Full Circle

by Shannon Hollis

  FULL CIRCLE

  Shannon Hollis

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  For my fellow writers in the San Francisco Area and

  Vancouver Island chapters of Romance Writers of America.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Carrie Alexander, Kristin Hardy, Jeanie London

  and Lori Wilde—true professionals and a pleasure

  to work with. Thanks also to Dr. David Andersen,

  paleogeologist, who knew exactly

  where I could find a plesiosaur.

  The White Star Continuity

  Book 5

  FULL CIRCLE

  by

  Shannon Hollis

  Before Daniel Burke was the “real Indiana Jones,

  ” Cate Wells thought he was everything she could ever

  want. Then, after a humiliating experience eight years

  ago, she realized she was wrong. Now Cate needs

  Daniel’s help, and it’s clear the heat between them

  hasn’t dimmed. But is she sleeping with the man…

  or the image?

  Don’t miss the final installment

  of The White Star

  DESTINY’S HAND

  by Lori Wilde,

  available June, Book 6

  FOR TRUE LOVE WOULD ENDURE…

  Princess Batu stood on the dais of the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, two steps below her sister, Queen Anan, and the queen’s husband of one moon, the brave soldier Egmath.

  Batu’s heart broke afresh at the sight of him—his thighs and arms with the strength of cedars and his eyes with the gentleness of a dove. Across the distance that separated them and behind the straight, commanding figure of the queen, their gazes met, warm with the love that must forever be unacknowledged. Batu thanked the gods that they had not denied her the gift of seeing his face one last time—for the news that the queen was to announce was not good.

  “People of the kingdom,” Anan said in tones that carried both hope and authority, “join with me in prayer that our army will be victorious. The Pharaoh of Egypt covets our lands and prosperity, and even now his forces advance upon us like jackals upon a herd of gazelles. In vain have we negotiated treaty. In vain have we sent tribute. Ramses demands utter capitulation, but this I will not do. Today our army marches. Today the gods will send victory!”

  A roar of cheering erupted in the great hall, and soon a chant arose: “Egmath! Egmath!”

  Head high, his hand on his sword, Egmath strode forward without a backward glance, and the soldiers lining the dais fell in behind him. Anan retired to her rooms at the palace, to spend the rest of the day on her knees before the altars of the gods entreating their favor.

  Batu retired to her own room, but she could not pray or light the scented oils of sacrifice. All she could do was stand at the window, which looked to the south from whence the Egyptian army would come, and think of Egmath. He would be attending to the arming of his troops now. Each man would strap on his leather and bronze armor, and put a bridle gleaming with oil and gold trim over his horse’s head. Each man would look to sword and shield, brave with the device of the lion, symbol of the royal house.

  Trumpets sounded, and the army marched in all its splendor through the gates of the city, past the river where only one full moon ago, she and Egmath had lain on the banks and she had experienced the ecstasy that is the crown of love. In the days since, she held that memory close to her heart, taking it out to turn it over and marvel at it only when she was alone in the dark of night. She kept it as close to her heart as Egmath kept her ivory star amulet to his.

  She had a memory. He had the White Star.

  It was enough.

  Batu watched at her window for seven days and seven nights. With the coming of the red dawn, a single messenger, bloodied and beaten, staggered through the gates and, with the last reserves of his strength, collapsed in the Hall of a Thousand Pillars.

  Batu left her window and raced into the hall. Forgetting her dignity as queen, Anan ran down the steps of the dais, her robes billowing around her, and both sisters fell to their knees beside the messenger.

  “Soldier, what news?” cried Anan, while Batu cradled the man’s head on her lap. Blood from a scalp wound—a sword? a spear?—smeared the white linen of her shift.

  The palace physician hurried toward them, but even Batu could see that the messenger had already begun his journey to the halls of the gods.

  “It was—a rout, Lady,” he gasped. “The armies of Egypt are as locusts on the ground. The kingdom must fall. None are left to defend it.”

  “What of Egmath?” Batu could barely pronounce the words, so frozen with fear was she.

  “Fallen, my lady.” The messenger’s voice was fading as he looked to Anan. “As I fled toward the city I saw the royal standard engulfed by the enemy. Egmath sent me. He bids you and the princess to flee. Take only a change of clothing and some food.”

  “Sent he no other message?” cried Batu. Oh, could she not go onto the field of battle and find him herself? Was there no hope that he might still live?

  “He—he sends to the queen…”

  “Yes?” Anan clutched his garment.

  “…that his love is as a white star in the heavens, that it will never die….”

  The messenger’s spirit completed its journey to the gods and his body slumped in Batu’s arms. She knelt, her own heart dying in her chest, as she realized that Egmath’s last message had been to her, and her alone. But that strength, that gentle humor, that bravery born of love…all were lost to her forever.

