Full Circle. Shannon Hollis
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