all night.
She was bright. Funny. Incisive. Practical. A good listener, even when he was saying too much, too honestly. Her direct manner, her humor, the intelligent, plainspoken way she expressed herself, reminded him of Ulsie somehow.
No, looking at and listening to her throughout the remainder of their meal wouldn’t prove a hardship.
Once she’d seated herself, he offered the amiable smile that had graced five straight years of photo spreads in the annual “World’s Hottest Men” magazine issue. “You’ve heard about my job. Tell me more about what you do.”
“I’m a geologist,” she said before taking another healthy bite of her chicken.
How far did he want to take the dunce routine? Pretty far, he supposed, given his earlier slipups.
“So you make maps?” he asked.
Her lips twitched, but somehow she didn’t seem to be laughing at him. More with him. Which was infinitely more alarming.
“That would be a geographer. Or, rather, a cartographer.” Neatly, she sliced off a manageable bite of her green beans. “I sometimes consult maps for my work, but I’m a geologist. In the simplest of terms, I study rocks.”
He couldn’t say he’d ever met a geologist before. To be fair, that was also true for geographers or cartographers, but he wasn’t having dinner with one of those.
“Why rocks?” For once, the simplest question mirrored his honest curiosity.
She tapped the tines of her fork against her plate, pausing to think before she answered. “I guess . . .” One last ting of metal against porcelain, and she looked up at him again. “The Northridge earthquake happened when I was a kid, and a geologist came on TV at one point. Everything she said was so fascinating. So smart. She impressed the hell out of preteen me. After that, I was into seismology for a while.”
He remembered watching news coverage of that quake himself, but the Loma Prieta quake was a much more visceral memory.
Most people had already tuned into the World Series game. He’d still been studying, though, seething with resentment all the while. And then: the ominous rumble from everywhere at once, the rattle of fragile glass and porcelain, the creak of their house moving around beneath them, the urgency in his mother’s voice as she pushed him under the dining room table where they suffered together day after day. The way she tried to tuck his head beneath her body, protecting him as best she could for those few seconds on a Tuesday evening.
Why did that memory hurt so damn much?
“Then, after a geology program I did one summer in high school, I realized seismology wasn’t my first love after all.” April took another bite of her chicken before continuing. “That would be sedimentary rocks.”
Well, his ignorance this time wasn’t feigned. He wouldn’t know a sedimentary rock from . . . well, any other rock. Whatever other rock types there were. His parents’ desire to teach science had paled in comparison to their love of languages and history.
Her wide smile shone with just a hint of wickedness, and he shifted in his seat. “It’s a love affair that continues to this day. A dirty one. Literally.”
He took a hasty sip of water. Cleared his throat before speaking. “Okay. Why do you love supplementary rocks so much?”
Her smile never wavering, she dipped her chin at that, as if she were giving him credit. Acknowledging his exemplary work in the Dunce Arts. Good one, Marcus, he could almost hear her say in that husky, warm voice of hers.
Jesus, he was in such trouble.
Olaf came by to refill their water, but Marcus couldn’t tear his gaze from April.
When she leaned forward, her cleavage—
No, he wouldn’t look at her cleavage. He wouldn’t.
“I love sedimentary rocks”—to her credit, she didn’t emphasize the correct word—“because I love the stories they tell. If you study them closely enough, if you’ve trained enough, if you use the right tools, you can look at a particular spot and know whether there was once a lake there. You can know whether that area was part of a fluvial system, if a lahar came through after a volcanic event, if there was a landslide, a mudslide.”
Her hands were tracing pictures in the air as she spoke, miming the movement of water and earth, a graceful visual shorthand for destruction and chaos and creation revealing itself under her scrutiny.
Shit. Even with those telling gestures, he didn’t understand half of what she was saying, but he was so fucking turned on right now. Smart, accomplished, passionate women were his undoing,