Sarah put on water to boil for mac and cheese, the tomato soup was heating in the microwave, and she’d started a pot of coffee. She also needed to make Nate another cup of herbal tea.
She’d already bathed, and Nate was still in the tub. They’d considered doing it together but they’d both agreed they didn’t need to get distracted. She’d also changed into her PJ pants, camisole, softest zip-up sweatshirt, and fluffy socks she wore as slippers. She’d towel-dried and braided her hair because she wasn’t sure what else to do with it.
“I smell food.” The deep, masculine voice came from nearby, and she turned to see Nate with only a towel around his waist.
Her mouth went dry. For some reason, he looked larger than last night. Maybe because, for the first time, it was light. Or maybe it was his newly re-bandaged shoulder. His muscles were so defined that water from his long, wet hair followed the rivulets of his cut body. Down his neck, working their way across his chest, disappearing beneath the towel slung low on his hips, then reappearing as they traveled along his calves.
There was nothing soft about him. Her heart began a staccato beat that made breathing difficult. If she pressed herself against him, his body would give no quarter.
“Sarah.”
His voice and the beeping microwave snapped her out of her stupor. “Food is almost ready.”
“I need you to do something first.”
She bit her lip and faced him again. He was closer now, and she could see the scars on his chest, beneath the dusting of hair. Burns. Cuts. Long stripes that looked like they could’ve been whip marks. What had this man suffered? “Yes?” There were so many frogs in her throat she was amazed she got one word out.
He held up a pair of haircutting scissors, a comb, and a battery-powered hair trimmer she’d not noticed. She’d been too distracted.
“You want me to cut your hair.” Nice going, obvious girl. What was wrong with her?
Nate placed everything on the table and used a finger to tilt her head until their gazes met. “They may or may not do this in the prison hospital, but I want you to.”
“Don’t you need permission?”
“I’m not in the army anymore. From now until tomorrow, I’m making my own decisions.” He handed her the tools. “You know how to cut hair, don’t you?”
She smirked. “I’m a cop’s daughter. I know how to cut a man’s hair.”
“Good.” He went out to the porch.
She followed to find him sitting in a rocking chair, towel still around his waist, waiting for her. The sun was setting behind them, but the sky had a pinkish hue, with all signs of the storm gone. It was hot and humid but not as buggy as it’d been in the cemetery. “I thought it would be easier to sweep up out here.”
She laid the tools on an overturned fishing bucket nearby. “How short?”
“Keep buzzing until I say stop.”
She combed his hair from crown to end, trying to ignore the scars on his back. She’d felt them last night, but seeing them now—much worse than the front—made her hands shake in sadness and rage. She’d like nothing better than to seek retribution on his behalf. But knowing Nate, he’d never let her do that. “I can’t use the trimmer until it dries.”
“Cut as much of it as you can.”
“I don’t know how I feel about this.” She started combing again. It wasn’t fair. His hair was thicker than hers. “I’ve only ever seen you with long hair.”
“I can assure you”—his voice rumbled as if holding in his laughter—“I’ll be even sexier.”
No doubt. “Well, you can’t have a long pompadour.”
His fingers gripped the chair’s handrails, and he planted his feet so he wouldn’t rock. “I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t sound badass.”
Nothing was as badass as Nate Walker. Or as gentle. And loving. “A pompadour is a medium-length cut with long bangs combed up from the forehead in a high roll.” She worked the comb through one more time. “It was named after Madame de Pompadour, King Louis XV’s mistress.”
“No real man would have such a lame haircut.”
“I knew a man once who did.” She smiled and began cutting. “Augustus.”
* * *
An hour and a half later, Nate came in from setting trip wires around the cabin and couldn’t help himself. He stared in the mirror and ran his hands over his head. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time he’d had short hair, and it felt…freeing.
He went to the CD player in the corner, next to the ham radio he’d already used to message Grady, and found a Nat King Cole album inside. He turned it on, listening to the strains of “Sweet Lorraine.” Sarah sat cross-legged on the floor surrounded by research.
After his haircut, he’d changed into jeans and a T-shirt for dinner. While macaroni and tomato soup weren’t his favorites, he’d been hungry, and the food hot. Then they’d gone back outside with her coffee and the tea that tasted like sludge so she could finish his haircut with the trimmer.
“How do you feel about your hair?” She sipped her coffee, but he could see the smile hidden behind the mug.
He ran his hands over his head again. “Glad I don’t need a brush anymore.”
She smiled. “Come help me.”
