10
BREAKFAST was tense. Nico joined Andreas, Patricia, and Rebecca in the sunny breakfast room after he’d caught a quick shower. The four of them sat at a corner table, the inn’s eight other guests taking up the rest of the room.
As soon as Nico sat down, Mrs. Blake and her two helpers brought out French toast in a decadent fruit syrup, scrambled eggs with sausage and potatoes, muffins the size of Nico’s hand, and coffee. Lots of hot, fresh coffee. Nico attacked his loaded plate, hungry after the morning’s debauch.
Neither Patricia nor Rebecca would look at him. Rebecca shot sidelong glances at Andreas, her cheeks pink, and Patricia would not look up from her plate at all.
Andreas, on the other hand, leaned back in his chair, stretching out his long legs and sipping coffee, as though he’d done nothing more decadent that morning than read the newspaper.
“Did you sleep well?” their hostess asked cheerfully as she refilled coffee mugs.
Both Patricia and Rebecca jumped. Andreas yawned placidly. “I did.”
“As did I,” Nico joined in. Snuggling with Patricia had been sweet.
“Good. The cats like you, Andreas, don’t they? I think Peachy stayed with you all night.”
The three cats were even now winding around Andreas’s feet, looking up with hopeful eyes. Andreas ignored them.
“They think he’s their mother,” Nico said.
Andreas gave him an evil look. “Their protector,” he corrected coldly. “They know I will protect them.”
The cats at the moment looked like they hoped he’d feed them. Andreas surreptitiously took a bit of sausage from his plate and crumbled it to the floor for them.
Mrs. Blake smiled at them. “You look lovely this morning, Dr. Trimble. I think the little porch room is good for you.”
Without waiting for reply, she moved off, leaving Rebecca redder than ever. Nico noted she’d not pulled her hair back this morning but let it float across her cheeks in soft yellow waves. Instead of wearing a plain blouse like she had yesterday, this one had a little white embroidery on the collar.
“How is the translation coming?” he asked her.
Rebecca jumped half a foot and flushed deeper. “Translation?”
“You know,” Andreas rumbled. “The one on the ostracon. The reason I’m here letting lackeys run my club.”
“Of course I know which translation . . .” Flustered, Rebecca dug into a slim portfolio briefcase at her side and withdrew a small sheaf of papers.
Nico stacked the used breakfast plates in the middle of the table, and Rebecca spread out papers and the photos of the ostracon. Patricia finally looked up with interest, but she refused to meet Nico’s eyes.
“It’s a most curious inscription,” Rebecca said. “I understand about half of it, but the other half is gibberish. I copied it out the best I could.”
She spread out papers covered with hand-drawn hieroglyphs, jottings of hieratic script, and words written in English letters.
“Some of the words are easily recognizable,” she said. “Others I’m not as familiar with off the top of my head, but I can look them up. But these . . .” She touched a row of hieroglyphs she’d copied out. “I can’t make head nor tail of them. Some of them I’ve never seen before, and I’ve read most of the texts available. In other words, they aren’t really hieroglyphs.”
“Or they’re so old, no one knows what they are?” Patricia suggested.
Rebecca shook her head. “No, we have examples of writing going all the way back to 3000 BCE. It’s a completely different writing, or else whoever copied them onto the ostracon carved them absolutely wrong. I’d love to see the original inscription.”
“On the ostracon?” Nico asked, studying the lettering. He could read some hieroglyphs, as many as he’d bothered to learn, but he couldn’t read the odd ones Rebecca had pointed out.
Rebecca’s embarrassment faded as she warmed to her subject. “Remember I said that it’s likely whoever carved the inscription had no idea what he was copying. There are words and symbols here that are from far before the Ptolemaic period, Eighteenth Dynasty, I still think. Plus, your ostracon is only a fragment of the entire carving. It’s likely the archaeologists on the dig found it in pieces, and the museum in Cairo still has the others. Or they sold all the pieces to different collectors.”
Andreas listened with barely concealed impatience. “So you have to have all the pieces to figure out what it says?”
“It would be best. I can translate much of what’s here, except the odd parts, but there will be gaps.”
