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
