Full Circle. Shannon Hollis
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