Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Thirty-Six

Ellie waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The hot fury under her skin was a sharp contrast to the cool water in which she stood.

She didn’t need to see to know that Jacobs was right. During that moment of bizarre illumination, she had managed to get a brief glimpse of the walls of the hole into which Adam had dragged her. It had been enough to show her that they weren’t climbable.

It was entirely reasonable for Jacobs to leave her and Adam there, even if he wasn’t sure that they had been shot. He didn’t have to be.

They had jumped into a perfect trap.

But that wasn’t what pushed a fierce anger up inside of her. Ellie knew that the reason for her quick-burning fury was trivial in the face of their current situation—but she couldn’t let it go.

Her eyes had recovered enough to make out Adam’s general shape in the darkness, from the line of his shoulders above the water to the hair plastered to his skull.

He started to speak. His tone was uncharacteristically solemn.

“Princess, I—”

“You pushed me under the water,” Ellie cut in, her words razor-edged.

“Huh?” Adam returned, obviously thrown. “Wait—you’re upset about that? What’d you want me to do? Let you backstroke while they were shooting at us?”

“That is not what I meant,” Ellie snapped in return as she drove a finger into the flat, solid surface of his chest.

The fabric of his shirt clung to him like a jellyfish.

“I told you not to pull that rigidly masculine, protect-the-weaker-sex nonsense—” she began.

“Rigidly…?” Adam cut in awkwardly.

“—with me less than five minutes before we fell in here, and what do you do? Shove me down and put your big, self-importantly male body—”

“Rigidly masculine,” Adam muttered as though confirming it to himself. “Sure. Why not?”

“—between me and the bullets as though somehow your person is expendable whereas mine has to be cherished and coddled like a… a prize Pomeranian!”

“You’re nothing like a Pomeranian,” Adam countered.

“Oh? Then what precious, oh-so-vulnerable creature that is completely incapable of taking care of itself do I resemble?” Ellie demanded with a hiss.

“How about a wolverine?” he offered.

“Arrgghhh!” Ellie growled. Her hands clenching into fists as she glared at him. “You are the most arrogant, impossible… just… dratted human being I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, and I… I…”

Her anger shuddered, threatening to break—and then collapsed into something far more unsettling.

“I am the reason we are both going to die in this godforsaken hole in the ground while those terrible men ravage this city, completely destroying the historical record in the process,” she spilled out, “while you should still be sitting on your porch at the Rio Nuevo drinking spirits and smoking cigars. Instead, you are going to starve here with me when you might have lived a perfectly happy, contented existence had you never had the misfortune to come blasting into my washroom… Though of course, that was entirely your own decision and not one that I will in any way countenance, implying as it does that any female who happens to emit the slightest… the slightest shriek…”

The words slipped away from her. The panicked rush that had pushed them from her lips spent itself like the ripples of a pond. The echo of her voice sank into the still, careful silence of the cenote until only the soft lapping of the water against the walls remained.

“Done now?” Adam asked carefully.

“I…” Ellie began. She swallowed thickly as her heart worked to return to its natural rhythm. “Yes.”

“Good,” Adam replied shortly. “Because I need your help with something.”

“Of course,” she said automatically as numbness settled in where that furious, panic-driven outrage had been a moment before.

“Great,” Adam replied and pulled his shirt off.

Ellie’s pulse started kicking wildly again. The cenote was still dark, but during her tirade, her eyes had further adjusted to the gloom. There was still a shade of twilight to the sky overhead, and it offered just enough light to keep their prison from falling into total darkness.

She had seen Adam without a shirt before, of course—it was obvious that he would have preferred not to wear one at all if he could’ve gotten away with it—but never from quite this… close.

He was not shaped like any of the men Ellie had known in London—the scholars at her university or the universally insipid suitors Florence kept ruthlessly setting in Ellie’s path. There was so much more of Adam. All of it was very terribly solid and cut in the most infuriatingly intriguing contours. There were other contours, she knew, on the parts of his torso currently concealed by the water. Ellie had taken note of them against her judgment during those better-lit occasions when he had decided to strip himself down like a wrestler.

“Ah, don’t you think you might require…” Ellie began awkwardly. “That is, it is rather chilly down here…”

“Hold it out straight,” Adam ordered as he pushed the shirt at her.

Ellie yanked the sodden fabric taut between her hands.

Adam stabbed it, neatly slicing his machete through the cotton.

He shoved the knife back into its sheath beneath the water and took the shirt, tearing it the rest of the way with an easy yank.

“Mind wrapping this up?” he asked and turned his left shoulder toward her.

