Julia leaned forward with interest. “Did they hire some hot new prof who actually has looks to go with his brains?”
“No such luck. A woman named Morgan Shaw came to see me. She has an antique store in Connecticut, and she brought an artifact with her. A wooden box. Kind of fascinating, all carved with nature figures, flowers and musical instruments. Very Egyptian looking, but not Egyptian, of course. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be having such a hard time dating and placing it.”
“Do you want me to have a look?” She and Julia had met at an archaeology symposium a year or two after Cate had graduated. Two women in a man’s field, they had gravitated together in self-defense, then had become friends. Since she’d taken up the curatorship at the museum, Julia would consult with Cate once in a while when she ran across a particularly interesting piece. But this was different.
“No, it’s not that. I want you to talk me out of going to California.”
Julia sat back and stared at her. “Not getting the connection, babe.”
“I don’t even make sense to myself. Did you see Jah-Redd last night?”
“Did the Romans invade Britain? Of course I saw it. How about that Indiana Jones guy with the Clive Owen mojo? Was he hot or what?”
Cate sighed and wished she’d gone home and poured a glass of whatever was in her fridge. “That Indiana Jones guy is Daniel Burke, who, despite his truly annoying tendency to hog the media spotlight, is an expert in ancient artifacts, specializing in symbology. He’s going to be at a conference in California and I’m toying with the idea of going to it and showing him some photos of the box.”
“There isn’t anybody closer?”
“Not with his experience.”
“Don’t you have classes? You can’t just skip off to California, can you?”
“Reading week is next week, where theoretically the students study for exams the following week.” Theoretically. She couldn’t imagine any of her students actually doing it. “I assume that’s why the conference is scheduled then.”
“So go.” Julia was looking at her with a what’s the big deal? expression.
“I…um…”
Understanding dawned in her friend’s eyes. “Oh, my God. You have a history with this guy.”
Cate nodded miserably. “And not a good one, either.”
“Professionally or personally?”
“Personally.”
“Cate Wells, how could I not have known this? You and the ‘real Indiana Jones’?”
“It’s not something I’m proud of, Julia. We had a fling on a dig in Mexico eight years ago. It ended badly with me being stupid. I never heard from him again. End of story.”
Julia’s eyes narrowed. “It seems to me that’s all the reason you need to go out there. Because, clearly, it isn’t the end of the story. You’ve got unfinished business with him.”
“I would not be going to finish any…business. I’d be going for a consultation on this artifact.”
“You could do that with a scanner and an e-mail.”
Which was, of course, the truth. “See, that’s why I like you, Julia. You never give me any BS. You just shoot me right in the forehead and get it over with, nice and clean.”
“That’s what friends are for,” Julia said virtuously, snagging another wonton. “So, when are you leaving?”
“The conference is next weekend. I’d have to fly into San Jose. The conference people have a shuttle for the trip down to Big Sur, so I wouldn’t have to rent a car.”
“Big Sur? That’s about as romantic a destination as you could wish for.”
“Not for me,” Cate said with firmness. “If I went, it would be strictly business. My extracurricular activities would be limited to discussions about cross-bedded sandstone and phallic symbolism in Mycenaean art with my colleagues in the field.”
Julia snorted. “Ha! Beds and phalluses. What did I tell you?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you meant, though. Tell me honestly, Cate. When was the last time you had a mind-blowing sexual experience?”
Cate studied the wine in her glass, the pale gold of spring sunshine in California. She trusted Julia, honestly she did, but how did you own up to something like this?
“Um…I can’t say I ever have. Sex just isn’t something I enjoy.”
Julia’s aristocratic dark eyebrows said everything her closed lips were holding back, for which Cate was grateful.
“I’ve had boyfriends, of course. That guy Robert you set me up with two years ago, for one. And a couple of others—a visiting history lecturer, and most recently a disaster with the acting head of the anthropology department. He’s gone to Northwestern now, thank God. But most of them just kind of…fade for lack of interest, I guess.”
