“You don’t need to stay if you have something better to do,” Callie told Eliades softly in Greek. Spanos and his sister hadn’t made an appearance. A good thing: She didn’t want anyone hanging over their shoulders all morning. The old man was there, but mostly dozing in his chair, emitting a small throaty snore every now and then.
Already covered with dust, she and Jonah stood in front of one of the ceiling-to-floor, wall-to-wall bookcases, going through the volumes. The leather-bound books, and thousands of loose-leaf manuscripts, were piled high on every shelf, higgledy-piggledy, three and four deep. It was laborious, dusty work, and she loved every magical second of it.
Callie knew if she dug deep enough into this gold mine of information she might find the gems she needed to decode what lay beneath the aqua waters of Stormchaser’s hull. She wished she had a month alone in the book-lined room. But even with just the few hours they had, the old man remained in the library with them, a corpulent, sleepy guard.
The poor old guy, seated in one of the comfortable, deep leather chairs, kept nodding off. His head jerked up at the sound of her voice. Blinking several times, he cleared his throat. “I am quite content to sit here and let my old bones soak up the sunshine. Don’t let me disturb you.”
* * *
“Can I get you anything?” Callie asked softly. Dressed from head to sandals in dense black wool, he couldn’t be comfortable sitting in the blistering sunlight streaming through the window beside him.
The damp folds of his plump face creased into a sweet smile. “In my own home? It is I, Doctor, who should offer you my hospitality.”
So the house was his, not Kallistrate Spanos’s? She met Jonah’s brilliant blue eyes to see if he’d caught that. He gave an infinitesimal nod. “Thank you n—”
Pushing himself up from the chair, and moving surprisingly fast for a man in his eighties who was at least a hundred pounds overweight, Eliades nodded his balding head as if remembering his hosting duties. “I will bring.”
Callie waited until the sound of Eliades’s surprisingly light footsteps faded to another part of the house. She’d palmed her cell phone in her jean pocket as the old man shuffled out of the room. The second she could no longer hear the snap of his sandals, she was already carefully flipping pages and taking pictures.
“Here,” she whispered, pausing long enough to slide Jonah another tome the size of a phone book from the piles she’d sorted in the last two hours, ready for the time the old man left the room. She’d learned long ago never to ask. The answer was invariably no, and it was easier to beg for forgiveness than permission. She suspected that the sweet old man would not take kindly to them taking pictures of his books.
Keeping her voice low enough so that only Jonah, standing two feet away, would hear her, she instructed, “Take pictures from the middle to the end, as fast as you can, before he comes back.”
“Find something?” Immediately opening the heavy manuscript to the middle, Jonah slipped his phone from his back pocket. He didn’t ask any more questions, just started taking pictures and turning pages.
He needed a shave, of course, but at least he wore a black T-shirt over black shorts this morning. He looked disreputable and sexy. The thick fog on the boat ride coming over had put a bit of curl in Jonah’s dark hair, which had since dried. It should’ve softened his face, but instead the slightly shaggy, rumpled strands made him look even more masculine and appealing. Callie had been itching to comb her fingers through his hair for hours. But instead she kept them busy flipping the heavy vellum pages that smelled of dust, leather, and age.
She loved how focused he was, even though he had no idea what he was looking at, or for. He had a smudge of dirt on his cheek as he took a picture and flipped the pages. Rugged, masculine to the nth degree, and heart-poundingly sexy, Jonah Cutter was every fair maiden’s wildest sexual fantasy.
But she was no fair maiden, and having sexual fantasies about a man she was going to screw out of his discovery of a lifetime made her feel like more of a bitch than ever.
She hadn’t told Rydell that when she’d talked to him at the crack of daybreak this morning. She’d mentioned the strange fog, and the head, and the mechanical whatever-it-was. She’d told him about the silver and gold coins; she’d briefly discussed the lava tube, and the tiled floor. She hadn’t mentioned the owner of Stormchaser or his natural allure.