“Wrapping what? Oh blast!” Ellie exclaimed as his movement revealed that a fair amount of blood soaked the upper half of his arm. “You’ve been shot!”

“It’s just a graze,” Adam returned stubbornly.

“A bullet has gone through your arm,” Ellie retorted, glaring at him. “When exactly were you going to inform me that someone had shot you?”

“Once you were done talking,” Adam replied. “And it didn’t go through me. It just kinda… skimmed along the outside.”

He splashed some water up onto the wound, washing away the immediate gore and revealing more of the actual injury. In the admittedly bad light, Ellie thought it looked like a particularly nasty burn.

“That is not cleaning it,” she complained. “It needs soap at the very least, and preferably a bit of carbolic.”

“Fresh out of carbolic,” Adam replied. He poked the wound and tried to crane his neck to get a better look at it.

“Stop that,” Ellie said as she slapped his hand away.

“We’re in a hole in the ground, Princess,” Adam pointed out. “How about you just wrap it up for now?”

Ellie had no good answer to this, even though it was a glum thought. She took the soaked length of Adam’s shirt and used it to bind the wound.

The effort required her to move even closer to him. She found herself alarmingly aware of his large, bare body just inches from her hands… her lips…

She snapped herself to alertness. Where on earth had those thoughts come from?

Ellie tied the knot in the fabric a little more tightly than necessary.

“There,” she finished awkwardly and took a step back.

Silence settled in as the cool water lapped at Ellie’s chest.

“Just how bad off are we?” she finally asked.

“I have a couple of friends in the camp,” Adam replied after a brief, telling pause. “If they figure out we’re down here, they’ll try to come and find us.”

“And if they don’t figure out we’re down here?” Ellie prompted.

Adam didn’t answer.

Ellie could puzzle the rest out easily enough. They couldn’t shout for help. They would be just as likely to be heard by one of Jacobs’ men as they would anybody else. Letting Jacobs know they were alive and anticipating a rescue wouldn’t work out well for anyone he came to suspect might aid them. Ellie remembered how Charlie, Lessard, and Flowers had conspired together to get her Adam’s knife, and then distract the guards to allow her a chance to escape. It would be desperately unfair to put the three of them in danger.

But where did that leave her?

The thought was more than depressing. It was… infuriating. Ellie’s temper sparked dangerously as she leaned against the wall beside Adam. She pushed from the stone and whirled to face him with sudden purpose.

“Absolutely not!” she declared.

“Huh?” Adam blinked in return.

“I am not going to die in this well,” she asserted. “You are not going to die in this well. We are going to find a way to get out of this, together, without endangering your friends. And when we do get out, we are going to make Dawson and Jacobs rue the day they ever considered illicitly buying stolen government property to come and loot a priceless piece of Mesoamerican history!”

Adam remained still as he leaned against the wall. He had lowered his head, but he raised it slightly to look at her.

“Sure we are, Princess,” he said.

He said it with a smile—but it wasn’t his usual reckless, charming grin. It was smaller and ever so slightly sad. A sharp, cold panic flared to life in Ellie’s chest.

“Oh no,” she said. “You are not allowed to do that. You are not allowed to give up!”

“Ellie…” he started.

He sounded tired.

No… it was worse than that. He sounded hopeless.

Ellie’s mind fought for the logic that would convince him that they could do this. She needed to, she realized with a real tremor of fear. This was Adam—the man who had laughed when his boat went over a waterfall. He couldn’t have given up hope. If he had… then it might mean that things really were well and truly cooked.

Her logic kept crumbling against the high, slick walls that surrounded them—but Ellie knew that there was a way in which she could snap him out of it. She could feel it there inside of her.

She would simply start talking, and surely it would come out.

Ellie took a step closer to Adam to do just that—but as she did, the rubble under her boot shifted, throwing her off balance.

She landed against Adam’s chest instead.

Her arms flew up to grasp his shoulders. Warmth flooded through her from every place where she touched him—under her hands, through the fabric of her shirt… her thigh, for goodness’ sake. She stared up at the grizzled, unshaven line of his jaw and his startlingly blue eyes, which were currently widened with surprise.

All of it felt so desperately right that words deserted her. Something irresistible rose in their place—something that drove Ellie to rise on the toes of her boots and press her lips to Adam’s mouth.

Sensation flooded her, sparking her nerves to life—the soft rasp of his stubble, the surprised give of his lips. The solid, male warmth under her hands. Her eyes closed as she let herself fall into the pure, wild feeling of it…

Ellie realized what she was doing.

