The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

fire danced from Bertrand’s room, and I could hear his muttering voice. But the crying was coming from the room beside mine.

I craned my neck through the doorway, surprised to find Flor facedown on her bedding in the corner of the dormitory, hair splayed over the forearm she was sobbing against.

“Hey,” I said softly. “Everything all right?”

She sniffled and wiped her eyes with her sleeping bag. Papers were strewn around her as though thrown in frustration.

“No,” she said. “Everything is awful.”

Though Bertrand’s warning about her lingered in my mind, she sounded more fragile than I had ever heard her. I hadn’t even thought fragility a part of her makeup. I lowered myself to the edge of her sleeping pad. “Well, if you tell me what’s going on, maybe I can help.”

With a long sniff, Flor sat up and tucked her hair behind her ears. She glanced up at me with damp, red-rimmed eyes—she hadn’t been acting—then began gathering the strewn papers.

“This is the list I was given by the collectors,” she said. “The texts I was to make sure were here. But except for a few, the names on their list do not match the names on the one you gave me.”

“May I?” I asked. When she handed me the lists, I looked them over. “Ah, the names the collectors gave you are in orthodox Latin. Understandable. But the titles of the texts are in a Latin used by the monks, some of the words entirely different. So, let’s see…” I pulled a pen from my shirt pocket as I consulted both lists. “This matches this here.” I wrote a small letter a beside both titles. “And this one matches this.” Beside those, I penned a b.

Flor watched me work, her body gradually conforming to the side of mine. Not an unpleasant feeling. I continued until I had accounted for all of the titles on the list she had brought with her. All save one.

“You see?” I smiled over at her. “Nothing to be upset about.”

“What about this one?” she asked, indicating the Book of Souls.

“It’s not here, apparently.”

Her glistening gaze searched my eyes before falling to my lips. In the next moment, her mouth was pressed against mine, fingers sliding into my hair. I leaned into the kiss, dizzy with her aggression, her strong, sensual taste. She broke back suddenly, hands holding the sides of my head.

“I have wanted this since I met you.”

I nodded dazedly, falling into her lips again. She pulled me on top of her, fingers unclasping the buttons of my shirt. I held her cheeks, her neck, squeezed the muscles of her upper back.

“You were right, love,” a voice said.

I sat up and twisted around to find James standing inside the doorway, a hard gleam in his eyes. As I buttoned my shirt back, I heard Flor scoot off the bedding behind me. With the shock of intrusion, I hadn’t paid attention to James’s actual words. “Ever heard of knocking,” I muttered.

“Is that it?” Flor asked.

When James stepped into the light, I saw he was holding the Book of Souls.

“I imagine so,” he said. “Everson had it stuffed in his pack. He can verify it, though.”

I looked from James to Flor, who was standing now—and pointing her pistol at me. “Is that the missing book?” she asked. Her hair was mussed from our two minutes of heaven, but her voice was ice cold.

I stammered silently for a second, my lips still throbbing. “What in the hell is going on?”

“I’m sorry, Everson,” she said. “We were hired to do a job.”

“We?” My eyes flicked between them, head spinning with the unreality of what was happening. “You’re working together?”

James gave a hard smile as he paced around me to Flor. Pulling her to his side, he kissed her crown with the familiarity of a lover. “As I said, two heads are better than one.”

“Is it the missing book?” Flor repeated.

“Get him to tell you,” I said bitterly. “James speaks old Lat…” I stopped, remembering how he had found the inscription outside the vault of forbidden texts but not actually translated it. “You don’t, do you? You just know that one line you fed me at the pension.”

The manuscripts are said to be in archaic Latin.

“Past tense,” James corrected me. “I’ve already forgotten it.”

I sighed. Who knew how long they’d been hanging out in the village, waiting for an unwitting researcher to show up and act as their translator, to ensure they would locate the correct texts. They had no doubt tried Bertrand, who rightly saw them as trouble—hence their need to impugn his character. Everson Croft on the other hand? Classic dupe. I fell for the whole damned thing, from Flor’s pretended reluctance to travel together, to her supposed Google search, to her hot damsel in distress act. My gaze moved across the papers I had notated for her.

“I believe Flor asked you a question,” James said. “Is this the missing book?”

I looked from the bore of Flor’s pistol to the tome in James’s hand. I remembered what I had felt while reading it, the shifting deep inside me, like wooden boxes being pushed from a trapdoor, one that opened onto the same subterranean ocean I had described to Grandpa. The book didn’t belong to them, and I sensed the powerful book felt the same way.

“What will you do with it?” I asked.

James chuckled. “I’ll take that as a yes.” He flipped open the book and thumbed through the pages irreverently. “We’ll be taking it, of course. Taking them all. We have very wealthy collectors in the wings. Flor wasn’t lying about that. Just about them wanting to purchase the collection from the Romanian government.”

“Would you consider leaving that one?”

“Heavens, no.” James clapped the book closed and tucked it under an arm. “It’s the one the collectors are most interested in.”

Heat burned in my cheeks. “So what now?”

“We have to send you and Bertrand out, I’m afraid,” James said.

“Feed us to the wolves,” I said numbly.

“Messy for