Lauren took a deep breath and glanced over at him. “I’m afraid a future for us is going to be problematic.”
He stopped walking and turned to her. “What do you mean… problematic?”
She stepped to the side of the path and sat on a boulder. “Well, you have your work in Atlanta — work that takes you all over the world for weeks at a time — and I have my work in Austin, Texas, that frequently takes me to remote areas of the world for weeks at a time.”
She smiled sadly and spread her arms. “Just how do you propose we reconcile those two disparate lifestyles?”
He frowned. “I don’t know, but there’s got to be a way. Maybe you could move to Atlanta. Emory University has a great archaeology department.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, and maybe you could move to Austin. The University of Texas has a great communicable disease department.”
“But… that’s different.”
She wagged her head. “No, Mason, no it isn’t.”
“Well, then we can take turns flying back and forth for visits.”
She shrugged. “We could, but we both know long-distance relationships never work. Not that I would mind a few lust-filled weekend encounters, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking it could ever be anything more.”
“Dammit, Lauren. You’re just being too damned logical.”
She smiled. “Sorry, it’s just the scientist in me, I’m afraid.”
He grabbed her and pulled her to her feet, kissing her as if he’d never get another chance. As he pulled back he looked into her eyes and said, “Believe me when I tell you that I’m going to find some way for us to be together.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. “Believe me when I tell you that I hope you do.”
Chapter 44
Two months later, Lauren was busy overseeing a team of twenty undergraduate and graduate students as they pored over the hundreds of specimens in Montezuma’s tomb and the surrounding area.
Guatemotzi, whom Lauren had hired as a native guide and all-around assistant, came up to her holding out a small, jewel-encrusted dagger.
Her eyes widened as she took the dagger from him. “Oh my God, Motzi, where did you find this?”
He grinned, his teeth white against the dark cocoa color of his face. “Motzi find it next to big, flat rock over there,” he said, pointing toward an area of the nearby jungle that hadn’t been explored yet.
“Jesus,” she exclaimed. “That might be a sacrificial rock where the Aztecs cut the hearts out of their enemies, and this might be one of the ceremonial daggers they used.”
She grabbed the small boy and squeezed him tight in a hug. “Motzi, you just might have made the biggest discovery of the site.”
As she stepped back from him, she heard a distant whup-whup and glanced up to see a helicopter weaving its way toward them from the direction of Mexico City, tropical sun glinting sharply off the Plexiglas windshield.
“Huh, I wonder what that chopper is doing coming here today? We’re not due for supplies for another week,” she said.
Motzi shrugged, as if to say such things were beyond his pay grade.
She handed him the dagger, told him to take it to the tent holding the specimens, and to be sure to document when and where he found it for their records, and then she walked down the path toward the helicopter landing area in the jungle.
By the time she got there, the helicopter had landed and though the rotor blades were slowing, the air was filled with a dense cloud of dust.
Out of the cloud walked a man wearing a snap-brimmed hat that she swore she’d seen in the Indiana Jones movies.
As he drew nearer, the man looked up, and she saw that it was Dr. Mason Williams grinning at her from under the brim.
“Oh, Mason,” she cried and she ran into his arms and held him as tight as she could.
After a moment, he leaned down and kissed her until she finally had to come up for breath.
“What are you doing here?” she asked as he put his arm around her and led her back down the path toward her dig site.
He smiled and gave her a wink. “It seems there’s been a significant outbreak of dengue fever in the jungle around here,” he said. “And I convinced the CDC that an expedition was necessary to see if we could get it under control before it spread all the way to Mexico City.”
She stopped and turned to face him, grinning widely. “Then… then you’re going to be here for a while?”
“Several weeks at least. We’ll be setting up the Bio-Lab in the same spot we did last time we were here.”
“You mean the same Bio-Lab with air-conditioning and Shirley’s famous cookies and muffins and cakes and the glorious hot showers?”
He nodded. “And it’s the same Bio-Lab with the private quarters for the leader of the team, which just happens to be me.”
“Well, then, come on down and I’ll show you my camp. We have a dozen tents for the students and one slightly larger tent for the leader of the expedition, which just happens to be me.”
She hesitated, and then she added, “Of course, it doesn’t have air-conditioning or hot showers, or any privacy whatsoever, but it is my home away from home.”
As they neared the camp, she pursed her lips and looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Just how serious is this dengue fever outbreak, anyway?”
He shrugged. “Not very, but when I found out from your dean that you were down here for a couple of months, I called in some chips and arranged for an in-depth study of the outbreak.”
She narrowed her eyes, “Why do I feel you’re going to spend the entire time trying to convince me to move to Atlanta?”
“Well, not the entire time,” he said with a lascivious smirk. “I plan to spend a significant amount of time making love to you, too.”
“Good,” she said, with a flip of her head as she turned toward her tent. “’Cause that’ll give me a lot of time to talk you into moving to Austin. You won’t believe what goes on down on Sixth Street.”
As she took his hand and led him toward her camp, she looked back over her shoulder, “And I warn you, Mason, I can be very persuasive when I put my mind to it.”
He sighed and shook his head. “It’s not your mind I’m worried about.”
As he followed her down the path, he patted his breast pocket that contained his brand-new Texas driver’s license and his faculty card showing he was now a professor of Communicable Diseases at the University of Texas Institute of Health Sciences in Austin, Texas.
His life without her for the past two months had been miserable and so he’d flown to Austin and interviewed for the position he now held. The dean had been tickled to death to have someone with his practical field experience agree to come teach at the medical school as soon as his present assignment for the CDC was over.
As he watched Lauren’s ponytail bobbing in front of him down the path, he planned to give her a few days of trying to convince him to move to Texas before he revealed the truth to her that he already had.
This was going to be fun.