Click. Turn page. Click. Turn. Click.
“Let me put it this way.” Callie spoke softly as she finished taking shots of the book she was holding. “I’m guardedly freaking excited.” An understatement of epic proportions. Inside she was doing a happy Snoopy dance, yelling Holyshit! Holyshit! Holy. Shit! at the top of her lungs.
Click. Turn page. Click. Turn page.
She spoke and read Greek, both modern and ancient, but the faded, spidery writing in the manuscripts was more ancient than ancient, and very hard to decipher. “I need more time to identify and analyze the structure of the morphemes—”
Click. Turn page.
“Which is?”
Click. Turn page.
The linguistic skill called morphology would help her ID linguistic units so she could better understand what she was reading. Or rather, trying to read. It seemed like a root dialect. Something akin to Greek, but also Latin. “Implied context, root words, intonation,” Callie told him absently, taking pictures as fast as the cell phone camera would allow, and as fast as she could turn pages while being careful not to tear the delicate vellum.
No gloves; books left out here in the open, in a dusty, brightly sunlit room. The scientist in her cringed at such carelessness. These documents were invaluable. Priceless.
“Dear God…” Callie shifted the phone so she could better look at a newly opened page. This time her heart didn’t race, it stopped with a hard thump. “I hope what I think I’m reading is really what I think it is—” Lord, what was she doing? No time to speculate—Go. Go. Go. Before the hefty guard gets back, her brain screamed.
Click. Turn page.
She repositioned the phone so she could take more pictures. There’d be plenty of time when they returned to Stormchaser to look and analyze. But, oh! She wanted to sit down, the large book in her lap, and try to read every intriguing, tantalizing, ancient word. “I can’t wait to get back.”
“Me, too, if it gets you this excited.” Jonah’s soft chuckle caused the already overstimulated little hairs on her body to stand up even more. Which showed how powerful her attraction to him was, because despite the incredible findings in her hands, she was still hyperaware of Jonah. All the time.
Callie heard the chink of china before she heard Eliades’s shuffling gait heading back to the library. She glanced over at Jonah, who was already slipping his phone into his back pocket.
Quickly and reluctantly returning the two heavy books to their previous spaces, she stacked other books in front of them. Exactly as they’d found them. She hoped.
Taking a later manuscript with her, Callie sat down just as the old man trundled in, carrying a large, tarnished silver tray with cups and a tea-stained cozy-covered pot.
Jonah strode over to take the clearly heavy burden from Eliades’s gnarled hands, then set it on what looked like an eighteenth-century Oeben marquetry mechanical table, which was probably worth double what her condo in Miami cost.
“You will take tea with an old man?” Eliades addressed Callie first, then looked to Jonah. “I would very much enjoy the company.”
“We’d be honored,” Callie responded, also in Greek. She didn’t want to waste time sipping tea or chatting. What she’d seen so far had her too excited even to sit still. But she got up to pour three cups of almost black-colored tea, passing them out before returning to her chair with her own cup and mismatched saucer.
The tea was far too strong and bitter, but she politely sipped it anyway. Jonah set his cup and saucer on the table beside him and crossed one ankle over his knee, stretching his arms out on the wide curved arms of his chair, looking perfectly relaxed. “We appreciate you allowing us access to your library. There is material here, I’m sure, we couldn’t find anywhere else.”
“There have been people living on Fire Island for centuries, possibly longer. What you see here is an accumulation of writings passed down from the oldest son in each family for generations. This scriptorium has been here as long as my ancestors were alive. A very, very long time.”
“This room was originally a scriptorium?” Callie asked, cradling her tea in her palm.
“What’s a scriptorium?” Jonah asked.
“In medieval monasteries it was a room devoted to the copying of manuscripts. Are you an order of monks, Kyrie Eliades?” It would certainly explain the black robes and isolated living, and the fact that she hadn’t seen any women other than Anndra Spanos. Callie suspected the young woman was the exception to the rules.
