Читать книгу Full Circle - Shannon Hollis - Страница 11

5

I’LL HAVE MY COFFEE, SHOW HIM the photos, and get out of here. I can be back in NewYork in time for The Late Show.

It had been a mistake to come to the conference. Cate realized that now, standing in the breakfast line in front of tables heaped with freshly cut strawberries, melon and orange, along with trays of steaming eggs and plates artistically arranged with bagels and pastries. She chose fruit, carbs and protein with a careful eye to the food pyramid, and filled her tall travel mug with coffee and cream. That part wasn’t on the food pyramid, but we were talking the bare necessities for survival, here.

Daniel took two of everything. How he hung on to that narrow-waisted frame feeding it things like that was a mystery.

Back in her room, she cleared off the round worktable, pulled up two chairs and waved him into one.

“Isn’t this cozy.” Fruit, eggs, sausage and biscuits disappeared with methodical rapidity. He glanced up. “Aren’t you eating?”

“Yes, of course.” It had been a long time since she’d seen a man eat with such gusto. Did he do everything that way—charge into it with such focus and concentration? Maybe that was why he was so good at what he did. Maybe people like her stayed in the office and wrote the papers and people like him went out into the field and gave them something to write about.

He gave the magazines something to write about, too. One of the things he also enjoyed with gusto was women, and as much as she’d determined not to think about it, it was hard not to with him right here in the room. He had that quality that made female heads turn. It wasn’t the dark eyes, or the sensual mouth or the stubbled jaw. It wasn’t the way his hair fell on his forehead or the long-fingered hands holding knife and fork.

It was the way they all went together, creating a whole that was much more than the sum of its parts. She’d sensed that quality in him years ago—that sexual quality, that magnetic thing that tugged a woman deep inside and said, “Yum. Must have that for mate.”

Maybe that was why she’d run. She’d been as green as a bean at a lot of things—sex, life, men, you name it. Maybe some instinct deep inside had perceived that she’d be engulfed in him and lose a self that wasn’t completely formed yet, and that had prodded her out of the cavern and out of his life.

Was it that same instinct that was telling her now she’d better pack her bags—or else?

Or else what, exactly?

“So tell me what I’m going to be looking at,” he suggested as he finished the last of his breakfast. He took their empty plates and set them outside in the hall, though technically this wasn’t a hotel and she had every reason to believe the staff wouldn’t be impressed.

But then, he’d probably charmed the support hose right off the staff and there was an entire fleet of them waiting in the nearest linen closet to take his dishes away.

She took a fortifying slug of coffee and pulled the manila envelope out of her briefcase. “A woman named Morgan Shaw came to my office last week to ask if I could tell her anything about a wooden box she’d found in her antique shop in Connecticut. The only thing I could say for sure was that it was made of bubinga and it was possible the carvings are contemporary with Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty.”

He spread the photos on the table and leaned on his elbows, studying them.

“As you know,” she went on a little diffidently, “a number of desert cultures were engulfed by Egypt’s expansion during that period. I wondered if this was one of them.”

For five silent minutes he turned the force of his concentration on the eight-by-ten color photographs, looking from one to the other, putting one or two side by side, then separating them and pairing different ones.

Finally he sat back and reached for his coffee cup without looking at it, his gaze fixed on the pictures.

“Wow,” he said.

“Photos don’t do it justice,” she offered. “When you actually hold the box, you see just how the carved images re-form and flow into one another. Every angle gives you a different perspective. It’s eerie.”

“What’s inside?”

“That’s just it. There doesn’t seem to be a way to open it. But Morgan says there’s a compartment—she ran it through an X-ray machine.”

“If there’s a compartment, there must be a key.” He glanced up. “You know how tricky the Egyptians were with secret entrances and doors in their pyramids and gravesites. It was a common practice that could have been part of this culture, too, though clearly it’s not Egyptian.”

“Any guesses as to who might have made it?”

“The symbology has elements of Egyptian art, so I’m thinking there might have been a bit of culture bleed before they were taken over completely. Which would mean a neighboring kingdom, and given the difficulty of agriculture deep in the desert away from the Nile, those are limited to the Manassites and the El Gibi.”

“The Manassite symbology doesn’t include rivers or river animals, like this crocodile.” She pointed to a figure on the photo closest to her. “They were a herd-based culture.”

“That leaves the El Gibi, about which we know hardly anything. Not even what they really called themselves. Kind of like the Navajo naming the Anasazi.”

Cate nodded. “I’m sure they didn’t call themselves the Old Ones.” She picked up a photo and Daniel took the one beneath it, a shot of the box’s lid. “But what I’d like to know most is—”

“Cate.”

“What?” She looked up.

“Look at this.”

Obediently, she looked at the shot of the top of the box. There was a bird and some river symbols and the harp she’d seen before when—

Wait a minute.

“They lock together,” she said. “Like those Escher drawings, only more complicated.”

“Look at the edges. They form the shape of a star.” His tanned finger traced the outline, an area about the size of a fifty-cent piece. “And the middle is hollow. Or maybe, given the cultural bleed, it’s a Ra symbol.”

Cate remembered running her fingers along the channels made by that awl all those centuries ago. Someone had held the awl with strong, powerful hands. Hands like Daniel’s.

No, no. Do not think about that.

“Who do you think the artist was?” She didn’t expect him to have an answer, but talking about the box kept her focused on work instead of…other things.

“Impossible to say.” He tapped the photos together and handed them to her. “But he—or she—had an unusual talent. And the person was no stranger to geometry, the way those pictograms fit together to form the star. So, probably an educated person. More than that, I couldn’t tell you.”

She slid the photos back into their envelope and replaced it in her briefcase. “Thanks for the help, Daniel. It’s not much to go on, but at least it’s something to give Morgan. She was pretty passionate about it.”