“Now I’m seeing why you’re so successful in your field,” Julia said. “And why your publication rate is double that of your cohorts in the department.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Cate wanted to know. “If a man has that kind of publication rate, nobody says it’s because he doesn’t have a love life. They say he’s ambitious. Which I am, and proud of it.”
“Oh, I didn’t say it was because of your love life. But I can see where all your sexual energy is going. Into your career. Which is why I repeat, go to California. Confront the wicked specter from your past. Put it to bed, as it were. And if it happens to be more than a metaphorical bed, then more power to you.”
“You’re supposed to be talking me out of this,” Cate moaned.
“As your friend, it’s my duty to make—er, encourage you to do what’s best for you. And clearly, if this guy has been under your skin all this time, you have to do something about him. Lance him like a boil, babe.”
Cate made a face. “With all that education, I’d think you could pick a better simile.”
“It gets the point across, though, doesn’t it? So, are you going?”
“Yes, I think so,” Cate said with a sigh and a big gulp of wine. “California, here I come.”
DANIEL WAS SO USED TO BEING in the spotlight that it was getting almost comfortable. Media darling, he knew, was a notoriously short career choice, so he didn’t take it too seriously. But in the eyes of his colleagues, sometimes this insouciance came off as arrogance. Too bad. He couldn’t help what people thought. What counted to him was the pursuit of knowledge, and people’s opinions didn’t concern him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, good evening,” he said into the microphone on the podium. His voice boomed through the auditorium, reaching every one of the three hundred or so professionals seated eight to a table and enjoying the last of their dessert. “My name is Daniel Burke, and I’d like to talk to you tonight about the ancient treasures I’ve had the privilege of working with, as described in my new book, Lost Treasures of the World.”
Fifteen minutes into his thirty-minute speech, the doors at the back opened and a woman slipped in. Slender and a little on the rangy side, she was wearing a black skirt and a white shirt that crossed in front and tied at the waist. She tossed back her hair and in that movement, so common and yet so completely unique to one particular woman, he recognized who it was.
His speech stumbled to a halt as she slid into an empty chair at a table three-quarters of the way back.
Cate Wells. By all the gods he’d ever dug out of the earth, it was Cate Wells.
He’d thought she was at Vandenberg, that tony private university with the seemingly limitless funding. Out there in New York, locked in an ivory tower on a different planet than the one he lived on. Not walking back into his life as inexplicably as she’d run out of it eight years before.
The audience rustled in its seats and he realized he hadn’t spoken in some endless stretch of time. God, what had he just been saying? He glanced down at his outline, but the orderly print looked jumbled, as foreign as any Phoenician chicken scratch on a piece of clay.
Cate Wells.
Someone in the front cleared his throat and
Daniel’s brain snapped back into professional mode. “The expedition to Argentina and my subsequent discovery of the Temecula Treasure was the result of a domino effect of good luck and careful planning,” he said, beginning part five as though nothing had happened.
Fifteen minutes later, the speech was done and he was striding off the stage to applause so tumultuous he couldn’t hear what Dr. Purvis, the conference chair, was saying to him as she shook his hand. Her lips moved. Sign boobs?
That couldn’t be right.
Books. Sign books.
Oh, right. A book signing was to follow his speech, out on the terrace where they were serving yet more gallons of terrific California wine. He hoped there were a few terrific California brews out there, too, or he was going to have to sneak off to his cottage and raid his own stash of pale ale.
Fortunately Stacy Mills, the publicity person his publisher had assigned to him, had taken note of his preferences, and a cold one was waiting for him at the table, along with a pitcher of ice water and a stack of books behind which an army could have barricaded itself.
Sheesh. Did they expect that every single attendee would buy one? Not that that was a bad thing. But it had already hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and he figured that in that case, everyone who wanted one would have bought it by now.
