She felt herself blush. Probably not a good idea to tell him. “Just looking at the water,” she said as she gazed past him to the turquoise blue of the Atlantic. ‘It’s so much prettier that the water on the Texas Gulf.”
“That’s because this has a sand bottom and the other side is mud.”
“It’s flatter, too,” she said. “The Gulf in Texas always has swells of three to five feet.”
Lucas arched an eyebrow. “It might get choppier soon. Looks like a cloud bank on the horizon.”
She studied it. The clouds did seem unusually dark. “Probably just one of the afternoon tropical thunderstorms that roll through,” she said. “The last week of April is too early for the hurricane season.”
Big drops of rain began to fall as they drove into St. Augustine, and Sara took out an umbrella as they pulled up in front of the Cathedral Basilica near the heart of the city.
“Let’s see when this was built,” she said as they walked up close and she looked at the cornerstone. “1793.” She tried not to sound disappointed. “Too late, if the Sinclairs came here in the late sixteenth century.”
“This is the present church,” Lucas answered. “It may be on the same spot as the first church was. Let’s check out the cemetery. Your friend did mention a graveyard, not the churches themselves.”
Sara brightened. “That’s true. Let’s see if we can find an ancient oak tree and some rosebushes.”
Again, she was disappointed, for there were no trees big enough to be even a hundred years old.
The rain increased in intensity as they took cover in the car. Lucas’s wet linen shirt clung to his body, outlining the hard muscles of his shoulders and arms. Sara longed to unbutton his shirt and dry that broad chest with a big, fluffy towel and then move down…Goddess, will I never stop fantasizing?Then she realized Lucas was staring at her own chest. Glancing down, she saw how her wet T-shirt outlined the mounds of her breasts. Her nipples hardened on their own accord, poking at the thin fabric.
Lucas tore his gaze away and cleared his throat. “There are actually three churches that belong to the Basilica,” he said as he quickly picked up the tourist information they had gotten earlier. “Want to check those out?”
“Sure,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound too steady.
The first one they drove past had a modern curved front with lots of glass. “This one is way too new,” Sara said.
They drove to the next one, located on Martin Luther King Avenue. “St. Benedict the Moor,” she read. “Sounds interesting.”
Lucas stopped the car and they braved the weather to make a quick tour of the graveyard, again with no practical results. As they returned to the car, Lucas pointed up.
“That rose window reminds me of the European cathedrals,” he said. ‘One of the earliest ones was at Abbot Suger, near Paris, in the 1130s. A century later, when the Templars were established in France, they placed them in Notre Dame, Laon, and Chartres.” He paused. “They always had the windows face west, although later in England, the window in Westminster Abbey faced north and the one in old St. Paul’s cathedral faced east.”
She looked up at the large, circular, stained-glass window with its stone tracery radiating from the center. “The old Roman church dedicated those windows to the Virgin Mary, didn’t they?”
Lucas nodded. “They referred to her as the Mystic Rose.”
Sara shook her head. “The Mystic Rose was Mary Magdalene, not the Virgin.” She grew thoughtful. “There may be a link, though.”
“How so?” Lucas asked as he kept his gaze carefully fixed on her face and not on her wet shirt.
Really, she didn’t mind if helooked. She wondered how it felt for him to have her breasts fill his hands or if he noticed the contrast between the hard nipple and the soft flesh surrounding it when he suckled. The thought made her breasts feel heavy and achy with need. How could she break through that steel resolve of his? She heaved a big sigh, which caused her breasts to rise and was rewarded to see him inhale sharply. Maybe she could get to the man. Better to pretend she hadn’t noticed, though.
“Did you know there’s a theory that traces Galahad back through both Lancelot and Elaine’s bloodlines all the way to the Magdalene herself?”
He looked intrigued. “Tell me.”
“It’s all in a book calledBloodline of the Holy Grailby Laurence Gardner,” she said. “Galahad’s roots go back through Lancelot I and II as well as Taliesin, Nascien, Anfortas, andJosephes, who was the Magdalene’s son.” She paused, glad that Lucas still looked interested. “He also addresses the ancient marriage rites of Mesopotamia and Egypt, where it was the female who gave strength and power to the male.”
“And your point?” Lucas prodded gently when she fell to thinking silently.
“The point is that the Roman church became male-dominated by the third century, but worship of the sacred feminine was alive and well in earlier times. And it didn’t die out. Mary had a daughter named Sarah who carried on the other bloodline.”
“Goddess worship?”
Sara nodded and looked back at the rose window. “West is the direction of the Otherworld where the goddess Arianrhod resides. If the Templars had the windows face that direction, maybe they were sympathetic to goddess worship.”
“An interesting theory,” Lucas said just as a bolt of lightning bounced off a light pole down the street and the crack of thunder jolted the car. “We can continue this conversation later. Right now, I think we’d better find a hotel.”