“No. Not monks. A different, more ancient order. You do not speak Greek, Mr. Cutter?” Eliades asked over his cup, sipping his tea.
“Only the most rudimentary words and phrases, I’m afraid. But I understand more than I speak. Dr. West is fluent, however.”
The non-monk smiled. “Yes,” he said in heavily accented English to Callie. “You have an excellent ear for my language.” He waved an expansive hand around the book-lined room. “You have found what you were looking for? So difficult in a room of this size with so many works to choose from in a small amount of time.”
“I think I have, yes.” She indicated the book on the table beside her. “Have you lived here all your life,” Callie asked, her eyes going to the hundreds if not thousands of dusty manuscripts and texts she was dying to get her hands on.
“I have, yes. Many, many years.”
“And Kallistrate Spanos? Has he lived here all his life?”
“He left sixt—many years ago, and returns every few months to—to rejuvenate himself. This time we are fortunate to have his young sister visit as well. We hope that he will adjust once again to the simple life and teachings of Fire Island, and make his permanent home here with us again.”
“I haven’t seen any women. Are they too shy to come out?” Callie asked in a teasing tone.
“Other than Anndra, there have been no women here for many years. We are … caretakers of the island.” He rested the cup on his knee. “Did you find anything of interest?”
Callie nodded, tamping her enthusiasm. “I think I’ve found a written report of a story from the correct time period. It mentions a Chinese boat being swallowed by the fire from the volcano. I’d like to ask—would it be possible to borrow some of these books for a few days? I promise to take excellent care of them, and return them as I find them.”
“That book.” He pointed a gnarled finger. “No more.”
Disappointed, Callie reminded herself that they could come again, take more photographs. “Thank you, I’ll be very careful with it. May we come back soon to look at more?”
“Here. Yes.”
It was lovely and warm sitting in the sunshine pouring in through the dusty windows, but she wanted to get back to the ancient texts, which predated the sinking of the Ji Li by hundreds of years.
“We’ve encountered a strange anomaly in a localized area near where Stormchaser is anchored,” Jonah said easily. “A dense electrical fog that’s scrambled our equipment. The weather bureaus are insisting there is no fog. Is this something you’ve ever encountered?”
The old man shrugged even as he confirmed the oddity. “This is something no one has understood for centuries. The fog comes and goes. Once, twice a year. No one understands it. It is never wise to question God’s will, yes?”
When it was obvious that the old man had settled in for a pleasant afternoon with his company, Jonah signaled Callie, and they both got to their feet. “Thank you for your hospitality, and for lending me the book.”
“You may keep it as long as you want to,” Eliades said magnanimously, pushing to his feet as well.
Callie topped his height by at least a foot. “I’ll take the tray to the kitchen and then be on our way.”
The old man wouldn’t hear of them carting the tray off, so they said their goodbyes and stepped outside into the sunshine. Eliades stood outside the front door, hands tucked into his sleeves, watching them leave.
“I wonder what happened to your little friend Anndra?”
Jonah shrugged. “Probably off somewhere doing her nails, or curling her eyelashes.”
“She’s stunningly beautiful.”
“I guess.”
Callie glanced over her shoulder as soon as they were clear of the small group of houses. Jonah had just taken his phone out, presumably to call or text Thanos, when Callie grabbed his forearm with both hands. Barely able to control her excitement, her words ran over each other. “Holy crap, Jonah! I can’t wait to get these images back to Stormchaser to see what we have!”
His eyes narrowed. “You pulled those two documents from the back of the bookshelf. How did you know what was in them?”
“I didn’t. But when I looked at all the shelves when we first walked in, I noticed how the dust was pushed back in several places. Those books were hidden from us in plain sight. Someone with not very good eyesight moved them to the back, and pulled others forward to block them from view.”
“Will you be able to decipher what you got?”
