DANIEL TOOK CATE’S ARM and led her to the couch, where he pushed her into it gently then went to raid the gift basket. He snagged a bottle of amaretto, twisted off the top and handed it to her.
One hit off the little bottle had her coughing and choking, but it warmed her all the way down.
“Because,” he answered her at last, “I told him to take the credit. Fossils are not my thing. They’re the love of his life. And I kind of like the old codger. He has a good heart, if you give him a chance. This will keep him happy for months to come.” He took the bottle from her and had some himself. “Besides, I’m sick to death of press conferences. If I had to do another one before the ones I have in San Francisco later in the week, I’d probably do something stupid, like moon the reporters or stagger into the room drunk. Not the best reflection on our fair discipline.”
She took the bottle back and had another sip, with a little more control this time. Her mind was racing with questions—about herself, about him and about her own motives. “That’s why you didn’t come back here. You were down at the beach with him, showing him the fossils.”
“And by the time I got back, you were gone.”
She glanced at him, ashamed of herself. “I assumed you’d been waylaid by a blonde and forgotten…my shoes.”
“Nope. And as for…your shoes, they’re over there, on the chair with your things.” He waved in the direction of the table. Sure enough, her Ferragamo sandals were sitting on one of the chairs, her skirt and blouse neatly folded on top of them.
Was his decision to sidestep the spotlight for once some kind of ploy—some kind of backward way of impressing her? Along the lines of I’m so famous, I don’t need any more attention? Or was it as simple as he made it out to be? Fossils weren’t his thing, so he turned the whole discovery over to someone who would appreciate them more. Game over. Move on.
“Daniel, just how much of the press about you is true?” And how many of her assumptions about him were true?
He got up and brought back the entire basket. Digging through it, he replied, “Some of it is true. Newsweek got the facts right, for instance. And everything I said to Jah-Redd was true. But the ragmags go for sales, not facts, so you have to take what they say with a grain of salt.” He handed her a small package wrapped in gold foil. “Godiva?”
“Thank you. Are you going to take that whole basket apart?”
“It’s meant to be eaten, isn’t it? I figure we can hole up here for the rest of the day and not even have to go to the cafeteria. Look—fresh grapes.”
He held one up and she opened her mouth. He slid it between her lips and she bit down on it. Sweet juice exploded on her tongue. “Cabernet,” she said around it. “Yum.”
“You can tell what kind of grape it is by one taste?” He ate one himself and shrugged. “It tastes like a grape.”
“You obviously didn’t do the extra-credit work during your exchange semester.”
“My loss.” He fed her another. “You didn’t learn about grapes in Mexico, I’ll bet.”
“No, we did a field excursion on prehistoric art in the south of France. And there was this Wine-making 101 type of class and I had a couple of weeks to play with at the end of the art class, so I took it.”
“Cate, most normal people with a couple of weeks to spend in the south of France would go sunbathe naked on a beach, not take another class.”
“I’m not most people.” She leaned against his shoulder and peered into the basket. “What else have you got in there?”
“I have some cassis and some Kahlúa, and what seems to be a couple of fingers of Glenlivet.”
“Yuck.” She hated hard liquor and had ever since her freshman year in college, when she’d spent the morning after the night before in the dorm bathroom. Cate shuddered at the memory. “Let’s break open the cassis.”
“You are such a lush. Most people would be civilized and have it over ice or something.”
“Unless you have a better idea, shut up and hand over the bottle.”
He sat back and raised one eyebrow. “As it happens, I do have a better idea.”
“If it involves anything but consuming what’s in this basket, forget it.”
Instead of answering, he opened the little bottle and tilted it against his finger. Then, gently, he brushed his finger against her lower lip, coating it with the sweet liqueur. Cate’s first instinct was to lick it off, but curiosity held her still.
Her patience was rewarded when Daniel leaned in and ran his tongue along her lower lip, then kissed her with slow thoroughness. The taste of black currants and the flavor that was uniquely him mingled in a heady brew that went straight to Cate’s head.
