Page 34 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Outside time, indeed! What he’d meant was “far enough away not to be caught.” And if they’d been caught? There would have been no consequences for him.

But Betsy—Betsy would have been ruined. The reality of it hit her hard. If anyone had seen them—if the others hadn’t been so far away—it wouldn’t matter that she hadn’t known he wasn’t free. She’d be used goods—and, even worse, it would be taken as an object lesson in the dangers of admitting women into previously male provinces. Just look what had happened to that little American girl who thought she could be an archaeologist.

It was horrifying how close she’d come to ruining her future, everything she’d always planned, and all for a man.

Well, it wasn’t going to happen again. Betsy wrapped her righteous anger around herself like the armor Monsieur de Robecourt’s ancestress had supposedly worn on crusade. Most likely he was lying about that too. Lies, all lies. She had to remember that. She had to remember that when her treacherous body wanted to remember the feel of his lips against her neck, his hand on her breast. Every look, every touch, a lie.

Aikaterini had tried to warn her. She had no one to blame but herself. She wouldn’t be that foolish again. No matter how compelling he was, how intoxicating his touch.

By the time they reached Mount Helicon the following day, Betsy was quite ready to pit herself against the elements. Never mind the historical significance, the myths of the Muses; she just wanted to climb something, to make her legs and lungs work so hard there was no room left for thinking.

“This will be,” their guide told them, “the first time barbarian women have climbed the mountain.”

“Barbarian?” Jenks guffawed, with a grin at Ethel and Betsy, even though he knew as well as the rest of them that barbarian was simply the Greek word for all non-Greeks. Betsy looked coldly back at him.

“European,” the guide hastily corrected himself.

“We’re not European,” said Betsy sharply. “We’re American. And we’re equal to anything. Particularly a measly old mountain.”

“Er, Betsy?” whispered Wingate. “Please don’t insult the mountain of the man we’re trusting to lead us back to civilization.”

“Why? Are you scared you can’t make it to the top?”

“No,” said Wingate. “I’m scared we won’t make it back again. Skulls are very picturesque, but I don’t want to be one.”

“We’re all bones eventually,” said Jenks philosophically.

Because no one had ever said that before. Betsy turned her back on them all and focused her attention on the slope. She wasn’t quite sure if their guide had tried to punish them for her flippant words by leading them up the steepest way possible, but if he had, she welcomed it. Her legs burned; her throat burned; her cheeks burned; the palms of her hands burned from pulling herself up the rough side of rocks. She felt as though she were being scoured clean.

The others ambled their way up the mountain, arguing about the festival of the Muses, pausing to examine the Hippocrene spring. Betsy didn’t need to hear Wingate quoting Keats—or Jenks going on about Pausanias. She was sick unto death of Pausanias. Betsy charged ahead, driving their guide half-distracted. He compromised by showing her to the summit and then hurrying back down to the rest of the party, who were picnicking by the sacred spring, taking turns sampling the famed waters to see if it brought out poetic inclination or just gas.

Betsy planted her feet firmly on the rock, the first American woman to stand where she stood, to stare out over Greece laid out like a map before her, mountains and valleys, wilderness and villages. The Gulf of Corinth lay below her, and there, on the far side, the American excavation. Her excavation.

She’d climbed to the top of Mount Helicon, thought Betsy fiercely. Who was Rufus Richardson to say she didn’t have the stamina to dig?

This was why she was here in Greece, here on top of the world, looking out at her destiny, not a French archaeologist, chance met and just as quickly forgotten.

“It does put things into perspective, does it not?” It was hard to forget someone when they insisted on creeping up behind you and stealing the thoughts out of your head.

Monsieur de Robecourt took his place at the summit beside her. He didn’t look at her, didn’t touch her, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need to touch her to make her treacherous body tingle. “Standing up here, we are but tiny specks of dust in the sweep of time.”

Betsy kept her eyes trained on the Gulf of Corinth. “I might be a dust mote in the eye of time, but I don’t mean to be swept away.”

She could hear the whisper of his hair against his collar as he turned to look at her. “I cannot imagine anyone would be such a fool as to attempt such a thing.”

Why did he have to sound so tender? “Then you’d better not try it, had you?”

“Or account myself even more a fool than I am?” he said quietly. “What can I say to make things right?”

“You can’t.” Betsy dug her feet into the rock and her hands into her pockets, bracing herself against the winds. “You can’t close Pandora’s box. It’s all out already.”

He drew closer, using his body to block the worst of the wind. “Might we not . . . go back to what we were?”

“Do you mean the bit where you pretend you don’t have a wife?” Betsy turned to glare at him. A clump of hair blew into her mouth. Betsy spat it out again. “Or the bit where you pretend that you have an interest in my opinions?”

“That was never pretense.” Reaching out, he gently tucked her hair back behind her ear for her. “You have a quality of mind—of thought—that is something entirely out of the ordinary. Most of us, we plod along—we accept what we’ve been told—but you, you look at everything fresh. You examine it, you interrogate it, you turn it upside down to find missing truths. Some day, every Hellenist in the world will know your name. When I am a very old man, I can brag that I knew you when you were first come to Greece, that I knew you and knew what you would be.”

Betsy hated herself for the way her cheek turned toward his hand, seeking his touch. She jerked her head away. “And what will I be?”