If it's what you really want to do, you'll find a way. If you settle for less, you're always going to wonder what you've missed. She walked slowly down the hall to her office, closed the door behind her, and sat down at her desk. She'd told her big secret. Half the department would know by tomorrow.
The phone was right there in front of her. All she had to do was to pick it up.
She reached into her briefcase for her wallet and found the dog-eared card inside it. Holding it carefully, she dialed the number on it and waited, her heart pounding, until Calder answered the phone.
"It's me," she said.
"Cassie? Are you all right?"
She drew a deep breath. "I love you, and I'd like it if you came back."
There was a long silence on the other end, and then Calder said, "Hold that thought. I'll be there tonight."
"You did what?" Calder stared at Cassie incredulously. Had he heard her correctly?
"I told them. No more secrets, except about the harboring. No more obstacles. You can stay as long as you want, and it doesn't matter who finds out." Her eyes were dancing.
It was hard to believe, after all these months of telling himself he could never have her. But he could see the truth of it in how she moved, in the energy that seemed to exude from her. He gathered her into his arms, holding her tight, making her laugh as he lifted her so her feet left the floor. "I don't deserve you."
She caught his face between her hands and kissed him. "Too bad. You're stuck with me now."
As the weekend progressed, Calder couldn't have been happier. The way Cassie made free with his body—always touching his arm or taking his hand or sliding into his lap—charmed him completely, and he sought out her touch more and more. The intensity of their sexual connection didn't diminish with repetition. He found he was growing addicted to the heady delight of pleasuring her, to the point that she teased him by saying he seemed to enjoy her satisfaction more than his own. He denied this vigorously, but the fact remained. The more he had of her, the more he wanted.
The most mundane things could remind him how much he wanted her. After dinner on Sunday, as Cassie filled the sink with warm water to do the dishes, he said, "Maybe I should start looking for that house with a hot tub."
Cassie's hands, buried deep in soap suds, stilled on the dishes. "Isn't it a little early to be thinking about that kind of thing?"
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't make assumptions." Some of Calder's exuberance slipped away at the reminder that Cassie still might have reservations about their relationship, even without the complication of her past. "I understand if you don't want to live together right away, but I'd still rather have a place you'd be comfortable with in the long term."
"Calder, we've just decided to give this relationship a try. We're not ready to move in together. Besides, how can we live together if you can't mention me to your family?"
"I'm fine with telling my family about you. I'd just rather wait, say, 'til after our first child is born." He said it as if it were a joke, but he didn't want to let Cassie meet his parents before he was sure of her commitment to him. He couldn't take the chance of them scaring her off.
Cassie scrubbed fiercely at a stain on the pan. "That's okay. I don't want you to meet my sister, either. She isn't pleasant. And of course you won't be meeting Ryan. He won't be out for at least twelve years."
So she didn't expect him to be around in twelve years. "What about your parents?"
"I suppose you could meet them if you wanted. You wouldn't have anything to talk to them about, but they're okay."
"I could talk to them about you." He slid his arms around her, letting his hand creep under her sweater to lie against her skin.
She raised her eyebrow. "Why do I get the feeling your mind is not on the conversation?"
"No, it is. Sometimes I feel better when I touch you." It reduced his anxiety about losing her, but he wasn't about to say so.
"So I'm sort of a big teddy bear, am I?"
"A sexy teddy bear." He kissed her neck. "But I wasn't trying to distract you. And I bet your family is very nice."
"Calder, my mother is a cashier at K-Mart. My father works construction when he can get a job, and when he can't, he sits in front of the TV and drinks beer. Sometimes he'd go off for months and we never knew if he was coming back. My sister—well, you know what she does. The only person in my family you could have a real conversation with is Ryan."
"Ryan is different?"
She inspected the pan for invisible stains. "Ryan's a lot like me. He's smart and he wanted more from life than the South Side. I taught him to read when he was four, and he was stealing my books by the time he was in second grade. He dropped out of high school, but he's taught himself a lot."
"He's younger than you are?" For some reason, Calder had pictured a much older brother.
"Almost ten years. I left home when he was nine. I didn't go back much, so I never realized he was getting beaten up regularly by other boys because his grades were too good. So he learned to do badly at school. When he was fifteen, he wrote to me, asking if he could come to live with me. I was twenty-four, in my second year of grad school. I could have taken him. It wouldn't have been easy, but I could have done it. But I was finally doing what I had dreamed of after all those years of fighting to get there, and I didn't want a teenage brother to take care of." She rinsed the pan and handed it to Calder. "So I said no, and I never asked him why he wanted to leave. If I'd said yes, he'd be graduating from college instead of being in prison."
