Full Circle
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.”