Full Circle

Shannon Hollis

www.millsandboon.co.uk

SHANNON HOLLI S

got her first positive review at the age of eight, when her teacher shivered at a story she wrote about a ghost in a graveyard. She wrote her first book at thirteen and sent it off to a literary publisher, who probably took one look at the yellow typing paper and white correction fluid and deduced the age of the author. His remarks were consequently very kind, and gave her the courage to keep writing.

Twenty-five years, seven manuscripts and zillions of rejection letters later, Shannon sold her master’s thesis to Mills & Boon and fulfilled a lifelong dream.

After moving to California from Canada, Shannon started work in the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley. She fell in love with and married her boss, but while they were still newlyweds, the 1989 earthquake destroyed their house. During the construction of a new home, she learned what teamwork and communication really mean!

Shannon is now living her dream of being a writer, and freelance editing keeps her in touch with the fast-paced corporate life that sparks so many ideas. She loves to hear from readers. Send her e-mail at shannonhollis@att.net

Dear Reader,

Welcome to book five of THE WHITE STAR mini-series! I’m thrilled to be part of it, and hope you enjoy the next instalment, which features academic cate Wells and adventurer archaeologist Daniel Burke.

Theirs is a reunion story – an ever-popular plot. But why is it so popular? What is it about the “do-over” that fascinates us so? Is it the chance to revisit an old love and see what has changed – and what has not? Or is it the chance to remember what went wrong – and get it right this time? Because we all know that our first love may not be our true love. But when it is, as cate and Daniel discover, getting it right can cover anything from that first magical kiss…to… well, let’s find out!

Warmly,

Shannon Hollis

For my fellow writers in the San Francisco Area

and Vancouver Island chapters of Romance

Writers of America.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Carrie Alexander, Kristin Hardy,

Jeanie London and Lori Wilde – true

professionals and a pleasure to work with.

Thanks also to Dr David Andersen,

paleogeologist, who knew exactly

where I could find a plesiosaur.

1

THERE WAS NO SUCH THING as a dead man’s curse.

In the murky twilight of two hundred feet of silty water, Daniel Burke felt like arguing the point as he squinted through his mask, searching for the ribs of the sixteenth-century Basque galleon on the ocean floor.

This recovery expedition had been cursed with everything from bad organization to shoddy safety practices, and the fact that Daniel knew he was only here to give it some legitimacy with the inevitable press orgy didn’t help. He should have said no when the Society for the Preservation of Antiquities had approached him. He should have told them that water wasn’t his element—he belonged in the desert, where layers of sandstone and petrified ash yielded their secrets as reluctantly as a beautiful woman, where caves and hills whispered to him of long-lost civilizations.

But no. The Society had promised him enough money to fund his next trip to Asia Minor, and he, like any dope, had fallen for it.

If the Society’s information was correct, the master of the whaling ship had been the first European to set foot on the shores of the New World. Not Columbus. Not Cabot or Cartier. But a wily Basque captain who had seen the money that could be made out of whale oil from the dangerous waters off the Atlantic coast of Canada. Daniel had no idea how many trips the ship had made before those waters had claimed her, but the success of this expedition and maybe even his own reputation were waiting on the results.

Not to mention the kid’s father.

The reason he was down here on an emergency rescue mission.

Ian MacPherson was a nineteen-year-old archaeology student swabbing decks in exchange for the SPA’s exclusive right from the Canadian government to study the site. The fact that the kid’s father was a high-ranking Canadian cabinet minister was the reason the Society had its permit—and Ian. The dumb-ass had swiped some diving equipment and gone over the side alone this morning, and some fifteen minutes had passed before anyone had noticed. Daniel was going to haul him back aboard by the scruff of his neck and ship him back to his father on the chopper.

As soon as he found him.

“I got not’ing forty feet from the site.” The transmitter in Daniel’s ear clicked as Luc Pinchot reported in from his left.

“Moi non plus,” said the diver on his right.

“Another ten feet,” Daniel said. “He has to have gone in to look at the site. He’ll be here somewhere.”

“The currents ’ere are pretty mean,” Luc said. “’E could have been swep’ to de nort’.”

“One can only hope.” Daniel’s voice was grim. The little weasel was going to wish he’d been washed up on the Newfoundland rocks after Daniel got through with him. The untimely death of the cabinet minister’s son was not the kind of publicity he needed right now.

A freak current cleared the silt for a split second—just long enough for him to see a flash of yellow neoprene in the beam of his lamp. “Straight ahead, twenty feet,” he snapped. “Looks like our boy got himself into trouble.”

The three divers put a little steam on and silt boiled around them as they surrounded Ian the Idiot. Somehow he’d managed to get his right foot caught between two heavy timbers—and was held down like a ferret in a leg trap.

“AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?”

Jah-Redd Jones, former NBA basketball star, Oscar nominee, and now the latest king of the talk-show hosts, leaned forward and his studio audience took a collective breath in anticipation.

Daniel brushed at his jeans and work boots and gave a modest smile that hid the disgust that hadn’t quite faded, four months later.

“We worked his foot loose and got him up to the surface. But not before we discovered that the galleon had been used for more than just transporting whale oil.” He grinned at the camera, drawing out the suspense, milking the extra second for all it was worth. “I figure the captain was an opportunistic kind of guy—because when an English ship blundered across its path, probably blown off course by a storm, he took the opportunity to relieve it of some of its cargo. Which in this case happened to be cases of Flemish wine and about fifty gold guineas.”

The audience gasped and even Jah-Redd, pro that he was, sat back on the interviewer’s couch with a big goofy grin. “Daniel Burke, man, there’s a reason they call you ‘the real Indiana Jones.’ Folks, can’t you see this as a movie? Huh?”

The studio audience burst into applause, the women in the front row whistling and stamping as if Daniel were an exotic dancer and they wanted to tuck bills in his G-string.

Daniel masked a sigh and held the grin between his teeth. His reputation was what brought in the funding. The fact that it was more of a media creation than reality didn’t make it any less useful. Besides, there was a curvy woman in the front row and he’d bet a hundred bucks she’d be waiting at the street door when he left after his segment. While the audience clapped, he toyed with a few interesting possibilities.

“So tell me,” Jah-Redd said, leaning on his elbows and clasping his hands under his chin, “is it true that the Canadian government gave you the Order of Canada for saving Ian MacPherson’s life?”