She’d studied—briefly—the discipline of reading, deciphering, and dating historical texts. But it would take more than her basic skills. “Maybe. I hope I can at least get an idea of when they were written, and see how much I can read. The style of alphabet in every language evolves constantly.
“One has to know the various characters as they existed in various eras. I only took a semester of the study of ancient writing, but I have a friend in Spain who’s a specialist in palaeography. Miguel’s made it his life’s work, and he’s amazing, I’ll send him what we have right away and see—”
Jonah put his hand on her wrist as she took out her phone. “Let’s wait until you take a look yourself. If those texts allude to Atlantis, I don’t want anyone else knowing about it until we’re ready to announce it to the world.”
Callie frowned, her anticipation fueling her agitation at Jonah trying to stonewall her efforts to decipher the images. What would take her weeks, maybe even months, would take Miguel only hours or days at most.
“If the images we have allude to Atlantis, chances are I won’t know because I can’t read them!”
“Let’s wait until we get back to the ship and your lab and go from there, okay? No point going off half-cocked asking for help until we know how much and who we can trust.”
She pulled her tingling wrist out of his grasp. “I trust Miguel.” She didn’t want Jonah touching her. Overreaction caused her heart to thump and her nerves to jump. Maybe she was running a fever?
“Then you’ll still trust him in a few days when we see what you can do with your one semester of palaeography.”
God the man was stubborn. “Two days.”
“A week.”
Ridiculous when a find of this significance was at their fingertips. “Three days.”
“Four.”
Callie crossed her arms, clutching the book she’d borrowed to her chest like a shield in battle. “Okay, but on the morning of day four I’m sending these images to Miguel to work on.”
“Fair enough.”
“Your buddy back there said several very interesting things today.” Callie stared ahead as they picked their way down the winding path through the rock and brush.
“Like?”
“He referred to the library as his before he caught himself.”
“Yeah, I noticed that. Perhaps Spanos and his sister are nightmare houseguests who never left.”
Callie locked her gaze on Jonah’s piercing blue eyes. How could such a cool color give the impression of so much heat? She imagined his gaze was hot—for her. Translated that look into the feel of his hands touching her all over. She shivered in the hot sun.
It was a mistake to look at him directly like this. It was as if those eyes were tractor beams, holding her immobile while her pulse raced and a dull ache radiated from between her legs to throb in her breasts.
“Before he caught himself,” she said, adjusting her depth perception, focusing on a shrub over his left shoulder, “it sounded as if he were about to say Spanos left sixty years ago. Is he that old? I thought you said he was in his early forties.”
His gaze dropped to her mouth. “Maybe he’s just well preserved. Left when he was a baby.”
“Sure.” That was possible. But Callie’s gut told her that just like the hidden books, there was more being concealed here than just a few dusty tomes.
* * *
Jonah copied the images off their phones to his computer’s hard drive, as well as a thumb drive, then backed everything up twice more.
Fortunately, all the systems knocked out by the electrical interference were back in working order as if there’d never been a problem once the strange fog disappeared. And that had disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
Still suspicious, Jonah called one of the most reliable weather stations in Europe, and spoke to their head meteorologist, Robin Waugh. Jonah trusted Robin, still enjoyed her company all these years later, and on hearing her sultry and very unscientific voice again seriously considered making a quick trip to Paris for a booty call.
He’d debated for all of thirty seconds as he watched Callie talking to the others while he was on the phone. Her elusive scent spiked the air in the cabin, making him all too aware she was within touching distance if he just reached out and … Not going to happen. He told Robin he’d catch up with her the next time he was in Paris, but they both knew he meant over coffee, not in the sack.
Robin checked back records and confirmed what Eliades had told him: The electrical storms and fog were intermittent, coming and going without warning. According to her weather station’s records, the anomaly went back to the 1950s and, she suspected, giving it an educated guess, further, way further back than that.
“Jonah?”