  Anan sat on the floor, as pale as her own shift, her eyes blank with terror. “They will make slaves of us, Batu,” she whispered. “I shall be the Pharaoh’s concubine at best, if the gods smile upon me.”

  “You will not.” Batu laid the messenger’s body on the glossy stone floor with care, then pulled her sister’s unresisting form to her feet. “Egmath’s last thoughts were of us. We will not betray him by allowing ourselves to be captured and taken to Egypt in chains.”

  Before the sun had fallen another finger’s breadth toward the horizon, the princess without a lover and the queen without a kingdom had stolen out of the palace even as the conquering army marched in triumph through the gates of the city. Batu carried only two linen shifts, some dried figs, dried meat and a skin of water. She would never see her home again—but that did not matter now. All that mattered was that Egmath’s last thoughts had been of her—and that meant more to her than all the jewels Anan carried wrapped in a linen towel.

  As the sun fell and the wings of the goddess of night enfolded the desert, two slender figures stole over the cliffs behind the city and vanished among the dunes, to be seen again no more….

  TO BE CONTINUED….

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Coming Next Month

  1

  THERE WAS NO SUCH THING as a dead man’s curse.

  In the murky twilight of two hundred feet of silty water, Daniel Burke felt like arguing
the point as he squinted through his mask, searching for the ribs of the sixteenth-century Basque galleon on the ocean floor.

  This recovery expedition had been cursed with everything from bad organization to shoddy safety practices, and the fact that Daniel knew he was only here to give it some legitimacy with the inevitable press orgy didn’t help. He should have said no when the Society for the Preservation of Antiquities had approached him. He should have told them that water wasn’t his element—he belonged in the desert, where layers of sandstone and petrified ash yielded their secrets as reluctantly as a beautiful woman, where caves and hills whispered to him of long-lost civilizations.

  But no. The Society had promised him enough money to fund his next trip to Asia Minor, and he, like any dope, had fallen for it.

  If the Society’s information was correct, the master of the whaling ship had been the first European to set foot on the shores of the New World. Not Columbus. Not Cabot or Cartier. But a wily Basque captain who had seen the money that could be made out of whale oil from the dangerous waters off the Atlantic coast of Canada. Daniel had no idea how many trips the ship had made before those waters had claimed her, but the success of this expedition and maybe even his own reputation were waiting on the results.

  Not to mention the kid’s father.

  The reason he was down here on an emergency rescue mission.

  Ian MacPherson was a nineteen-year-old archaeology student swabbing decks in exchange for the SPA’s exclusive right from the Canadian government to study the site. The fact that the kid’s father was a high-ranking Canadian cabinet minister was the reason the Society had its permit—and Ian. The dumb-ass had swiped some diving equipment and gone over the side alone this morning, and some fifteen minutes had passed before anyone had noticed. Daniel was going to haul him back aboard by the scruff of his neck and ship him back to his father on the chopper.

  As soon as he found him.

  “I got not’ing forty feet from the site.” The transmitter in Daniel’s ear clicked as Luc Pinchot reported in from his left.

  “Moi non plus,” said the diver on his right.

  “Another ten feet,” Daniel said. “He has to have gone in to look at the site. He’ll be here somewhere.”

  “The currents ’ere are pretty mean,” Luc said. “’E could have been swep’ to de nort’.”

  “One can only hope.” Daniel’s voice was grim. The little weasel was going to wish he’d been washed up on the Newfoundland rocks after Daniel got through with him. The untimely death of the cabinet minister’s son was not the kind of publicity he needed right now.

  A freak current cleared the silt for a split second—just long enough for him to see a flash of yellow neoprene in the beam of his lamp. “Straight ahead, twenty feet,” he snapped. “Looks like our boy got himself into trouble.”

  The three divers put a little steam on and silt boiled around them as they surrounded Ian the Idiot. Somehow he’d managed to get his right foot caught between two heavy timbers—and was held down like a ferret in a leg trap.

  “AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?”

  Jah-Redd Jones, former NBA basketball star, Oscar nominee, and now the latest king of the talk-show hosts, leaned forward and his studio audience took a collective breath in anticipation.

  Daniel brushed at his jeans and work boots and gave a modest smile that hid the disgust that hadn’t quite faded, four months later.

  “We worked his foot loose and got him up to the surface. But not before we discovered that the galleon had been used for more than just transporting whale oil.” He grinned at the camera, drawing out the suspense, milking the extra second for all it was worth. “I figure the captain was an opportunistic kind of guy—because when an English ship blundered across its path, probably blown off course by a storm, he took the opportunity to relieve it of some of its cargo. Which in this case happened to be cases of Flemish wine and about fifty gold guineas.”

  The audience gasped and even Jah-Redd, pro that he was, sat back on the interviewer’s couch with a big goofy grin. “Daniel Burke, man, there’s a reason they call you ‘the real Indiana Jones.’ Folks, can’t you see this as a movie? Huh?”