“No.” Daniel brought his wandering thoughts back to business. “There was talk, but it’s hard to take a medal for doing what you’d do for any member of your crew.” And saving a kid from his own stupidity isn’t worth a medal. “The divers with me helped get him free, and that’s when we discovered the gold. It was in a strongbox directly under where Ian was trapped. His struggles to get free had disturbed the silt that covered it.”

Jah-Redd appealed to the audience. “Save a person’s life, find a buried treasure, all in a day’s work. How many people would like a job like that?” The audience applauded again.

“I’d like a man like that!” hollered the curvy woman, and Daniel mentally awarded himself a hundred bucks.

“Not married, huh?” Jah-Redd cocked a knowing eyebrow in Daniel’s direction. “Girlfriend, significant other, rows of willing concubines?”

Daniel had a flash of memory—a wide and sensuous mouth, long-lashed eyes, sun-streaked brown hair spread on red sandstone—and covered the mental lapse with a laugh.

“None of the above. Not too many women will tolerate a pot hunter, even when we clean up nice. We spend half the year in remote locations and the other half holed up in dark offices writing research papers about them. Not the best conditions to nurture a relationship, I’m afraid.”

“By pot hunter I take it you don’t mean the green leafy stuff.” The audience laughed along with its host. “How did you get started, er, pot hunting?”

“Did you ever dig holes in the backyard as a kid, hoping to get to Australia?”

Jones nodded. “Now I just take Qantas and let them do all the work.”

Daniel smiled while the audience cracked up. “Well, I just never stopped digging. After my folks were killed when I was six, I went to live with my godparents. I found a Native American artifact in their yard in the burbs when I was twelve, and I knew then I wanted to be an archaeologist. So I went to the University of Chicago, then did postgrad work at the University of New Mexico, specializing in the work of a particular Anasazi potter. From there I assisted in a couple of Central American digs, and that of course led to Argentina and—”

“The Temecula Treasure.”

“Right.”

On the screen above them, a clip began to play from the documentary PBS had done last year on his discovery of a trove of gold artifacts. Audience members who hadn’t seen it yet gasped. He couldn’t blame them. He’d done the same when he’d realized that, instead of finding pottery, he’d stumbled on a grave belonging to a much later civilization—one that believed the dead needed jewelry in the afterlife. Spectacular jewelry.

“Did you get to keep any of it?” Jah-Redd wanted to know.

Daniel shook his head. “It belongs to the Argentinian government, of course. We had six months to study it all before our permit expired and we turned everything over.”

But not before he’d published the second of two groundbreaking papers that had made his name in the academic world and clinched the funding that made his projects possible.

Beautiful funding. Nonacademic funding that took him all over the world and satisfied his itch to get his fingers into every stratum of soil this planet had to offer. That was his real passion. Discovery. It was the media that had latched on to a couple of lucky finds and branded him with this adventurer persona. After the Newsweek article, someone had even sent him a fedora and a leather whip, which had sent the archaeology department’s assistant into gales of laughter and made him the butt of half disgusted, half admiring jokes for months afterward. The other faculty members might gripe in private about his celebrity, but no one complained when it was grant-writing time and the money poured in.

Jah-Redd had returned to the subject of women, prompted, no doubt, by the screaming in the front row. “It’s hard to believe that a man like you—you’re what, twenty-eight? Thirty?—wouldn’t have someone important in his life, though,” his host said with mock gravity. On the screen, still shots of three actresses appeared. “Indiana Jones loved three women over the years of the movies. Which one would be most like your ideal? The tomboy adventurer with the broken heart, the blond bombshell or the seductress?”

Daniel laughed while the audience waited, the expectant silence punctuated by blatant come-ons and even a boob flash—mercifully unseen by the studio cameras—from the front row.

Again, her face drifted through his mind’s eye, laughing down at him from some impossible rock outcropping while she trusted her life to bits of metal jammed in where metal was never meant to go.

“I’d have to say my ideal woman would have the brains and adventurous spirit of Marion Ravenwood, the loyalty of Short Round, and the sexual curiosity of Dr. Elsa Schneider. But of course, a woman like that already exists—I believe you snapped her up for yourself, Jah-Redd.”

The audience laughed and applauded, and while Jones announced they were cutting to commercial, Daniel sat motionless while memory attacked him.

Because a woman like that did exist.

And he’d chased her out of his life long ago.

2

“SEXUAL CURIOSITY, my aunt Fanny!”

Cate Wells snapped off the TV with a vicious stab of her thumb and threw the remote—not against the wall, because that would damage it—but into the corner of the couch, where it bounced off a pillow and onto the floor.

Fuming, she rammed her feet into slippers shaped like the man-eating bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and stalked into her bedroom. The nerve of that man! He was everywhere she looked these days—on The Jah-Redd Jones Show, in the papers, even in the Vandenberg University bookstore, where the obnoxious book he was so enthusiastically promoting on talk shows was stacked ten deep on a front-table display.

As if anybody but a gullible public could mistake him for a serious scholar and field researcher when the wretched thing was called Lost Treasures of the World: Adventures in Archaeology.

How utterly lame.

As lame as those women in the studio audience, screaming and drooling like a lot of hormone-ridden teenagers. Most of them were old enough to be his mother. Granted, the cheekbones and the iron planes of his jaw hadn’t changed in the eight years since she’d seen him last. And the obliging close-ups of the camera had shown eyes that were as dark and shuttered as they’d ever been. But the boy she’d fallen for on the short southern nights of the dig in Mexico where they’d worked together for one enchanted summer was gone forever. That boy had shared her love of discovery—whether it was the secrets hidden by layers of soil and rock, or the secrets hidden by diffidence and sexual uncertainty.

Sexual curiosity, indeed!

Thank heavens she’d never told a soul about their aborted relationship—not even her closest girlfriends or her parents in San Diego. He had been a secret she was prepared to take to her grave. What a pity he hadn’t been quite so discreet.

Cate pulled the five-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheet up to her chin and willed herself to go to sleep. She had appointments in the morning and a paper to proof that was guaranteed to knock the socks off the tenure committee, and she needed a clear head.

