by Cherry Adair
“So—what’s this big surprise?” Beside him, Dr. Calista West turned to mimic his slouched posture, forearms over the rail. On her it was downright provocative, even though her khaki shorts covered her lightly tanned legs almost to her knees, and the white T-shirt wasn’t formfitting. There was nothing in the least provocative about her. But somehow Jonah felt … provoked. His eyes went to her mouth. Jonah noticed a hairline scar over her left eyebrow, another faint one on the edge if her upper lip. Now that he knew where to look, he saw multiple tiny, almost invisible scars on her face and throat. His gaze landed on her arm. How had she gotten them? Hell, the injury must’ve hurt like hell. The long, thin scar on her arm looked like she’d been cut open with a can opener.
She turned her head so he could see himself reflected in her dark glass. “A big secret then.” Her tone was a little snarky, but he let it go.
She turned her attention to look out over the water. “I suppose this isn’t a bad spot to wait. There’s something magical about the light in Greece that I’ve never found anywhere else. I love it here.” Bright afternoon sun glinted warningly off her wedding ring as she leaned forward to drape her crossed wrists over the rail.
Jonah was not the kind to waste a single motion; everything had a purpose, and if it didn’t, he ditched it. He’d learned in the last few years the advantage of biding his time. Right now stealth chaffed. When he inhaled the salt-laden air, he got a brainful of the good doctor’s fresh scent as well. Endorphins flooded his synapses and he was pathetically grateful when Agyros arrived with a tray carrying glasses with crystalline cubes of ice and a pitcher of tea so he could stride across the deck, away from the allure of the most important person on board.
Hands off, he reminded himself.
The steward had stopped by his cabin for his iPad and the box on the desk. Agyros placed both on the table with the drinks, then left. Funny that two such relatively small objects could hold so much weight. For now he let them be.
“The Ji Li wasn’t the impetus for hiring you.”
“No?”
“I read your paper on Atlantis.”
She raised a brow at the non sequitur. After a moment she said, “I wrote several papers on the unlikelihood that Atlantis really existed. To sum up five years of research, my hypothesis is that Plato used a dozen cities to make up his fictional Atlantis.”
He dragged in a deep breath. The good doctor’s fresh scent and the smell of the sea filled his lungs before he let out the air. “I’ve found it.”
She gave him a skeptical look over her tilted glasses. “Atlantis?”
“Yeah.”
Shoving the dark glasses back to cover her eyes, she said evenly. “Here?”
“Yeah, here.”
“You know there’s an enormous probability that you’re wrong.” Her voice told him he was 100 percent wrong and she was merely indulging him even by having this conversation. Jonah enjoyed a good debate now and then. He and Nick had them all the time. He didn’t give a shit which side he was on, he’d argue it with alacrity. Callie didn’t debate. She knew she was right, and she wasn’t going to waste her time arguing the point.
He leaned on the rail beside her. “All I need is a chance to prove that I’m right. And you’re going to help me do just that.”
The sunglasses were shoved on top of her head as she looked at him with those pale, greeny-blue eyes. “You want my help to prove Atlantis exists, even though years of study in my field have proven to my satisfaction that it doesn’t? Not to mention, you’re a couple of hundred miles off—or according to some, several thousand miles off. If Atlantis was ever a real place, which, since you’ve read my work—it wasn’t.” She sounded skeptical as hell.
Jonah expected her response. Hell, he’d counted on it.
Converts were the strongest advocates.
Her official stance was that Atlantis was an allegory. A combination of dozens of Mediterranean towns fictionalized into one utopian city. But if she helped him unearth it, prove that he’d found it, her word would hold a great deal of weight. It would make her name in the field of marine archaeology. Not to mention all of them a great deal of money, fame, and fortune.
He rubbed his chest, staring into the water as if he could see the pillars and walls, the streets and temples …
“Calculations and educated guesses are off,” he said with utmost confidence. He knew, because Stormchaser lay at anchor right over it.