He sat on the couch, close enough to take one of the three pencils sticking out of her hair. “I thought you were doing this on the table.”
“I need to be in the center where I can see everything.” She handed him her mother’s beat-up copy of Othello and a piece of paper. “Open up the play to Act 5, Scene 2, lines 310 to 332.”
“Why?”
She scanned her circle of research, which included all of the photos they’d collected, Rebecca’s diary, their cemetery map, and the ledger. There were also notebooks, pens, pencils, and multicolored Post-it notes. It looked like a huge mess, but he wasn’t about to doubt the woman with the PhD.
She handed him the rubbing from Rebecca’s tomb. “See that sequence? 52OTH310332?”
“Yes.”
She held Rebecca’s diary and turned it to the page that had the same number written on top. “Rebecca wrote the same sequence in her diary.”
“What does it have to do with Othello?”
Sarah opened her journal and wrote 52OTH310332. “This is an old citation format for the play.” Then she rewrote it as OTH 5.2.310–332. “This is the citation format we use now. I think this passage, where Othello is lamenting the fact that he killed Desdemona, is the substitution key.”
He took a pencil out of her hair and turned to Act 5, Scene 2. “Now what?”
“Starting on line 310, alphabetically label the beginning of each line until you reach line 332. Start with A and end with W.”
He gave each line a letter. “Done.”
She peered at the diary, unaware of how lovely she looked with her messy bun, PJs, glasses, and hair pencils. “We know the Jones tomb covers a hide site, soooooooo…can you find a J anywhere in the passage?”
He scanned until he hit the line he’d marked as the letter I. “The line ‘I’ reads, ‘Here is my journey’s end.’” He raised an eyebrow. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
“It’s not. It’s also the line my mother starred.” She paused to write in her journal. “If you start counting with ‘H,’ the first letter in the phrase ‘Here is my journey’s end,’ the ‘J’ in ‘journey’ is the ninth letter in. That means the letter J is represented by the notation I9: I for the line it comes from, 9 from the position of the letter in the phrase.”
“Makes sense.” Kind of. “There are a million O’s.”
She picked up the diary again and, using the eraser end of a pencil, gently skimmed the pages filled with alphanumeric sequences.
“Is that killing you?” he said, trying not to tease her too much. “Working on a three-hundred-year old journal without muslin gloves or bone folders?”
“You’ve no idea,” she said as she scanned. “Here’s a cipher sequence that starts with I. It’s I9A4B8M5C6.”
She handed him her journal, and he started comparing the sequence to the play. She shifted so she could watch while he wrote. He tapped her on the nose. “Do you mind?”
“You’re slow.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m dyslexic.”
“I forgot.” She kissed him on the head. “What is A4?”
He chuckled. Her insistence told him she wasn’t as sympathetic as he’d expected, but as long as she kept kissing him, he didn’t care. He went to the first line and counted four letters until landing on…“O.”
She smiled wide. “B8?”
That one was easy. “N.”
Her shoulders shook, and he wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying. “Nate!”
“Right. M5 is E.” He paused. “C6 is…S.” He’d just spelled out JONES. “Sarah?” Was that awe in his voice? It sounded like it. Because, apparently, they’d just solved the cipher.
She wore the widest smile he’d ever seen on a woman’s face. “We did it, Nate. We solved it.”
“Let’s do another one. Just to make sure.”
She picked up Rebecca’s diary and started reading off alphanumeric sequences. Thirty minutes later, while the crooner sang through his greatest hits, they’d identified twenty-four names. She’d also transcribed the sequences and corresponding tomb names on the bottom of their map.
She shut the diary and slipped it, along with their map and the copy of Othello, into a gallon-size Ziploc bag she’d found in a kitchen drawer. Then she stood and stared at him. “I still can’t believe it.” Her voice was breathless with joy or wonder or awe. He wasn’t sure which, but it didn’t matter. They now had something to bargain with.
When Nat King Cole started singing “Unforgettable,” Nate stood and pulled her into his arms. Moving them away from her research, he swung her around and started to dance. “You’re amazing. How did you figure it out?”
“All the pieces were there. That quotation we’ve seen everywhere—Here is my journey’s end—is from Othello. As are the phrases My Soul’s Joy and My Fair Warrior.” She pointed to the rubbing of Rebecca’s tomb with the sequence 52OTH310332. “But it was when I saw my mother’s notation in the book on line 318 of Act 5, Scene 2, that I realized the rubbing was an old citation. I just needed to figure out the pattern.”
Nate swung her around again and then brought her in, closer this time.
