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A knock pounded against the door. She reached for the ticket and opened the door, only to step back in shock.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Mateo Marin loomed impossibly large in the small doorway, still wearing the tuxedo from the auction earlier that evening.
For anyone who grew up loving adventures, treasure hunts, pirate stories and romances as much as I did.
This one is for us.
(Any mistakes are very much my own.)
xx
CHAPTER ONE
ITWASAsurprise to many that Evie Edwards didn’thatethe room she’d been assigned for her lectures. At the far end of the London campus, down the back stairs of the smallest building, along a corridor with less than fully functioning lights was a door to what looked like a store room, bearing the bold declaration of Lecture Room Four.
While the room was considered a lecture hall, there was nothing remotely academic about it. Not the rows of black plastic chairs placed awkwardly in a semi-circle around her chair, or the large A3 clipboard that looked more boardroom than school room. Part of the issue was that, much like her lecture hall, she just didn’tlookthe part of the University of South-East London’s Lecturer in Archaeology.
At the age of twenty-five, she was mistaken for being either a PhD student or a teaching assistant, which Evie could begrudgingly understand. She had never truly fitted in, having finished her A levels by the time she was sixteen and her degree by eighteen. Her Masters rolled into her PhD at nineteen and she had passed her viva for her doctorate by twenty-one.
And with an IQ higher than one hundred and sixty Evie either failed to live up to anticipation or confounded those with lower expectations. Her adoptive parents, Carol and Alan, leaned towards the former, where mostly everyone else leaned into the latter.
‘It doesn’t matter what they think at the beginning, it’s what they think at the end that counts.’
Professor Marin’s words echoed through her mind and she felt the sting of his loss throb a little as a group of fresh-faced students filed into the room. But she buried it deep, knowing that, as the first lecture of the year for the new crop of undergraduates,thiswas Evie’s only chance to grab and hold her students’ attention. Positioning herself in the centre of the room, she took in the familiar sense of expectation, excitement and a little trepidation universal to all students on their first day. She counted heads and waited a few more minutes, aware of just how many students would come in late, having struggled to find Lecture Room Four in the back of beyond.
‘Good morning,’ she said in a bright, confident voice after the door closed behind the last few stragglers. ‘Welcome to the BA Programme in Archaeology.’ Evie’s glance skimmed the faces of students who sat up a little taller, eyes a little wider, recognising her finally as their new professor. ‘Archaeology is the study of the past, but from investigation of the material remains left throughout history we can see what it means to be human. In your first year, your modules will cover...’
Evie slipped into the rehearsed welcome, soothed by the familiar outline of the lecture programme she would give over the next year. This was her domain and she was happy here. It was comfortable, even if there was a sense of disappointment that muddied the waters.
As she was wrapping up, she ignored the door to the lecture hall that opened and closed, refusing to be knocked from her stride. Perhaps it was the Dean, come to deny her conference proposal request. Again. She’d spent the entire summer on it and knew its merits; it was excellent, but the Dean was wary of being tainted by the reputation that she had already earned herself in her four-year career. A reputation that would have been made precarious enough by her age and gender, but that had been damaged irrevocably by her work with Professor Marin and their research area. Stubbornness and loyalty steeled her spine, even now. She wouldn’t take back her work and time with Prof for anyone or anything.
So, as the students filed past her on their way out of the room, she gathered her lecture materials and prepared herself for the overbearing obsequiousness of her boss. But when she turned round, she was so shocked she nearly dropped everything she was holding. Rather than the red-faced, sweaty visage of the Dean of USEL, a shockingly beautiful blonde-haired woman stood before her.
‘Your Majesty,’ Evie stated, somewhat obviously, to the Queen of Iondorra, immediately dropping into an awkward curtsy.
By the time Evie had straightened, she could just make out a few figures placed around the small lecture hall in shadows.
‘Professor Edwards,’ the Queen said with a perfect smile. ‘It is nice to finally make your acquaintance.’
Evie nodded as if they’d had an arrangement to meet when she knew that they’d had nothing of the sort. She was as shocked by the sudden appearance of the ruler of the small European kingdom as she would have been had Cleopatra stepped right out of the pages of a history book.
Queen Sofia of Iondorra gestured towards the front row of seats and waited for Evie to sit down before taking a seat right beside her.
‘So this is where they put a prominent professor whose thesis was focused on eighteenth-century Iondorran history?’ she asked, looking around her and appearing somewhat dissatisfied.
Alarmed at the thought the Queen would take it as a slight against Iondorra, rather than what it was—a slight against her—Evie rushed to reassure the Queen that she liked teaching in this room, a reassurance which was gently waved away with the sweep of a gloved hand.
‘I was sorry to hear of Professor Marin’s passing,’ Queen Sofia said. ‘I know that we weren’t able to acknowledge his theories publicly, but they were of interest to...my family.’
Evie looked down, unsure—as always—that it was for her to accept sympathies as if she were a family member. He had been family to her. Not on paper. But the professor had understood her, accepted her, in a way that not even Carol and Alan had. But every time she received condolences she couldn’t help but remember the looming figure of the son who had barely made it to stand at the back of the graveyard where Professor Marin had been laid to rest. The son who had not spoken a word to his father in the three years before his passing. But before the well of a familiar resentment stirred, she brought her focus back to the Queen.
‘Professor Edwards, I would like to talk to you about a very sensitive matter. A matter that, I’m afraid, would need the utmost secrecy and discretion, which is why, before I explain anything further, I would like you to sign a non-disclosure agreement.’
Queen Sofia held out her hand and a man appeared from the shadows with a sheaf of papers and a pen.
‘Personally, I detest the things and I understand if you feel that you—’