But the sight of Daniel, older but just as charismatic and sexy in his jeans and boots, disturbed her dreams as thoroughly as he’d disturbed her peace of mind—and, it must be confessed, her body. Her brain, usually so dependable, decided to take her on a trip down memory lane. The dig site, baking under the relentless Mexican sun, where archaeology students from universities across the country had been cycled in and out for brute labor disguised as summer credit. A moon the size of a gold doubloon lighting Daniel’s face as he’d leaned in, as dirty and sweaty as she was, for that first kiss. That last night, when they’d slipped off to find a cool cave to lay their sleeping bags in, where she’d panicked at the very last moment and run, humiliating herself and no doubt earning his undying contempt.

But oh, those days between the first kiss and the cave…those days had been filled with her first experience of intense sexual longing. He had been all she’d been able to think about—her body becoming a kind of tuning fork with a single frequency: Daniel Burke. Lying here in the dark of her bedroom, her unsatisfied lust triggered dreams of him. A stealthy hand cupping her derriere as the group of students stood listening to a field lecture. A hard thigh pressing hers as they ate together in camp. Kisses that practically blew the top off her head as they abandoned the others and sneaked off behind rock outcroppings to explore each other in private.

At four in the morning, Cate woke to find herself wet and aching, staring into the dark.

She’d followed his career—it was pretty hard to avoid it, with Newsweek and the American Journal of Archaeology doing their very best to give his exploits legitimacy. It was only at moments like this, in the deepest dark, when her defenses were down and she was unable to keep the lid of professional disdain on her natural honesty, that she could admit how much it had hurt when no call or letter had ever come. It wasn’t as though she was hard to find. All the faculty at Vandenberg were listed on the Web site, and she was in the Queens phone directory. When she’d made associate professor at Columbia and then taken the position at Vandenberg shortly afterward, the papers had made a nice little fuss about nabbing such a coveted job out from under hundreds of candidates when she was so young.

No, it was clear that when Daniel had told Jah-Redd about wanting someone who was loyal and who had sexual curiosity, he had been making a dig at her.

Bastard. She would absolutely not waste another thought on him. Her body could just calm down. Instead of masturbating and giving him control of her body again, she would think about her paper. That would do the trick.

She would think about her career plan, which was laid out in nice, achievable steps where she did the right things and talked with the right people, and success was a natural outgrowth of a good strategy. Columbia, to start. Then the move to Vandenberg, a private university that had its quirks but whose reputation was stellar. Tenure by the age of thirty. After that, perhaps a book of her own. A serious, scholarly work, unlike that of some people she could name.

Success. The right career path, a book, a reputation people would give their eyeteeth for. That was what was important here, not memories of the past, no matter how disturbing.

Despite big helpings of positive visualization, it was only thanks to an extra-large latte (no whip) that she was able to get herself to the gym, then to the subway and onto the campus a couple of hours later. The walk across the quad to the Horn Building normally lifted her spirits, especially on an early summer day like this, when the sun warmed the granite dome of the Memorial Library to terra-cotta and students sat on the amphitheater-like plaza steps like flocks of birds sunning themselves. Darn Daniel anyway. He’d managed to take even that small pleasure from her.

Which wasn’t the most mature and logical attitude to take, but she wasn’t feeling mature or logical this morning, thank you very much.

In her tiny but carefully decorated office, Cate dumped the day’s mail on her desk, put her purse in the bottom left drawer, and extracted the paper with its sticky tabs and red corrections from her briefcase. A glance at the calendar told her she had thirty minutes before her first appointment, a woman named Morgan Shaw who wanted to talk about an artifact but who would not tell Anne Walters, the department administrative assistant, a thing more.

Cate gave a mental shrug. Every now and again she got one of these—someone who dug up an arrowhead and figured they’d discovered a Native American burial site, or someone who found something in Uncle Lester’s attic that had to be an ancient treasure. She’d become quite skilled at letting people down gently.

She turned her attention to the mail. Circulars, notices, memorandums from the department head, who knew better than to kill trees by sending memos in hard copy, but insisted on doing so to make himself feel he’d accomplished something. Cate sighed and picked up a glossy brochure giving her final notice of a conference in Big Sur, California.

Then a name caught her eye.

Keynote speaker and featured presenter: Daniel Burke, “the real Indiana Jones.” Dr. Burke will present the keynote speech at Saturday’s luncheon and will also present his latest paper, Silent Voices: Tracing the Trade Routes through Pre-Columbian Pottery, on Friday night. After the presentation, Dr. Burke will sign his new book, an event that will be open to the public.

“Be still my heart.” Bad enough his face invaded her living room. Worse that it had inhabited her dreams. But to barge uninvited into her office, her citadel where only she was in control—that was just too much.

Cate aimed the brochure at the trash can and fired it with a flick of her wrist, where it landed with a swish amid a lot of other things that she didn’t need and no longer cared about.

The digital clock on her desk flipped from 9:29 to 9:30 and Anne Walters leaned in the door. “Dr. Wells? Ms. Shaw is here for her appointment.”

Cate turned her back on the trash can and its obnoxious contents. “Thanks, Anne. Send her in.”

“I’m going to run out for another coffee. Want one?”

Anne knew the location of every espresso bar in a ten-block radius. “You are a goddess. Extra-large, no whip.”

“Back in fifteen.”

Morgan Shaw, tall, blond and professional, came in with a confident stride and a hand outstretched in greeting. When Cate shook it, she got the impression of self-assurance mixed with a whole lot of anticipation. Whatever the woman had to show her, it meant a lot to her.

Ms. Shaw shook back her mane of hair and smiled. “Dr. Wells, thank you for seeing me.”

Cate waved her into the guest chair in front of her desk and settled herself in her own. “Did Anne offer you something to drink?”

“Yes, she did, thanks.”

“No trouble finding us?”

“Not at all. I got very good directions from my sister, Cassandra. I’d like to thank you personally for rescuing her a few months ago.”

Cate grinned with delight. Earlier in the year she had escaped the city and had been four-wheeling through the woods upstate, on her way back from her therapy cliff—the one she climbed when she really needed to clear her head and find her center again. She’d offered a lift to a couple of stranded hikers, and had stayed in touch ever since. “Cass is your sister? Then I’m doubly pleased to meet you. I understand you have an artifact that you wanted to show me,” she prompted. “How did you come by it?”

