same speed and determination, and damn near the agility, he'd possessed on the football field during his high school heyday.
When he'd regained his breath and coherency, he reported to his foreman, and his foreman reported to Ronald Dolan.
By the time the county sheriff arrived, several other bones had been exhumed by curious laborers. The medical examiner was sent for, and a local news team arrived to interview Billy, Dolan and whoever else could help fill up the airtime on the evening report.
Word spread. There was talk of murder, mass graves, serial killers. Eager fingers squeezed juice out of the grapevine so that when the examination was complete, and the bones were deemed very old, a number of people weren't sure if they were pleased or disappointed.
But for Dolan, who'd already fought through petitions, protests and injunctions to turn the pristine fifty acres of boggy bottomland and woods into a housing development, the age of the bones didn't matter.
Their very existence was a major pain in his ass.
And when two days later Lana Campbell, the transplanted city lawyer, crossed her legs and gave him a smug smile, it was all Dolan could do not to pop her in her pretty face.
"You'll find the court order fairly straightforward," she told him, and kept the smile in place. She'd been one of the loudest voices against the development. At the moment, she had quite a bit to smile about.
"You don't need a court order. I stopped work. I'm cooperating with the police and the planning commission."
"Let's just consider this an additional safety measure. The County Planning Commission has given you sixty days to file a report and to convince them that your development should continue."
"I know the ropes, sweetheart. Dolan's been building houses in this county for forty-six years."
He called her "sweetheart" to annoy her. Because they both knew it, Lana only grinned. "The Historical and Preservation Societies have retained me. I'm doing my job. Members of the faculty from the University of Maryland archaeology and anthropology departments will he visiting the site. As liaison, I'm asking you to allow them to remove and test samples."
"Attorney of record, liaison." Dolan, a strongly built man with a ruddy, Irish face, leaned back in his desk chair. Sarcasm dripped from his voice. "Busy lady."
He hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. He always wore red suspenders over a blue work shirt. Part of the uniform, as he thought of it. Part of what made him one of the common men, the working class that had made his town, and his country, great.
Whatever his bank balance, and he knew it to the penny, he didn't need fancy clothes to show himself off.
He still drove a pickup truck. American-made.
He'd been born and raised in Woodsboro, unlike the pretty city lawyer. And he didn't need her, or anybody else, to tell him what his community needed. The fact was, he knew better than a lot of the people in the community about what was best for Woodsboro.
He was a man who looked to the future, and took care of his own.
"We're both busy people, so I'll come straight to the point." Lana was dead sure she was about to wipe that patronizing grin off Dolan's face. "You can't proceed on your development until the site is examined and cleared by the county. Samples need to be taken for that to happen. Any artifacts excavated won't be of any use to you. Cooperation in this matter would, we both know, go a long way toward shoring up your PR troubles."
"I don't look at them as troubles." He spread his big workingman's hands. "People need homes. The community needs jobs. The Antietam Creek development provides both. It's called progress."
"Thirty new homes. More traffic on roads not equipped to handle it, already overcrowded schools, the loss of rural sensibilities and open space."
The "sweetheart" hadn't gotten a rise out of her, but the old argument did. She drew a breath, let it out slowly. "The community fought against it. It's called quality of life. But that's another matter," she said before he could respond. "Until the bones are tested and dated, you're stuck." She tapped a finger on the court order. "Dolan Development must want that process expedited. You'll want to pay for the testing. Radiocarbon dating."
"Pay-"
Yeah, she thought, who's the winner now? "You own the property. You own the artifacts." She'd done her homework. "You know we'll fight against the construction, bury you in court orders and briefs until this is settled. Pay the two dollars, Mr. Dolan," she added as she got to her feet. "Your attorneys are going to give you the same advice."
Lana waited until she had closed the office door behind her before letting the grin spread across her face. She strolled out, took a deep breath of thick summer air as she gazed up and down Woodsboro's Main Street.
She refrained from doing a happy dance-too undignified-but she nearly skipped down the sidewalk like a ten-year-old. This was her town now. Her community. Her home. And had been since she'd moved there from Baltimore two years before.
It was a good town, steeped in tradition and history, fueled by gossip, protected from the urban sprawl by distance and the looming shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Coming to Woodsboro had been a huge leap of faith for a born and bred city girl. But she couldn't bear the memories in Baltimore after losing her husband. Steve's death had flattened her. It had taken her nearly six months to find her feet again, to pull herself out of the sticky haze of grief and deal with life.
And life demanded, Lana thought. She missed Steve. There was still a hole in her where he'd been. But she'd had to keep breathing, keep functioning. And there was Tyler. Her baby. Her boy. Her treasure.
She couldn't bring back his daddy, but she could give him the best childhood possible.
He had room to run now, and a dog to run with. Neighbors and friends, and a mother who'd do whatever needed to be done to keep him safe and happy.
She checked her watch as she walked. It was Ty's day to go to his friend Brock's after preschool. She'd give Brock's mother, Jo, a call in an hour. Just to make sure everything was all right.
She paused at the intersection, waited for the light. Traffic was slow, as traffic was meant to be in small towns.
She didn't look small-town. Her wardrobe had once been selected to suit the image of an up-and-coming lawyer in a major urban firm. She might have hung out her shingle in a little rural dot of less than four thousand people, but that didn't mean she couldn't continue to dress for success,
She wore a summer blue suit in crisp linen. The classic tailoring complemented her delicate build and her own sense of tidiness. Her hair was a straight swing of sunny blond that brushed the jawline of a pretty, youthful face. She had round blue eyes that were often mistaken for guileless, a nose that tipped up at the end and a deeply curved mouth.