Her eyes flew open. She pulled back, forcing her hands to release their somewhat desperate grip on his shoulders.

“I…” she began as she flailed about for something—anything—to say. “I… I’m terribly sorry. I shouldn’t have… I mean, at the very least, I should have asked before I… Oh, drat.”

“Did you want to do it?” Adam demanded.

His voice was lower and rougher than it usually was. The way he was looking at her had grown quite intense.

The question was a terribly awkward one. How on earth was she to answer that? Ellie’s cheeks flushed with heat despite the coolness of the water around her.

They were facing a slow and terrible death in a pit in the ground. Ellie determined that she might as well be honest.

“Er… well, yes,” she admitted weakly. “I suppose I did.”

Under the darkness of the water, strong hands slipped around her waist and gave her a firm, powerful tug closer.

Adam’s face was inches from her own. The strong lines of it were painted with rich shadows.

His hands felt good. So did the rest of him. Ellie’s cheeks flushed further, and something began to move through her—something tingling and warm, like holding a potentially volatile pair of chemical compounds in her hands that she knew would explode the minute she combined them.

“May I kiss you back?” Adam asked as his hands tightened on her.

Ellie’s heart pounded in her chest, striking like a quick, compulsive drum at the tight, coiled strength she could feel in his arms.

The words were not a demand. They were most decidedly a question—and Ellie was abruptly certain that when she answered it, everything was going to change.

On one side lay the safe, practical plateau of the rational and sensible choice.

On the other lay a wild, unpredictable abyss that she could not even begin to fathom.

She mustered her logic to face it—but before her logic had a chance to begin, the answer popped to her lips, rising from somewhere else… somewhere much deeper than logic.

“Please,” Ellie blurted.

Adam lifted her boots from the ground and devoured her.

It was wild. Relentless. His hands moved over her body—clenching, claiming. His mouth was demanding against her own, the feeling perfectly accented by the exquisite texture of his beard.

He tasted like summer rain and fire. Ellie opened herself instinctively, burning with the knowledge that lips weren’t enough—weren’t even close to enough. She wanted more.

Her hands wanted too. She drew her fingers up the relentless planes of his back, and then grasped a handful of his hair, knotting her fingers in the sun-kissed thickness. She pulled herself closer to him—molded and clung.

His teeth grazed her lip and she groaned, the sound emerging from her throat of its own accord.

A hand slipped to her rear. Ellie gasped out an incoherent plea.

It might have been harder. Or simply yes. It could even have been in Latin. Ellie wasn’t entirely sure and did not in the least bit care.

Instinct drove her. She let herself rise in the water, wrapped her legs around his waist, and locked them there. The move brought her higher, giving her new places to explore.

He stole his lips from her mouth. Ellie growled in protest, and he actually laughed at her—the absolute rotten bastard—and then set his mouth to her neck instead. He ran his tongue from the curve of her collarbone to a singular little spot just below the lobe of her ear that made her see stars.

Actual stars, exploding behind her eyelids.

She wasn’t sure how that was possible.

And as for what was happening below the water… It was… Dear Lord…

There was nothing decent about it. There was nothing scholarly about it, and Ellie relished every ever-loving bit.

“Bates…” she groaned as he pressed her against the wall of the sinkhole, his hands gliding up her flanks until he pulled her shirt from her trousers.

“Princess,” he growled in return and nipped at the line of her jaw.

“I never… I never thought… Well, I mean I thought, but I never realized…” she began.

“Uh-huh,” Adam replied as his hand reached the comfortable, practical lines of her half-corset. It continued up until his thumb slid across the top of her breast.

Those damned stars started popping up across her eyes again.

“You… This… I…”

Ellie had lost the ability to form a coherent sentence. There was nothing left in her but an uncontrollable, animal need.

“Oh, fiddlesticks,” she declared, and then grabbed his hair, yanked his head back, and kissed him again.

He pressed her harder into the wall. It wasn’t hard enough. His hands gripped the collar of her shirt, and then yanked at it. A button sprang free, followed by another.

To hell with buttons. All of them could go. Ellie didn’t need them.

She knew exactly what she needed.

She didn’t even need words to ask for it. She just clenched her thighs and pulled him even closer.

Adam groaned. He shifted his face ever so slightly to the right and dropped his forehead against the stones over her shoulder. His hands carefully, deliberately lifted from the delicious, inflaming places that they had been exploring on her body. He held them suspended in the air to either side of her.

“Ellie,” he said. It seemed to take him a great deal of effort.

“What is it?” Ellie demanded as confusion and a growling frustration rose up inside of her. “What’s wrong?”