Morgan leaned over and pulled her leather tote into her lap. “I have an antique shop in Fairfield, Connecticut. I found this in a late-Victorian dresser that was part of the stock I bought along with the shop.” She opened a cardboard container much like the ones the post office used, and extracted a wooden box. “I was hoping you could tell me a little about it.”

Cate pulled the box closer. This was no relic from Uncle Lester’s attic. Weighing no more than her low-profile laptop, the box was so ornately carved that there was no room for a single extra figure on its surface. She tried to separate the images to discover some meaning or clue as to its provenance, but the figures merged into one another, almost seeming to lose themselves before she could fix them in place. There were flowers, a sun and a hawk, what looked like a tree and the wavy lines that in most cultures denoted water. There were animals—a hippo, a lion—and plants. A lotus. Reeds, maybe. There were musical instruments—a lyre, or was it a harp? A flute—or was it a reed next to a crocodile? And among the images were symbols, regular and uniform enough to indicate written language.

“This is amazing.” When Morgan nodded, Cate realized she’d spoken aloud.

“I can’t even tell what kind of wood it is, much less figure out what the carvings mean,” Morgan said. “I thought maybe cherry? Walnut? Not ebony, because it’s kind of reddish-brown.”

“That much I do recognize.” Cate turned the box over to examine its underside. She caught a faint whiff of some kind of spice. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s bubinga, an extremely hard and durable wood from Africa. The person who carved it was obviously a very skilled craftsman.”

“Can you tell how old it is?”

“Other than ‘old’?” Cate, with the box at eye level, smiled over the top of it at her visitor. “I can’t be sure, but at a guess I’d say more than two thousand years. From some of the cuts in the curved lines, here, I’d say they used a hand awl, which might even put it at three thousand years.”

Daniel would know.

Yes, but the likelihood of Daniel seeing this box was nil, wasn’t it?

She lowered the box and ran her fingers along a row of what looked like monkey heads. Or maybe they were irises. The more she looked, the harder it was to tell. “How does it open?”

Morgan lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I was hoping you could tell me. There’s a compartment inside, I know that much, because I ran it through the security check at the train station on the way here and peeked at the monitor. But I have no idea if it contains anything, or how it’s opened.”

Lost Treasures of the World, whispered that treacherous voice in her head. Daniel might have some information.

Cate stifled the voice and glanced at Morgan. “Do you mind if I take some photographs? I could show the pictures to one or two of my colleagues and they might be able to identify the culture that produced these carvings.”

Morgan shook her head. “Not at all.”

Cate kept her field camera in the office just for moments like these. She put in a fresh roll of high-resolution film and tore the top sheet off her desk blotter to make a clean white surface. A ruler next to the box gave perspective. Then she carefully photographed each side in close-up, at midrange and from a couple of feet away, just as she’d been taught all those years ago in Mexico.

“We can learn as much from the matrix in which a piece of pottery is embedded as we can from the potsherd itself.” The voice of their supervising prof, Dr. Andersen, sounded in her memory. “Your photographs should include this information. It could be important.”

Cate was surprised she remembered that much—the day they’d excavated the midden and found the fragments of pottery was the day Daniel Burke had arrived. Cate’s memory of anything but him after that point had been burned away by the force of their attraction. There was a thesis for you—The Passionate Flame: Biological Urges and the Death of Brain Cells.

“—long it might take?”

Cate blinked and resisted the urge to roll her eyes at herself. Damn that Daniel Burke anyway. Now she looked like an airhead.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” She put the camera back in its case and ran a slow hand over the surface of the box. She was not normally given to touching things. Her colleague Julia was always doing that, though—rubbing fabric between her fingers, stroking passing dogs in Central Park. Now Cate felt the same urge to touch this box. Something about the carvings invited you to follow them with your fingers, to touch them as though they were braille and had a message for you.

“I was just wondering how long it might take to get an opinion from your colleague,” Morgan said, doing a good job of disguising her eagerness. But Cate knew that feeling—that excitement when you were this close to finding an answer that had eluded you. Some said that curiosity killed the cat. But curiosity was an archaeologist’s best friend.

“I’m not sure,” Cate hedged. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the glossy brochure advertising the conference, facedown in the trash.

Daniel might help.

No. No way. Not to satisfy her own curiosity, not to help out Ms. Morgan Shaw, would she get on a plane and fly across the country to see Daniel Burke strutting around Big Sur as though he were God’s gift to archaeology and women.

“A couple of weeks? A month?” Morgan persisted.

What are you afraid of?

Nothing. The thought was ludicrous.

So he had a rep for flamboyance. So he’d been on Jah-Redd last night. The fact remained that he was an authority on ancient symbology, and if anyone would know about this box, it would be him. Besides, she hadn’t taken in a conference since that one in D.C. last year. And she hadn’t seen the ocean since the Jurassic period—or at least it seemed that way.

Think of it. Big breakers crashing on the beach. Someone else doing the cooking. Late-night conversations with experts from all over the world, in fields as diverse as geology, history and archaeology.

The beach. No walls. No taxis honking and sirens screaming. Nothing but the vast Pacific, stretching out into infinity, and seagulls telling you about it as they wheeled overhead.

“A couple of weeks,” she said suddenly, handing the box back to Morgan Shaw, who tucked it carefully into its container. “I’m considering a conference next weekend. If I go, I would show these photographs to an archaeologist there.”

A smile as broad and warm as the California sun broke across the other woman’s face. “I’d love it if you could help. I don’t know what it is about this box. It’s not an obsession—it’s more like an itch that I just have to scratch, you know?”

Cate did know.

Because Daniel Burke had been the itch she’d been longing to scratch for the last eight years.

3

“FEEL LIKE HAVING A DRINK with me tonight before you head home?”

There was a pause while Cate imagined Julia Covington checking her watch and raising her eyebrows. “Cate, it’s ten in the morning and already you’re scheduling drinks?”

“I feel the need.” Thinking about a nice, cold glass of chardonnay was better than thinking about Daniel Burke. “So, can you? Or do you have plans already with Alex?”

“Just dinner, but we don’t eat till late. The usual place at six?”

“I’ll be there,” Cate promised with a little more fervency than strictly necessary.

Jake’s was a real Irish pub just down the street from the Museum of Antiquities, where Julia was a curator. You could get anything from a pint of Guinness to a good French champagne—or a California chardonnay, if that happened to be on your mind. Plus they served shrimp wontons that were about as far from Ireland as you could get, but that Cate adored.

