Through Ancient Eyes (BookStrand Publishing Romance) Page 10

  “I guess.” She gasped as his supporting hand spread across the small of her back with an intense and sensual pressure that sent waves of pleasure down her spine. “I guess I’m also your landlady.”

  Chapter Nine

  Danielle almost stumbled when he released her, and she flung her arms out into the darkness for some kind of support that wasn’t there. The candle inside the ancient lantern sputtered to life with a soft glow, but after all their time in the darkness it was as blinding as the noonday sun for a moment.

  Jake turned his face away and closed his eyes briefly, cursing under his breath at the pain that must have been a lingering trademark of his illness. Danielle took the opportunity to look around at their environment, which appeared to consist of a small passage with only one thick, wooden door at the opposite end.

  “I don’t think I heard you properly. What did you say again?”

  She knew the door to the garden was locked and covered over, so the only way she had to escape was waiting at the other end of the corridor. Jake didn’t stop her as she edged away from him, and it told her right off she’d be trapped in this small space with him when she informed him of the fact he didn’t have anywhere to live now.

  The look on his face was endlessly patient as he sat the lantern down on a small shelf and leaned against the roughly plastered wall. He folded his arms over his chest and crossed his long legs as if they had all the time in the world.

  Danielle desperately wanted to tell him about the house, yet she knew a lot of things were adding up, and those things didn’t cast her in a particularly good light. After she came up with possession of the mask and an ‘almost’ dinner date with Britton, how could she explain the way she was accidentally responsible for his homeless state, too?

  The feeble candlelight touched his body with flickering shadows and those strong arms, so casually crossed above his flat waist in the thin T-shirt, were distracting in a way she couldn’t resist. Those same arms had held her so passionately just a few minutes ago, and she could still feel the pressure of his touch against her skin. She wanted more than anything to take those few steps between them and press herself against his tall frame so she could feel every inch of his body, but she was so afraid he wouldn’t trust her motives.

  Hell, she didn’t even trust her motives and hadn’t really taken the time to talk to herself about what she thought she was doing here. Her life in the city was so restrained, so mediated. She had never felt such an uncontrollable desire, and it overcame her soul in waves that threatened to drown her if she didn’t ride the tide.

  She knew then she would do anything to help him, anything to give him what he needed to keep her at his side—anything except lie to him.

  “I bought your house, off the Internet. I have to tell you, it really could use a lot of work.”

  A strange look crossed his face, maybe a mixture of confusion and relief, but she wasn’t prepared at all when he jumped away from the wall and forcefully grabbed her arms.

  “Are the hummingbirds all right?” His eyes glistened in the soft light and his powerful reaction set her back momentarily. She had expected a hundred questions about his lifetime collection of artifacts, or the state of his prized library perhaps, but not this.

  He asked her about the birds… God help her, she thought she loved him already.

  “They’re fine and dive-bombing the front porch on a regular schedule now. Mary Jane is feeding them while I’m gone, so you don’t need to worry.”

  She didn’t realize how tight his grip was on her upper arms until he let go, and it seemed he hadn’t either because he immediately began to explain.

  “It’s been so long since I have spoken to anyone from home. I really thought Britton Majers would take over the house in my absence, tear it to shreds and starve the local wildlife to death.”

  “Well, I can’t say a lot about the ‘tearing to shreds’ part. Like I mentioned earlier, it needs a lot of work. The garden has gone to seed completely. I planted mums in it.”

  “Mums mostly stay in a pot on the front porch, city-girl,” he responded teasingly, until a look of realization dawned on his face. “You found the mask in the garden.”

  Danielle nodded, completely lost in the wonder of his hazel eyes as they shared a moment of understanding. She almost told him more, about the dream and the pyramid, but she didn’t dare put her position with him at risk. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was an interloper and crazy, too.

  “What are the odds of you finding this case in the garden? I’ll bet you took it to the local University and met Britton Majers to boot. I’d love to believe everything you say, but it still doesn’t explain why you came all the way to South America when you might have just given the artifact over to our esteemed Director and gotten on with your autumn planting.”

  “I had a feeling about it,” she tried to explain, but the words sounded clumsy coming out of her mouth, without knowing any way she could clue him in and not come off sounding like a madwoman.

  I came here to find you, can’t you tell? Her heart poured the words out through her eyes because she couldn’t bring herself to say them out loud.

  “I was thinking about leaving you here, you know,” he finally whispered as his countenance softened, and he shook his head at the thought.

  Danielle’s gaze flew around the small space in panic, and her hands reached out to a shelf for support as images of nuns bricked into the surrounding walls filled her head.

  “No, I don’t mean right here.” Jake chuckled softly and steadied her searching arms. “In the main part of the church. I thought it would take you a considerable while to make your way back to Majers, and I would be long gone by then.”

  “You aren’t going to leave me then?”

