Read Online Lady of Heaven by Kathryn Le Veque - Free Book Online

time is it?”
    He glanced at
his watch. “About five a.m.,” he murmured. “Get up; I’ve got something to show
you.”
    Those few words
struck her and she blinked her eyes, forcing herself up from the couch. Fox
pulled on her arm to help her sit up.
    “Did you find
something?” she yawned again, rubbing at her eyelids. “What is it?”
    “Come over
here.”
    He carefully
pulled her to her feet, helping her over to the table.  She was groggy,
struggling to wake up, but when she sat down and realized there was a steaming
cup of coffee in front of her, her brow furrowed.
    “Is my mom up?”
she asked.
    He sat down next
to her. “No,” he replied. “I made the coffee.”
    She looked at
him, an incredulous smile on her face. “Do you cook, too?”
    He met her
smile, aware that he was incredibly glad to be sitting next to her again. He
also realized something more; he couldn’t imagine anything greater than waking
up to her face every morning.  He didn’t know how or why, but in less than
twenty-four hours he had fallen in love with the woman. At least, he had fallen
in love what he knew of her. He was sure he would love the rest he didn’t even
know about yet.
    “I do,” he said.
“I’ll prove it to you tonight when I make dinner for you.”
    Her smile
broadened. “You really are a flirt, you know that?”
    He laughed
softly. “I’m not flirting. I mean it.”
    She yawned
again, giggling at him because he was smiling at her so intensely.  “Are you
asking me out on a date?”
    He nodded,
tearing his gaze away to put his reading glasses back on. “That’s a start,” he
muttered, listening to her snort.  He focused on the copious notes in front of
him. “But we’ll talk about that later. For now, I thought you might like to
hear about this papyrus.”
    She collected
the coffee and took a healthy sip. “Did you translate the entire thing?”
    He nodded,
feeling her scoot up close to him and torn between loving the sensation of it
and the work spread before him.  He focused on the yellow legal pad with his
scribbled notes.
    “I did,” he
said. “There really wasn’t that much text, but what text there was showed great
promise.  I also went through Fanny’s journal from start to finish.”
    Morgan
interrupted him. “You went through both the papyrus and the journal in just one
night?” He nodded and she cut him off a second time. “You must be the fastest
reader on the planet. How did you do it so fast?”
    He shrugged. “To
begin with, the papyrus only has six rows of hieroglyphs.” He pointed to the
papyrus, laid open in the middle of the table.  He gestured at the contents
with the eraser of the pencil. “There’s some writing along the base of the two
figures of Isis and Osiris as they face one another that is actually hieratic
writing, but for the most part, there really wasn’t a tremendous amount of
writing to decipher.  Secondly, this papyrus is written in a very archaic form
of hieroglyphics.  In fact, I’ve never seen such remote writings.”
    “Remote?” she
repeated, trying to see what he was pointing at as he gestured at the faded
symbols. “What does that mean?”
    “It means old,”
he told her, trying to figure out how to explain what he suspected. “Your
papyrus, material-wise, is archaic enough but the writing on it… well, it’s
just doesn’t match the manufacture date of the papyrus or the style in which
it’s written. It’s like…like somebody copied really old text onto this from
another source.”
    “Another
source?” Morgan was confused. “Like what?”
    He sat back,
took his glasses off and looked at her. “The closest thing I can equate it to
would be if Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom phase of Egyptian history came across
some kind of writing or tablets that were ancient even to them.  Maybe these
tablets were fading out, or breaking apart because they were so old, so they
took the script from the tablets and wrote it down on a papyrus to