“I… This…” He swallowed, still very clearly fighting for control of himself, and shook his head. “Not like this.”

“Not like this?” Ellie asked as uncertainty crept in.

Adam lifted his face from the wall and looked at her. It was not the look that she had been expecting—or fearing. It was a look that set her nerves tingling again, sparking little fires of the most delicious and terrible anticipation. It was a look that wanted.

“If I’m going to take you… every perfect, infuriating inch of you,” he elaborated as his eyes moved over her in a way that felt as intense as a touch. “I’m not going to do it like this.”

“Every inch?” Ellie echoed roughly.

The words rasped in her throat, which had suddenly gone rather dry. She shifted herself against him involuntarily.

Her legs were still wrapped around Adam’s waist. He hissed at her movement and set his forehead to the wall again, this time joining it with his hands.

“Princess. Please,” he rasped.

“I am really not sure that I agree with you,” Ellie countered uncertainly, still clinging to him. “This seems like a perfectly nice place to me.”

“We’re standing in a damned well.”

“Maybe you are,” Ellie pointed out.

She was not standing on anything at all.

Adam lifted his head again and gave her a look that made her throat even dryer.

“I can’t do all the things I intend to do to you,” he declared, carefully enunciating each of the words. “Not in here.”

Ellie was very intrigued.

“What sort of things?” she demanded.

“I’ll tell you about them. All about them. Later.”

Later.

He almost made it sound like a threat. Ellie found that she liked that. It was a very enticing threat.

“There is only one problem with that,” she noted. “Perhaps you forgot in the heat of our recent exertions, but we are still trapped inside this hole in the ground.”

“You’ve got a point there,” Adam admitted.

He was still pinning her to the wall. He didn’t seem to want to stop. Ellie was entirely amenable to that decision, but now that he was no longer licking her collarbone, a little part of her rational brain began to reassert itself. It itched at the back of her mind as it tried to tell her something.

Perhaps the fact that she was still wrapped around Adam’s hips was inhibiting her mental processes.

Reluctantly, Ellie untangled her legs and let them slide back down through the water until her boots brushed against the ground again. She put a hand to Adam’s chest. The hand decided it wanted to glide along his hot, gorgeously contoured skin before doing what she had intended it to do—which was very gently push him back.

He moved away from her. He was watching her carefully—and then the carefulness turned to a flash of wicked amusement.

“You’re thinking,” he pointed out.

“Well, I am trying to,” Ellie retorted.

“Want me to help?” he offered.

She shot him a glare. “I think you are having the opposite effect at the moment.”

Adam laughed at that. It was a very satisfied-sounding laugh.

Ellie stepped a little further away from him and forced herself to focus on their gloomy, damp surroundings instead of the hard, wet, damnably enticing man standing behind her.

She looked up at the mouth of the cenote where the massed clouds of the storm had grown darker.

“No help from above,” she admitted and shifted her gaze to the walls. “Too steep and slick to climb. Which leaves what?”

Adam shrugged.

“The water?” he suggested.

Ellie froze as the demanding little itch in her brain grew stronger.

“The water,” she agreed thoughtfully as she moved another step farther into it. “The water is… clean,” she finished, startled at the word. She turned back to look at Adam in surprise. “It’s clean. If this was just rainwater, it would be thoroughly fetid by now at the end of the dry season. But it’s not. It seems relatively fresh, and…”

She trailed off as the itch turned into a buzz, rising in its nearness and urgency.

“Sinkholes,” she said as she turned around slowly. “Cenotes are sinkholes. Sinkholes result from cave systems. Cave systems.”

She raised her head to Adam with a sudden and shocking hope.

“We need to find out if there’s a current!” she declared.

“That’d be easy if we had anything that floats,” Adam returned.

Ellie reached into her pockets, feeling through the assorted useful things she had collected. She pulled out the broken pencil.

“Aha!” she declared triumphantly.

She set the pencil down on the surface of the water. It bobbed there. The slightly chewed-upon yellow paint contrasted with the darker surface of the water.

Ellie held her arms out to warn Adam back as she stared down at the little sliver of wood.

“Stay perfectly still, Mr. Bates.”

“I’ve had my tongue in your ear,” Adam cheerfully reminded her. “Pretty sure we can drop the ‘mister.’”

Ellie shot him a glare.

“Be quiet!” she ordered.

“Me talking doesn’t do anything to the water.”

“You are distracting me,” Ellie grumbled with her eyes on the pencil.

“Not as much as I could be,” Adam returned with a wicked grin.

