Betina Krahn (7 page)

Celeste set her basket back down and ran a hand over the cracked surface of the vase, tracing the patterns, wondering at the beauty of the pattern and quality of the colorful designs. For the thousandth time, she surveyed the objects and artifacts that were the fruit of her grandfather’s lifelong search. Huge stones, pedestals, brass plates, great shells, carvings, bronze castings … many of them intriguing, some perfectly astonishing. But did they truly tell the tale that her grandmother had woven from her devotion to them and to her deceased husband?

To have known such a love and to live with such a loneliness and longing … then to channel that love into a passion for re-creating the good of a civilization …

For the thousandth time, she rolled those questions from
her shoulders and once more battled down the guilt she felt at asking Nana to refrain from revealing her work and her views on Atlantis before the professor. It couldn’t be helped. One scientific inquisition at a time was enough.

T
ITUS
T
HORNE ARRIVED
late that afternoon in an unsprung pony cart driven by the grizzled local blacksmith. The train down from London had been on schedule, but he had stopped to pay a call on a former student now serving a vicarage outside Brighton. By the time he arrived at the coaching station, the three o’clock coach to Pevensey Bay had already departed. Hiring a horse was out of the question, for he had never learned to ride. With the help of the liveryman at the station, he located a freight hauler traveling east and hired space on the wagon bed … hoping it wasn’t an omen that he was listed on the wagoneer’s bill of lading as “live freight.”

But his journey derailed once again when the freight wagon broke a wheel just outside the sleepy little village of Cardamon. He and the teamster were forced to walk through the afternoon heat to the local smithy, where once again he benefited from the good graces of a local Samaritan. It seemed the aging smith, Ned Caldwell, was “goin’ thataway, meself,” and was willing to give him a ride.

According to Ned, Ashton House was a “roight old place,” and “them what lives there is fine wimmen.” Those pronouncements apparently exhausted the smith’s conversational repertoire, for he rode the rest of the way to Ashton House in glowering silence.

The sun was sinking toward the sea when they rounded the last turn and headed up the rutted road to Ashton House. It was a larger place than he had imagined and was nestled around an impressive old Norman tower. But, as they neared, Titus saw that the house was older than it had first appeared, and seriously neglected. By the time the blacksmith let him off by the front entrance, he had assessed the
crumbling mortar, paint-bare doors, and beggarly windows, and was regretting that he hadn’t made his own arrangements for lodgings.

He was met at the door by a houseman so bent with age that Titus watched anxiously as he struggled to pick up Titus’s bag and totter inside.

“Wait ’ere, sir. I’ll tell the mistruss,” the old fellow wheezed, then disappeared with his valise.

Titus glanced about the once impressive hall, then strolled over to peer through the open doors on either side. They were huge rooms … Elizabethan in style, with arches, nooks, and carved finials everywhere … heavy, old Jacobean furnishings, threadbare rugs, and dim, sagging tapestries. The dark wood of the hall and main stairs was worn thin from literally centuries of foot traffic. But on the center table was a large vase of brilliant flowers that included every color and variety imaginable in a summer garden. Their vitality and freshness posed a stunning contrast to the rest of that moldering pile of rocks. Delphinium, roses, asters, foxglove, coreopsis, showy phlox, verbena, daisies …

“Welcome, Professor.”

Jerking his nose out of the flowers, he turned to face a genteel-looking older woman with thick silver hair and rosy cheeks. She came forward with an outstretched hand and he found himself momentarily mesmerized by a pair of timeless blue eyes that looked somehow familiar.

“I am Sophia Ashton, Celeste’s paternal grandmother. We were expecting you earlier in the day. I hope you haven’t had a mishap on the road.”

“Not at all.” He straightened his aching spine. “Uneventful journey, really.”

“Good.” She turned smoothly at his side, inserted her arm through his, and urged him toward the stairs. “Dinner is in a quarter of an hour. I’ll show you to your room so you can freshen up.”

The old lady showed him to a spacious but stuffy chamber on the second floor and advised him to ring for whatever he
might need. As she turned to go, he was startled to see that her proper gray dress had been left open in back from neck to bustle, exposing a shocking expanse of white muslin.