“Anyway,” she continued in a whispery voice, “one of the few things I know about my father—my real father—is that he used to call my mom his fair warrior and she used to call me her soul’s joy.”
“The same phrases on Rebecca’s tomb.”
Sarah smiled. “We had all of these disparate pieces, and we just needed my mother’s notation to bring them all together.”
“Do you think your mother figured out how the cipher worked?”
She leaned into him, and he tucked her head beneath his chin. “I don’t know. It’s possible. She never mentioned the cipher. She was always more interested in the love story.”
“Hmm.”
She lifted her head slightly. “What?”
“It’s just that the someone who came up with this cipher—before Rebecca and Thomas stole it—must’ve had a broken heart. That passage is beyond sad. It’s almost suicidal. The cipher’s author must’ve been in a bad place too.”
“I’ve never thought of that. Anecdotal evidence places the cipher’s beginnings around 1642.” She paused. “It’s attributed to a Prideaux pirate who probably lived a brutal life.”
Nate closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about death or sadness or broken hearts. The crooner’s voice lulled Nate to a place he was afraid he’d never be able to leave. “What I’m not sure about is how to find the other hide sites. We have names but no locations.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his chin. “I was only asked to solve the cipher. Now we just have to use it to save Jack, my dad, and you.”
Nate stared into Sarah’s eyes. “Why do you want to save me?”
“That’s a ridiculous question.”
“I need to know.”
She rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the scar on his cheek. “Because I love you.” She closed her eyes. “And I don’t want to lose you.”
He dropped kisses on her forehead, trickling them along her cheek to her neck. “I don’t want to lose you either.”
“Why?” The hitch in her voice made him smile.
“Because I love you too.”
“Nate?” He could feel her shortened breath, see her wide, panicky eyes, hear her shaky voice. “What are we going to do?”
“We have the cipher key.” His hands moved up her side until coming dangerously close to her breasts. “We have to come up with a plan to use it.”
“Now?” She kissed his chin.
“No.” His lips trailed down to her neck while he undid the sweatshirt zipper. “Not now.”
And that’s when static came through the SAT phone. “HQ…to base.”
* * *
Sarah wanted to throw the SAT phone out the window. Instead, Nate grabbed it from the kitchen table and responded. “Base to HQ. Go ahead.”
She frowned. This was their time. And the sand was slipping through the glass quickly.
“Nate,” Jimmy’s voice came through the static. “Zack—”
“Repeat,” Nate said, clicking the button.
She turned off the CD player. She knew she was being selfish, but Nate would be gone soon, and she’d be alone. Swallowing hard, she stripped off her sweatshirt and knelt in front of Nate, dragging her fingers along his denim legs.
Nate’s eyelids lowered, and the bulge in the front of his jeans grew. Her hands rested close to the very large, very masculine part of him that moved. Her stomach tightened from the memory of his weight on top of her, his body deep inside hers.
Nate clicked the button again. “Repeat?”
“Kells wants—” And the phone went silent.
Nate threw it onto the couch. “Sarah.”
“What do they want?” The heat coming from inside the denim was almost enough to scorch her, and she kept her gaze at zipper level. All it would take was a simple tug of the zipper. And her mouth was right there.
“I don’t know.”
She looked up and licked her lips. “Should we call back?” She cupped him, enjoying the weight of his erection through his jeans.
His larger hand immediately trapped hers, forcing her to hold him harder. He growled. “No.”
Slowly, despite his hand covering hers, she undid the zipper. Would he let her?
“Sarah.” The word held so much weight it sounded like his emotions were more than he could carry. Which was why it was time for her to take some of the burden.
Aaaaaaaaaaaand he didn’t wear underwear. She gripped his erection, her thumb running over the top while her fist began to pump. She heard him swallow, and she smiled as her tongue ran over his hard ridge. Back and forth, up and down, in a rhythm set by her hand and tongue. His scent surrounded her, making her feel safe and loved.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” he moaned. “Sarah, I can’t—”
She took him into her mouth, and his entire body contracted. His legs were now wide apart, his hands gripped her hair, and his hips thrust forward. She slipped a hand into his jeans to hold his balls. He was so warm and tight and hard. His hands encouraged her, his breath sounding like a low-flying jet.
“Sarah.” The way he drawled her name, like a deep yearning, sent shock waves through her. Her lower body clenched until the pain made her catch her breath. “I need you.”
She stood, took his hand, and led him to the bedroom. They might only have a few hours left, but he wasn’t going to leave her without understanding what he meant to her. He wasn’t going to rot in that prison hospital without believing how much she loved him.