With Daniel, she never knew what was going to happen. Even something as simple as eating became illuminated with sensual possibility. The fact was that he was more experienced than her, so that in the world of sex, she became the adventurer, the one who explored and discovered. And oddly, that seemed to be just fine with him.
Content to let the moment take them where it would, Cate bit a chocolate in half and put the other half between Daniel’s lips. A tiny trickle of caramel escaped and before he could lick it off, she reached up and touched her tongue to the wisp of sweetness at the corner of his mouth.
“Hey now, don’t be stealing my caramel.”
He selected a Bosc pear, the bronze color of an ancient statue, and sectioned it with the penknife in his pocket.
She’d forgotten he always carried a little knife with him. “That’s such a guy thing.”
“What? Slicing up fruit?”
“No, having a knife in your pocket all the time. Do you get separation anxiety at airports when you can’t have it on the plane?”
He handed her a slice of pear and wiped the juice off the blade. “No. And it’s not a guy thing. It’s just practical. I can trim my nails, pick a lock, slice a pear, open a package or whittle something, whenever I want.”
“Except for opening a package, I’ve never been tempted to do any of those things with a knife. So I’m right. It is a guy thing.”
“You’d think differently if you’d been in the green room on Jah-Redd. One of the techs tie-wrapped a bunch of cable together and then found out they needed it in a couple of minutes for some more lights. You can’t undo tie-wraps once they’re in place, so they had to cut them.”
“I get it,” Cate said. “There you were with your trusty pocket knife.”
“I have a rep to keep up.” He handed her another slice of pear with such serene complacency that Cate began to have second thoughts about her second thoughts.
“I know how important that is to you.”
“Do you?” He raised one eyebrow.
“Well, it must be or you wouldn’t find so many ways to keep yourself in the spotlight.”
“Maybe we should clarify just what kind of rep I meant.” His tone had become almost bland, which Cate had the uncomfortable feeling meant she had offended him somehow. And she didn’t want to offend him. Not when he was feeding her pears and chocolate in the middle of the morning.
“Maybe we should,” she agreed. “You have to admit you are in the public eye a lot. More than your average academic.”
“I’m not your average academic. I’m hardly ever on campus. I’m the only prof who puts in expense reports for the worldwide-access coverage on my cell phone.”
The most she ever put in for was the odd conference fee and her publication subscriptions. “That’s what I mean. Even that has an element of glamour to it.”
“It’s practical. Cate, why do you see everything I do as some kind of attention-getting scheme?”
Because it is. Because that’s the kind of man you are. Isn’t it?
If it was, what did that say about her, having a fling with a man like that? In that case, she’d be as bad as any of his arm candy, latching on to him in the hopes that some of his glamour would rub off on her.
Cate shifted uncomfortably and tried to formulate an answer. “Because everything you do seems to attract attention, whether you intend it to or not. How can you be surprised when someone thinks that way?”
“Because I’m a serious scientist.” He straightened, and she was forced to straighten up herself or fall over. Cool air flowed between them. “I can’t help that my work attracts attention—that it appeals to something in the public psyche. In the end, it’s all about the work. The only thing real is what I am in the field.”
For heaven’s sake, his entire career contradicted him. “Then what on earth possessed you to write that book?” she burst out. “What is a serious archaeologist doing, writing something like that?”
He swallowed the last of the pear and wouldn’t meet her eyes. To her astonishment, ruddy color washed into his face under the tan.
He mumbled something around a gulp of liqueur and she blinked. She couldn’t have heard him properly. She must have misunderstood. “What?”
“I said, I didn’t write that book.”
Cate’s jaw hung open for a moment before she collected herself enough to speak. “Who did?”
He shrugged, as uncomfortable as she’d ever seen him since the day the class had laughed at him over the shark’s tooth. “Some ghostwriter my publisher dug up.”
Well, if this wasn’t newsworthy, she didn’t know what was. “Do you mean to tell me that that book on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list wasn’t written by you at all? That some other person wrote it?”