  The studio audience burst into applause, the women in the front row whistling and stamping as if Daniel were an exotic dancer and they wanted to tuck bills in his G-string.

  Daniel masked a sigh and held the grin between his teeth. His reputation was what brought in the funding. The fact that it was more of a media creation than reality didn’t make it any less useful. Besides, there was a curvy woman in the front row and he’d bet a hundred bucks she’d be waiting at the street door when he left after his segment. While the audience clapped, he toyed with a few interesting possibilities.

  “So tell me,” Jah-Redd said, leaning on his elbows and clasping his hands under his chin, “is it true that the Canadian government gave you the Order of Canada for saving Ian MacPherson’s life?”

  “No.” Daniel brought his wandering thoughts back to business. “There was talk, but it’s hard to take a medal for doing what you’d do for any member of your crew.” And saving a kid from his own stupidity isn’t worth a medal. “The divers with me helped get him free, and that’s when we discovered the gold. It was in a strongbox directly under where Ian was trapped. His struggles to get free had disturbed the silt that covered it.”

  Jah-Redd appealed to the audience. “Save a person’s life, find a buried treasure, all in a day’s work. How many people would like a job like that?” The audience applauded again.

  “I’d like a man like that!” hollered the curvy woman, and Daniel mentally awarded himself a hundred bucks.

  “Not married, huh?” Jah-Redd cocked a knowing eyebrow in Daniel’s direction. “Girlfriend, significant other, rows of willing concubines?”

  Daniel had a flash of memory—a wide and sensuous mouth, long-lashed eyes, sun-streaked brown hair spread on red sandstone—and covered the mental lapse with a laugh.

  “None of the above. Not too many women will tolerate a pot hunter, even when we clean up nice. We spend half the year in remote locations and the other half holed up in dark offices writing research papers about them. Not the best conditions to nurture a relationship, I’m afraid.”

  “By pot hunter I take it you don’t mean the green leafy stuff.” The audience laughed along with its host. “How did you get started, er, pot hunting?”

  “Did you ever dig holes in the backyard as a kid, hoping to get to Australia?”

  Jones nodded. “Now I just take Qantas and let them do all the work.”

  Daniel smiled while the audience cracked up. “Well, I just never stopped digging. After my folks were killed when I was six, I went to live with my godparents. I found a Native American artifact in their yard in the burbs when I was twelve, and I knew then I wanted to be an archaeologist. So I went to the University of Chicago, then did postgrad work at the University of New Mexico, specializing in the work of a particular Anasazi potter. From there I assisted in a couple of Central American digs, and that of course led to Argentina and—”

  “The Temecula Treasure.”

  “Right.”

  On the screen above them, a clip began to play from the documentary PBS had done last year on his discovery of a trove of gold artifacts. Audience members who hadn’t seen it yet gasped. He couldn’t blame them. He’d done the same when he’d realized that, instead of finding pottery, he’d stumbled on a grave belonging to a much later civilization—one that believed the dead needed jewelry in the afterlife. Spectacular jewelry.

  “Did you get to keep any of it?” Jah-Redd wanted to know.

  Daniel shook his head. “It belongs to the Argentinian government, of course. We had six months to study it all before our permit expired and we turned everything over.”

  But not before he’d published the second of two groundbreaking papers that had made his name in the academic world and clinched the funding that made his projects possible.

  Beauti
ful funding. Nonacademic funding that took him all over the world and satisfied his itch to get his fingers into every stratum of soil this planet had to offer. That was his real passion. Discovery. It was the media that had latched on to a couple of lucky finds and branded him with this adventurer persona. After the Newsweek article, someone had even sent him a fedora and a leather whip, which had sent the archaeology department’s assistant into gales of laughter and made him the butt of half disgusted, half admiring jokes for months afterward. The other faculty members might gripe in private about his celebrity, but no one complained when it was grant-writing time and the money poured in.

  Jah-Redd had returned to the subject of women, prompted, no doubt, by the screaming in the front row. “It’s hard to believe that a man like you—you’re what, twenty-eight? Thirty?—wouldn’t have someone important in his life, though,” his host said with mock gravity. On the screen, still shots of three actresses appeared. “Indiana Jones loved three women over the years of the movies. Which one would be most like your ideal? The tomboy adventurer with the broken heart, the blond bombshell or the seductress?”

  Daniel laughed while the audience waited, the expectant silence punctuated by blatant come-ons and even a boob flash—mercifully unseen by the studio cameras—from the front row.

  Again, her face drifted through his mind’s eye, laughing down at him from some impossible rock outcropping while she trusted her life to bits of metal jammed in where metal was never meant to go.

  “I’d have to say my ideal woman would have the brains and adventurous spirit of Marion Ravenwood, the loyalty of Short Round, and the sexual curiosity of Dr. Elsa Schneider. But of course, a woman like that already exists—I believe you snapped her up for yourself, Jah-Redd.”