The waiter put a big plate of them between Cate and Julia, and Cate dipped one in rice vinegar, savoring the tartness against the sweet shrimp on her tongue.

“I’ve been waiting for this all day,” she sighed.

“I’ve been waiting to find out what the emergency is.” Julia sipped her cabernet and eyed her friend with that narrowed gaze that meant Cate hadn’t fooled her one bit. “Either something happened at the department or you’ve got man trouble.”

Man, she was good. “Both.”

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 meany BS. You justs hoot 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 handle.

“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!”

Oh, God. The embarrassment of that moment flooded his memory—the snorting laughter of the supervising professor, the derision of the students for days afterward, and Cate’s red face as she suffered through the moment on his behalf.

Back then, she had cared. Or so he’d thought.

“Do you suppose anybody remembers that?” he asked softly. And more important, did she remember what had happened afterward?

Later, when dinner was over and people were wandering back to their tents to moan over the no-alcohol rule, he had slipped away to the cliffs and found her sitting under a piñon pine, her back to the sandstone and her feet hanging over a hundred-foot cliff as if it were the deck of a swimming pool.

That night, the moon had witnessed their first kiss.

She was looking at him as though trying to see under the surface of his skin. “I doubt it,” she said at last. “They’ve probably all bought your book so they can brag about how they knew you when.”

“Except you.”

“I bought it. Tonight. For my friend Anne. And you made a mistake in the inscription.”

No, he hadn’t. “I’ll give you another copy for your friend and sign it properly this time.” He stood and returned the chair to its place in front of the desk. “I was being an ass. Forgive me?”

Every time he moved, she made sure the distance between them stayed the same. He wondered what she’d do if he crowded her up against the sliding glass door. Her room was on the second floor of the main lodge, and he had no doubt that she’d probably rappel over the balcony, bunny slippers and all, if he tried it.

Instead of answering his question, she asked one of her own. “Who are you now, really, Daniel?”

He took refuge in flippancy. “The ‘real Indiana Jones,’ according to Newsweek.”

“Yes, I read that, too. But I’m more interested in what you think, not what Newsweek thinks.”

“I could ask you the same question. I could ask why a successful, attractive associate prof is still single. I could ask why you prefer pajamas to, say, Victoria’s Secret. And I could ask what I really want to know, which is why do your bunny slippers have teeth?”

Waggling a foot, she pretended to admire one slipper the way a woman admires a huge diamond ring. “They’re a feminist reaction to male control of the sexual arena commonly known as the bedroom.”

He stepped back, alarmed, and for the first time, her eyes warmed and her face lit with a grin. “You’re not a Monty Python fan, I take it.”

He shook his head. “You know me. The Webslinger’s my man. Always has been.”

“Some day I’ll explain it to you.”

“How about tomorrow? Over breakfast, say? We can talk about why you like teeth and I like crime fighters.”

“I’m going for a run first thing.”

“I’ll wait. Some geology guy from San Jose State is talking about the mammoth bones he discovered in a riverbed. Not really my thing, so breakfast together would be a good alternative.”

“Let’s see how it works out. Good night, Daniel.”

And somehow—he wasn’t sure how—he found himself out in the hallway without even a kiss, while the door closed quietly between them.

In the morning, Cate proved just as elusive. When she didn’t answer his seven o’clock knock at the door and she wasn’t in the common room swilling strong coffee with a lot of milk—was that still her drug of choice?—he decided to mosey on down to the beach. True, she could have decided that a run under the trees, where the road in to the conference center ran through five miles of thick Monterey pine and live oak, was a good idea, but he doubted it. The woman he remembered would have headed to where there was space and light. In the absence of hundred-foot cliffs, he’d bet she was already a mile down the beach.

He’d have lost his bet, as it turned out. Big Sur was famous for plunging cliffs and crashing breakers, and the beach below the conference center was about fifty yards long and mostly submerged under high tide. A thin ribbon of sand was still left at the base of the cliffs, though. Enough to give a woman access to—aha.

Cate Wells sat on a ledge about forty feet up, her legs dangling in empty space in exactly the way he remembered. The ledge wasn’t very wide, but she made it look as though she were draped on a chaise longue poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

With a grin, he parked himself on a grassy patch at the side of the path down to the cove, and watched her. Did she do this at home in NewYork? Did she have days when she thought, Gee, I’d like some air—I think I’ll go climb out on one of the Woolworth building’s windowsills. Or did she do what normal people did, and go find a climbing wall at the nearest sporting-goods store? More important, did she have a climbing buddy who partnered her? And just who might that be? Some tight-assed stockbroker who thought everything revolved around him? Who only went out on windowsills when the market dipped?

There must be a man in her life somewhere. A woman like Cate wouldn’t be alone. But if there was, how come he wasn’t with her? Was he some kind of stay-at-home guy who did all her cooking and let her boss him around in bed?

A rock dug into his hip and Daniel got to his feet, feeling a little less cheerful than he had a few minutes ago. The movement attracted her attention. Cate’s gaze swung from the pale horizon to him, and he lifted one hand in a wave. She waved back, turned to the side and began climbing down.

Watching Cate descend a cliff without equipment was like being six again and watching the trapeze artists at the circus. He knew she was capable. He knew it wasn’t a vertical slope and she had plenty of handholds. But still, he didn’t really breathe properly until she’d dropped lightly to the sand and begun the walk up to where he stood.

“Good morning.” She loped up the slope and joined him where he once again lounged on the grassy patch overlooking the sea.

“I thought I’d find you down here,” he said, “though I was thinking beach, not cliff. Have a seat.”

“Couldn’t resist.” She flopped down next to him. “I feel as though I’ve been cooped up in my office for months.”

“The academic year is almost over. Got any fieldwork scheduled for the summer?”

She refashioned her ponytail and stretched out those long legs. The way she leaned back on both hands thrust her small breasts into prominence. She was a line of lean strength mixed with an elusive sense of vulnerability that made him want to pull her into his arms and find out what was wrong.

For which she’d probably send him over the cliff.

“I’ve been working pretty hard,” she said. “I was asked to assist on a site in New Mexico, but a friend of mine—Anne—” she shot him a sidelong glance “—wants to do a literary tour of England and asked if I’d be interested. I need to make up my mind soon.”

