book romance

Chapter 2

The silence of her Cambridge office was no longer a sanctuary; it was an arena for a deafening internal debate. For three days, Elara attempted to re-immerse herself in the world of Sister Maria Isabel, but the Spanish nun’s celestial visions kept being interrupted by the storm-grey eyes of a modern-day Oxford historian.

Leo’s email, with its attached chapter and that simple, devastating citation, sat in her inbox like a lit fuse. She had read his revised work. It was brilliant. He had taken her critique, the one she’d delivered as a weapon in a Viennese bar, and had honed it into a stronger, more nuanced argument. He hadn’t conceded; he had evolved. It was the most formidable intellectual integrity she had ever encountered.

Her pride, a stalwart and prickly companion, insisted she maintain her distance. But her curiosity, a far more potent force, was thoroughly piqued. The shared drive he’d set up was a siren’s call. Finally, on the fourth morning, fortified by a strong cup of coffee and a stern lecture to herself about professional priorities, she opened it.

He had already populated a folder with scanned documents from the Medici archives. They weren’t just dry ledgers. As he’d promised, they were interspersed with personal letters. She found herself looking at a page where a meticulous list of expenses for a pilgrim’ journey to Rome—x florins for a mule, y for lodging—was followed by a hastily scrawled note from Cosimo de' Medici to his cousin: “Ensure the man’s faith is as sturdy as his purse, for the road to God is paved with more than good intentions.”

It was the perfect synthesis. The commerce and the faith, inextricably linked. Leo had seen it immediately.

Swallowing the last dregs of her resistance, she began uploading her own treasures: high-resolution images of letters from the Cairo Geniza. A document from a Jewish trader, Khalaf, requesting payment for a shipment of Indian spices, the business Hebrew clear and formal. But in the margin, in a more personal, flowing script, was a prayer for his son, who was traveling with the caravan: “May the Angel Raphael guide you, my boy, and may your heart be as open to the wonders of the world as your mind is to its accounts.”

She organized them into a subfolder titled “Khalaf & Cosimo: A Dialogue.”

Within an hour, a comment popped up on the document, a little digital sticky note from Leo.

Elara – This is breathtaking. The parallel is uncanny. Two men, two faiths, one Mediterranean, the same human impulse to balance ledger books and souls. – L.

She stared at the words. Breathtaking. He found her work breathtaking. A warmth, entirely separate from the coffee, spread through her chest. Her fingers flew over the keyboard before she could second-guess herself.

Leo – See the Medici note on the mule. The cost of the journey was a tangible expression of the spiritual investment. The price of the mule = the value of the pilgrimage. Your data makes my mystics concrete. – E.

The collaboration became a daily rhythm, a digital dance conducted across the sixty miles separating Cambridge and Oxford. Their emails started formally but quickly shed their skin.

Dr. Thorne, Please find the attached analysis of the tariff records from Acre... became Leo, The Acre records show a spike in donations to local churches precisely when the silk trade boom ended. Coincidence? I think not. – E.

Dr. Vance, I have cross-referenced your Khalaf letters with monsoon patterns in the Indian Ocean... became Elara, The monsoons failed the year Khalaf’s son fell ill. The prayer in the margin takes on a new, desperate weight. It’s all here. – L.

They scheduled a video call a week in to discuss the paper’s structure. Elara prepared meticulously, her notes organized, her hair neatly coiled. She logged on precisely at 7:00 PM.

He was already there, his face filling her screen. He was in what looked like a home study, shelves overflowing with books behind him. He wore a faded Oxford rugby shirt, and his hair was slightly messy, as if he’d been running his hands through it. He looked… comfortable. Real.

“You’re late,” he said, a familiar smirk playing on his lips.

“I’m exactly on time,” she retorted, though she felt off-balance. Seeing him in his private space felt like an intrusion, a privilege she hadn’t earned.

“In Oxford, we consider punctuality to be a form of premature arrival. It shows excessive eagerness.”

“In Cambridge, we call it professionalism.”

“Dull,” he pronounced, but his eyes were smiling. “Shall we?”

For the next forty minutes, they were pure academics. They argued over the flow of their argument, debated the placement of their best evidence, and bickered over the title. He wanted something bold: “God and the Gross Profit Margin.” She wanted something elegant: “The Soul of the Transaction.”

“Yours sounds like a bad economic thesis,” she said, frowning.

“Yours sounds like a poem,” he countered. “We need to grab the committee by the lapels.”

“We need to persuade them, not assault them.”

They eventually settled on a compromise: “The Ledger and the Liturgy: Faith as Commerce on the Medieval Silk Road.” It was her structure with his punch.

The intellectual work was done, the agenda complete. But neither of them moved to end the call. An awkward silence descended, different from the one in the pub. This was the silence of two people who had run out of professional excuses to talk.

“So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, the camera wobbling slightly. “What does a brilliant Cambridge historian do when she’s not rescuing 16th-century nuns from obscurity?”

It was a personal question. The kind she usually deflected. But the digital barrier, and the strange intimacy of the last week, made her bold.

“I garden,” she said, surprising herself.

He blinked. “You… garden?”

“Is that so hard to believe? It’s history in real-time. Things grow, they die, they come back the next year. It’s predictable. Unlike,” she added wryly, “academic committees.”

A slow smile spread across his face. “What do you grow?”

“Herbs, mostly. Rosemary, thyme. Lavender. A climbing rose that’s trying to eat my cottage.”

“You live in a cottage?” He looked delighted. “Of course you do. Let me guess. Stone walls, low ceilings, a front door that requires you to duck.”

“How did you know?”

