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“Dancing again?” Josh teased. He gave me a peck on the cheek. “Way to go, Indy!”

We stood there, the three of us, marveling at the space object, and then it happened. I was still staring at Levi’s face when his mouth went slack, his pupils dilating as if he’d just seen something extraordinary, something that made even this meteor pale in comparison.

Ashleigh stood there in a short white sundress that hugged her slim but curvy figure, her long tan legs on enviable display. Her light brown hair as always was perfect, not a strand out of place. I knew she was pretty. People were always praising her for it. I was used to it. It didn’t bother me that people didn’t have the same reaction to me. It was all right. I was the clever one.

But today, it was like I saw her with different eyes. His eyes. She was honestly the prettiest girl I’d ever seen in person. And I wondered how I’d never noticed before.

Levi ran a hand over his mussed hair as Josh introduced them. Ashleigh’s eyes flicked to me and then back to Levi. She cocked her head and she smiled. I’d seen that smile before. She used it whenever she wanted something.

A sickening wave of betrayal rose up in my gut. She knew how I felt about Levi. Why was she smiling up at him like that? I’d been worried about her embarrassing me. When I should have been worried about her stealing him from me.

It was too late, I reminded myself now as the cold, wet air of the tomb brought me back to the present moment. Why hadn’t I told him I loved him?

Because he was hers and always would be.

Chapter 1

Diana

Two Weeks Earlier

The jet left a thick contrail across the clear blue sky. I stared at it as it dissolved, a wispy memory of its former self. As always, my thoughts turned to Levi. Was that him up there?

“Earth to Diana.” Sabrina’s singsong voice behind me diverted my attention from the line of vaporous smoke in the air and memories of the boy who had broken my heart.

I turned around to meet her amused gaze. She shook her head and her dark curls bounced around her face. “Have you not heard Pete calling you for the past two minutes? I know he’s easy to tune out, but he’s getting shrill now. He may have blown a hole in my eardrum.” She lifted her hand and gestured to the tall, gangly figure of our “supervisor” Peter O’Malley, adjunct professor extraordinaire, who was standing with arms crossed, mouth pinched. He was miraculously dust free in his perfectly pleated chinos and pressed shirt, unlike Sabrina and me; we’d been up to our knees in damp soil all morning sifting pottery fragments from the dirt. It was tedious work, but someone had to do it. And I’d always enjoyed the mess.

“Yes, Pete?” I made no attempt to keep the irritation from my voice. We usually kept out of each other’s way, but today he’d been hovering over me like an overzealous mother hen, and I had the sneaking suspicion that he had been asked to keep me on task.

“Professor Harris has requested to see you, Diana.” Pete intoned as if he were summoning me to an audience with the king, which in the field of Etruscan archaeology was not far from the truth. Sometimes I still had to pinch myself to believe that I was working with the Reginald Harris, the foremost expert on the ancient world, whose television shows on PBS and the Discovery Channel had made me want to become an archaeologist in the first place. How many Sunday nights had I spent in front of the television watching him brush dust off some lost treasure, explaining in his Oxford-accented English the object’s incredible history? His was the voice I heard in my own head when, as a kid, I used to go digging for arrowheads. And, embarrassingly, I still heard it, late at night while working on my dissertation.

The dissertation that I’d almost decided to abandon because I’d gone and made a complete fool of myself by believing I’d found an Etruscan artifact on an isolated Greek island, when in fact, it was an elaborate hoax.

“Oh, so it’s Professor Harris today and not Reginald?” Sabrina teased. Pete loved nothing more than first-name dropping our boss to remind us that we peons were leagues beneath him on the field research totem pole—Sabrina as a field technician and me a lowly graduate assistant. Pete was a lecturer, but not tenure track (as Sabrina never ceased to remind him). As usual, whenever she teased him, the blood rushed to his pale cheeks and he cleared his throat, nervously adjusting his glasses. It was so obvious he was in her thrall. Well to everyone but Sabrina, that is, who waved me off any time I brought it up.

“Please, D,” she’d assured me numerous times, “he’s the last person I’d let shake my tree, even if he is kinda cute in a tight-assed Poindexter way.”

It’s true they were total opposites—the outspoken girl from the Bronx and the uptight adjunct from London, but stranger things have happened, and hook-ups were a commonplace occurrence when people were thrust together for weeks and even months at a dig site.

“Are you coming, Diana? Reginald”—he emphasized Professor Harris’s first name—“is waiting.”

“You musn’t keep him waiting, Diana!” Sabrina gasped and pressed a hand to her chest, intentionally drawing Pete’s eyes to her prodigious bosom encased in a tight gray tank. He cleared his throat again and turned around stalking off past the tumuli toward the portable trailers that marked the end of the excavation site. I stood and dusted the soil from the knees of my cargo pants taking a nervous glance around me. Ever since my embarrassing “discovery” this summer, I was sure that people were staring at me and feeling sorry for me any time I got called in to see Professor Harris.

“Poor girl, there she goes again,” I imagined them saying. “She thought she was on to something, and turns out, she’s just a big fraud.”

I took a deep breath and stood as tall as possible, blocking out the imaginary—and frankly extremely mean—voices in my head. Ignoring Pete, I knocked on Harris’s door and strode in with as much confidence as I could muster.

Professor Harris sat behind the mahogany desk he’d had shipped in from Venice. I’d been the one to choose it—along with the handblown glass lamp and a brass lion paperweight—back when I was still in his good graces and could be trusted with personal shopping duties. He ran a hand through his graying hair and adjusted his glasses over his long nose, lowering them just enough to study me over the tortoiseshell rims. I held my breath and tried to pretend that my heart wasn’t threatening to burst through my ribs.

“Di-an-a.” Harris articulated each syllable of my name as if I were a pesky pet who kept bringing him chewed-up shoes.

“Professor Harris, you wanted to see me?” I took a hesitant step forward.

“Yes, please sit down. I have excellent news.”

Excellent news? That would be a first. The tension in my shoulders loosened as I sat down on the leather chair in front of his desk. My eyes fixed to the papers spread out over his desk.

“I’ve been going over your notes from your Greek discovery.” I flinched and tried to tell myself that he didn’t take some strange delight in reminding me of my failure nearly every time I saw him, but it was increasingly difficult to believe that wasn’t the case.