She grasped his chin and swiveled his face away from the light, down to meet hers. “Don’t look directly at it, or your eyes will never adjust. Just focus on me and take slow breaths. That’s it. In . . . and out.”
She spoke in a calm, soothing voice. Likely the same tone she employed to soothe her sister through a breathing crisis. Colin’s pride bristled. He didn’t need coddling. But he quite enjoyed the smoky, entrancing quality of her voice and her tender touch against his cheek. His pounding heart began to slow.
Eventually the white specks overhead diffused to a faint, milky glow that illuminated her features. Soft, dark calf eyes with inky lashes. Rounded cheeks and pale skin. Those lips, wet with seawater.
“You see me now?” she whispered.
He nodded. And it was surely that brush with death coloring his perception, or perhaps the dim light—but he found her lovely.
“I see you.” Sliding his arms around her waist, he pulled her close.
“What happened? Did you lose your bearings underwater?” She pushed a damp strand of hair from his brow. “Should I be worried about you?”
What a question, asked in such a sweet, husky voice. Something made him delay answering.
“No.” He dropped a firm kiss on her brow. “No, pet. Don’t spare a moment’s concern for me.”
He released her then, and she drifted away.
“This way, then.” She led him to a shelf of rock, and he gave her a boost as she struggled onto it. It felt good to retake the strong, manly role. It also felt good to cup her thigh.
Once they’d both pulled themselves onto the ledge, she felt her way along the cave’s wall and reached into a high niche to withdraw some sort of box. From it, she took a candle and tinderbox. The flare of warm, waxy light revealed the cave, letting him know that it was just as small and suffocating as he’d suspected. But that candle’s glow also created a small, intimate space within its golden circumference. Colin thought he would be content to stay within its borders for the foreseeable future.
Shadows played over her face as she retrieved and put on her spectacles. She held the candle up to the rocky wall at his back.
“So what is this place?
“A cave of wonders. Look. The entire exposed surface is a compressed layer of fossilized marine life.” She skipped her fingertips over the rugged surface. “I’ve spent hours making casts and rubbings and drawing sketches. Chipping away specimens where I can. Here’s an echinoid, see? Next to it, a trilobite. And just a few inches over, this is a fossilized sea sponge. Look.”
Colin looked. He saw rocks, bumps, and bumpy rocks. “Fascinating. So this is the topic of your paper for the symposium? Echy-things and troglodytes. Hard to see how they’d be worth five hundred guineas.”
“They’re not, not on their own. But this is truly priceless.”
She crawled sideways back into the cave, some half-dozen feet. Because she seemed to expect it, he followed. The farther back they went, the more the cave shrank around him, constricting his lungs. Even though he was dripping with seawater, a fine sheen of sweat pressed to his brow.
“See here?” she asked, lifting the candle. “This depression in the stone?”
He focused on it, glad for any distraction. “I suppose.”
“It’s a footprint,” she said, in a hushed, reverent tone. “Untold ages ago, some creature walked in the mud here. And the print was preserved, compressed into stone.”
“I see. And this excites you because . . . footprints are rare?”
“Fossilized footprints are rare. And no one’s ever recorded a footprint like this one before. There are three toes spread wide, see?”
Colin did see. His entire boot could have fit in any one of the individual “toe” impressions.
“It’s like a lizard’s foot,” she said.
“With a footprint that size, that deep? That would have to be one bloody large lizard.”
“Precisely.” Even in the dark, her eyes gleamed with excitement. “Don’t you see? Mr. James Parkinson has published three volumes of fossil plates, from vegetables to vertebrates. He’s documented dozens of larger animals, including an ancient alligator and a primeval elephant. But this footprint doesn’t meet any description found in his volumes. This is evidence of an entirely new creature, unknown to modern science until now. A giant prehistoric lizard.”
Colin blinked. “Well. That is most . . . remarkable.”
A giant prehistoric lizard. This was the great scientific discovery that was guaranteed to win five hundred guineas. She wanted to travel all the way to Edinburgh to argue the existence of dragons. No scientists in their right minds would award a prize for that.
“This footprint,” she said excitedly, “changes everything. Everything.”
He could only stare at her.
“Don’t you see?” she asked.
“Not . . . really.”
Unable to take the closeness any longer, he made his way back to the larger mouth of the cavern. He sat near the shelf’s edge. Black water lapped at his fingertips.