Betina Krahn (15 page)

Clever. The word circled back into his awareness, dragging with it his earlier assessment of her.
Clever girl
. He sat up, propped one arm on an upraised knee, and ran his hand back through his hair. She’d said something about an “arrangement” and seemed damned pleased. Something about how clever it was of nature to have set things up such that—he looked down at her, lying beside him, warm and flushed from his attentions—such that his own unruly passions
would do her work for her! He blanched. What in hell was he doing getting entangled physically—
amorously
—with her?

She watched him withdraw, saw his mood change abruptly, and guessed what must be happening in him … probably the very opposite of what was happening in her. She sat up, pulled her smock together, and began fastening buttons and examining the dampness and wrinkling of his coat. Her head felt oddly light and her lips felt curiously naked.

When she looked up, there was a flush of embarrassment in her cheeks. “I’m sorry about your coat. I’ll have Stephan see if he can rescue it. He used to be my grandfather’s valet, years ago.”

“You are making a dent in my wardrobe. Two pairs of trousers and now my best coat … Savile Row, you know.”

“I warned you to bring clothes suitable for the water,” she said with a rueful smile. “It’s your bad luck that you chose not to believe me.”

He pulled her braid and she rolled away and scrambled to her feet. She shoved her arms into his oversized sleeves, carefully rolled them up, then set about raising the sail and making for the cove. He watched, hearing her last words repeating over and over in his head. “…
Your bad luck
…
you chose not to believe me.”

He
had
chosen not to believe her. He had gone well past objective and rational, had even defied logic not to believe her. He didn’t want her to be right. And for all his pride in his own perception and in his integrity in pursuit of the truth … he had pursued an agenda of confrontations with her that made a mockery of his own vaunted principles of objectivity and sound scientific practice.

Grimly he observed her competence on the sea and admitted that she showed equal mastery beneath the water as well. She was out of the boat for at least ten minutes and was definitely not thrashing about at the surface.
Under water
was
the only place she could have been. His reluctance to admit it, even in the face of irrefutable evidence, disturbed him.

Why was he so reluctant to admit the truth? She was one hell of a sailor. She could and did dive in the open ocean, unassisted and at considerable risk to her own health and safety. He glanced up, catching her in profile for a moment. Those two facts alone made her the most unusual woman he’d ever known. And the most courageous. Hell, he didn’t know any
men
who would attempt what she apparently did with regularity!

His heart began to thud as he watched the land grow in his field of vision and realized the stakes he was playing for had just enlarged as well. It was no longer just a matter of pride or his reputation as an academic and a scientific skeptic. It had gone beyond that, somehow. In admitting that she truly did sail and dive, as she claimed, he now had to admit at least the possibility that she was telling the truth about the rest of it as well. Dolphins. What if she really had seen and studied dolphins?

He stole a glance at her and saw her give a small, single shiver. The tension that simple motion generated in him made him realize that, whatever happened, he was not going to get out of this unscathed. Something deep and fundamental in his being had been engaged, had involved itself in her fate. He closed his eyes and suffered a keen awareness of the lingering heat in his loins. And he hoped against hope that a bit of
heat
was all it was.

F
AR ABOVE THE COVE
, on the rampart of the old Norman tower, Lady Sophia and a few of her closest friends stood watching Celeste’s boat put in to the dock. They observed in silence the familiar motions of Celeste tying off the boat and the pair of figures climbing up the ladder. The professor went first, then turned to extend a hand to Celeste, which she seemed to ignore.

“Wait—” the brigadier said, squinting and cocking his
head at a different angle to get a better view. “Is that his coat she is wearing?”

Lady Sophia beamed. “It most certainly is.”

“And look at how they’re walking,” came another feminine opinion. “Close, but not too close.”

“Not in much o’ a hurry,” was the assessment from a coarse male voice.

“They look quoight roight together,” came a third female judgment. “But then, it’s quoight a dist-ance, ain’ it?”