And speaking of Stacy Mills, here she was, with a dark-haired woman in tow. He handed a signed book to Andy Hoogbeck, one of the other speakers, and smiled at the newcomers.
“Getting writer’s cramp?” Stacy asked. “Take a break. I want you to meet Melanie Savage.”
With relief, he stood up and shook the woman’s hand. “You’ll have to forgive me. The name’s familiar, but I can’t remember where we met.”
Her hair was cropped short and tinted with that dark purple stuff the Goths liked, and there was a discreet stud in her nose. Still, her face had an appealing heart shape and her eyes were wide and dark, and looked at the moment as if she were staring, dazzled, into a spotlight.
A fan. Daniel smothered a sigh and glanced at his line, which seemed to be lengthening again.
“We haven’t actually met,” she said a little breathlessly. “But I maintain your Web site, derringburke.com.”
“I have a Web site?” He looked at Stacy for help.
“You have three or four. But Melanie here has the most comprehensive of your fan sites. Its name is a play on derring-do, Daniel.”
A light went on in his brain. “Is that the one that wanted letters from me? For a blog or something?”
If it were possible, Melanie lit up even more. “Yes! You sent one a month for a couple of months. We got a zillion hits because of course it meant you’d singled us out to be your authorized site.”
He hadn’t—Stacy had probably sent him the request—but he wasn’t about to dim that glow, especially if this girl’s site was getting a zillion hits. Hits were good. Hits meant recognition of his work, and he was all for that.
“I’m glad it was a success,” he said with his best lady-killer grin. “Nice to meet you, Melanie. And now—” he glanced at the line “—I’d better get back to work.”
He signed copy after copy until his hand, rough and deeply tanned from holding its normal tools, a trowel and brush, was aching. But the wall of books diminished with every copy, until he could see over it enough to observe that the end was near.
And there, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, was Cate Wells.
This was going to be fun.
“Who should I sign it to?” he asked as politely as he’d just done at least a hundred times. As if she were any fan at any book signing whom he didn’t know.
The smile that curved her lips held equal parts expectancy and irony. At his words, it tilted off her mouth and disappeared.
“To Anne,” she said clearly. “With an e.”
Not Cate with a C? The name he’d doodled in the margins of his papers for years until he’d finally forced himself to quit? Instead of the requested Anne, he wrote Cate, with a C, and scribbled a line below it, then closed the book and held it out to her.
“There you are, Anne,” he said. “I hope you enjoy it.”
“Oh, I won’t be reading it,” she snapped, jerking the book from his hand. “It’s for someone else.” She marched to the cash register set up inside as if buying the book were a personal affront, one she’d been forced into under duress, and he smothered a smile as he turned to his next reader.
Conferences usually bored him to the point of unconsciousness. But not this one. He’d thrown down the glove and she’d kicked it out of the arena. She hadn’t changed one bit in eight years. Still as uptight and brilliant and beautiful as ever. Her hands were still ringless. Her mouth was still that combination of innocence and carnality that could drive a man mad.
This was going to be one conference where nobody was sleeping.
Unless it was together.
FOR CATE,THE INSCRIPTION read. May you find your buried treasure someday. Daniel.
Cate tossed the book on the nightstand in her room, where its impact made the clock radio jump.
Just what the hell was that supposed to mean? Was it some sort of competitive gibe about the fact that she spent more time in the classroom than the field? Or was it more personal?
“As if you’d know what any women’s treasure is, you slinking coyote.” Her glare should have burned the cover right off the wretched book, but it just sat there, a sepia map of the “here be dragons” variety behind his name, which was displayed in at least thirty-point font. Above the title, as if he were somebody famous.
She grabbed the book and shoved it in the drawer of the nightstand.
Her nighttime routine of shower, moisturizer and hair brushing calmed her a little. Her body clock was set three hours ahead, so she was definitely ready to climb under the puffy duvet and shut her brain off for a few hours.
Tomorrow she’d figure out how to get a copy of the wretched book signed to Anne without actually having to see its author. Maybe the conference chair could arrange it.