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
Seated on the comfortable sofa in the salon, he and Callie looked at each page of text up on the big-screen television. They’d been at it for six hours; everyone else had hit the hay a while ago. The aroma of coffee lingered in the air despite their cups having gone cold.
With the lights dimmed for better viewing, the room was far too intimate. Callie was curled up at the other end of the deep sofa, but she didn’t look the least bit relaxed as she leaned forward, holding a pen and a notebook, eyes fixed on the image in front of her.
She pointed with the pen. “See how this passage is written in a consonantal form from left to right?”
Jonah tipped his head to the side, still unable to make any sense of the squiggles and smudges. He was amazed she could identify anything resembling language there at all and now completely understood why she had wanted her friend’s expert help.
“I’ll take your word for it. It all looks like chicken scratches to me.” How could she tell something this old and faded had been written left to right, or upside down? He wasn’t even sure that he was looking at letters and not ancient fly guts. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m as eager as you are to see if and how this relates to Atlantis, but my eyes are crossing, and my brain is about as thick as that fog.”
“Go ahead and go to bed then,” she muttered absently, chewing the corner of her lip as she leaned forward, elbows on her knees, staring at the screen. “I think I can figure out the next passage…”
Jonah loved watching her think. The twin lines of concentration between the wings of her eyebrows, the way she nibbled at the corner of her lower lip. He could almost hear the wheels turning. He bet she wasn’t even aware he was sitting three feet away, watching her, or that leaning forward like that gave him a mind-numbing view of her cleavage. Who the hell could concentrate on a page of ancient text when something so delectable was on display in the same room?
“This appears to be written in Linear B syllabary, which was always on clay tablets. Mycenaean. The earliest Greek writing.” Her voice rose with excitement, and she leaned forward, eyes fixed on the screen. “I’ve never seen it on parchment, and never like this. Holy crap! This appears to be prose. It’s always been held that Mycenaean literature was passed on orally, because nothing was ever written down. Or not anything ever found anyway. Linear B doesn’t lend itself to the sounds of Greek.”
“Hmm.”
“This is remarkable … The only Linear B documents ever discovered were prosaic lists. Mainly for trade. Inventory. They think perhaps some poetry. Never prose. But isn’t a list—see—there aren’t any short lines, which would indicate word dividers. That’s prose. Prose!” She scrolled to the next image and dragged in a breath. “Linear A. Hieroglyphic script. I’ve seen it on seal stones, but those have yet to be deciphered.
“My God, Jonah…” Callie turned shining eyes to him. Pale as peridot, and filled with wonder. She said with quiet awe, “The few pages we have from just two manuscripts could be the Rosetta stone of ancient Greece.”
Jonah heard the wistful bliss in her voice, he understood the magnitude of the discovery, but in that instant his entire world shifted on its axis, and it had fuck-all to do with ancient writings.
She kept talking, her excited voice a sensual hum in his ears. He wanted to lie with her on a field of green grass under the sunshine so he could look at every inch of her body. He wanted to touch and taste, and linger while he did it, and then start again. He wanted to pick up that thick rope of braid and slowly unravel the strands, and spread them out around her in a dark silken blanket.
The light caught the long shiny scar on her arm, and Jonah’s heart twisted in empathy. When she’d told him about the car accident, he’d been furious with her irresponsible parents. His father had been a drinker, too. More when he’d been around Zane, Logan, and Nick than he’d ever been around Jonah. But even as a kid, he’d had a problem with his father’s social drinking.
It was fascinating to Jonah that while he and his brothers had lived a world and life apart, none of them drank more than one beer. He noticed Callie didn’t drink at all.
“How old were you when your parents died?”
She blinked him into focus, her frown deepening. “Wow. That’s out of the blue. What made you think about that now?”
“I was looking at your scar. It’s hellish, and a badge of your courage. You said they were alcoholics. My father also had a drinking problem. More so when he was with my brothers, but he drank a lot.”