She turned to look at him. Her skin, dewy from the heat, looked flushed—from excitement? And crazy touchable. His fingers tightened around the rail to prevent himself from closing the small gap between them and brushing her flushed cheek with a fingertip. He caught a drift of her scent. The brine of the sea, and the mist of mountains, the creamy fragrance of tropical beaches—
Hyperaware of her, he shifted slightly. But the scent of her skin followed him. Jonah clenched his teeth, breathing through his mouth. Married. Yeah, right. He needed to send that information to his dick, which was responding independently, and without his permission, to the crazy, mixed-up lust-inducing smell of her hair. Her skin.
She licked her lower lip as her eyes met his. Briefly, before she looked just to the left of his face. She shook her head almost pityingly. “You’re crazy wrong. Seriously, you’ve wasted your money. Concentrate on Ji Li. She’s a known entity and her treasure will be rock-solid, not pie in the sky.”
“The same people who said Atlantis wasn’t real claimed Homer’s Troy wasn’t real, either, and yet—” He waved an expansive hand. The ancient city, featured in Homer’s Iliad, had also been believed fiction. Then they’d discovered the city in 1865. “I’ll show you what’s sitting right below us, and you can see it for yourself.”
The professor gave him a look, something between amused and skeptical, that made his hackles rise. Yeah, better to be annoyed with her than what he was really feeling. Pure, unadulterated lust, the kind that tightened his balls and made his hands itch to touch. Her face. Her hair. Her—
For God’s sake. Get a fucking grip. The woman’s married. Worse, she’s under my protection.
Decency and self-control was going to become his mantra for the duration.
She gave a noncommittal shrug. “Go for it.”
Now, that was a challenge if he’d ever heard one.
* * *
Callie knew the chances of Jonah Cutter unwittingly tripping over Atlantis were a gazillion to one, but God—despite her outward nonchalance, she was intrigued. Smart move of him to hire someone who’d already claimed no such place existed. A skeptic’s word would bear even more weight than a true believer’s.
Ancient cities were her thing, and discovering Atlantis in particular would make her name in the marine archaeology field. Hell. Any field. Publishing and name recognition were everything if an archaeologist wanted to keep funding coming in. Truth was, discovering a new ancient city, even if it wasn’t Atlantis, still held the promise of fame and fortune.
And doing so would also make her assignment here easier to perform. A win–win–win. Atlantis? She didn’t dare get her hopes up. The most sought-after of ancient cities held worldwide appeal, and for Jonah to discover it when nobody else had? Callie shook her head. “Doubtful,” she muttered.
She walked a slippery slope. For Jonah to trust her, she had to appear trustworthy. The fact that she was going to betray him, hand over his findings to Rydell Case, gave her conscience a mild twinge, which she shoved out of sight. She’d heard about the Cutter brothers en masse for years, and had learned not to trust or like any of them from the first.
Is this why Rydell had encouraged her to take the job? Callie wasn’t sure how he knew about what Jonah thought he’d found. Jonah said he hadn’t even told his dive team. Ry wasn’t clairvoyant, but he was obsessed with bringing the Cutter empire to its knees. Maybe he didn’t care what it was Jonah was diving for. Just that he could take it from under the Cutters’ noses.
Callie would do anything for her brother-
in-law, short of murder. Anything. It hadn’t taken a lot of persuading for her to agree to infiltrate a Cutter ship and report back on any findings. What Rydell was going to do with the information she didn’t know, although she suspected he was going to turn the tables on the Cutters as they had done to him off the coast of South Africa last year. He’d keep them tied up in red tape and bankrupt them as they were trying to do to him.
Callie shivered in the hot sunshine. Ry was more than her brother-in-law, he was family, and, she knew, a formidable opponent. She’d hate to be the one in his crosshairs.