"You can't hold yourself responsible for that."
"I raised him, Calder. My mother worked two jobs to meet the mortgage, and we never knew when Dad would be working, so I took care of Ryan. Don't tell me what I can hold myself responsible for."
"But you were only ten."
"That's practically a grown-up where I come from." Her voice held forced cheerfulness as she changed the subject. "My mother named me after a soap opera character. That should tell you something about her."
He hated seeing the tension in her and the knowledge that some parts of her were still off limits. "She picked a character with a nice name."
"I was lucky. She almost named me after her second favorite, because she liked the name so much. Then I would have been Brandi—Brandi Boulton. I think I'd rather have died."
He pulled her back against him. "No, I can't see you as a Brandi. She was right to choose Cassandra instead."
"That's easy for you to say. You don't know what my middle name is."
"What's your middle name?"
She leaned her head back to kiss him. "That secret will go to the grave with me."
He woke up during the night with the sense something was wrong. At first he couldn't tell what it was; Cassie was in his arms and holding him tightly, but that certainly wasn't a problem as far as he was concerned. It took a moment before his thinking became clear enough to notice how tense her body was and the unevenness of her breathing. Concerned, he reached up to touch her face, only to discover that, as he suspected, she was crying silently. He kissed her forehead. "What's the matter?" he asked, afraid of what the answer might be.
She seemed to freeze. "Nothing," she said, her voice carefully steady.
"It's not nothing. I may be inarticulate, but I'm not stupid."
"No," she said into his chest. "You're not stupid."
"So tell me about it, then."
She was silent for a moment. "There's nothing really to tell. Just a lot of feelings, nothing sensible."
He held her close, stroking her hair. "If I've done something wrong, if I've pushed you too hard, please tell me. I don't want to frighten you away again."
"You didn't do anything," she said, her voice muffled. "I'm just scared, that's all."
"Scared of what?" He held his breath, waiting for her answer.
"That it will end badly—that you'll find out I'm not who you think I am, or that you'll get tired of living in my world, and I can't fit into yours."
<
br /> "Surely you know I'm not that easy to get rid of by now." He could hardly stand the anxiety. It would be unbearable if she backed away from him again now. "What's this 'my world and your world' business?"
"We can do fine when our worlds intersect, but there's another part of your life. The charity balls, the high society, even the politics. I can carry off a fancy party every now and then, but I just couldn't breathe if I always had to worry about who knew what about whom. I'm not from that world, and it would show, and I'd embarrass you."
"Don't worry about that. I agree. I think you'd be unhappy in that world. But so am I, and I have been for years, and I'm not going back to it. I hate being in crowds of people, I hate having to say the right thing, I hate all the predatory behavior. The only reason I've put up with it is because I felt I had to uphold the family name, but I don't care about that anymore. If my family can't cope with the fact that I hate big parties, that's their problem."
"But what about your friends, like Scott? He'd expect you to do things like that, too."
"My friends know better than to ask that of me. Why is it so hard to believe me on this?"
"Because men leave. That's what they do."
Like her father had left her. He would have to be careful here. "I'm not going to leave."
"That's easy to say, but I'm still afraid of losing you."
He tipped up her face so she could see him. "Do you think I'm not frightened of losing you? I'm bloody terrified of it, I can tell you. You have nothing to worry about. After all, you're the one who wants to take this slowly, while I'm talking about marriage, a house here and probably one on the Cape, and if I knew whether you wanted them or not, I'd be talking about the kids, the station wagon, and the dog as well."
"You haven't been talking about marriage," she said in a small voice. "And please don't start. I'm scared enough as it is."
"I won't talk about it now, at least. But I have a confession to make."
"What's that?"
"I really would like to get a dog. I've always wanted one."
She laughed. "You can have a dog, that's fine. As long as it's not one of those tiny ones. I don't like dogs I can step on."
He pretended to be offended. "Of course not. I want a big dog, one that can go on walks along the beach with us. Don't be surprised if you come home from work some day to find a puppy. I've wanted a dog for a really long time."
She nibbled his shoulder affectionately. "I think I'm safe. My landlord doesn't allow dogs."
"See, I told you we needed a house," he said with a glint in his eye.
"You certainly like having your own way!"
"Yes," he said, rolling on top of her and neatly pinning her to the bed. "I like having my own way very, very much, and I especially like having my way with you." His lips came down on hers in a manner that left little doubt as to his meaning.
Chapter 18
THE NEXT DAY CASSIE asked, "Have you thought through the implications of taking this job at Haverford? Presumably the faculty can be trusted not to go around telling people who you are, but once students are involved, it's a different question. What if one of them recognizes you? Then everyone would know."