Ellie ignored him. It was more difficult than it should have been, since Adam’s threat had done exactly what it was supposed to do, filling her mind with all kinds of delicious notions of exactly how distracting he could be.

And then she saw it.

“Bates!” she whispered excitedly.

“How about Adam?” he countered.

She ignored him, her attention riveted on the pencil.

“It’s moving!” she exclaimed.

She pointed at where the slender yellow bit of wood was drifting ever so gently toward the wall as it passed between them.

Adam’s eyes narrowed. He zeroed in on the trajectory of the pencil, tracing the line of it back across the water until he locked onto a stretch of dark stone on the opposite side of the cenote.

“Stay here,” he ordered, and then dove.

Ellie hissed in protest, startled by his sudden disappearance.

He surfaced on the far side of the well. She could just make him out in the gloom.

“I think I feel something,” he announced.

“I’m coming over,” Ellie declared.

He held up a hand. “Wait there.”

Adam dropped under the water. He popped back up again a moment later.

“There’s a tunnel,” he announced.

Ellie pushed from the wall and swam across the pool to join him.

“A tunnel?” she echoed as she arrived.

“Three, maybe four feet wide,” he confirmed.

“We must try it,” she declared firmly.

“Not we,” Adam returned as he leaned down to reach under the water, hopping a bit awkwardly as he did so.

He pulled a sodden boot to the surface with a splash and thrust it at her.

“Hold that,” he ordered.

“Surely the risk would be minimized if the pair of us—”

“Nope,” Adam countered, tugging under the water again. “I’ll be back in a minute. Well… maybe a little more than a minute.”

“Bates…” Ellie protested. He tossed the other boot at her and she caught it awkwardly as he moved away. “Adam!”

He paused, and then turned back to catch her by her belt and haul her closer for a sudden, firm kiss.

He smiled at her through the dark.

“That sounds nice,” he concluded, and then dropped below the surface.

“Grrraaaah!” Ellie kicked at the water as her frustration peaked. She was still clutching Adam’s wet boots. “Incorrigible, arrogant, reprehensible—”

She forced herself to take a breath as she fought for calm… and then hesitated thoughtfully. She shifted her grip on the boots, took a deeper breath, and held it.

And held it.

The breath came out of her in a whoosh as her lungs burned with desperation for air.

The water before her remained still.

It was taking too long.

The realization sparked a quick panic. She could not lose him. Not now. Not like this. Not when she’d only just started to realize… to admit…

She would go in after him. Ellie quickly knotted the laces of his boots together and slung them over her shoulder. She hopped awkwardly, her balance off thanks to her buoyancy in the water, until she had yanked her own boots free.

She would dive in there and pull him back out again. And if he was… If he wasn’t… If she had to…

“Stop it,” she said aloud to herself, firmly as she tied her own laces together. “Stop it, stop it, stop it. Just go. Just…”

She took a quick, deep breath—and then another, readying herself to dive. She tried desperately not to think of how it had already been too long.

Too long.

Adam surfaced in front of her with a gasp.

“You absolute rotten bastard!” Ellie exclaimed.

He laughed, his eyes glittering.

“Miss me?” he prompted.

Ellie gritted her teeth as she bit back the string of inappropriate vocabulary that rose to her lips in response.

“There’s a chamber,” Adam quickly added. “Can’t tell how big.”

“There was another sinkhole on the other side of the plaza,” Ellie noted with rising excitement.

“Then there’s a good chance that it’s all part of the same system running under the city,” Adam replied.

“A system with an exit?”

“Possibly,” he cautioned.

“That seems like better odds than what we’re facing here,” she pointed out.

“Yup,” Adam replied. He plucked both sets of boots from her shoulder and swung them around his neck.

Ellie bristled.

“I am perfectly capable of carrying my own—”

“Ready?” he cut in as he patted the boots with a wicked grin. “It’s a long way, and we’re going against the current. It’s a pretty gentle current, but still. Use the walls. Push yourself along. There are a couple of pockets of air along the way, but you’ll have to stay with me. And stay calm,” he added pointedly.

She fixed him with a glare.

“Have I ever given you any reason to think I am the type to react irrationally?” she demanded.

“You jumped off a balcony with your hands tied,” Adam replied.

“I was taking the most direct route away from a pursuer,” Ellie retorted.

“You were planning to blow up a boat to get me to listen to you.”

“But I didn’t!”

“And you tried to set Mendez’s pants on fire,” Adam finished.

Ellie opened her mouth to reply, and then closed it.

“How did you know about that?” she demanded cannily.

“I saw the burn marks on his trousers,” Adam said. “Now—deep breath. Stay close.”