“That sounds like a snooze. Here I thought you’d be dragging your boyfriend up El Capitan or something.” The granite dome in Yosemite National Park was a magnet for rock climbers. He’d heard you had to schedule your climb the way golfers had to schedule their tee times.

“I’m between those at the moment.” Her tone was calm as she looked out over the ocean instead of at him, but her jaw was tight. “Besides, I’ve already done El Cap.”

“I’m sure you have. Not to mention every other rock face on this continent. You’re going to have to widen your range to Europe at this rate.”

With a smile, she said, “Maybe. I wonder if I can find Anne some literary sites in Switzerland.”

“So what is it about climbing, anyway? Do you just like being on top?”

Her expression didn’t change, but in the clear morning light it was hard to miss the hot color washing into her cheeks. “Does that threaten you?” she asked.

“A woman on top? Not a bit. I’m a big fan of that, in fact.”

“I didn’t know rock climbing interested you so much.”

He grinned, that patented you-slay-me grin that studio audiences ate up. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about rocks.”

This time she looked at him full in the face. “If you’re trying to embarrass me by making sexual innuendos, it isn’t working.”

“Liar. Who’s blushing? Not me.”

“I can’t help my physiological reactions.”

“I love it when you talk geek, Cate.”

Abruptly, she got up and dusted off the back of her khaki shorts. “Clearly it’s impossible to have a conversation with you that doesn’t revolve around your two favorite subjects—yourself and sex. It probably works very well with your groupies but I need a little more mental stimulation.”

She was already five strides away by the time he got up, and he had to jog to catch her.

“Cate.” He swung her around by one arm. “Hey. Don’t go.”

“I want a cup of coffee.” She pulled away and kept walking.

“Let me buy you one.”

“I don’t think so, Daniel.”

“Come on. You can’t avoid me all conference.”

“I can do a fine impression of it.” Her pace didn’t slow one bit. They were leaving the cut through which the river ran and would soon be on the conference center’s lawn.

“What about that consultation you wanted?”

That got her. She slowed. “Right. The photographs.”

“We can grab some breakfast and take it up to your room, if you want.”

“I don’t think that’s—”

“We need to be able to talk freely.” He threw down his trump card. “Don’t forget we’re surrounded. If these photos are something really extraordinary, we don’t want to give anyone the jump on it, so to speak, by overhearing our discussions.”

Despite her reluctance, he could see her acknowledge the truth of that. “All right. Breakfast at my place.”

Internally, he was grinning, though it didn’t show on his face. “Race you to the coffee,” was all he said.

He let her win.

For now.

5

I’LL HAVE MY COFFEE, SHOW HIM the photos, and get out of here. I can be back in NewYork in time for The Late Show.

It had been a mistake to come to the conference. Cate realized that now, standing in the breakfast line in front of tables heaped with freshly cut strawberries, melon and orange, along with trays of steaming eggs and plates artistically arranged with bagels and pastries. She chose fruit, carbs and protein with a careful eye to the food pyramid, and filled her tall travel mug with coffee and cream. That part wasn’t on the food pyramid, but we were talking the bare necessities for survival, here.

Daniel took two of everything. How he hung on to that narrow-waisted frame feeding it things like that was a mystery.

Back in her room, she cleared off the round worktable, pulled up two chairs and waved him into one.

“Isn’t this cozy.” Fruit, eggs, sausage and biscuits disappeared with methodical rapidity. He glanced up. “Aren’t you eating?”

“Yes, of course.” It had been a long time since she’d seen a man eat with such gusto. Did he do everything that way—charge into it with such focus and concentration? Maybe that was why he was so good at what he did. Maybe people like her stayed in the office and wrote the papers and people like him went out into the field and gave them something to write about.

He gave the magazines something to write about, too. One of the things he also enjoyed with gusto was women, and as much as she’d determined not to think about it, it was hard not to with him right here in the room. He had that quality that made female heads turn. It wasn’t the dark eyes, or the sensual mouth or the stubbled jaw. It wasn’t the way his hair fell on his forehead or the long-fingered hands holding knife and fork.

It was the way they all went together, creating a whole that was much more than the sum of its parts. She’d sensed that quality in him years ago—that sexual quality, that magnetic thing that tugged a woman deep inside and said, “Yum. Must have that for mate.”

Maybe that was why she’d run. She’d been as green as a bean at a lot of things—sex, life, men, you name it. Maybe some instinct deep inside had perceived that she’d be engulfed in him and lose a self that wasn’t completely formed yet, and that had prodded her out of the cavern and out of his life.

Was it that same instinct that was telling her now she’d better pack her bags—or else?

Or else what, exactly?

“So tell me what I’m going to be looking at,” he suggested as he finished the last of his breakfast. He took their empty plates and set them outside in the hall, though technically this wasn’t a hotel and she had every reason to believe the staff wouldn’t be impressed.

But then, he’d probably charmed the support hose right off the staff and there was an entire fleet of them waiting in the nearest linen closet to take his dishes away.

She took a fortifying slug of coffee and pulled the manila envelope out of her briefcase. “A woman named Morgan Shaw came to my office last week to ask if I could tell her anything about a wooden box she’d found in her antique shop in Connecticut. The only thing I could say for sure was that it was made of bubinga and it was possible the carvings are contemporary with Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty.”

He spread the photos on the table and leaned on his elbows, studying them.

“As you know,” she went on a little diffidently, “a number of desert cultures were engulfed by Egypt’s expansion during that period. I wondered if this was one of them.”

For five silent minutes he turned the force of his concentration on the eight-by-ten color photographs, looking from one to the other, putting one or two side by side, then separating them and pairing different ones.

Finally he sat back and reached for his coffee cup without looking at it, his gaze fixed on the pictures.

“Wow,” he said.

“Photos don’t do it justice,” she offered. “When you actually hold the box, you see just how the carved images re-form and flow into one another. Every angle gives you a different perspective. It’s eerie.”

“What’s inside?”

“That’s just it. There doesn’t seem to be a way to open it. But Morgan says there’s a compartment—she ran it through an X-ray machine.”

“If there’s a compartment, there must be a key.” He glanced up. “You know how tricky the Egyptians were with secret entrances and doors in their pyramids and gravesites. It was a common practice that could have been part of this culture, too, though clearly it’s not Egyptian.”

