She blinked. "Is there a time limit?"

"Usual business hours." He glanced at his watch. "You have until five."

She looked at her own watch. "Does someone have to be here with me all the time?"

"Yes."

Carly wasn't surprised, but she wasn't pleased that Dan had been assigned to babysit her. Something about him was distracting and she had a lot of work to do.

From beneath lowered lashes she watched while he shrugged out of his jacket and denim shirt. Stripped down to a black turtleneck and faded jeans, he went to a storage cupboard at the back of the room. He pulled out some yellowed, fragile papers, and went to work with a piece of equipment she assumed was some kind of scanner. Despite the size of his fingers and a physical strength made clear by the fit of the turtle-neck, he handled the papers with a delicate patience that intrigued her.

"You've done that a lot, haven't you?" she asked.

Dan nodded without looking up.

"But you're not an archivist?"

He nodded again.

She didn't take the hint. "Then why did you take on the job of translating microfilm into computer files?"

He looked up at her. In the stark light and shadows of the room, his green eyes had a catlike glow. "I wanted to."

"Why?"

"Why do you care?"

"I'm curious. And don't bother telling me about curiosity and the cat. Been there, heard that, wasn't impressed."

The line of his mouth shifted slightly. Almost a smile. But then, his face was in shadow so she couldn't be sure.

"Somehow I'm not surprised," Dan said.

"Somehow I don't think much could surprise you."

He looked at the smoky gold of her eyes and knew she was wrong. She surprised him. Everyone else walked on tiptoe around him, trying not to disturb whatever was brooding inside him. But did she tiptoe? Hell, no. She nudged and nipped and kicked.

"When I was thirteen, I chose to microfilm the computer files as a school project," he said, surprising himself again. "Back then, the newspaper wouldn't let me near the really old stuff, so there's a lot still to be done." He lifted and turned the sheet and hit the button again. "I modified a computer scanning program and kept working on it until I left for college when I was eighteen. No one else could figure out how to make my program work, so they just kept on with the microfilming and I'd do the 'translation' when I visited."

She looked at the power implicit in Dan's shoulders and shook her head.

"What?" he said.

"I'm trying to picture you as a pencil-necked geek teenager. Ain't happening."

"Muscles don't reduce your IQ."

"Maybe in your case." Carly shrugged.

"You have something against men who aren't nerds?"

"As long as they don't mistake brawn for the Second Coming of Christ, no."

"Somebody burned you good."

"No. Somebody bored me. Big difference. Then he couldn't believe I didn't want him. Finally had to serve the jerk with a court order not to be where I was, ever, under any circumstances."

"How long ago was that?" Dan asked.

A quality in his voice made her look at him again. Though he hadn't moved, there was a difference in him, more intense, more alert, all relaxation gone.

"Eight, nine years," she said. "A long time."

Whatever had tightened his body left as silently as it had come. He leaned back into his chair and said, "Not long enough, apparently."

"What do you mean?"

"You're still afraid of men."

Carly didn't like that description. Being careful wasn't the same as being afraid. "I don't like men who won't take no for an answer," she said. "The big boneheads are more intimidating than the smaller sizes of stupid. Must be something genetic in me that makes me avoid the big ones."

"Common sense?" he suggested dryly.

"Bingo. So what interested you about the past enough that you spent a lot of time down here scanning old newspapers and making high-tech computer files out of microfilmed data?"

For a while she thought he wasn't going to answer. So did he. Then he surprised both of them.

"I believed that the past explained the present," Dan said.

"It does."

He lifted one shoulder. "The recorded past? Not really. It's written by winners. That leaves at least one whole side unrecorded. Playing cards with half a deck is a sure way to lose the game."

While Carly thought about his words, she wound a curl around her index finger, a childhood habit she'd never been able to break. "That's an unusual insight," she said finally.

"If you're thirteen, maybe. After that you outgrow it." He went back to scanning in old papers.

She tried to decide if she'd just been personally insulted or if he was rude to everyone.

Not my problem. I’m here on Winifred's nickel and his last name isn't Quintrell or Castillo.

Having decided that, she heard herself asking, "Do you understand the old Spanish?"

"Yes." He brought down the scanner lid and hit a button.

"Good. The more I read about the original Onate land grant, the less sense it makes. Since you have to be here anyway, would you help me with the translation?"

"There's a lot about the old land grants that no one understands, no matter what the language."

"Is that a yes or a no on the translation?"

He looked up. "It's a possible maybe. What's giving you the most trouble?"

She rolled her eyes. "Maybe it's more a cultural question than a translation issue. The original Onate grant was passed along under the Spanish rules of inheritance, right?"

"Every son inherited equally, and under some circumstances, so did the daughters. Is that the sort of thing you mean?"

"Yes. It's confusing to me because the only family histories I've researched this far back have been under the British system where the oldest son inherits and the rest of the sons go into the military or priesthood or whatever, because in terms of any inheritance, they don't get much more than a few hundred dollars and a pat on the head."

"The British way is very effective for concentrating family wealth and power from generation to generation," Dan said as he removed the paper, turned it, and placed it on the scanner again. "The Spanish method was different. The grazing and woodcutting lands were held in common by all family members. Rights to the river and irrigated lands were divided so that each inheriting member of the family had a water source and fields for crops."

Carly hesitated. "Common lands? Like the Indians had?"

"Not quite." Dan hit the button on the scanner. "The Indians, whether they lived in pueblos or followed the old hunting, gathering, and raiding way of life, held all land in common-if they held any land at all." Carefully he set the paper aside and picked up another yellowed sheet. "The Spanish rules were more complex. They called for a combination of individual and common lands within the original grant. The common lands remained the same size. The individual lands got smaller and smaller with each generation. Big families dividing and subdividing the same land over and over again."

"Got it. But what happened to the land grants when political control passed from Spain to Mexico?"

Dan placed another fragile piece of paper on the scanner and carefully lowered the lid. "Mexican rules of inheritance were basically the same as Spanish, which meant that old land grants generally passed intact to the next generation despite the change in government. Other than the change from Spanish priests to Mexican priests and the resulting outlawry of the Penitente sect of Catholicism, New Mexico hardly noticed the change from Spanish to Mexican governors. In any case, by the time Mexico kicked out the Spanish in 1821, New Mexico had been around long enough as a frontier to think of itself as a separate entity."

"So the effect through time was to have more and more New Mexican families owning smaller and smaller patches of the original grant?" Carly asked.