For Chrissy and Rich—the best aunt and uncle in the world—with love
‘RUN that by me again.’ No way could Isobel have heard him correctly. She was used to Alex asking if he could sleep on her sofa while he was in London between digs or on a flying visit—his own flat in London was let out to tenants—but this request …
She must’ve been hearing things.
‘Will you marry me?’ Alex repeated.
Exactly what Isobel thought he’d said.
Was this some kind of joke?
Unlikely, because he looked serious. Besides, Alex didn’t make that kind of joke. She frowned. ‘I don’t understand. Have you gone temporarily insane, or something?’
‘No. I just need to get married. And I think you’d be the perfect wife.’
Oh, no, she wouldn’t. She’d already failed spectacularly with Gary. ‘You get women posting their knickers to you. You could get married to any woman you wanted.’
He laughed. ‘They don’t post their knickers to me, Bel. That’s a vicious rumour started by Saskia.’
Saskia was Alex’s baby sister and had been Isobel’s best friend since they were toddlers. Though Isobel wasn’t so sure the comment was just sibling teasing. ‘I know for a fact you get asked out by more women than most men even dream about.’
‘Women who fantasise about The Hunter—not about me.’
‘You’re one and the same, in their eyes.’ In hers, too: Alex had presented three series of a popular television archaeology programme, based on a series of articles he’d written for a leading Sunday newspaper, and when Isobel had curled up to watch the programmes she’d thought he came across just as he was in real life. Clever and extremely well read, but with a bit of flamboyance that had women dropping at his feet and the kind of easy charm that meant he made friends effortlessly and couldn’t go anywhere without half a dozen people hailing him by name. It had been like that even before he’d been catapulted to fame as ‘The Hunter’, an explorer who delved in ancient places and found treasure; but nowadays, with national television exposure, he was recognised by people he’d never even met.
‘Just let it slip to one of your gossip-column friends that you’re looking for a wife and there’ll be queues for miles,’ she suggested.
‘Gossip-column journos aren’t anybody’s friends except their own,’ he corrected. ‘And none of those women would be like you—sensible and settled.’
She coughed. ‘You’re digging yourself deeper into that hole, Alex.’ He wanted to marry her because she was sensible? Give her a break. That wasn’t why people got married.
Then again, marrying for love hadn’t exactly worked for her, had it? Her marriage hadn’t survived its final crisis.
‘Why do you need to get married anyway?’ she asked.
‘Because I need to get a job.’
‘This is beginning to feel like Alice Through the Looking Glass. The harder I try to understand this, the weirder it seems.’ She shook her head. ‘Apart from the fact that you don’t need to get married to get a job, why do you even need a job in the first place? You’re loaded.’
Alex waved a dismissive hand. ‘It’s got nothing to do with money.’
‘So what, then?’
‘It’s complicated,’ he hedged.
She leaned back against the sofa. ‘You’re not getting out of it that easily, Alex. Explain. Why do you need to get married?’
‘Because of this job. It’s perfect, Bel—Chief Archaeological Consultant for a firm that works with all the big property developers. When the developers plan to build on a site and discover remains of some structure they hadn’t even known existed, or we already know there are remains in the area that need to be conserved or recorded before any development work can start, I’d be in charge of a team of archaeologists who’d excavate the site.’
‘A desk job, you mean?’ She shook her head, scoffing. ‘No way. You’d last five minutes before you came down with a case of terminal boredom.’
‘It’s not a desk job. I’ll be doing the initial site visits and setting up the exploration, liaising with planning officers and talking people into giving us more time than they really want to for excavation work. Plus I’d be talking to the press, explaining the significance of the find.’
Put that way, it sounded just the sort of thing he’d enjoy doing. Alex would love the chance to be the first one in maybe hundreds of years to discover something. And the time pressure to excavate the site as thoroughly but as quickly as possible, so the builders could finish their job on schedule, would just add to the thrill for him. He thrived on being too busy.
‘I still don’t understand why you need a job. Aren’t you going to do the Hunter stuff any more?’
‘Of course I am.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s only for a few weeks a year.’
She understood where he was coming from. Alex was a workaholic—it was the only way to explain how he managed to pack more into two days than the average person did in a working week—and he liked it that way. ‘In other words, not enough to keep you busy and out of mischief.’
He laughed. ‘Exactly. I could do more TV work, I suppose, but I’ve talked to my agent and I agree with him that overexposure would be a mistake. It’s better to keep the series the length it is and leave people wanting more, rather than them seeing my face and thinking, Oh, no, not him again, and switching off. So I need something else to keep me occupied.’
‘What about your articles?’
He shrugged. ‘As you say, a desk job would drive me crazy. I need something with a lot of variety.’
‘Lecturing, then? If you had tutorial groups as well, that’d give you the variety because your students would all be different.’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘I’ve had offers, but to be honest I don’t really want to teach.’
Isobel frowned. ‘What’s wrong with what you do now?’
‘Nothing. I love freelancing. But I’m thirty-five, Bel. I need to be realistic about the future. In ten or twenty years I’m not going to want to spend hours at a time on my knees in a trench in the pouring rain. So I want to make the right career move now, while all my options are still wide open.’
It was a fair point, although Isobel thought Alex had enough strength of personality to make his own opportunities. She had a feeling there was a bit more to it than what he was telling her, but she couldn’t work out what. A relationship that had gone wrong? Surely not, because Alex kept his relationships light and very casual and in all the years she’d known him she couldn’t remember a girlfriend lasting more than half a dozen dates.
Maybe she was asking the wrong questions.
‘I still don’t understand where the married bit comes in.’
‘Apparently, the guy who owns the company wants a married man for the job.’
She snorted. ‘No way. That’s discrimination. It’s against the law, Alex.’
‘They’re not going to be able to ask me outright about my marital status,’ he agreed. ‘But it seems the last two guys they hired lasted all of six weeks before they got an offer they couldn’t refuse for—I quote—a really glamorous dig abroad.’
They both laughed,