“Shit,” Andreas growled.
“The other pieces shouldn’t be too difficult to locate,” Rebecca said calmly. “Archaeologists are manic about keeping records, at least in this day and age, and the museum will know exactly where all these pieces went. Also, if this inscription is a copy from something older, like a temple wall or tomb, there will be records of that, too.”
“Unless the other pieces were destroyed or never found,” Patricia said glumly. “It happens.”
“We can but try,” Rebecca said with confidence. “I know a lot of people in the archaeological world, and those people know people. Let me make some calls. You’d be surprised how much we can unearth, pardon the pun.”
Nico hid a smile. Their translator was a little geeky, but she was smart, optimistic, and capable. Patricia had made a good choice.
Andreas caught Rebecca’s eye and waggled his tongue at her. Instantly she subsided into incoherent blushing, and Andreas grinned. It made Nico wonder just what his friend had gotten up to in the night.
REBECCA scolded herself as she entered her snug room to start making phone calls. She’d had a dream last night, was all. Nothing to get all flustered about every time she saw Andreas.
But looking into Andreas’s chill blue eyes, she understood why she’d dreamed him as a snow leopard. His mottled hair, his gleaming smile, and above all, his eyes, so beautiful and cool and arrogant, made her think of a beautiful wild cat. She’d seen a snow leopard only once, a sad specimen in a zoo, but her dream leopard had been strong and sleek.
She vividly recalled the cat’s strength as he’d climbed onto her, his breath hot between her breasts. He’d known exactly where to lick . . .
Rebecca found her face heating again, and she banished the memory. It was a silly dream, but she realized what it meant. She’d wanted
Andreas
to do those things, and her dream had put him in the form of a leopard to keep herself from admitting it.
She made herself work hard in the autumn sunshine on her room’s little porch. She liked problems like the strange hieroglyphs, unraveling inscriptions no one else had unraveled before.
Rebecca had made her name proving that the uninteresting could be important. A minor priest’s account of what happened at a temple could solve the mystery of where a lost queen might be buried. She’d won awards for her work.
But spending days hunched over her desk or scorching weeks in the desert brushing dust from a piece of stone disrupted her love life—what there was of it. She hadn’t been laid since . . . Oh, God, she’d forgotten.
She looked across the grounds and saw Andreas out on the grass, tossing a football back and forth with Nico. Just an ordinary guy in tight jeans and a sweatshirt, except that she’d turned him into a leopard in her dreams.
It was Saturday, and she didn’t have a class to teach until Tuesday. She could spend the next three days here dawdling in this nice B and B with sexy Andreas. She hummed softly as she worked, enjoying the nice weather she missed shut up in an office.
A shadow obscured her papers, and she looked up in annoyance. Andreas leaned on the porch rail watching her, the three cats twining around his feet. He’d abandoned the football and Nico, who was walking away with his arm around Patricia.
“Andreas.” She gulped.
He leaned over the porch rail and peered at the papers strewn across the table. Rebecca didn’t let herself look at the way the blue jeans hugged his hips or at his zippered fly and speculate what his cock looked like lying snug inside.
“Getting anywhere?” he asked.
“What? Oh, the translation. It’s moving ahead.”
“How long will it take you?”
Her nervousness turned to irritation. “I don’t know. It’s not like scrubbing a bathtub. There are nuances, and I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Do you scrub many bathtubs?”
What was he talking about? “I live by myself, so yes. There’s no one else to do it.”
His eyes took on a mischievous glint. “I think I’d enjoy watching you scrub a bathtub.”
She couldn’t imagine why, and the way he looked at her embarrassed her and irritated her.
“I had a dream about you last night,” she said sharply. “Or I think I did. You turned into a leopard.”
His brows rose. “Really? What did I do?”
“You just . . . were a leopard. The cats were in it, too, following you around like they always do.”
“They can’t get enough of me.”
Isis and Red Kitty were practically binding his ankles with their tails. Peachy perched on the porch railing beside him, closing her eyes as Andreas scratched her chin.
