Digging Deep (Xcite Romance) (4 page)

Beth was tugging against his hand, trying to escape and get back to the house. Without thinking about the consequences, Harrison held her tighter, and growled through gritted teeth, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Beth, I’ve said I’m sorry.’

Diving forward, he took her rage-red face in his free hand, and pulled her closer, kissing her fiercely on her bone-dry lips.

The first sensation Beth registered was that Harrison’s stubble felt good as it scraped across her skin. The second was that she was being kissed by the man she’d idolised for years. For a moment, she relaxed into the kiss, enjoying its intensity, which was filling her up from the inside. Then reality hit her in a cold rush. Harrison didn’t fancy her at all. He was just seeing if Candida was right; testing the theory that she would make out with anyone if it suited her situation. Humiliation took over from pleasure like a sharp kick in the teeth.

Yanking herself away, she glowered at her companion. ‘What are trying to do? Prove I’m the slapper you think I am? Well, I am sorry to disappoint you, Dr Harris, but I am not that fucking easy. And yes, I did just bloody swear again, so please don’t feel obliged to point it out.’

She couldn’t stay where she was a moment longer. Forgetting about having to pace the olive groves, Beth pointed a finger directly at Harrison. ‘Don’t you dare follow me.’ Then she walked back to the house with all the dignity she could muster, trying not to consider how incredible Harrison’s kiss had felt against her lips.

Chapter Four

The scantily furnished three-storey house where the excavation team was lodging lay on the outskirts of Lepti Minus village, which sat side by side with its larger ancient sister settlement. The property’s lack of doors, and windows without glass or shutters, kept it forever cool, and a blessed sanctuary from the blast of the sun.

Its open, flat roof in particular, which was littered with pots of shade-providing large-leafed palm trees, was almost idyllic. It was the perfect place to make the tedious business of washing and cataloguing all the finds from the previous day bearable, as each student and supervisor took a shift on cleaning and recording duty.

The suitability of the house at night was a different matter. With only Beth and Harrison’s bedrooms having internal doors to close, and not many of the rooms having access to natural light, the very conditions that made the house a haven during the day caused it to be like a freezer by midnight.

Lying on her thin camping mattress, cuddling her sleeping bag and an additional blanket to her chest as if they were oversized teddy bears, Beth stared up at the cracked ceiling. For once the shabby nature of the room, with its concrete floor and grey-plastered walls, failed to radiate its inbuilt cold into her bones. Tonight, she was too incensed to notice that she was only protected from the permanently icy floor by an inch of inefficient padding. Her heart was beating too fast in her chest, and her palms and forehead felt sticky with the perspiration of hot embarrassment. Why? she asked herself. Why would Candida say those things about me?

Trying to block out the feeling that the happy laughter she could hear from the female students camped down in the next room was caused by her, a fully dressed Beth clambered into her sleeping bag. Plumping a pillow over her face, as much to keep herself warm as to adopt the ostrich mentality she knew would be the only way she’d be able to switch off enough to give her fatigued muscles some rest, Beth snuggled into as comfortable a position as she could manage.

Despite her efforts to clear her head, however, the details of what she and Ryan were alleged to have got up to on the open roof of the house tangoed provocatively around her imagination. She couldn’t help but see the irony. How could Candida think she was going to convince anyone who’d actually met Beth that she could have exposed her sensitive flesh to the elements like that? She spent her whole life virtually buried in layers, be they protection against the sun, driving rain, or gusting winds. If her students had any idea how much Beth longed to be able to display her skin to the world, to have the kind of flesh that could be tanned without burning to a crisp in minutes despite being virtually drowned in lotion, then they’d dismiss Candida’s claims as ludicrous.

Before she’d arrived in Africa, Beth had believed she’d be better off by covering herself in thin layers like the locals did. Now she knew different. There could be few things worse than shovelling sand all day in clothes that seemed to have been purpose built for getting grains stuck in the creases, and irritating the hell out of sensitive skin.

Thoroughly muddled as to how her ill-advised act of kindness towards Ryan had led to this suspicion of extreme fraternisation, Beth found herself fighting the urge to burst into tears.

Students had been developing unsuitable crushes on their supervisors since the first teacher had chalked on a blackboard; it was clichéd stuff. And you’re just as bad! she admonished herself. Beth had always told herself that her admiration for Harrison was simply because his work was so good
.
In her heart she knew she’d been kidding herself. ‘At your age you should not be getting crushes!’

Now she’d met Dr Harris, and he was nothing like she’d imagined, either physically or conversationally. And having made a total fool of herself in front of him, Beth knew it was time to make sure her crush was well and truly crushed.