  “If I were, I certainly would not have confessed it to you just now. My mind tells me I shouldn’t completely trust you, but I know my heart wants to trust you more than anything in the world.”

  He has a heart, and it even considers me a little! Danielle rejoiced at the thought until the distant sound of a siren interrupted her reverie and she was forced back to the reality of the situation.

  This time, she was the one who grabbed his hand.

  “We better get a move on and the groove on, then.” She pulled him toward the garden door. “You said yourself the roads will be crawling with police, and we have spent a lot more time here than we should have if we’re not going to get caught.”

  “So, you are willing to risk your reputation, your friends and everything you have, to come with me and help me on this endeavor?”

  Jake easily balked at her attempts to move him in the direction she wanted to go.

  “Are you kidding?” She stopped tugging away on his hand as she turned to answer him. “My reputation only means something to people who don’t know me. My real friends will stand by me no matter my situation, and things I can’t take with me when I die aren’t worth living for. It’s all for nothing if I can’t experience life with my heart!”

  “I never pray,” Jake eventually responded to her statement as he pulled her closer in the tiny room. “But here we are, at church, and I just have to believe in something.”

  His hands were a little rough as he gently touched her arms in the same place he had grasped her so urgently such a short time ago. Danielle shivered involuntarily as a thousand chill bumps ran from her shoulders down her spine. Her nipples grew hard and ached painfully for her to press them against his firm chest. It was almost agony as he held her just inches away, and her hands impulsively reached out to touch his taut, sculpted stomach.

  He breathed deeply the moment she made contact with the soft material, but to her surprise he didn’t stop her advance as she pulled the fabric from the tight waistband of his jeans. His copper skin was smooth and hot in the candle light, and she ran her fingers to each side of his waist as her thumbs instinctively found the coarse, dark blonde hair that led from his navel downward.

  D
anielle worked her fingers along his hips to pull him closer while she explored the trail that went below his waist. It felt to her like everything in the world hinged on their passion and their need to be together. It was almost like a dream as her body moved in ways she had never imagined before to facilitate that happening.

  The siren was unexpected and loud, just outside the garden door, and it startled the two of them back into reality. They looked at each other for a moment like they couldn’t quite believe what they had been doing just an instant before, and Jake put a silencing finger to his lips before she could say anything.

  Without a word he shouldered the two leather bags and made for the door at the opposite end of the passage. Danielle followed his lead, thinking perhaps it was safer to hide in the church for now until the coast was clear.

  She was about to discover one thing was for certain. If she thought the cubby door to her basement was the entrance to the underworld before, she understood now she was sadly mistaken.

  * * * *

  “These catacombs go on for miles underneath the city,” Jake explained as they wound their way down a roughly hewn stone stairwell. “Their construction began in the 1500’s, though just a small portion of the expanse is now open to the tourists. They connect most of the churches in Lima in a macabre sort of maze that only the very well versed can travel without incident.”

  “Please tell me we’re the very well versed.”

  Jake turned to her in the lamp light and smiled as they reached the bottom of the level.

  “I would not put another soul at risk in the catacombs if I didn’t think I could navigate them successfully.”

  Looking at the handmade brick arches which contained a myriad of shelves filled with fully visible skulls and bones, Danielle balked a little at his words. They were even lit up for her benefit, something she thought the ancestral peoples of the city probably didn’t do back in the day.

  “But you can risk my soul searching for a lost civilization that practiced magic?”

  “Ah, but that is life, not death as we see here in the catacombs.” He gestured broadly around his lamp light. “Besides, you did say you were willing to risk everything.”

  “Oh, don’t think I’m backing out, even for a second.” Danielle raised her chin and noticed the admiration in his eyes. “It’s on, and I’m going as far as I can go. Do you think they can find us down here?”

  “We won’t be down here long enough for them to discover us. It would take weeks for even the most savvy of searchers to locate our whereabouts, and by the time they find any trace, we’ll be long gone.”

  “Where will we be long gone to?” she had to ask as they progressed further down the eerie corridor that death built.

  “First stop is the security station for supplies. After that, we head north.”

  “I hope you have a compass or something.” Danielle had no sense of direction as they traversed the winding tunnels, and she could easily see how anyone could get lost down here the first time they took a wrong turn.

  “We are traveling quite a bit further north than you think, I suspect.”

  They moved through the tunnels at a fast pace, though Danielle seemed to see shadows at every turn, and it set her nerves on edge despite her brave nature. It made her think of the time in her basement when she wondered what Ghost Hunters would do. The truth was, just because she couldn’t explain something didn’t mean it was supernatural in nature and she had to remember that down in catacombs. There was almost always another explanation. Almost always.

  She noticed it didn’t take long for them to pass through a couple of wrought iron gates, and the tunnel became a lot less appealing and traversable. She wondered how the lighted up skulls in the previous corridor could make her feel safer, when she realized they must have left behind the tourist type part of the catacombs.

