on the news of the discovery, and the sharks and parasites of the media world would descend en masse. The story could break somewhere else—anywhere else; he didn’t care—and then the media attention would be someone else’s problem.
So he would tell her. And then she would go.
Nothing could be simpler.
The door to her office was slightly ajar. He pushed it open, still rehearsing his speech. It wouldn’t be a long one. Pack your things and be ready for the next boat, was about the size of it. Still, knowing Dr Hunter and how she liked an argument, he was mentally preparing for a fight.
He was also preparing himself to win.
She was sitting at the desk, so intent on one of the pages she was studying and on the notes she was typing in the notebook computer alongside that she didn’t hear him enter. She looked younger today, even with the frown puckering her brow, or maybe she just looked fresher. She’d dispensed with the ponytail and instead had twisted her hair behind her head so the blonde tips feathered out, and she’d swapped the khaki shirt for a white tank with straps so thin he wondered how they covered her bra straps.
Assuming she was wearing one …
Breath whooshed from his lungs. His blood rushed south. She muttered something, still oblivious to his presence, and jumped out of her chair, wheeling around to the briefcase on the credenza beside her, rummaging through its contents. It would be rude to interrupt now, he thought, when she was so intensely involved in her work. Besides, the view from the back was no hardship to endure either. A well-worn denim skirt lovingly hugged her bottom and made his hands itch to do the same. But it was the length of the skirt he approved of most, or rather the lack of it, showcasing the surprisingly long legs beneath.
He sucked in air, desperate to replace what he had lost. She was nothing like the woman from the village. That woman was olive-skinned and dark-eyed, lush with curves and sultry good-looks. Whereas this one was blonde and petite, blue-eyed and more than slightly bookish. It made no sense.
Except for one more difference that made all the sense in the world.
This woman he wanted.
She pulled something from the briefcase then, a sheaf of papers, and looked up, blinking warily when she saw him standing in the doorway. ‘Count Volta. I wasn’t expecting you.’
He nodded. ‘Dr Hunter,’ he acknowledged, moving closer, searching his mind, certain that he’d been intending to say something but knowing only that he needed to get closer— maybe then it would come to him. And maybe he might even find an answer to his earlier question. But before he could latch onto his reason for coming, or work out whether there were telltale lines under her singlet after all, her face broke into one of those electric smiles. He felt the charge all the way to his toes, felt the jolt in his aching length.
‘You picked the best time to drop by. Come and see.’
‘What is it?’
‘I translated the first of the pages. It’s a prayer, a midnight prayer, beseeching the coming of dawn and an end to the darkness of night.’
He looked at the page and then at the translation she had up on her screen. ‘And that’s important because …?’
‘Don’t you see? The Salus Totus was revered—no, more than that, almost worshipped in its own right—as a book of healing. But little of the book remains to explain why. Remnants talk of eating and drinking in moderation, of taking fresh air, and while that is good advice, scholars have always felt there must have been more to warrant such a reputation for miracle cures and saved lives. Speculation has existed for centuries as to what might be in the missing pages and why they were removed.’
He didn’t understand what she was getting at. He couldn’t honestly say he cared. But her face was so animated with whatever she’d discovered that he could not help but join in the game. He shrugged. ‘Because the pages offended someone they had to be destroyed?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s the most common theory, I agree, but I don’t think it’s right. Not now. I think they were sliced from the book not to destroy them but to save them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re secular. They’re prayers of life and living that talk about the earth as mother of all. Nothing offensive to us now, in these times, but for