Morning came too soon for Charlotte but she savoured it regardless, delighting in being wooed awake by wicked promises and exceptionally good coffee. A woman could get used to such treatment, but only a foolish woman would allow herself to depend on it.
She’d thought about joining Greyson in Borneo for the week. One week, what harm could it do? She had holiday time owing. Time her boss had urged her to take. She had no commitments to pets or to people—no responsibilities at all in that regard. She was a free agent and why shouldn’t she follow her heart—or at least her libido for a time—and see where it led?
Tempting, so tempting, this man’s kisses, as she and Greyson stood on dry land later in the day, saying their farewells beside her baking hot car, and stealing kisses where they could. Charlotte stole a lot of them, a woman bent on gorging herself before a famine.
‘Safe travels, Greyson Tyler,’ she murmured, and if her heart felt as if it was breaking, well, perhaps it was. She stood back and took one last look at him, storing up the memories for later. A big beautiful man with tousled black hair, intelligent brown eyes, more charm than was good for him, and an air of command and purpose that clung to him like skin. ‘I’ll think of you with pleasure and I’ll think of you with regret, but I’ll not be going with you to Borneo.’
‘Why not?’ His turn to move forward, to reach for her and coax every last drop of pleasure from a kiss. ‘We’re good together, Charlotte. Better than good.’
‘I know. And maybe in another lifetime, one shaped by a different upbringing, I’d have followed you and never looked back.’ She stepped back, out of his arms and the solace she found there and regarded him pensively. ‘You think I don’t know my own mind or that you can change it. Somewhere along the way, I’ve given you the impression that I don’t know what I want from a partner or from this life, and maybe I don’t. Not fully, not with certainty. Thing is, no matter how often I examine the notion of travel or of being with a partner who travels, there’s a resistance there that runs soul deep.’
‘Call me,’ he said gruffly. ‘When I get back.’
‘Greyson.’ She looked away, down at the suddenly blurry steering wheel of her car, anywhere but at him. How had she come to care for him so much in such a short time? Two weeks. Less than half a dozen meetings, and already he was tearing her in two. ‘I can’t.’ Nothing more than a ragged plea for mercy, for he seemed bent on making this farewell so much harder than it should have been. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered again.
‘Then I’ll call you.’
‘Greyson, please …’ She pressed her lips to his, one final farewell. She stepped back and smiled through her tears. Time to go before she begged him to stay. ‘Don’t.’
GREYSON TYLER wasn’t always an easy man to deal with. He had his fair share of dogged determination. He knew exactly how well persistence paid off. He hadn’t wanted to walk away from Charlotte Greenstone when she’d asked him to. His body had screamed no and his brain had assured him that he could overcome her protests eventually. Only honour had stayed his hand.
Charlotte hadn’t refused him in haste—she’d thought about his offer, thought hard about where their fledgling relationship might lead and what he could give her that she wanted. Her conclusion had been a valid one.
Not enough.
He’d heard that tune before. He knew all the words.
This time round, they hammered home hard.
He went to Borneo. He stayed the week and decided he had all the skills required to do good work there—if he had a mind to. Living conditions would be perfectly adequate. The seafood was exceptional. He’d be on the water a lot, and that always endeared a project to him, for the water was his home. He knew of half a dozen funding opportunities coming up. He should have been busy writing and sending out proposals.
And yet … a week passed, and then another three, and he still hadn’t written an outline for what he wanted to do in Borneo.
He tried telling himself it was because the PNG data had proved so richly rewarding, and he’d been distracted by that, and by all the research papers to be had from it. He even wrote some of those papers and was pleased with his efforts. Dr Grey Tyler was doing good work—work that, when reviewed and published, should make finding grant money for future projects easy.
Six months was all he’d allowed himself when it came to mining the PNG data for papers and two of those had already passed. He needed to get another project in place soon or he’d be out of work.
Being out of work held no appeal whatsoever.
Neither, he finally admitted to himself, did spending the next three years in a tiny fishing village in Borneo.
Something else, then. Something fascinating and captivating and a little more civilised would surely command his attention sooner or later.
And he wasn’t talking about Charlotte Greenstone.
With Greyson—and Gilbert—out of the picture, Charlotte attempted to settle back into her normal routine with joy, and, if not joy, then at least some measure of contentment. Alas, embracing her inner contentment really wasn’t going so well.
Restlessness plagued her. She couldn’t settle to her work.
For the first time in five years, the congestion of inner city Sydney got on her nerves, and the charm of her nose-to-girder view of the Harbour Bridge, and the vibrations that shook the windows with every passing passenger train, wore thin.
Life didn’t shine so brightly these days. Emptiness had crept back into her life and this time it stayed. Dreariness and weariness had crept in too—ugly unwanted companions that she couldn’t seem to shake.
Crankiness … Heaven help her, she had a short fuse these days.
The Mead had requested a meeting this morning to discuss a dig he was keen to find funding for. No guesses required as to whose job that would be. Following that, she had two undergraduate lectures scheduled for ten and twelve, and a doctor’s appointment to go to in the afternoon.
It was seven a.m. and all Charlotte wanted to do was crawl back into bed and relive a morning or two when she’d woken up in a strong and loving man’s arms and been treated to coffee in bed and pancakes with syrup, and a day of sailing and sunshine that she’d never wanted to end.
‘Damn you!’ she muttered to the man who’d given her that day. ‘A curse on you, Greyson Tyler.’ A really good curse, for having the temerity and the God-given attributes to worm his way into her psyche and stay there.
Greyson the gone—be he in Borneo, PNG, roasting over hot coals … wherever.
Gone.
Charlotte’s meeting with Harold Mead didn’t start well. She was ten minutes late, the smell of the coffee he handed her made her want to throw up, and there were two other suits in the room—one of them the head of university finance, the other one the Dean of Geology. She smelled collaboration and coercion and they came through on that in spades. A joint dig involving every geologist, archaeologist, and currently aimless dogsbody on the payroll of three different universities. Charlotte would not be in charge, of course. She wouldn’t even be required to step foot on site, if that was her preference. Nor would they utilise her field expertise, nor, by extrapolation, did they intend to credit her with any of the research.
No, Charlotte’s sole task was to shake the loose change from the private sector in order to fund the project.
She declined. Politely.