“Any guesses as to who might have made it?”

“The symbology has elements of Egyptian art, so I’m thinking there might have been a bit of culture bleed before they were taken over completely. Which would mean a neighboring kingdom, and given the difficulty of agriculture deep in the desert away from the Nile, those are limited to the Manassites and the El Gibi.”

“The Manassite symbology doesn’t include rivers or river animals, like this crocodile.” She pointed to a figure on the photo closest to her. “They were a herd-based culture.”

“That leaves the El Gibi, about which we know hardly anything. Not even what they really called themselves. Kind of like the Navajo naming the Anasazi.”

Cate nodded. “I’m sure they didn’t call themselves the Old Ones.” She picked up a photo and Daniel took the one beneath it, a shot of the box’s lid. “But what I’d like to know most is—”

“Cate.”

“What?” She looked up.

“Look at this.”

Obediently, she looked at the shot of the top of the box. There was a bird and some river symbols and the harp she’d seen before when—

Wait a minute.

“They lock together,” she said. “Like those Escher drawings, only more complicated.”

“Look at the edges. They form the shape of a star.” His tanned finger traced the outline, an area about the size of a fifty-cent piece. “And the middle is hollow. Or maybe, given the cultural bleed, it’s a Ra symbol.”

Cate remembered running her fingers along the channels made by that awl all those centuries ago. Someone had held the awl with strong, powerful hands. Hands like Daniel’s.

No, no. Do not think about that.

“Who do you think the artist was?” She didn’t expect him to have an answer, but talking about the box kept her focused on work instead of…other things.

“Impossible to say.” He tapped the photos together and handed them to her. “But he—or she—had an unusual talent. And the person was no stranger to geometry, the way those pictograms fit together to form the star. So, probably an educated person. More than that, I couldn’t tell you.”

She slid the photos back into their envelope and replaced it in her briefcase. “Thanks for the help, Daniel. It’s not much to go on, but at least it’s something to give Morgan. She was pretty passionate about it.”

“You know antique people. They get that way.”

With a smile, she agreed. “At least she wasn’t the usual crackpot that shows up on my doorstep with some wonderful find that turns out to be a fifty-year-old fake.”

“Don’t you hate that?” He pushed his chair back and stretched, the fabric of his shirt pulling taut over compact abs and the kind of chest that a woman could fall on in complete bliss. “With my work at the digs, I get the ones who are convinced the clay pot somebody’s kid made in the forties is an example of primitive art.”

“Pre-Columbian, at that.”

“At least. If not Precambrian.”

To her surprise, Cate found herself laughing along with him.

“I can’t blame people, though,” he said thoughtfully after a moment. “Isn’t buried treasure a fantasy we have as kids? Look at me. I’ve never lost that fascination.”

“I supposed I haven’t, either,” she confessed.

“That’s why I wrote what I did when I signed your book,” he said quietly. “Some things haven’t changed.”

Cate closed her briefcase and set it in the closet, taking her time about sliding the door shut. “A lot of things have,” she said. “Most things, in fact.”

“Have they?” His gaze changed from professional to speculative with one lazy blink. “You’re more beautiful. You didn’t have cheekbones like that at twenty. And there’s more confidence in your eyes. Makes me wonder if it’s all those publications that put it there, or some adoring stockbroker.”

Cate felt the hot blood seething under her skin. Was it from irritation at his personal remarks, or something darker and more dangerous? Was he flirting with her? And if he was, how was she going to respond?

She hovered in the middle of the room, uncertain whether to take her seat opposite him at the little table, where he’d probably think she was dying for more personal observations, or to remain standing in the middle of the room, where maybe he’d take a hint and find a lecture to go to.

“Cate.” His eyes laughed at her, though his face remained serious. “Come and sit down. We were going to catch up, remember?”

She couldn’t sit down. She couldn’t trust herself not to reach out and stroke his hand, or run her fingers up his sleeve. That same sexual magnetism that had enthralled her eight years ago hadn’t lost any of its potency, and if she got too close she just might lose it and become another one of his…what was that word Anne had coined? Oh yes—archaeologroupies.

With a mental shudder, Cate forced herself to ignore the siren call of his pheromones and be sensible.

“I’m afraid not, Daniel,” she said as steadily as she could. “The ten o’clock seminar starts in a few minutes and I don’t want to miss it.”

“You’re not going to listen to old Andy Hogbreath? How much more do you need to know about fossils?”

Was that who the ten o’clock speaker was? “Dr. Hoogbeck is highly respected in his field,” she said stiffly. “And I happen to be interested in the fossil beds I find when I’m excavating.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged, then shot her a wicked glance. “But when you feel like thinking about any other kind of bed, fossil or not, you know where to find me.”

She didn’t bother to reply as, laughing, he let himself out. She didn’t need to. Because her scarlet face had given everything away.

DANIEL HAD NO INTENTION of taking in Dr. Hoogbeck’s seminar, or of returning yet another persistent call from a think tank in New Mexico, or even of returning to his cottage to tackle some of the logistics for the Asia Minor expedition. Instead, he stopped by the dining room to refill his mug of coffee and took an unhurried stroll down the nearest walking trail. It led through a stand of live oaks, their holly-like leaves spiky and rustling above him. Long native grasses nodded on either side, and a small stand of redwoods gave a bit of dark contrast at the bottom of the slope.

Daniel couldn’t remember the last time he’d been completely alone out in the woods. You’d think that at this point in his career, he could say at any time, “Hey, all you hangers-on, get outta here,” and he’d have some peace. But no. The problem was, no one was hanging on. His students, his fellow academics, his crews—even Stacy Mills, his publicist—all of them had a job to do. He was like the well at which they all drew, to use a simile from the ancient world where his brain spent half its time. He provided the water, and they let their jars down, filled them and then took off to do what they needed to do.

It was bloody exhausting is what it was.

And here was Cate Wells, who couldn’t wait to see the backside of him going out the door. Never let it be said she wanted to fill her jar at his expense—no, she had her own well, thank you very much, and she was quite happy standing in front of it so nobody else could come near.

Or was she?