She frowned, the light of discovery dimming in her eyes, crowded out by more unsavory memories. Interestingly, she made no move to cover the scar, as most people would do when mentioning what they perceived as a flaw. Callie wasn’t most people. “We have that in common then.”
“I don’t think so. My mother was there to protect me from the worst of it. I never saw him anything more than slightly tipsy. But my brothers have told me some of the stories, and it’s like he was another man when he was with them.”
Callie rested her chin on her knees. “Are they alcoholics, too? It’s not uncommon.”
“No, none of us drink. No more than a beer once in a while.” He paused for a moment. “So how old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Who took care of you after your parents died?”
She gave him a surprised look. “I took care of myself. I became an emancipated minor right after the accident. Their life insurance paid my way through college. I was fortunate I didn’t have to go into debt.”
Her life didn’t sound fortunate at all. “Is that when you met Adam?”
Callie nodded. “His sister has been my best friend since junior high, so I’ve known him since I was thirteen. I spent a lot of time at their house. He has an older brother who was basically the man of the family. Their mom was more a mother to me than my own mother ever was. I was more devastated by her death than I was when my own mother was killed. I’m still close to them all. They’re family, and family is everything.”
“Another thing we have in common then,” he said, giving her an easy smile he didn’t feel, especially when all he wanted to do was wrap himself around her and take her mind away from all those memories that had stolen the light out of her eyes. “We both found family when we didn’t expect to. I’m glad you weren’t alone.”
She sat up, her back straight, and leveled her gaze at him. “Even if I had been, I would’ve survived.”
“I know you would’ve. But having people who love you makes pretty much everything in life better, right?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve never married?”
The powerful need to see her naked, that silky dark hair loose around her shoulders, wrapped around him …
Dios. These thoughts had to stop. He was many things, but, unlike his father, he’d never stoop so low as to seduce another man’s wife. And even if that were a faint possibility, if he lost all sense of honor and reason, he’d despise Callie almost as much as he’d despise himself for giving in.
Man, he couldn’t fucking well win.
“Almost.” He kept his thoughts well hidden. “Somehow I let her slip through my fingers. Young. Stupid. Blind.” He shrugged. “She’s the woman I called at the weather station earlier. Robin Waugh. I thought at the time that she was the love of my life. I had no idea.” Because what he felt for Callie, if not love, was as powerful, as motivational as love and sure as hell made whatever he’d felt for Robin feel like a school yard crush in comparison. And his hands were tied.
It was some sort of cosmic joke that when he was ready, really ready, the woman was unavailable.
“Is she still single? Maybe you could rekindle what you had.”
Jonah sat back, deliberately putting himself out of reach of her soft, tanned skin. “No, that ship sailed years ago. Plenty more fish in the sea, right?”
She covered a yawn with her hand. “Not always.”
His gut twisted. Yeah. There’d never be anyone like Callie. And letting that particular ship sail just out of reach was killing him.
“Let’s give it another hour, tops,” Jonah said, longing to take her in his arms, to carry her downstairs to his cabin and make love to her slowly. “If you want to dive tomorrow you need a decent night’s sleep.”
“I just want to run through all the pictures to get a sense of what we have here. I think…” Trailing off as she thought to herself, she picked up the remote control and brought up the next picture from a different book—the one that he’d been photographing. “This is Old Aramaic script.” Brow furrowed, she squinted as she tried to read the faded text.
Jonah was having a hard time multitasking. Focusing and keeping his hands off her. “That was the international trade language of the ancient Middle East, right?”
She nodded. “It originated in modern-day Syria between 1000 and 600 BCE. What we’re looking at here is the ancestor of present-day Arabic and Hebrew … Damn it, Jonah! I can’t decipher this. It’s like having something on the tip of my tongue. Please let me send this to Miguel.”
It made complete sense to send it to an expert. But even if it didn’t, her eyes looked so green, so pleading, that damn if he could deny her anything.
“If you send it now, can we go to bed?”