Bone Idol

A Total-E-Bound Publication

Bone Idol

ISBN #978-0-85715-832-1

©Copyright Paige Turner 2011

Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright December 2011

Edited by Laura Hulley

Total-E-Bound Publishing

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Total-E-Bound Publishing.

Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Total-E-Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

Published in 2011 by Total-E-Bound Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, United Kingdom.

Warning:

This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a
heat rating
of
Total-e-burning
and a
sexometer
of
2.

This story contains 86 pages, additionally there is also a
free excerpt
at the end of the book containing 4 pages.

Past Perfect

BONE IDOL

Paige Turner

Love stripped down to the bare bones.

1875. The Bone Wars. Dinosaur hunters will go to any lengths to make bigger, better discoveries—and to see their rivals broken.

Henry is a man of science—precise, proper and achingly correct. When Albert arrives in his life in a storm of boyish enthusiasm, he’s torn between his loyalty to science and a new and troubling desire.

Albert wants to protect his father and fears Henry means to ruin his reputation in the bone-hunter world. Will he be ruled by his fear or by his feelings?

As they hunt for dinosaurs and explore their desire together, Henry and Albert find themselves digging up some secrets that could threaten their love—and their lives.

For my brother, who taught me all about the Bone Wars, who shouted at me when I insisted there was such a thing as a brontosaurus, and who’s mortified that I’ve used his lifelong passion for palaeontology as the setting for a romance novel.

Trademarks Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmark mentioned in this work of fiction:

Vaseline: Unilever

Dorset, October 1875

Henry rapped once more at the door to the cliff-top rectory. Nobody answered.

Stepping back, he looked up at the darkened windows. He pulled his greatcoat around himself and shivered. A fat moon hung above the house. The stars here were bright, like splinters of ice scattered across the black sky—so different from the yellowish night skies of London, where the gas lights reflected sickly from a low fug of smoke and dirt. But at least that covering blanket gave an illusion of warmth, however unwholesome. Here, nothing stood between him and the brisk, chilly winds of the English Channel.

When the telegram arrived, Henry had not been able to resist—a new species of plesiosaur found on the beach near the Reverend Arthur Boundry’s rectory! The bone hunter in him had been enchanted. He had hastily packed a valise and set out for Dorset at once.

Now he was standing, shivering and hungry, in the middle of the night, on the doorstep of a man whom he only really knew through his letters. Worse, a thin drizzle was beginning to fall. He should have found an inn for the night and called in the morning, at a more civilised hour. But he had been excited and had just assumed that the reverend would be, too. How could anyone sleep when there was a fabulous fossil find to be retrieved, examined and catalogued?

Heaving a weary sigh, he turned away from the dark rectory and looked out at the choppy waves, ink black under the moonlight but capped with frothy white. There was little to be done until morning. He decided to stroll along the beach. The exercise might at least keep him warm—and awake.

Shivering in the damp air, he followed the course of a lively, gurgling stream that bubbled up from the ground and then flowed downhill, splashing over shards of rock not yet smoothed by its course, towards the shore. The rain had become heavier and the wind was picking up. Henry huddled miserably in his greatcoat, hands in his pockets and eyes downcast. His feet slipped on slick, brown seaweed as he got closer to the shore, and he swore when he stepped into a rock pool, soaking his boot and crushing a crab that had been going peacefully about its night-time business.

Cold, and increasingly damp and discouraged, he squelched on along the beach, one boot full of water. He had been walking for perhaps a mile, lost in his thoughts, the rain quite heavy now and whipped into his face by the blustery wind, when he thought he heard a shout.

Squinting through the rain, he thought he could make out a number of bobbing, yellow lights ahead of him on the beach. The wind brought him snatches of urgent conversation, occasional incomprehensible shouts. He stepped up his pace as the rain became a downpour, suddenly energised and alive with excitement.

As he drew nearer, he saw a group of people standing amongst the fallen shale at the bottom of the cliffs. There was an air of bustle about them as they stepped nimbly about on the wet rocks, struggling to keep the light from their lanterns on two of their number who knelt on the slick stone, apparently engrossed.

“Hallo!” Henry called, approaching the group. “Can I be of any assistance?”

“Elkington! Is that you?” The Reverend Arthur Boundry bounced to his feet, face wreathed in smiles as he peered myopically through the rain at Henry.