But now he’s kissed you, you aren’t so sure, are you … I wonder what the rest of his body tastes like?

Screwing up her eyes against the memory of his face, so close to hers that she could smell his masculine scent and feel quiet desire radiating from his body, Beth forced her mind to the problem in hand.

Until Harrison had said something, it hadn’t occurred to her that Ryan had been acting like an over-enthusiastic white knight with any intension other than to make up for her for being such a clumsy idiot. But what if that wasn’t it at all? she wondered. What if he does fancy me a bit?

The whole idea seemed preposterous. Beth cared so little for her appearance that she could go days without even a glance in the mirror. She was in the wrong sort of job to bother with decent clothes, she’d given up on finding make-up that didn’t make her skin itch years ago, and her hair did what it liked, when it liked, and thus far no treatment had been invented to say otherwise.

The idea that a young Adonis like Ryan, who Beth had to concede was fit in every sense of the word, would want another, younger woman to think that he’d slept with her was mad – even if it was a little flattering.

Perhaps I should have just laughed off what Candida said when I was with Harrison? Even as she had the thought, Beth knew she couldn’t have laughed. It had been a massive shock to discover someone was spreading such gossip about her. Trying to console herself with the fact that at least Candida’s malicious conversation had been with someone on the other end of the phone and not someone on site, Beth
w
rapped herself up tighter, like a sausage roll in her insulated sleeping bag.

Eventually reaching a temperature which allowed her body to unclench enough to consider sleep, Beth’s eyes began to droop. As the sheer exhaustion of her working day, combined with the conflicting emotions of the evening, sent her drifting toward unconsciousness, a treacherous voice at the back of her head asked whether she’d have felt so upset if it had been Harrison she was accused of having a kinky romp with.

I wonder what his dick feels like …

Beth awoke with a start and sat bolt upright. Her pulse was racing ten to the dozen. Flashes of the dream she’d been having replayed behind her eyes.

Harrison had been standing over her naked body, disappointed yet lustful craving etched on his face. He’d yelled at her, telling her she was a slut one minute, but then complaining he couldn’t see her chest the next. Ryan lay on top of her, his bare back protecting her breasts from the sun as he gave her a blissfully slow fuck. The Beth of the dream was aware she wanted to speak, to make some sort of noise, but her mouth hadn’t been able to open.

Shivering, Beth tried to take control of her night-time thoughts, clamping her legs together to deny her fast-growing arousal. She could almost feel the rough baked clay of the roof on her back, as she’d been trapped there in her dream. Ryan’s thick cock had been moving rhythmically within her, his eyes focused on hers in such a way that Beth had been unable to look at Harrison to her left, or to the figure who silently stood to her right.

A fresh wave of clammy sweat trickled down a wide-awake Beth’s neck. She hugged her sleeping bag to her chest as she realised who it had been standing with them in her dream. A supercilious Candida, an iPhone held out recording the salacious sight before her. The vision filled Beth with almost as much dread as if the dream had been a fixture of fact and not a figment of her imagination.

‘This is utterly ridiculous!’ Beth addressed the room in general as she wriggled out of her sleeping bag. Wrapping the blanket back around her shoulders immediately, she checked her watch. It was only half-past five in the morning. With a groan, she dug her toothbrush out of her bag, deciding that although extra sleep would have been most welcome, the dreams that might accompany it were not.

Creeping down the stairs as quietly as possible so she didn’t wake anyone, Beth attacked her teeth, the simple act of hygiene making her feel better. With each brush back and forth she felt a little more awake, and her usual sensible perspective took charge of her out-of-control imagination.

These are the facts, she told herself as she rinsed the white paste around her mouth; first, you made an error of judgement over the mosaic. You’ve apologised, Harrison wasn’t angry, and he isn’t going to send you home, or report you for being an idiot. He respects you as an archaeologist. Second, Candida is a gossip. She probably invented the whole sex on the roof scenario so she’d have something to say to a friend in the States. Third, Harrison doesn’t know you very well so you can’t be too upset if he believed what he heard, especially after you withheld information about Ryan breaking the mosaic. And last of all, he kissed you because you were distressed and he was trying to calm you. He wasn’t testing you out to see if you were a slut. But however nice it was, it meant nothing.

Beth spat into the bucket, rinsed it out, and poured the water away. All that remains, she continued to tell herself, is for me to say sorry to Harrison for overreacting, and to make sure that Ryan apologises for breaking the mosaic. Candida is Harrison’s student and not mine, so her bad behaviour is his problem. Then perhaps I can get on with my job!