He knew her very well. He’d bet that the second she heard the Atlantis connection, she’d be hooked. As usual, he was right. Atlantis or not, whatever Jonah Cutter had found was something no one else had seen. That alone was enough to intoxicate her. Callie agreed to join the Cutter dive. The pay was stellar, she adored Greece, and the diving was always fabulous. What was there not to like? Other than risking exposure, and Jonah Cutter, of course. She’d known him all of an hour, while Ry had had years of business dealings gone sour because of the Cutters.
Time would tell. A tiger rarely changed its stripes.
Jonah leveraged himself off the rail. “Come on. I’ll show you some of the images I have, just to give you a taste before we go down and you can see and touch for yourself.”
She joined him at the table, dragging out a cushioned chair to sit in the shade of the huge, square umbrella that matched the fat light-gray cushions on the seats. She removed her sunnies from the top of her head, setting them on the glass-topped table, and gave him an expectant look. “I’m all ears.” And apparently all hormones for some reason. Just looking at Jonah Cutter made her feel hot and jumpy all over. Nerves, of course.
Instead of sitting in one of the other chairs, Jonah picked up an iPad, then crouched beside her chair, resting his bare arm on her armrest. The fine hairs on her arm lifted in a static electric connection between them.
Unfazed, Jonah handed her the tablet. “Take a look.”
Callie took the proffered tablet. Their fingers brushed. So brief, so slight, she was sure he didn’t even notice, but the effect on her was profound. Everything inside her stilled for a moment until it passed, leaving in its wake a ripple of hyperaware disquiet. Such a reaction to a man, any man, was so out of character, so profound, she wanted to examine it and analyze it so she could dismiss the feelings scientifically.
He was so close she smelled the soap and salt on his skin, felt the heat of him through her T-shirt. Didn’t the man own a shirt, for God’s sake? He stretched out his hand to slide an image of Stormchaser aside, his arm grazing her breast. Damn it, he was so close she smelled coffee on his breath and saw the fine lines beside his incredible eyes. She quickly refocused on the screen.
Stormchaser, she thought, trying to get her concentration back and quickly.
The next image was underwater, fairly deep as indicated by the deep-blue wash over everything. She angled the screen away from the sunlight. “Rocks?” Now her heart skipped several beats for another reason. One she fully embraced and understood.
“Lava flow.”
Narrowing her eyes, she scanned the image. What she was looking at could be pumice …
“It’s well documented that there was considerable seismic activity in this region all the way back to the Minoan eruption in the mid-second millennium BCE. The catastrophic eruption reached all the way to Egypt, and even China, so this lava flow and what looks like pumice, here and here, are certainly possible.”
Probable? Not really.
“Myths and legends were written about it.” Callie paused. “I’ve done my research. Believe me, I want to believe in Atlantis, God only knows it would make my decade. But it doesn’t exist.”
“Okay. Stick to that until I prove to you that’s what we have. Right here”—he pointed—“is a wall.” He slid the next image across the screen. And brushed her breast again. Her nipples went hard. Oh, for God’s sake! She had to get herself together. Focus, damn it.
A close-up. Not rocks. Square, rough-hewn. Symmetrical. Human-made. Callie’s pulse raced as it always did when she discovered something few had seen in hundreds, if not thousands of years. Of course it wasn’t Atlantis, but a new discovery of any kind fired her blood like nothing else.
Of course, she realized with relief. She wasn’t hot for him, it was the possibility of the new discovery. The thrill of uncharted possibilities. And as Rydell often told her, “Callie, I love you, but you take life way too seriously.” She tore her gaze away from the tempting picture for just a moment and stared at Jonah, realizing his eyes were a stunning clear blue that matched the water in the photograph.
She swallowed, her throat dry. “Where was this taken?”
He pointed at the deck beneath their feet. Or at the impressive bulge in his black shorts depending on one’s point of view, Callie thought, as he rested his arm on his knee.
They were practically shoulder-to-shoulder, nose-to-nose. Too hot for two strangers to be sitting so close to each other. There were three other very comfortable freaking chairs. Why didn’t he sit in one? “International waters?” she asked, shifting a little to break what appeared to be a seal between her bare arm and his.
