“You needn’t call me Mr. Sterling when we’re alone.” He grinned with appallingly winsome charm. “Professorwill do fine.”
How anyone could make such a respectable title sound indecent, Amelia did not know. “We aren’t alone,” she pointed out. “There are fifty other people in the room.”
“When I’m with you, it feels as if the rest of the world vanishes.”
Amelia rolled her eyes.
“Speaking of vanishing,” he continued, “you fled after the Ashmolean fire—”
“I went to Hereford,” she corrected him.
“I’ve been worried.”
“Nonsense. You’ve been sleeping half the day and reading”—she angled her head to see the title of his book, and her nose wrinkled—“Byron.”
“Of course I’ve been reading Byron,” he retorted, as if it were obvious. “My best friend disappeared into the ether!”
“Sh!” Amelia glanced again at the crowd, but they hadgiven up hope of scandal and returned to their conversations. “I only went out of town for a few days. That’s hardly a good reason to succumb to Romantic poetry.”
“Was it because I got my eyebrows shaped and you were overwhelmed by their beauty?” he asked with apparent sincerity.
Ameliatsked. “No, I—” She paused, looking at his eyebrows, and he grinned. She speared him with a frown, although only briefly, in case she hurt him for real. “Scoundrel. No, Professor Ottersock started asking too many questions, and I needed an excuse to get away. You know that if he realized the truth about us not actually being enemies, he’d immediately fire me. He hasn’t budged from his notion that a male and female professor being bosom friends would bring Oxford into disrepute.”
“Well if you’re going to use a phrase like ‘bosom friends’ I can’t say I blame him,” Caleb said, then smiled again as her frown reappeared. “So when you sent me a note to meet here tonight, you weren’t planning to tell me goodbye forever? And in public, where I couldn’t make a scene?”
Amelia suppressed a laugh. “As if being in public ever deterred you from making a scene. No, I’m not planning to say goodbye. I wouldn’t leave Oxford.” She paused for the slightest of moments, then added, “My aunt Mary would get too lonely.”
“Ah yes, poor Aunt Mary, with only her husband, your brother, your cousin, his wife, and your parents for company.” He chuckled, and a dozen heads in the crowd whipped around to see what was happening and whether it signaled an imminent explosion.
“You are a pest!” Amelia declared at once in a strident voice.
Caleb straightened, shaking back his hair. “And you are poison!”
Murmuring, the crowd turned away again. Amelia and Caleb exchanged a look that mingled amusement, exasperation, and old remembrances—the kind of look only possible when you have known someone most of your life.No,Amelia corrected herself,“known” skimped on the truth.She didn’t just know Caleb. He was deep inside her heart, the truest friend she’d ever had, her most favorite person in all the world.
He was not supposed to be. Society, faced with the minefield of co-ed schools, tolerated the opposite sexes being friends only so long as they never touched, never went anywhere alone together, and never progressed beyond the most polite of conversations.
Because of that, she and Caleb had, since adolescence, kept the richness of their friendship scrupulously hidden behind a facade of “just chums.” But one slip had been all it took…one hug in a supposedly empty lane…to ruin everything. When Throckmorton went on his gossipmongering spree, their academic peers (generally speaking, a group of bookish old men who themselves had never been hugged, except that one time Mama was a bit drunk and feeling sentimental), were immediately ready with charges of seduction! misconduct! and making everyone else feel all hot and bothered!
Only a show of outright enmity had been able to stop the virulent rumors and ensure Amelia kept her reputation and her job, and Caleb kept his lifestyle as a wild, carefree bachelor (which mostly involved sleeping in late and adding bacon to every meal).
They’d become rather good at it; indeed, Caleb seemed to be having so much fun coming up with novel insults for her that Amelia didn’t quite know whether to be entertained or offended. And the madcap scheme was actually working. ProfessorOttersock complained daily about their antagonism, but he never guessed that Amelia and Caleb might be doing worse things than arguing; i.e., lounging next to each other on a sofa, drinking tea, and discussing their favorite types of biscuit.
Amelia could only suppose that society’s fear of men and women being close friends originated with historical events, such as when Isabella of France chummied up to Roger Mortimer and together they invaded England, overthrowing the king, her husband. Otherwise, the whole nonsense was beyond her. Fortunately, she was an antiquarian, not a psychiatrist, because she found people utterly inexplicable.
Caleb leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the table, ankles crossed. Amelia stiffened, imagining the germs that were no doubt leaping from his shoes to populate her books. “What are you writing?” he asked.
“My speech for the symposium tomorrow.”
“Is it about the amazing treasure you found in Hereford Cathedral?”
She raised an eyebrow. “How do you know I found anything?”
“Because I know you.”
All of a sudden Amelia’s interior twinkled, as if her cells had turned to stars. “It’s just a trinket, nothing important,” she said. (It was extraordinary.) “Not even worth discussing.” (If she didn’t win this year’s Petrarch Award for Excellence in Historical Research, King Henry VIII was an exemplary husband.)
“Can I see it?” Caleb craned his head as if he might be able to read her notes from a distance, upside down.