“Have to see ’em close up,” the brigadier declared, stroking his chin.

“Oh, we will,” Lady Sophia said, gazing fondly at the pair ambling across the beach in the lowering light. “We most certainly will. At dinner.”

A WARM BATH
, a change of clothes, and a cup of Maria’s rich coffee, laced with something from old Stephan’s special shelf in the wine cellar, did wonders for Celeste’s chilled spirits and aching body. She soaped and soaked and sipped, relishing the sudsy warmth between her bare toes and recalling the afternoon.

She had made her scientific point. Now Titus Thorne had to admit that she was a diver and was capable of carrying out the research she had published. That should secure her a few days in which to locate her truant dolphins. But the wisp of a smile on her face and the hum in her body had nothing to do with dolphins or diving or science at all … unless one considered human mating rituals to be a field of scientific inquiry. She had also made her personal point. Titus Thorne had kissed her and touched her because he wanted to. While he clearly still harbored misgivings about her work, it was now abundantly clear that he didn’t find her
person
distasteful at all.

Her thoughts settled on his reaction after their “warming” session in the bottom of the boat. He had distanced himself from her again, become cool and professorial, although with noticeably less hostility toward her. As she thought about why, trying to see it from his perspective, she
finally concluded that he was loath to involve himself personally with her because he still expected her work to be fraudulent.

She sank deeper in the water. As long as he disbelieved her, he couldn’t allow himself to become entangled with her, no matter how pleasurable it was. She sighed. What she wouldn’t give for a few friendly dolphins, just now.

By the time she had rinsed, dried, dressed, and emptied her bathwater herself, she just had time to give her hair a good toweling, powder her sunburned cheeks, and put a pair of tortoiseshell combs in her hair. The sound of the clock in the hall chiming eight sent her hurrying down the main stairs, where she ran into Stephan showing an equally refreshed and refurbished Titus Thorne into the dining room.

She tried to resist the temptation to stare at the glint of his dark hair, the contrast of his sun-burnished face to the pristine white of his collar, and the changeable sea-green eyes that seemed to be searching and evaluating her as well. With her cheeks reddening under his scrutiny, she fell in beside the old servant and vowed to make Titus Thorne admit, aloud, over supper, that she proved her “method” today. But when they entered the dining room, she stopped halfway to the table, horrified to find a number of the chairs already occupied … by the Atlantean Society of Pevensey Bay.

“There you are!” Lady Sophia called from her chair at the head of the table. “I hope you don’t mind, Professor. I invited a few friends to dinner and … what with all our creaky limbs and achy joints … we thought it best to wait for you in comfort.” She gestured to the others at the table, all of whom had survived to an age of at least sixty years, and they nodded agreement, smiling at Celeste and the professor, who had stopped beside her.

Celeste came to her senses and proceeded to her chair, watching in quiet desperation as her grandmother launched upon the disaster of the moment.

“Permit me to introduce several members of our local
society,” Lady Sophia continued, clearly in her element as hostess. “Brigadier Penworthy Smythe, Royal Army, retired … Miss Penelope Hatch, our local postmistress, retired … the Reverend Marcus Altarbright, retired vicar of Cardamon … Misters Hiram and Bernard Bass, proprietors of a local fishing concern … Mrs. Anabelle Feather, milliner … Mr. Darwin Tucker, retired haberdasher … and of course, you have already made the acquaintance of Mr. Ned Caldwell, our local blacksmith.”

Celeste could only watch in dismay as Titus Thorne shook the men’s hands and nodded politely over the women’s. He seemed perfectly obliging, as if he dined with hatmakers, postmistresses, fishermen, and village blacksmiths on a regular basis. But she recalled too well that his mannerliness could be a prelude to far less pleasant behavior.

“Really, Nana”—she gave the old lady an emphatic, pleading look—“Professor Thorne cannot possibly be interested in our local
society.”

“On the contrary, Miss Ashton,” he said as he took his seat opposite her. “I find things to interest me in the most unlikely places. The mark of a true scientist, curiosity.”