From the moment she’d been told she had got the job as co-supervisor on a world-class site with Harrison three months earlier, Beth had been determined to work as hard as she possibly could to prove her worth. Now, with her integrity questioned, she was more resolute than ever. No way would anyone get the impression she was even remotely unprofessional ever again. Deciding that going back to bed for only an hour was pointless, Beth headed towards the only room with furniture.

The dining room had one large table in it, with 12 chairs, each virtually jammed next to the walls; such was the limited amount of space.

‘I made you a coffee.’

The voice coming out of the gloom of the poorly lit room made Beth jump a foot and give an involuntary shriek of surprise.

‘Hell, doll! Are you
always
so jumpy?’ Harrison, who looked as if he’d had very little sleep himself, sat cradling a chipped mug of what smelt to Beth like at least a triple, if not quadruple, espresso. He pushed a mug of a similarly rich milk-free concoction in her direction.

Dismissing the flutter between her thighs, as the need to feel Harrison’s lips on hers grew again, Beth kept her tone light. ‘What are you doing up?’

Sliding between a chair and the table so she could sit opposite him, Beth gestured towards the coffee that was far stronger than anything she usually touched. ‘Thanks.’

Busily quashing the residue of his own erotic dreams of a naked Beth writhing on the roof of the house with his dick between her lips; images that had sent him wanking in the dingy toilet cubicle at two o’clock in the morning, Harrison merely said, ‘I’m a terrible sleeper, especially when I have to sleep on freezing concrete. You?’

‘I felt bad about how we left things last night.’ Beth took a sip of her coffee and winced; it was pure caffeine. ‘I’m sorry I overreacted. I’m not used to being suspected of sleeping with my students. ‘

Harrison held up a reassuring hand. ‘I’ve been thinking about that too. Of course you were livid, and to be honest, after being accused of sleeping with someone in your charge I can’t blame you. I totally understand. I mean, it’s a basic rule. Don’t sleep with people you work with, and definitely don’t sleep with students in your care!’

‘Even if they’re of the musclebound Adonis variety, and owe you big time!’ Beth risked a joke. She wasn’t sure if it was the relief of finding that Harrison understood and had forgiven her uncharacteristic fury, or the coffee that was knocking her sense of humour back into place, loosening her up, but she was relieved to feel more like her normal self again.

A wry smile lit the corners of Harrison’s lips. ‘Even then!’

The way the green of Beth’s eyes shone when she grinned back at him was doing unbidden things to Harrison’s crotch, as he coerced his brain to revert to the business of the day. He gestured to the plans of the site. ‘I’ve added in yesterday’s finds and strata information. How does this look to you?’ He knocked them towards Beth, who began to study the intricate, hand drawn work.

‘How did you do this so neatly without a computer?’ Beth’s respect for her archaeological hero increased further as she ran a finger over the representation of the drainage ditch she’d found, and traced where she imagined it might run, until it met up with a similar system on the US side of the site.

‘Practice. And a background in graphic design.’

‘You were a graphic designer?’

‘Briefly, once upon a time when the world was young.’

‘I can’t imagine you in an office.’ Beth couldn’t contain her surprise. ‘In fact, I can’t picture you being anything other than an archaeologist. You always seem to have been there! I was reading your books as I did my degree.’ Then she added more shyly, ‘You sort of influenced my decision about where to specialise.’

She could feel the blush starting before she’d finished speaking, realising that she sounded a bit like a groupie.

Harrison laughed as he picked up his coffee. ‘Thank you, doll, although I could do without being reminded how much older than you I am!’

‘You aren’t much older than me at all! I know you wrote
The Roman World in Archaeology
at an annoyingly early stage in your career. You make me feel like a total underachiever!’

‘Doll, I wrote that ten years ago.’ Harrison peered at Beth across the top of his mug, amazed at how difficult he was finding it not to reach out a hand to touch hers. ‘I did two years as a graphic designer back in the States before I admitted to myself that, although it was a useful skill, my heart wasn’t in it. I annoyed the hell out of my folks by changing my major at such a late stage in my degree.’

‘No way!’ Beth studied the plan again. She was curious about his past but, determined to remain doggedly professional, simply said, ‘I guess we should get the grid set up in the middle of the site and join the two sides up.’

‘We should also get a rota for a week of field-walking set up.’ He produced a second drawing of the eight metre by eight olive field’s layout, which was punctuated by nothing but a small hut he’d marked down on the edge of field three. ‘I stayed last night and paced the groves.’