Full Circle. Shannon Hollis
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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