“Ah, yes. Professor Thorne is a scientist, you know,” Lady Sophia informed the others as she beckoned old Stephan to begin the serving. “An
ichthyologist
. One who studies fish.”

“Do tell,” one of the Bass brothers said, leaning over his plate with widened eyes. “Bernard and me”—he jerked a thumb at his hulking, ruddy-faced brother—“we be ‘fish men’ ourselves.”

“Know ever’ shoal and shaller, ever’ school and big’un in these waters,” Bernard declared with pride as he tucked his napkin firmly into his collar.

“How interesting.” The professor’s face was a polite mask as he flicked a narrow glance at Celeste. “Then perhaps you’ve seen Miss Ashton’s dolphins?”

“Oh, aye.” Hiram Bass eyed with eagerness the tureen
making its way toward him on the serving cart. “Dozens o’ times. Ever’ time we have our Sacred Dolph—”

“How is your soup, Professor?” Celeste hurriedly broke in, knowing full well that he’d not yet had time to taste it. “It’s turtle. A great favorite of ours. Compliments of the Bass brothers. They provide us with a marvelous bounty of fish.”

“We see ’er dolphins now an’ then,” Hiram continued gamely. “Miss Celeste don’t like us to take our boats too close to the cove, on account of it gets ’em all wrought up.” When he saw the frown flicker across the professor’s face, he explained: “They chase th’ boats, y’see. Ride th’ bow waves. And if we ain’t careful, they get all fouled up in our nets.”

“And have you ever heard one of her dolphins
talk?”
Titus Thorne asked, eyeing the garrulous old brothers.

“Aye. If ye can call them clicks an’ screeches talkin’,” Hiram answered.

“Don’t be silly, Mr. Bass.” Miss Penelope, the postmistress, spoke up. “We all know they talk. We’ve all heard them at one time or other.”

“You have?” Thorne sat forward, now completely focused. “Can you understand them? What do they say?”

“Ohhh, they speak of mysteries, sir,” Miss Penelope answered smartly. “Things too deep for human ken.”

Celeste groaned privately, knowing just where the conversation was heading. This was precisely what she had hoped to avoid.

“They are the messengers of the deep,” Miss Penelope went on, “who carry with them the secrets of ages past and the promises of glories yet to come.”

“Well”—Titus Thorne seemed to be suppressing a smile—“how annoyingly inscrutable of them.”

“Oh, it ain’t in-scroodable, sarr,” Mrs. Anabelle Feather said in tones of East End London. “It’s parfectly understandable to them what’s in the know.”

“I think we may be having oysters for a second course—
have you ever studied oysters, Professor?” Celeste tried desperately to derail the conversation.

Titus Thorne gave her a look that said he intended to hear it all, precisely because she was trying to distract him.

“In the know? About what?” he asked the coarse-spoken milliner.

“And I believe Stephan and Maria may have made spiced pears for dessert—” Celeste tried again.

“Atlantis, o’course,” Anabelle Feather responded, glancing at the others, clearly pleased at the prospect of expounding on their common passion. “Th’ lost continent. Th’
ante-de-luvian
world.” She leaned forward to earnestly explain: “That means ‘sunk under th’ ocean.’ ”

Her answer took Titus by surprise. He blinked, then chuckled. “Atlantis? Dolphins speaking to human beings about the sunken continent
of Atlantis’?”
He glanced at Lady Sophia, then at Celeste as if to say that he held her responsible for such nonsense, then returned to Anabelle Feather. “The possibility of dolphins speaking of anything at all is exceedingly remote … but the possibility of them knowing and speaking of the secrets of a civilization that has been gone for three thousand years … well, that is nothing short of … ludicrous.”

Silence fell over the table and he looked from one wary and unsettled face to another, discovering he had just trespassed an unrecognized boundary. After an increasingly uncomfortable pause, he glanced again at Celeste, who looked at her grandmother with a firm expression of
I-told-you-so
.