He’d thrown out those little innuendos on purpose. A woman who was comfortable with her sexuality would have taken him on and tossed them back—but Cate hadn’t. She’d been exactly the same way in Mexico. She hadn’t had the same experience that he’d found most women had by their sophomore year. In fact, the first time he’d kissed her, he’d wondered if it was her first time, period. It hadn’t been—that much she’d confessed in one of their late-night conversations on the cliff—but it hadn’t been the kiss of a woman who enjoyed doing the wild thing at every chance she got, either.

Far from it.

Had things changed? Except for a very interesting ring he’d swear was Georgian on the right fourth finger, she wore nothing on her hands. And that sense of self-awareness, of the knowledge that she was both desirable and desired, that some women wore like an ermine robe when they were committed in a loving relationship—well, that didn’t seem to be there, either.

But who was he kidding? He was used to reading soil matrices. The women he came into contact with were usually totally up-front and wide open about what they wanted. There was none of the reserve and mystery that was so intriguing in Cate. That reserve had challenged him back when and it was challenging him now. It was the same way with a new site. Just the presence of ancient clay walls with the wind whistling through them, silently keeping their secrets, drove him mad until he could gently tease their stories out of them.

He’d only been half kidding about the beds when he’d left her room. Now he wasn’t so sure he was kidding at all. The truth was he’d never gotten over Cate. Had never forgotten that last night, in the cave.

So yeah, she’d run out on him, taking her secrets with her. But that was then.

This, he thought, as he turned back up the path, away from the river he could hear behind the trees… this was now.

6

DR. HOOGBECK HAD THE GIFT of being able to send an audience into a state of complete catatonia, even after multiple cups of breakfast coffee.

Cate had told Daniel she was going to this presentation, so here she was, even though geologic fossilization processes were enough to put her out even without Dr. Hoogbeck’s soothing monotone. But instead of making her fall asleep, his voice sent her to that beta zone where she could think.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t thinking about useful things like feminine imagery in animal cults or the demise of desert kingdoms. No, she was thinking about Daniel.

Because the simple truth was that Julia had been right and Cate had unfinished business with him. She wasn’t a quitter. You start a degree program and you get a certificate. You start a paper and you reach a publishable conclusion. You start a relationship and you expect it to go somewhere.

Okay, so that last was something over which she didn’t have all the control, but the point was you couldn’t just drop something and run away and not have it bug you for years.

At least, she couldn’t.

Because she was now in her ninth year of wondering what sex with Daniel would have been like, and, to put it quite bluntly, it was driving her nuts. He was the root of erotic dreams that woke her in mid-orgasm in the middle of the night. He was the reason she had had such high expectations for Robert Novinsky and Charles Morton and probably the reason she had sabotaged relationships with both of them. It wasn’t that she was sexually dysfunctional, exactly, but what if somehow Daniel was the key?

What if she did take him up on his blatant offers and made him put his money where his mouth was? Would that unlock her sexuality? Would it break down this dam that seemed to hold her back in relationships with other people? If she had sex with him, maybe that would be the “kick galvanic” that got her back on track again.

And aside from the therapeutic effects of sex with Daniel, maybe it was simply time to have a little fun.

Fun was not a word she usually used in conjunction with sex. In her experience, sex was comfort, it was payment of an obligation, it was fulfillment of someone’s expectations…but it was very rarely fun. She had no doubt whatsoever that if a girl wanted to have great big dollops of fun with her sex, then Daniel was the guy to serve it up to her.

What would be wrong with having a little fling with him? It wasn’t as though he ever went into a relationship with the long term in mind. The endless string of girlfriends he’d paraded for the media over the years was proof of that. Not that she was keeping a scrapbook or anything, but every time she saw him in a circular for a benefit or in one of the scandal sheets, he was with a different “companion.” If he wasn’t going to commit to one of those beautiful and no doubt intelligent people, it was a safe bet he wouldn’t expect anything from her, either.

Besides, it might be exciting to have an affair with someone who was the next thing to a movie star. The man every woman wanted. He was clearly interested. And she was mature and intelligent and on birth control. Why shouldn’t she have a fling if she wanted to? It wasn’t as if she would lose control and fall in love with him or anything. It wasn’t like fieldwork, where the unexpected could throw your theories out the window or a freak storm could destroy months of work. She could have a fling under controlled conditions, having carefully chosen her subject, the way she might in the lab.

As long as she was the one controlling the conditions, what was there to be afraid of? There was no harm done to either of them, and they’d both enjoy it.

Cate straightened in her chair and slid her empty notebook back into her tote as Dr. Hoogbeck blinked owlishly under the stage lights, seeming a little bemused at the applause as he wound up his presentation. There was always the chance that she’d talk herself out of this, but at the moment it seemed like a fine plan.

Of course, once she’d made up her mind, Daniel decided not to cooperate. At lunch he sat at the faculty table, entertaining all six of his companions with some uproariously funny story that made heads turn and a little prick of envy at being left out needle its way through Cate’s heart. He didn’t go to the afternoon workshops, which made her wonder if that polished blonde who had been hovering behind him at the book signing was keeping him company in his private cottage, too.

It was merely speculation. Not jealousy. The man could have whomever he wanted in his cottage. But once she, Cate, had decided it should be herself, it was a little annoying to have him switch from being on her doorstep every time she turned around to playing hard to get.

She went to the afternoon seminar to hear the latest research on Cretan snake dancers to take her mind off him, and when she came out, there he was, walking under the oaks on the far side of the grounds.

He looked up when she was about fifty feet away. “Hey, Cate.”

“Enjoying yourself?”

“Decompressing. I just spent the last hour with my publisher’s rep, going over the plan of attack for flogging the book in Nevada and New Mexico. I need a drink.”

“Your publisher’s rep is here?”

“Yeah. Stacy Mills. Blonde. About this high.” He held out a hand near his shoulder.

So she had been right. The polished blonde had been in his cottage with him. Plan of attack indeed. Attacking each other, more like. Cate’s mood took a spiraling nosedive and crashed in flames.

“I won’t disturb you, then.” She turned on her heel, but before she could move more than a foot, he stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“Let’s get out of here, Cate. All these people are driving me nuts. How about dinner?”

Her muscles jumped with anticipation under his hand, but she kept her voice calm. “Where? I didn’t see anything on the way here but a café and some campgrounds.”

“A couple of miles south there’s a place called Nepenthe. Supposed to have a view off the terrace to die for, and good food. What do you say?”

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