“Yep.” He drained the little bottle and opened the Glenlivet. “He spent a week in the field with me, then another week taping interviews with me in Long Beach, and then he took all my assistant’s scrapbooks back to Colorado with him and wrote the book. I’m surprised you couldn’t tell it wasn’t me.”
“Daniel, until now I hadn’t seen you in eight years. How was I supposed to know what your writing was like?”
“It’s not a bad piece of work, really, but you’re right, it definitely has a Hollywood tone to it. Not surprising when you know the last thing the guy did was a biography of Errol Flynn. Also put out by my publisher, if you’ll forgive the expression.”
“It’s none of my business, but you might want to try a university press next time. God knows a dozen of them would jump at the chance.” She sat back against the cushions of the couch, and Daniel slid an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer.
Across the room, cartons of books sat neatly piled on the floor, waiting for the next segment of the tour.
Cate shook her head in disbelief. “Aren’t you supposed to have ‘as told to’ on the cover? So you don’t mislead people?”
“It’s all about perception. My publisher figured people would expect an archaeologist to be able to write a coherent sentence. Which I can, but not the way the writer did. Hollywood or not, the guy knows how to hook a reader. So they paid him a pile of money and my name went on there instead of his.” He squeezed her shoulders. “So are you going to bust me out? Expose me as a fraud?”
“Why should I? It’s your story—your life, whether you wrote the words or not. And, again, it’s none of my business.”
“You sure about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Only that a serious academic might not want to be seen with a media hound like me.”
“That part you bring on yourself. You don’t have to go prancing around in front of cameras with models, you know.”
“You have to admit, it builds public awareness of what I’m doing.”
“Yes, but what kind? The kind that gets you respect, or the kind that gets you tabloid coverage?”
He shrugged and she bit back her frustration. She needed to remember that this was a fling. What he did with himself and his career would be nothing to her once they’d parted ways. It was just her natural inclination—talent, even—to try to help him see that if he wanted public recognition, there were better ways to manage it.
If she’d been the one advising him, now, she would never have recommended a ghostwriter. She’d have gone to a university press, and while it might not have made the nonfiction bestseller list, it would have reaped him the kind of recognition that counted.
The kind of recognition she’d been battling for all her working life. But obviously he wasn’t doing these things for that kind of respect. He was doing it for the publicity it would bring. For the funding. For the glory.
She laid her head on his shoulder and he pulled her closer. If he had been different—or if she had—they might have ended up together long ago. Cate could hardly imagine having Daniel next to her every single day for the rest of her life. A sleepy Sunday morning, with orange juice instead of amaretto, and the New York Times all over the floor, with or without his book in the review section.
But there was no point in thinking that way. Despite the mind-bending sex and their common love of antiquities and chocolate caramels, their views were too different. In her weaker moments she might not want it that way, but there was no getting around it.
With her other love affairs, there was always some obstacle she couldn’t get over as well. Robert, with whom her friend Julia had set her up on a blind date, had stuck around for a couple of months, but since he was a stockbroker, he always had somewhere to be and someone to see. Byron, the visiting lecturer, had lasted a little longer—a whole academic year. She’d actually had hopes for him, but before he’d gone back to England he’d told her very kindly that if she wanted to sustain something long-term, she should consider being a little more feminine. After she’d gotten over her hurt and astonishment, she’d heard one day through the grapevine that he’d had an operation and was now to be addressed in correspondence as Bryony, with the honorific of Ms.
And Charles Morton, the acting head of anthropology? Cate closed her eyes and breathed in the warm scent of Daniel’s skin to override the memory. Every sexual encounter they’d had was tainted and abbreviated by his guilt over cheating on his wife—who had divorced him the year before. When he’d taken a position at Northwestern, it was to move to the town she lived in, and the last Cate heard, they were getting remarried.
No, considering her romantic history, and despite his love of the limelight, when you saw him just as a talented man, Daniel was the pick of the bunch.
What a pity he could only be a fling.