Ford swallowed. Hard.
“But don’t worry,” she continued. “I assure you, it has just enough support. Would you like me to show you?” she asked, holding the bra in front of her.
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
Show him? As in right here, right now? Corrie in . . . that? Blood rushed through his body like a fire sweeping over a dry plain.
“My God, Ford. Are you blushing?” she smirked.
Crap. Was he? He quickly reached for his ear, his telltale sign—it was hot, red hot—all while unable to take his eyes off Corrie.
“Working hard, I see,” Agnes said as she walked into the tent with a thermos and a couple of empty mugs, forcing Ford to take a step back.
“Oh, just trying to explain to Dr. Matthews how bras work. He doesn’t think this one has enough support for me,” Corrie said, holding up the bra for Agnes.
Ford already knew he was never going to hear the end of it from either of them. Why he’d felt the need—or the right—to ask in the first place was completely beyond him.
“Mm,” Agnes said, inspecting the bra from afar. “It’s got plenty of support, depending on what you’re using it for. I’ve got one just like it. Want to see?” she asked Ford.
Agnes and Corrie snickered, like the two of them had planned this.
“Ha ha ha,” Ford exaggerated. “You two are hilarious.”
“Your cheeks are a little red. Are you feeling all right?” Agnes said, walking toward him and reaching to touch his forehead.
But he swatted at her hand and backed away. “I’m fine.”
Blushing, though? Seriously? Like he’d never seen a bra before.
“Here you go,” Agnes said, handing the coffee and mugs to Corrie. “Made it extra strong. Now I’ll let you get back to . . . work,” she said, with a shimmy in her shoulders.
Ford walked to the desk, trying to ignore the suggestion in Agnes’s voice. Why had he even opened his mouth? Since when did he start thinking it was okay to comment on a woman’s—or anyone’s—attire? Especially their intimate attire. His mother would be mortified.
Even more than he was.
“Sorry,” Corrie said, setting the mugs and thermos on the desk next to the sandwiches.
“No, I’m the one who should be sorry. That was totally inappropriate of me.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t exactly being appropriate in my response, either. I was trying to add a little levity to the situation. I mean, first my vibrator, now my bra? It’s like a regular boudoir in here,” she said with a slight chuckle.
Ford closed his eyes and cringed. He didn’t want to think about Corrie’s bra or her vibrator. Or boudoirs. Or anything else that might make him blush again. It was going to be hard enough working next to her every day, especially on days like this when they would be in close quarters. At least once they found another dig site, they’d be spread out and he wouldn’t have to chance being close enough that he could smell whatever that coconut scent was that shrouded her entire being.
The scent that permeated his nostrils now that she was sitting across from him. Intoxicating him. Putting him in a daze.
“Sorry,” Corrie apologized again. “Inappropriate.”
“How about we get to work, okay?”
She nodded as she twisted off the lid of the thermos and poured the coffee, now filling the air with the aromas of Jamaican coffee and coconut. He sucked in a breath. Mm. It took him back to the night in the library.
He was in trouble.
“So here’s where we are,” he said, pointing out their location on the map and trying to focus. “The locations marked with an X? Those are the ones I’ve checked out personally and determined weren’t right. The locations with a question mark? Well, it’s obvious what that means.”
Corrie stood and bent over the map while taking a sip of her coffee. Did she not realize what that did for her cleavage? Staring shouldn’t have been an option, but Ford couldn’t avert his gaze.
His eyes traveled upward along the crease between her breasts to the length of her neck, pausing momentarily on her wet, glistening lips before landing on her eyes. The ones staring right back at him.
Fuck. He quickly looked at the map and cleared his throat, waiting for another teasing browbeating from Corrie. When one didn’t come, he glanced back at Corrie, who was deeply entrenched in the map.
“Do you have a copy of my dissertation?” she asked.
“Um . . . yeah. Let me find it.”
The papers shuffled on the desk as he sorted through the stacks. Maybe he should have been embarrassed that he had been relying on someone else’s work, even going so far as assigning her dissertation as required reading material for his students, but it was a great paper. He could admit it. Corrie was brilliant. It was one of the reasons he’d kept her close during grad school. Keep your enemies close, right? Not that he’d viewed Corrie as his enemy all those years ago. Back in the day, it had been more like friendly competition.
Though, since then, it had turned less . . . friendly. And when Ford had taken the Yale fellowship, well, he’d all but declared war.
“Here,” he said, pulling out the well-worn copy of her dissertation. Dog-ears. Post-its. Handwritten notes in the margins.
He’d read it front to back a least a dozen times. A few passages he could even recite by memory. He remembered sitting there in the audience of her dissertation defense in awe—hidden in the back, of course, so as not to piss her off and screw her up. Had Dr. Crawley seen her defense, there was no way Ford would ever have gotten his job. In that moment, she’d earned that title of Dr. Socorro Mejía. She was the whole package—brains, beauty, fearlessness. A pang had shot through his chest. Regret possibly? And questioning whether he’d made a mistake.
Her eyebrows raised as she stared at his Frankenstein version of her paper. Okay, now he was embarrassed.
“Yeah . . . I might have read it a few times,” he said, lowering his head and rubbing the back of his neck.
“I guess so.”
Cringe again.
“Don’t worry, I’ve read yours, too, and also took notes. I mean, my notes are more like holes in a giant bull’s-eye, but the overall tattered effect is about the same. I’ll let you see it sometime. You know, like if I ever ask you to join me on a dig in Peru.”
Ford winced and thought back to his dissertation on the lives of the Incas in Machu Picchu. If he’d ever learned that Corrie had been hired for a dig there, and not him, it would have more than stung. “I deserve that.”
“Yeah, you do. But I’m still grateful for the after-the-fact invitation. If I’d heard that you’d come here and found Chimalli without me, I would have murdered you.” She smiled. God, why did Ford find it so sexy despite the fact that she was joking about killing him?
“Then I guess it’s a good thing for me that I wasn’t digging in the right spot.” He smiled back, and a silence fell over the room as they stared at each other. Searching each other’s faces.
What was happening here? Were they . . . getting along? Engaging in playful banter? Not wanting to murder each other?
The curled corners of Corrie’s dissertation thrummed through her delicate, slender fingers. What was she thinking? He could see something was on her mind. Something she wanted to ask him. Her lips twitched and she pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. Ford fought to keep from looking at her mouth, but it was like a beacon begging for his attention.