He puzzled over that for a moment, then shook his head.

Strolling around the room, he gave the large tester bed an experimental poke, ran a hand over the writing table—came up without the expected dust on his fingertips—and then headed for the window. He parted the worn lace curtains and struggled to turn the rusty handle and open the aged window. The metal finally gave with a scrape and a creak, and the frame swung open. He stood in the opening, inhaling the salt air, then focused on the sight of the bay.

For anyone but Titus Thorne, the view would have been breathtaking—gilded sky … glittering blue-green sea … a stretch of pale sand … the white foam of waves breaking on rocks and beach. He tensed and curled his hands into fists. He had to go through with this, he told himself, staring down at that restless water. There was no backing out now.

Dolphins. Why did it have to be
dolphins?
Why couldn’t she have studied birds, or exotic plants, or even archaeology like her old grandfather?

He turned away from that disturbing view and began unpacking. In the middle of his starched shirts was that blue-green book with a dolphin on it. He picked it up and couldn’t help leafing through it … pausing wherever his eye caught on a line. Invariably the lines that caught his eye contained the words “sexual,” “coupling,” or “mating preferences.” He snorted and tossed the book on the bed. He didn’t need to look at it to recall what it said; her inflammatory prose was virtually scored into his brain. The more he read and studied it, the more annoying it became.

Here, he had finally understood, was a diabolically clever work. Her presentation of her research—if it could be dignified with that title—was crafted to appear to be a scholarly work, while appealing to the lowest, basest impulses of the
masses. It was pure sensationalism … sex and sea creatures … hedonism cloaked in scientific terms.

She had been canny, indeed, in selecting her subject. Dolphins were familiar to all levels of society, were largely unexplored by legitimate scientists, and were something about which the general population had a natural curiosity. And her methodology—direct underwater observation—was so unprecedented and so difficult to repeat, she probably believed she was all but assured of no direct challenges to her conclusions.

Even her style of writing—at first glance amateurish and infuriating—now appeared nothing short of brilliant. She had combined scientific terminology and titillating romantic prose in a way that stimulated the reader’s libidinous impulses without triggering any feelings of guilt or moral outrage.
It was just animals, after all
, he imagined her saying.
All done in the name of science
.

Science, hell. It had all been done in the name of
profit
. A calculated grab for money and notoriety. A masterpiece of scientific hucksterism.

He had to give her credit, though; she was a shrewd one. This “Lady Mermaid” idea was positively inspired. She had somehow managed to fill both the papers and people’s heads with visions of half-naked women wearing fish tails and swimming about the ocean, seducing exotic secrets from the deep itself. One look at her—blond hair, blue eyes, country fresh and ripely curved—was enough to give a tantalizing hint of flesh to the fantasy. The portrait that appeared in yesterday’s
Gazette
had been nothing short of sensational.

He sat down on the bench at the foot of the bed and pulled the clipping from the back of the book. There she was … seated on a chair composed of carved dolphins, her body curved over one of the arms, her eyes bright and unabashedly provocative as she caressed the wooden dolphin she rested on. She certainly earned points for audacity, presenting herself before Britain’s finest scientific minds, lecturing
them
on marine science. Annoyed, he crumpled it and stuffed it in his coat pocket.

She was not to be taken lightly, that was easy to see. Confronted, she had defended herself quite capably, and backed into a corner, she had proved dangerously resourceful. Her challenge that he come to her home and verify her work had seemed straightforward enough … until he studied her work again, in the light of her brazen attitude and bald manipulation of public opinion. She had something clever in mind, he was certain of it.

The task she had set for herself was formidable, indeed: conjure up a small herd of dolphins, climb into the water with them, and convince him that she and they were practically blood relations. The task was so formidable, in fact, that he couldn’t help wondering how she meant to pull it off.

Or
if she
meant to pull it off.

But then, faking such a demonstration would be no trivial matter, either. He was an ichthyologist, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t as if she could just draft a few barrel-chested fishermen, strap a fin on their backs, and set them to swimming back and forth in the water. She had promised him firsthand experiences … a close, personal look at her subjects.