He looked too good. His sweatshirt stretched across hard shoulders, his throat strong and tanned. Blond hair covered muscular forearms that were crisscrossed with little scars. He’d shaved this morning, a faint scent of aftershave clinging to him.
“Maybe if I help, it will go faster,” he said. He invited himself up the porch steps and scraped a chair out from the table.
“You read hieroglyphs?”
“Some. I can read enough to know that the inscription is about us.”
Rebecca blinked at him. “About you? How could it be?”
He put his finger on the picture of a wild cat and the hieroglyphs next to it. Transliterated, they sounded like
ndr
. Egyptians didn’t include vowels when they wrote; the reader filled them in.
“That’s one of the words that makes no sense to me,” she said.
“It’s the name Andrei, the Greek form. I changed it to Andreas as times changed, because people could spell and pronounce it easier.”
He pointed to a picture of a man with wings. The copier had drawn detailed feathers that flowed down the man’s back and curled at his feet. The inscription transliterated as
ncls
.
“Nikolaus,” Andreas said. “Which he shortened to Nico.”
Rebecca laughed at him. “Andreas, this inscription is several thousand years old. I’ll know exactly how old if we can find the original. As egotistical as you are, it can’t be about you.”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe.” He lounged back, clasping his hands behind his head. “As long as you find an answer for us. Soon.”
“I don’t work for you,” she said in irritation. “I’m doing this as a favor to Patricia. You and Nico are the ones who insisted I stay here with you, but you keep interrupting me. I’m getting it done as fast as I can.”
Andreas slanted her an unreadable glance. “I’ll make it up to you.” His voice went dark. “Promise.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked nervously.
Andreas leaned forward, putting his face near hers. “I know you like being licked between your breasts. I can do that for you.”
Her face flamed. “You can’t know that.”
“Afraid I do.” He tapped the picture of the wild cat. “It wasn’t a dream, sweetheart. You tasted nice.”
Her throat went dry. “You can’t possibly know everything I dreamed.”
Andreas skimmed his fingers down her throat and brushed the hollow of her collarbone. “You’re awake now. Isn’t it better this way?”
Rebecca wanted to stop him. She opened her mouth to tell him she would never finish the translation if he distracted her so much, but she seemed robbed of words.
She closed her eyes as his warm fingers continued downward, then he tugged at the lace of her bra. “Take this off.”
Her eyes popped open. “You mean right here?”
“Take it off and put it on the table.”
Rebecca glanced quickly over the porch railing, but she could see no one in the yard. The room was tucked into a corner, the porch shielded from the front of the house by two big trees.
She wet her lips. The Rebecca she knew would never dream of obeying him. She was practical, disciplined, smart, and sensible.
Her fingers seemed to move of their own accord as she slowly undid the buttons of her blouse. Andreas watched with flattering interest while she loosened the shirt enough for her to reach around and unhook the bra.
She’d mastered the art of removing her bra without taking off her shirt, wanting to rid herself of its binding spandex the instant she came home. She slid the shoulder straps down her sleeves and over her hands and then pulled the black lace bra away from her chest and laid it on the table.
Her blouse still covered her, but Andreas’s gaze raked her as though he could see everything underneath it. “How long did it take you to learn to be so coy?”
“Is this being coy?”
“You’re a tease.”
“I can’t be a tease. I have no one to tease.”
“Open your blouse and show me your breasts.”
She gasped at the abrupt command. “Why should you want me to?”
“
You
want to,” he said flatly. “But you’re waiting for permission.” He gestured to her shirt. “Come on, show me.”
The Rebecca she knew would snort in derision, tell him he was full of himself, and that she had things to do.
No, wait—the Rebecca she knew would never even get this kind of request.
Her fingers shook as she slid the rest of the buttons free. She closed her eyes briefly, then threw her inhibitions to the wind and slowly pulled open the blouse.
Cool air touched her breasts, which had never been bare outdoors before. Her skin tingled, and something inside her squeezed in excitement.
Andreas tilted his head as he studied her breasts, and she felt the absurd hope that he’d like them. The approval that flickered in his eyes made her want to give him more.