“Oh, yeah.”
She subtly used her shoulder to block Jonah from reaching out to slide the next image into view. Callie did it herself. With her ring finger. The dull glow shone like her personal body armor. She refocused on the screen. Another close-up of the blocks on the wall. She pinched the image, then spread her fingers wide to make it larger. Definitely a wall, and spilling over the edge of it was what looked like a hardened flow of volcanic rock.
The area was known for its volcanic action. There was a small island fairly close by that looked as if it had an extinct cone on it. Nothing to get excited about. Plato had written about a massive eruption followed by tidal waves. Both things known about and reported from ancient time.
Tons of small islands and atolls, volcanic rocky outcrops, and even a few calderas lay between Greece and Turkey. Any of the larger islands could potentially have had a small city or town swallowed by volcanic action and or tidal waves. But was what lay beneath her feet caused by the Minoan eruption of Thera? The idea that this could possibly really be Atlantis was mind boggling.
“These are satellite images taken six months ago.”
Callie narrowed her eyes at the screen. What appeared to be grid-like lines resembling city streets, perhaps walls … certainly human-made. He slid through several more similar images.
Despite her skepticism, Callie’s heart leapt. “Was someone taking bathymetric data at the time?” Bathymetric data was collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the seafloor. “Because you know that these lines could reflect the path the boat took to gather the data?”
“No boat.”
“You’re sure?”
“Look at the rest. You tell me.”
The next image wasn’t from a satellite. This was a photograph under the water. A long shot. The wall was about three feet high and stretched into the dark water beyond the lights of the camera. Her heart leapt into her throat. “Do you have anything else?”
“Next image. What do you think?”
A pillar. An honest-to-God temple order. Simple—indicating ancient … no capital, but she’d search the ground below and see if it sat flat on the stylobate, with no base, indicating a Doric style. The fluting on the column didn’t appear to match the sharp-edged requisite twenty-four grooves on a typical Doric column. But neither did the grooves have the slight flattened spacing between them of an Ionic column structure. It was neither. Because rather than being concave the grooves moved in an almost wave-like continuation around the column, dipping in and out. Something she’d never seen before.
“God…” Giddy with excitement, Callie slewed her eyes to his. “How big?”
“What you see here is forty feet high, ten feet in diameter. Almost intact. Once you see it for you
rself you can let me know how tall the building was. There are more, half a dozen almost fully intact, many more broken, some missing.”
“A temple,” Callie said with reverence, almost forgetting that he was so close. An almost intact temple of undetermined era and origin. The diameter and length of the columns indicated an enormous structure.
“And this—?” He leaned against her to point to the tablet. “A mosaic floor … check out the colors.”
Callie wasn’t ready to leave the temple, but by the same token she was eager to see more. The camera light showed an intricate design of multicolored tesserae. The small pieces looked like glass, stones, perhaps clay or pottery pieces; she couldn’t tell from the picture. God—she needed to be there to see all of this for herself.
She realized she had her hand over her chest as if her heart might explode with excitement. “This is incredible…”
He grinned, his eyes sparking with the same excitement singing through her veins. “There’s more.”
“I want to see all of them. About twenty times, then go down to see everything for myself—”
“Yeah, and you will. Plenty more pictures in the meantime,” he told her, his voice filled with brimming excitement that was infectious. “But wait—there’s more—”
“You have a Ginsu knife somewhere?”
His smile—damn it—was contagious. He got up from his crouch to lean across the table. He brought a shoe-box-sized metal box back to his position beside her.
“Maybe you’d be more comfortable in a chair?” Callie suggested tartly. Between Cutter’s close proximity and the pictures—the evidence—she was seeing, her blood pressure and respiration were off the charts.
“Here’s good,” he said absently, crouching beside her chair again, and placing the box on the deck between his feet. The lid creaked like a rusty hinge when he opened the metal box. “Hold out both hands and close your eyes.”