She’d just glanced at the clock radio and noted that it was one in the morning her time, when a soft knock came at the door.
Who on earth…?
It had to be one of the staff, coming to see if she needed anything. At dinner she had recognized one or two people by name, and a few more by reputation, but none of them were on the kind of footing that would allow them to come visiting this late in the evening.
Ah well. She could use an iron for her outfit for tomorrow. She swung the door open and took a breath to ask for it.
The breath froze in her throat.
“Can I borrow some toothpaste?” Daniel Burke said with an infuriating, I’m-so-sexy grin.
4
“NO.” CATE TRIED TO SLAM the door, but Daniel jammed his foot in the opening before she could.
“Come on, Cate.” The laughter he couldn’t keep out of his voice made her face tighten up, as though she wanted to grab the door and bash it into his foot as hard as she could.
“Sorry, you have the wrong person. The name is Anne.”
“All right, so it was a bad joke. I apologize. Come on, let me in.”
“What for?”
He winced at the implication that there was nothing left between them to do, say or even think about. “I just wanted to say hello. Catch up on what you’ve been doing. Which is going to be really hard out here in the hallway, whispering to you through the keyhole.”
“I don’t have a keyhole. I use a key card.”
He laughed. “I forgot how literal you are. Please, Cate. Just for a minute.”
The Cate Wells he’d known in Mexico would have been a terrible poker player. Her emotions were mirrored on a face so expressive she’d once accused him of reading her mind. Somehow in the past eight years she’d learned to school it, to paste on a calm mask that hid what she was really thinking. Now that mask slid into place and she released her death grip on the door handl
e.
“Great,” she said politely. “Let’s catch up.” She led the way into the room as though she were wearing designer shoes and a cocktail dress, not cotton pj’s and a pair of bunny slippers.
He resisted the urge to comment.
She offered him the chair in front of the desk and he pulled it out and straddled it backward. She perched on the end of the bed, her jammies and bunny slippers at odds with the woman he remembered. The one who hung on rocks over fathoms of air and laughed. The one who put in hours in the broiling sun and counted it time well spent when she triumphantly held up a potsherd, its white-and-ocher paint faded by the passing centuries.
The one he’d thought he might be in love with.
The one who had run away.
He shook away the memories and concentrated on the reality. “You’re looking well.” Even the sexless cotton pajamas couldn’t hide the fit, slender body underneath. He wondered if her skin was still as soft, and if she still favored skinny little midriff-baring tank tops with no bra when she was out in the field.
“That’s hardly relevant, Daniel.”
Visions of tank tops fizzled in his head. “You’re supposed to say ‘thank you, so are you.’ Then I say, ‘Nice paper on the feminine in that leopard cult,’ and you say, ‘Congratulations on hitting the Times list, I’m so proud of you,’ and I say—”
“I had no idea your book hit the Times list. I’m afraid I don’t pay much attention to that kind of thing.”
As putdowns went, that was about as devastating a delivery as he’d ever heard. He studied her for a moment.
“Somehow I’d hoped our reunion would be a little friendlier than this.”
“I didn’t come here for a reunion. I came here for the conference and to consult with you about something. And what do I find?” She stood and began to pace around the room. “I find a man who is so full of himself he expects every woman in the room to swoon, no matter how rudely he treats them. I find someone who happily hogs the spotlight, presenting science as though it’s some kind of entertaining reality show. And worst of all—” she took a breath “—I find someone who isn’t above hurting and insulting people from his past, who finds it amusing to poke fun at them, confident that no one knows what he’s talking about. Well, here’s a news flash, Daniel.” She marched over and stood squarely in front of him, her face flushed and her breath coming fast. “I knew you when you were nothing but a grubby undergrad who couldn’t tell a potsherd from a shark’s tooth and who, in fact, presented a lovely tooth to the class and proclaimed it was Anasazi pottery!”
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