She swung into Treasured Pages, beamed at the man behind the counter. And finally did her victory dance.
Roger Grogan took off his reading glasses and raised his bushy silver eyebrows. He was a trim and vigorous seventy-five, and his face made Lana think of a canny leprechaun.
He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, and his hair, a beautiful mix of silver and white, exploded in untamed tufts.
"You look pretty full of yourself." His voice was gravel spilling down a steel chute. "Must've seen Ron Dolan."
"Just came from there." She indulged herself with another spin before she leaned on the counter. "You should've come with me, Roger. Just to see his face."
"You're too hard on him." Roger tapped a fingertip to Lana's nose. "He's just doing what he thinks is right."
When Lana merely angled her head, stared blandly, Roger laughed. "Didn't say I agreed with him. Boy's got a hard head, just like his old man did. Doesn't have the sense to see if a community's this divided over something, you need to rethink."
"He'll be rethinking now," Lana promised. "Testing and dating those bones is going to cause him some major delays. And if we're lucky, they're going to be old enough to draw a lot of attention-national attention-to the site. We can delay the development for months. Maybe years."
"He's as hardheaded as you. You managed to hold him up for months already."
"He says it's progress," she mumbled.
"He's not alone in that."
"Alone or not, he's wrong. You can't plant houses like a corn crop. Our projections show-"
Roger held up a hand. "Preaching to the choir, counselor."
"Yeah." She let out a breath. "Once we get the archaeological survey, we'll see what we see. I can't wait. Meanwhile, the longer the development's delayed, the more Dolan loses. And the more time we have to raise money. He might just reconsider selling that land to the Woodsboro Preservation Society."
She pushed back her hair. "Why don't you let me take you to lunch? We can celebrate today's victory."
"Why aren't you letting some young, good-looking guy take you out to lunch?"
"Because I lost my heart to you, Roger, the first time I saw you." It wasn't far from the truth. "In fact, hell with lunch. Let's you and me run off to Aruba together."
It made him chuckle, nearly made him blush. He'd lost his wife the same year Lana had lost her husband. He often wondered if that was part of the reason for the bond that had forged between them so quickly.
He admired her sharp mind, her stubborn streak, her absolute devotion to her son. He had a granddaughter right about her age, he thought. Somewhere.
"That'd set this town on its ear, wouldn't it? Be the biggest thing since the Methodist minister got caught playing patty-cake with the choir director. But the fact is, I've got books to catalogue-just in. Don't have time for lunch or tropical islands."
"I didn't know you'd gotten new stock. Is this one?" At his nod, she gently turned the book around.
Roger dealt in rare books, and his tiny shop was a small cathedral to them. It smelled, always, of old leather and old paper and the Old Spice he'd been sprinkling on his skin for sixty years.
A rare bookstore wasn't the sort of thing expected in a two-stoplight rural town. Lana knew the bulk of his clientele came, like his stock, from much farther afield.
"It's beautiful." She traced a finger over the leather binding. "Where did it come from?"
"An estate in Chicago." His ears pricked at a sound at the rear of the shop. "But it came with something even more valuable."
He waited, heard the door between the shop and the stairs to the living quarters on the second floor open. Lana saw the pleasure light up his face, and turned.
He had a face of deep valleys and strong hills. His hair was very dark brown with gilt lights in it. The type, she imagined, that would go silver and white with age. There was a rumpled mass of it that brushed the collar of his shirt.
The eyes were deep, dark brown, and at the moment seemed a bit surly. As did his mouth. It was a face, Lana mused, that mirrored both intellect and will. Smart and stubborn, was her first analysis. But perhaps, she admitted, it was because Roger had often described his grandson as just that.
The fact that he looked as if he'd just rolled out of bed and hitched on a pair of old jeans as an afterthought added sexy to the mix.
She felt a pleasant little ripple in the blood she hadn't experienced in a very long time.
"Doug." There was pride, delight and love in the single word. "Wondered when you were going to wander down. Good timing, as it happens. This is Lana. I told you about our Lana. Lana Campbell, my grandson, Doug Cullen."
"It's nice to meet you." She offered a hand. "We've missed each other whenever you've popped back home since I moved to Woodsboro."
He shook her hand, scanned her face. "You're the lawyer."
"Guilty. I just stopped in to tell Roger the latest on the Dolan development. And to hit on him. How long are you in town?"
"I'm not sure."
A man of few words, she thought, and tried again. "You do a lot of traveling, acquiring and selling antiquarian books. It must be fascinating."
"I like it."
Roger leaped into the awkward pause. "I don't know what I'd do without Doug. Can't get around like I used to. He's got a feel for the business, too. A natural feel. I'd be retired and boring myself to death if he hadn't taken up the fieldwork."
"It must be satisfying for both of you, to share an interest, and a family business." Since Douglas looked bored by the conversation, Lana turned to his grandfather. "Well, Roger, since you've blown me off, again, I'd better get back to work. See you at the meeting tomorrow night?"
"I'll be there."
"Nice meeting you, Doug."
"Yeah. See you around."
When the door closed behind her, Roger let out a steam-kettle sigh. "`See you around'? That's the best you can do when you're talking to a pretty woman? You're breaking my heart, boy."
"There's no coffee. Upstairs. No coffee. No brain. I'm lucky I can speak in simple declarative sentences."
Continues...
Excerpted from BIRTHRIGHT by Nora Roberts Copyright © 2003 by Nora Roberts
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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