Calder found there was something reassuring about Cassie worrying over him. "It doesn't matter. I've decided to stop keeping it secret anyway. I may just tell the students flat out the first day, and let the chips fall where they may."
"But what about your family? Won't they be upset?"
"Probably." He wasn't displeased with the idea. Now that he'd made this much of a break, he was starting to enjoy it. "It's their problem, though, not mine."
"That's brave of you."
He shrugged. "I should have done it a long time ago. It's just a habit to do things their way."
"Whatever you think is best. But if you're going to do it anyway, you might consider telling people sooner. That could be a disruptive way to start your first class."
When he had Cassie at his side, it was easy to believe his family was unimportant. Unfortunately, he knew that sooner or later he would pay for the illusion. It wasn't something he wanted to think about. "Tell you what. I'll announce it right away if you'll tell me what your middle name is."
Cassie laughed, as he had intended. "No deal."
Cassie gathered the dirty laundry into the hamper and put the bottle of detergent on top of it. Calder had done the laundry the last time, just to prove he knew how. The various household tasks that were a mystery to him were one of her favorite things to tease him about.
She picked up the basket to take it to the basement, but Calder came in the door carrying a newspaper before she had a chance. He didn't return the smile she gave him. Instead he threw the paper on the table in front of her. "It's started. My father's secretary called to point it out to me."
It was a tabloid, the kind she saw at the grocery store check-out. The teaser strip at the top of the front page read, "Calder's Love Nest?" next to a small photo of the two of them.
Cassie leaned over to take a closer look. "That's a fake, isn't it? I don't remember anyone taking pictures of us together."
"They don't bother themselves with facts. Wait 'til you see the story."
She flipped through the paper until she found the article. "Calder Westing in Love Nest with Sexy Scientist." A disbelieving laugh escaped her. According to it, she and Calder met for the first time at a party a few weeks earlier and had been inseparable since. It listed her as a professor at Haverford but said nothing about her background. That was something to be grateful for.
The remainder recounted what she hoped was a sensationalized version of Calder's past affairs and speculated whether this would last any longer than his previous flings. There was no reference to his writing or why he was at Haverford in the first place.
He rested his hands on the back of a chair. "How is the college going to react to one of its faculty members showing up in the tabloids?" he asked, as if the answer to his question was a foregone conclusion.
"I don't think it will be that much of a problem. It doesn't say anything bad about me. It might be embarrassing in my department, if anyone finds out about it. Maybe I should ignore it and hope nobody notices." She folded the paper and pushed it away.
"If you want, I could talk to them. After all, I'm the one the tabloids are after."
"Thanks, but no. What we need is to get them to see how ridiculous it is." She paused and then smiled wickedly. "I have an idea. Are you really ready to go public about Stephen West?"
It was 10:45, near the end of Biology 101, the largest class the department offered. Cassie took a deep breath, glancing down to make sure her PowerPoint was ready to go.
"Now, before we conclude today, I'd like to take a few minutes to review common errors in experiment design and write-ups. Not only do these occur in our lab," she clicked to display the cover of a lab notebook on the overhead screen "but also in some of our finer scientific journals." She replaced it with an image of the tabloid's front page.
The class was accustomed to her tongue-in-cheek humor, so it took a moment before any of them looked closely enough to recognize her picture. She spoke over the first gasps and whispered comments. "The scientific method requires following a particular series of steps. First, you make an observation, and then you formulate the hypothesis, a possible explanation for your observation."
She clicked to show the headline of the article, "Calder Westing in Love Nest with Sexy Scientist." "Your observation must be a neutral one that avoids bias. A good scientist will, of course, define any terms that might cause confusion." She used her laser pointer to circle the words "love nest" and "sexy." "And then there is the most fundamental error, which is to mistake the hypothesis for an explanation of a phenomenon, without performing experimental tests."
She had to raise her voice to be heard over the laughter. She flashed up the first paragraph of the story. "It simply will not do to formulate your hypothesis without a thorough review of literature. In this ca
se, the researcher states that the two subjects under observation have just met, whereas a quick check of a book written by Calder Westing makes mention of their acquaintance well before this date." The acknowledgments page from Pride & Presumption appeared on the screen.
"Another common mistake is to ignore or rule out data that do not support the hypothesis. In this case, the writer implies that Mr. Westing's sole purpose for being in the area was the aforementioned scientist, ignoring the data showing that he had been interviewed for a job earlier that week at a small liberal arts college within a half mile of the so-called love nest." She put up an aerial photo of Haverford's campus, amused to hear excited whispers being passed back and forth.
Man Who Loved Pride and Prejudice Page 24