But at least they were all amateurs, rather than actual paparazzi. He’d half expected to be greeted that night by a shouting handful of people with enormous cameras clustered outside the restaurant entrance, as had happened on so many of his other dates.
Not because the paparazzi had followed him to those restaurants. Because his dates had told the media beforehand where to go.
It was unforgivably stupid. Naive. He knew it. But each time, blinking against the harsh strobe of the flashes, overwhelmed amid the roar of voices calling his name and telling him to look over here, the realization that his date hadn’t wanted him, really, but rather the dubious perks of his odd, transient fame—
Each time, he’d floated outside himself for a moment. Disoriented. Lost.
Tonight, he’d walked into the restaurant undisturbed, illuminated only by the lingering glow of sunset and streetlights just flickering to life. Even though, if April had alerted them, countless reporters would have raced to cover the much-anticipated date.
STAR MEETS STAN, one blogger had termed the momentous occasion.
Before April had even arrived, then, he’d already considered their date more enjoyable than most he’d had since being cast on Gods of the Gates. Her eventual entrance into the restaurant hadn’t shaken that assessment, either. This might be an evening spent together out of necessity, rather than any real attachment on either side, but he could still appreciate her company, the opportunity to admire her across the table for an hour or two, and the convenience of her location near San Francisco and his parents.
When their dinner ended, they’d take a few pics to post on Twitter and prove her haters wrong. Afterward, once they went their separate ways, all the buzz would slowly diminish. Until their meal together became simply a footnote in his Wikipedia entry, a reminder of that time he went on a date with a fan of his show, because he might be dim, but he was also kind.
That was how everyone was interpreting this dinner. As a sympathetic gesture, rather than an expression of real attraction.
They weren’t wrong, obviously. But the easy assumption that of course he couldn’t be attracted to April, of course he couldn’t truly want to date her, pricked some raw spot within him. Made him bristle a bit. After that ugly thread the other day, he couldn’t avoid knowing why everyone had made their assumptions. And if he understood, April did too.
The irony: they weren’t entirely right, either.
Yes, he would have asked out anyone in her position. A troll living under a bridge. A beauty queen. Whomever.
But April was no troll. By candlelight, her hair was a gleaming sheet of copper flowing just past her shoulders, her eyes dark and sparked by fire. She hadn’t covered her freckles with whatever makeup she was wearing, and he was trying very hard not to count each adorable speckle on her nose and the tops of her round cheeks. Much as he’d forced himself not to stare for longer than a heartbeat at her body, lush and faithfully outlined by that green dress she wore.
Those braying fanboys weren’t just cruel. They were fools.
April Whittier was a goddess. And as the son of Lawrence Caster and Debra Rupp, as a man who played a demigod himself, he would know.
As she circled other tables on her way back to theirs, her confident stride matched her up-tilted chin. Maybe she didn’t notice the stares, the way at least one cell phone camera followed her progress. Maybe she didn’t care. Or maybe she was pretending not to care.
Either way, she impressed the hell out of him, just as she’d been doing all night.
She was bright. Funny. Incisive. Practical. A good listener, even when he was saying too much, too honestly. Her direct manner, her humor, the intelligent, plainspoken way she expressed herself, reminded him of Ulsie somehow.
No, looking at and listening to her throughout the remainder of their meal wouldn’t prove a hardship.
Once she’d seated herself, he offered the amiable smile that had graced five straight years of photo spreads in the annual “World’s Hottest Men” magazine issue. “You’ve heard about my job. Tell me more about what you do.”
“I’m a geologist,” she said before taking another healthy bite of her chicken.
How far did he want to take the dunce routine? Pretty far, he supposed, given his earlier slipups.
“So you make maps?” he asked.
Her lips twitched, but somehow she didn’t seem to be laughing at him. More with him. Which was infinitely more alarming.
“That would be a geographer. Or, rather, a cartographer.” Neatly, she sliced off a manageable bite of her green beans. “I sometimes consult maps for my work, but I’m a geologist. In the simplest of terms, I study rocks.”
He couldn’t say he’d ever met a geologist before. To be fair, that was also true for geographers or cartographers, but he wasn’t having dinner with one of those.
“Why rocks?” For once, the simplest question mirrored his honest curiosity.