  The candle in the old lantern was nearly out when they came to another wooden door, and this one was obviously secured, too. Jake produced a skeleton key, and she laughed when she considered how appropriate it was.

  “Is everything okay?” He turned to her in surprise, but she couldn’t respond. It was probably the stress of everything that had happened to her the past few days but her tiny giggle was transforming into a hysterical laugh and there was no way she could stop it at that point. It would surely echo down the brick pipeline of bones and alert the devil himself to their presence.

  Oh, how he would most likely hate her after she lost control like this! She wanted to suppress it, but it flowed out of her with an unstoppable force, and all she could do was point to the brass ring in his hand.

  Instead of hushing her or expressing anger at her uncontrollable mirth, Jake looked at the ring of keys in his hand and began to smirk with understanding.

  “I’ve never thought of that before. A skeleton key in the catacombs… You’re very clever.”

  He swung the door open and in a gentlemanly way, motioned for her to enter first. It didn’t even matter to her he might be making fun of her wit, or lack thereof, at that point. He seemed to accept her as she was, and it was certainly a quality she had never experienced in a relationship before.

  The security station wasn’t quite what she expected in a pre-Columbian sort of underground structure, and there was a series of television monitors set along one wall, recording everything that went on in the passages nearby.

  With an apparent and alarming ease, Jake pulled a blank tape from one of his bags and switched it with another that looked exactly like it from the main recording device. She noticed the time on the screen said midnight exactly when he resumed the function, and the new tape he inserted was wound halfway through already.

  “What if we had gotten here after twelve p.m.?” She gave him a suspicious look, wondering how he could have coordinated their arrival time so perfectly.

  “Then we’d have to stay until one o’clock. I have one for every hour.” He fondly patted the leather bag on his right shoulder. “I find I have more reasons than I like to use these tunnels. A security officer partial to our cause makes them for me when I need them.”

  “Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. What is ‘the cause’ exactly? All for one and one for all, right?”

  “We had this conversation already, my pretty Musketeer,” Jake said solemnly and put his bags on the floor next to the small station. With an almost absentminded gesture he flicked his fingertips to his temples and pressed them against his head.

  “Yes, we did. I didn’t mean to upset you or anything.” Danielle regarded him with true concern, and for more than one reason. If something happened to him, she was fairly certain she couldn’t find her way out of the underground maze on her own and there was no way to know when any of the staff would be along to help. She guessed by the way Jake was lounging against the desk in such an informal manner that it was quite some time before he expected anyone to check in at the station.

  “I have some Tylenol in my purse, I think.” She moved closer to him in an attempt to discover the seriousness of his situation and was a little relieved when he alertly lifted his head and held out a restraining hand.

  “Before you come any closer to me with your soft skin and tempting eyes, I have to ask you a question.”

  Danielle blinked compulsively, not sure where to look after such an unexpected compliment and found it difficult to hold his gaze. Warmth flooded her cheeks despite her desperation to control the reaction.

  “When we first entered the catacombs, you mentioned something about the risk I put to your soul in search of magic and lost civilizations. What makes you think that’s what I am doing here?”

  “Britton came to the farmhouse one evening,” she tried to explain, but her mind momentarily panicked and formed a blank beneath his penetrating stare when she attempted to piece together her conversation with the Director of Antiquities.

  “Britton is it? You two seem quite comfortable on a first name basis…”

  “No, it’s nothing like you th
ink. He had a bag of tools and he wanted to help with a few things I needed around the house.”

  Jake raised one eyebrow but didn’t dare to comment on that part of her explanation.

  “I opened the bottle of wine so he would tell me more about you, and he lit the fireplace.” Danielle slowed down and knew her words were dragging her under. “Your fireplace still works fine, by the way.”

  “That is certainly good news. Let’s see, was it a bottle of Merlot? If I know Britton Majers, and sadly I think I must, he likely brought the wine for his own benefit and I’ll bet he told you more about himself than you wanted to hear.”

  “He seemed to believe you were crazy—dead, too. I know about the last part now, but I really wonder about the other thing.”

  “I think I was wrong about you, Danielle.”

  She had halfway expected a sarcastic response after her strange tale, of course, and was thinking of all the ways she had lost ground on her quest to earn his trust by simply being truthful. She was about to ask him how he could be wrong about her if he didn’t even know her, when he continued.

  “I think you are much more important to him than I could have realized. We have to keep moving. I now know I have two things Britton Majers prizes, and it makes our journey that much more precarious.”

  Chapter Ten

  Jake opened a cabinet underneath the desk and removed a backpack from the shelf inside. He walked toward the door, but Danielle didn’t follow, closely eyeing the exhausted lantern he had discard in its place.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He followed her gaze and immediately understood her concern before he unzipped the pack and began to rummage inside.

  “The lantern is a prop the monks use when they bring an initiate of the monastery into the catacombs for the first time. You should see the look on their faces when the guide lights that little stub of wax and they slowly push the door open to lead them down the spiral.”