“You know antique people. They get that way.”

With a smile, she agreed. “At least she wasn’t the usual crackpot that shows up on my doorstep with some wonderful find that turns out to be a fifty-year-old fake.”

“Don’t you hate that?” He pushed his chair back and stretched, the fabric of his shirt pulling taut over compact abs and the kind of chest that a woman could fall on in complete bliss. “With my work at the digs, I get the ones who are convinced the clay pot somebody’s kid made in the forties is an example of primitive art.”

“Pre-Columbian, at that.”

“At least. If not Precambrian.”

To her surprise, Cate found herself laughing along with him.

“I can’t blame people, though,” he said thoughtfully after a moment. “Isn’t buried treasure a fantasy we have as kids? Look at me. I’ve never lost that fascination.”

“I supposed I haven’t, either,” she confessed.

“That’s why I wrote what I did when I signed your book,” he said quietly. “Some things haven’t changed.”

Cate closed her briefcase and set it in the closet, taking her time about sliding the door shut. “A lot of things have,” she said. “Most things, in fact.”

“Have they?” His gaze changed from professional to speculative with one lazy blink. “You’re more beautiful. You didn’t have cheekbones like that at twenty. And there’s more confidence in your eyes. Makes me wonder if it’s all those publications that put it there, or some adoring stockbroker.”

Cate felt the hot blood seething under her skin. Was it from irritation at his personal remarks, or something darker and more dangerous? Was he flirting with her? And if he was, how was she going to respond?

She hovered in the middle of the room, uncertain whether to take her seat opposite him at the little table, where he’d probably think she was dying for more personal observations, or to remain standing in the middle of the room, where maybe he’d take a hint and find a lecture to go to.

“Cate.” His eyes laughed at her, though his face remained serious. “Come and sit down. We were going to catch up, remember?”

She couldn’t sit down. She couldn’t trust herself not to reach out and stroke his hand, or run her fingers up his sleeve. That same sexual magnetism that had enthralled her eight years ago hadn’t lost any of its potency, and if she got too close she just might lose it and become another one of his…what was that word Anne had coined? Oh yes—archaeologroupies.

With a mental shudder, Cate forced herself to ignore the siren call of his pheromones and be sensible.

“I’m afraid not, Daniel,” she said as steadily as she could. “The ten o’clock seminar starts in a few minutes and I don’t want to miss it.”

“You’re not going to listen to old Andy Hogbreath? How much more do you need to know about fossils?”

Was that who the ten o’clock speaker was? “Dr. Hoogbeck is highly respected in his field,” she said stiffly. “And I happen to be interested in the fossil beds I find when I’m excavating.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged, then shot her a wicked glance. “But when you feel like thinking about any other kind of bed, fossil or not, you know where to find me.”

She didn’t bother to reply as, laughing, he let himself out. She didn’t need to. Because her scarlet face had given everything away.

DANIEL HAD NO INTENTION of taking in Dr. Hoogbeck’s seminar, or of returning yet another persistent call from a think tank in New Mexico, or even of returning to his cottage to tackle some of the logistics for the Asia Minor expedition. Instead, he stopped by the dining room to refill his mug of coffee and took an unhurried stroll down the nearest walking trail. It led through a stand of live oaks, their holly-like leaves spiky and rustling above him. Long native grasses nodded on either side, and a small stand of redwoods gave a bit of dark contrast at the bottom of the slope.

Daniel couldn’t remember the last time he’d been completely alone out in the woods. You’d think that at this point in his career, he could say at any time, “Hey, all you hangers-on, get outta here,” and he’d have some peace. But no. The problem was, no one was hanging on. His students, his fellow academics, his crews—even Stacy Mills, his publicist—all of them had a job to do. He was like the well at which they all drew, to use a simile from the ancient world where his brain spent half its time. He provided the water, and they let their jars down, filled them and then took off to do what they needed to do.

It was bloody exhausting is what it was.

And here was Cate Wells, who couldn’t wait to see the backside of him going out the door. Never let it be said she wanted to fill her jar at his expense—no, she had her own well, thank you very much, and she was quite happy standing in front of it so nobody else could come near.

Or was she?

He’d thrown out those little innuendos on purpose. A woman who was comfortable with her sexuality would have taken him on and tossed them back—but Cate hadn’t. She’d been exactly the same way in Mexico. She hadn’t had the same experience that he’d found most women had by their sophomore year. In fact, the first time he’d kissed her, he’d wondered if it was her first time, period. It hadn’t been—that much she’d confessed in one of their late-night conversations on the cliff—but it hadn’t been the kiss of a woman who enjoyed doing the wild thing at every chance she got, either.

Far from it.

Had things changed? Except for a very interesting ring he’d swear was Georgian on the right fourth finger, she wore nothing on her hands. And that sense of self-awareness, of the knowledge that she was both desirable and desired, that some women wore like an ermine robe when they were committed in a loving relationship—well, that didn’t seem to be there, either.

But who was he kidding? He was used to reading soil matrices. The women he came into contact with were usually totally up-front and wide open about what they wanted. There was none of the reserve and mystery that was so intriguing in Cate. That reserve had challenged him back when and it was challenging him now. It was the same way with a new site. Just the presence of ancient clay walls with the wind whistling through them, silently keeping their secrets, drove him mad until he could gently tease their stories out of them.

He’d only been half kidding about the beds when he’d left her room. Now he wasn’t so sure he was kidding at all. The truth was he’d never gotten over Cate. Had never forgotten that last night, in the cave.

So yeah, she’d run out on him, taking her secrets with her. But that was then.

This, he thought, as he turned back up the path, away from the river he could hear behind the trees… this was now.