She tapped the tines of her fork against her plate, pausing to think before she answered. “I guess . . .” One last ting of metal against porcelain, and she looked up at him again. “The Northridge earthquake happened when I was a kid, and a geologist came on TV at one point. Everything she said was so fascinating. So smart. She impressed the hell out of preteen me. After that, I was into seismology for a while.”
He remembered watching news coverage of that quake himself, but the Loma Prieta quake was a much more visceral memory.
Most people had already tuned into the World Series game. He’d still been studying, though, seething with resentment all the while. And then: the ominous rumble from everywhere at once, the rattle of fragile glass and porcelain, the creak of their house moving around beneath them, the urgency in his mother’s voice as she pushed him under the dining room table where they suffered together day after day. The way she tried to tuck his head beneath her body, protecting him as best she could for those few seconds on a Tuesday evening.
Why did that memory hurt so damn much?
“Then, after a geology program I did one summer in high school, I realized seismology wasn’t my first love after all.” April took another bite of her chicken before continuing. “That would be sedimentary rocks.”
Well, his ignorance this time wasn’t feigned. He wouldn’t know a sedimentary rock from . . . well, any other rock. Whatever other rock types there were. His parents’ desire to teach science had paled in comparison to their love of languages and history.
Her wide smile shone with just a hint of wickedness, and he shifted in his seat. “It’s a love affair that continues to this day. A dirty one. Literally.”
He took a hasty sip of water. Cleared his throat before speaking. “Okay. Why do you love supplementary rocks so much?”
Her smile never wavering, she dipped her chin at that, as if she were giving him credit. Acknowledging his exemplary work in the Dunce Arts. Good one, Marcus, he could almost hear her say in that husky, warm voice of hers.
Jesus, he was in such trouble.
Olaf came by to refill their water, but Marcus couldn’t tear his gaze from April.
When she leaned forward, her cleavage—
No, he wouldn’t look at her cleavage. He wouldn’t.
“I love sedimentary rocks”—to her credit, she didn’t emphasize the correct word—“because I love the stories they tell. If you study them closely enough, if you’ve trained enough, if you use the right tools, you can look at a particular spot and know whether there was once a lake there. You can know whether that area was part of a fluvial system, if a lahar came through after a volcanic event, if there was a landslide, a mudslide.”
Her hands were tracing pictures in the air as she spoke, miming the movement of water and earth, a graceful visual shorthand for destruction and chaos and creation revealing itself under her scrutiny.
Shit. Even with those telling gestures, he didn’t understand half of what she was saying, but he was so fucking turned on right now. Smart, accomplished, passionate women were his undoing, always, even though he knew—he knew—he’d never be enough for them. Not the fake him, and not the real him, either.
She waited until he met her eyes before continuing. Each word precise. Each word the echo of a siren, and he meant that in every conceivable way.
“You have to dig.” She didn’t look away, and he couldn’t. “You have to look carefully, but there’s a story waiting for you. It wants you to see the signs. It wants to be told.”
Under that clear, calm gaze, he wanted to hide beneath the table once more. Cover his head and protect himself as the ground beneath him swayed and buckled.
Then she picked up her fork and speared another bite of her haricot verts, and he could breathe again. Could ignore for another moment that under his feet, the earth wasn’t actually solid and still. It was moving, continually. And deep, deep below a placid, cool surface, even stone turned molten and fiery and liquid.
“Also, geology is a culmination of various sciences,” she added in a casual aside. “Chemistry, physics, biology all come into play. I liked that too, because lots of different subjects interest me.”
He shouldn’t ask. He definitely wasn’t going to ask.
And yet—
“Why do you say it’s a dirty love affair?” he asked.
There it was.
Closing his eyes, he dropped his chin to his chest and exhaled hard through his nose. Shit. He didn’t need yet more reason to want April, not when his gut already tightened with each glimpse of her pale, freckled skin bathed by candlelight. Not when she made a goddamn living spearing through surfaces and discovering what lay underneath, and he wanted to remain undiscovered. At least for the moment.
“Up until now, I’ve spent a good chunk of my workdays handling soil. Looking for contamination at former industrial sites and coordinating whatever cleanup is feasible under the circumstances.” When he opened his eyes again, she was scraping the last bits of polenta from her plate. “The last few weeks, I’ve been dealing with a former pesticide facility, so the ground is contaminated with metals.”