A smile spread slowly across his face. It would be interesting to see how she handled it all.

D
OWNSTAIRS
, C
ELESTE STOOD
looking out the seaward windows in the drawing room. She was dressed in a gathered blue cotton skirt and matching blouse, and her hair was pulled back into a simple chignon. They were the best clothes she owned, aside from the proper woolen suit she had worn the day she gave her ill-fated lecture. At a sound from the door, she turned to find old Stephan showing her reluctant guest into the room. The professor, looking tall, dark, and disdainful, paused just inside the doorway. Something deep inside her responded with a quiver. Dread, she told herself and stood straighter to compensate.

“I see you found the way,” she said, trying not to let her thoughts show in her face as he came forward into the light. This was her arrogant professor? She was surprised by how different he was than she had remembered. He was tall, but not gargantuan; a bit on the angular side, but not rawboned or cadaverous. His nose was actually quite normal-sized and his eyebrows didn’t really meet in the middle. His garments were well tailored, and his dark hair was perfectly groomed. He didn’t look at all like the monster she had remembered him as being. He was physically impressive, striking of countenance, and blatantly, unmistakably
male
. Which made her worry about just which of her instincts had made her challenge him to come to Ashton House for a fortnight.

“My grandmother was concerned you might be lost,” she said coolly.

“Lost?” He gave a huff of amusement. “Hardly. I have an unerring sense of direction. Nothing, my dear Miss Ashton, would have kept me from this appointment.”

“A pity you couldn’t have arrived earlier in the day. The wind was perfect for sailing. We shall just have to hope for fair weather tomorrow as well.” She looked pointedly at his starched shirt and elegant silk tie, then had to force her gaze away from his broad shoulders. “I hope you brought something less formal to wear when meeting the dolphins.”

“If I meet dolphins, Miss Ashton, I doubt they shall be interested in what I am wearing.”

“Oh, you’ll meet them, all right.”

She jerked her errant gaze up and it collided, head-on, with his. She recalled with sudden, breathtaking clarity those sea-green eyes, that dark hair, the bold curve of his lips, the sun-bronzed texture of his skin. It all came back in a rush that heated the air she drew into her lungs. Don’t stare, she told herself. But it was impossible not to; his gaze held her like a magnet did a needle.

“Dinner, missy,” Stephan announced from the doorway.

Freed unexpectedly, Celeste headed for the door with her heart racing and heat tingling in her cheeks. He might not
be a monster, she realized, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.

The dining room was a large, paneled hall, furnished with a venerable walnut table, ringed with heavy, intricately carved chairs, and two well-worn Jacobean sideboards laden with covered dishes that vented wisps of fragrant steam. The walls were hung with elaborate old tapestries faded by time. The only things that had been added to the room in more than a century were the two sizable mirrors hanging over the sideboards and the rose-tinted light provided by the lowering sun.

“Welcome again, Professor.” Nana beckoned him to the seat on her right, leaving Celeste to take the chair across from him. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t wait. Old bones must be humored, you know.” She flashed him a flirtatious smile as he took his seat. To her granddaughter, she said, “Celeste, my dear, he is even more dashing than you said.”

Celeste looked up from settling her napkin, her face flushed with color. Had her grandmother somehow read her mind? “Nana! I never—”

“His eyes.” The old lady squinted at him. “Just the color of the sea on a summer’s day. You were absolutely right. And I do believe ‘aristocratic’ quite sums up his face.” Celeste groaned silently and Nana relaxed into an impish grin. “But I should have known. Our Celeste doesn’t miss much, you know.”

“Do tell,” he said, flicking Celeste a look that warned
he
didn’t miss much, either.

“Oh, yes. She is quite the observer. Of course, she hasn’t had the chance to observe many
gentlemen
at close range.”

“Nana!” Her face flamed now. “Pay no heed, Professor. My grandmother can sometimes be a bit … direct.”

“Like grandmother, like granddaughter?” he asked tartly.