The little old clergyman was utterly soaked through, his spectacles spotted with rainwater and one of the lenses smeared with damp sand. Henry greeted him with enthusiasm, but his attention was taken, unexpectedly, by the reverend’s companion. Rising with a sort of nervous, febrile energy from his position on the wet rock, he wiped his filthy hands on his shirt front. His fingers, Henry noticed, were small and very slender. The fingernails were caked with sand. Henry raised his eyes to the man’s face and felt a strange, unwholesome jolt down his spine as he took in the quick, honey-brown eyes and the soft, smiling mouth. His hair was a riotous mop of curls, and Henry found himself wondering what colour it was in the daylight.

The Reverend Arthur Boundry followed Henry’s gaze. “Oh, yes,” he said. “My son, Albert. Albert, this is Mr Elkington. You have heard me speak of his paper on the reconstruction of the Maidstone Iguanadon. He has some interesting ideas…very interesting indeed.”

It was true that, between them, they had come up with some quite radical ideas based on Mantell’s assertions that the beast was probably bipedal. But for some reason, Henry could not think about that at the moment. His attention was taken by the young man who had risen to his feet to greet him.

The reverend’s son wiped his hand again on his thigh, and held it out to be shaken. His smile lit up his face. “Mr Elkington,” he said.

Henry felt a blush rising in his face and blessed the darkness and the inclement weather for hiding his bewilderment. “Henry,” he managed to say. “Please, call me Henry.” He thought that he held Albert’s fingers for a fraction of a moment too long, and even after he had relinquished his hand he continued to look into the other man’s shining eyes until Albert said, “Have you come to help us to extract the specimen…Henry?” He gestured to the ground where he and his father had been kneeling.

Embedded there in the rock were the unmistakable contours of fossilised bones. A long, serrated ridge of spine curved across the slab, some of the ribs still articulated. The neck was hyper-extended, thrown back as though the creature had thrashed and flailed in its final death agonies. The slender skull was crocodilian, with rows of needle-sharp teeth and enormous, empty eye sockets. It had become separated from the neck and lay among the scattered bones of the ribcage. The digits of the massive, splayed flippers looked like smooth pebbles, carefully arranged into neat rows.

Shrugging off his drenched overcoat, Henry set to work with a will. He was soon calling instructions to the men with lanterns, shouting to be heard over the howling of the wind, working with the Reverend Arthur Boundry and Albert to free the ancient beast from the rock. Between them they cleared fallen shale from around the boundaries of the fossil, then laboured to liberate it from its bed of rock with hammers, chisels and small picks. The team of locals worked willingly to heave away loads full of spoil, keeping the area clear for them to work.

It had turned into a wild night, the rain lashing down furiously so that Henry was soon soaked through and chilled to the bone. He knew it was no time to be fastidious—they must move quickly if they were to save the fossil remains from the encroaching sea.

The Dorset coast was changeable, its cliffs made of soft, friable shale. The ever-changing, almost living coastline meant that a storm could expose a fossil that had been hidden in the rock for aeons. But the same action of wind and water meant that it could be buried again just as quickly, never to be seen again. Mary Anning, the famous female fossil hunter, had almost lost her life in a landslide there some forty-odd years before, and the bones of her terrier still lay somewhere under the cliffs. Some said her ghost still walked these stretches of windblown beach and, although not given to fancy, on a night like tonight www.total-e-bound.com

Henry could believe it. So it was treacherous work, and not an environment that rewarded hesitation or preciousness.

And he would not have complained in any case. Albert worked uncomplainingly across from him, handling hammer and chisel with deft, decisive strokes. The young man’s slender fingers were red with cold and Henry had a sudden, wild urge to press the frozen digits to his mouth and warm them with his breath.

The spell was broken when Albert called to the local helpers in a gleeful voice, “We have it free from the rock! Bring the ropes, please.”

Henry eased himself to his feet, his knees cracking and his back complaining at the time he had spent huddled over the fossil, working single-mindedly on releasing the ancient creature from the stone. He watched as Albert almost danced around the rock, the wet fabric of his trousers clinging to his thighs and buttocks, directing the townsmen to construct a sling of ropes that would be used to carefully lift the block of stone from the beach and then to transport it to the rectory. The reverend scampered between his son and the fossil, over-excited almost to the point of incoherence and mindless of the wind and the weather.

Before long, six of the younger and stronger lads had the fossil carefully slung between them in a cat’s cradle of ropes, its weight carefully distributed so that it could not become dislodged and fall. Albert strode after them with his father trotting and twittering in his wake.