“It suits you. It has roots.” He paused. “I live in a converted warehouse loft. Exposed brick, steel beams, an elevator. It has… height.”

The contrast was a perfect metaphor for them. Her, grounded in the earth and the deep past. Him, elevated, looking out at the broad horizon. Opposites. And yet, the connection humming through the fiber-optic cables between them felt anything but opposed.

“What about you?” she asked, her voice softer than she intended. “What does a rock star historian do when he’s not redefining crusader motivation?”

He laughed, a low, comfortable sound. “I rock climb. Actually. It’s the same thing, in a way. You’re presented with a problem—a rock face. You look for the patterns, the cracks, the holds. You plan your route. It’s a physical puzzle. It requires focus. It shuts everything else out.”

Elara tried and failed to imagine this man, who debated with such broad, sweeping gestures, clinging to a sheer cliff face. The image was both terrifying and strangely compelling. It spoke of a physical discipline, a control, that was at odds with his expansive personality.

“That sounds… dangerous.”

“Only if you fall,” he said, his gaze holding hers through the screen. “The trick is to never trust a hold you haven’t tested yourself.”

The double meaning hung in the digital air between them, charged and potent. They were both testing holds, weren’t they? Reaching for something new and uncertain.

“I should go,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “It’s late.”

“Right. Of course.” He seemed to shake himself out of a reverie. “I’ll draft the section on the Medici data tomorrow.”

“And I’ll work on weaving in the Geniza letters.”

Another pause. A full stop where a goodbye should be.

“Goodnight, Elara.”

“Goodnight, Leo.”

She clicked ‘end call,’ and his face vanished, leaving her staring at her own reflection in the black screen. She looked flushed. Her carefully constructed composure was gone. The trick is to never trust a hold you haven’t tested yourself.

Was he the rock face? Or was he the untested hold?

The following days were a whirlwind of productivity and profound disquiet. Their work was coalescing into something extraordinary. The paper was shaping up to be more than the sum of its parts; it was a new, unified voice, a powerful argument that neither could have made alone. They were creating something beautiful, and the process of creating it was drawing them inextricably closer.

One evening, an email from him arrived with the subject: URGENT: Theoretical Crisis.

Her heart jumped into her throat. Had he found a flaw? A fatal error in their core thesis? She opened it, her mind racing.

Elara – I’m stuck. I’m trying to write the conclusion and I keep coming back to the same problem. We’ve proven the intersection. We’ve shown the data. But the why. Why did they feel the need to annotate their ledgers with prayers? Why did the spiritual merit need a price tag? My quantitative brain is failing me. I need your poetry. What are we missing? – L.

He was being vulnerable. The brilliant, confident Leo Thorne was admitting a limit to his methodology and asking for hers. It was the ultimate act of professional trust.

She read the email three times. Then, without overthinking it, she began to type her reply. She didn’t quote historians or cite sources. She wrote from the place she usually kept locked away, the place her mother’s poetry lived.

Leo – They annotated the ledgers for the same reason we tell stories. To make meaning. A number in a book is just a fact. A fact is cold. It doesn’t remember the storm that almost sank the ship, or the fever the trader’s child survived, or the beauty of a foreign sunset. The prayer is the context. It’s the human emotion wrapped around the cold fact. The price tag wasn’t the value of the pilgrimage; it was the anchor. It was the one tangible thing they could grasp in the terrifying, wonderful, uncertain voyage of faith. The numbers were their map. But the prayers were their compass. We’re not missing anything. We’ve found both. – E.

She hit send and sat back, her heart pounding. She had just shown him her core, the secret, beating heart of her historical philosophy.

The reply came back in less than two minutes.

Thank you. That was all. Thank you.

It was enough.

Two days before their first full draft was due, a storm knocked out the internet in her part of Cambridge. Panic seized her. She had final edits to complete. She tried working from a café, but the noise was distracting. In a fit of frustration, she packed her laptop and a stack of books and took a train to London, deciding the British Library was her best bet.

She found a desk, connected to the wifi, and buried herself in work, the familiar hush of a great library calming her nerves. She was so deep in her focus that she didn’t notice the figure approaching her table until a shadow fell over her screen.

She looked up.

It was Leo.

He stood there, a leather messenger bag slung over his shoulder, his expression a mixture of amusement and something else, something warmer.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered, her voice breathless with shock.

“You vanished from the shared drive,” he said, his own voice low, meant only for her. “I emailed. No response. I called your office. Ben said you’d had a internet apocalypse and fled to London. I had a meeting at the Royal Historical Society anyway.” He gestured vaguely. “I took a chance you’d be here.”

He had tracked her down. The act should have felt invasive, obsessive. Instead, it felt… incredible. He had been concerned enough to find her.

“I… the storm…” she stammered, utterly disarmed.

“I see that,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He nodded at her hair. She’d been running her hands through it in frustration, and she knew her usually severe bun was coming undone, wisps of hair framing her face.

Self-consciously, she tried to smooth it. He reached out, his fingers stopping just short of touching a stray curl. The air between them crackled. He lowered his hand, his gaze intense.

“I was worried,” he said, the words simple and devastatingly sincere.

In that moment, surrounded by the silent, towering knowledge of centuries, the last of Elara’s defenses crumbled. The equation was no longer just complex. It was solving itself in front of her, and the solution was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.

He was no longer just her rival. He was the untested hold she was desperately, recklessly, ready to trust.

The world narrowed to the space between their two desks in the British Library. The silent, vast dome of knowledge above them seemed to hold its breath.

“You were worried?” Elara finally managed to whisper, the words feeling both foolish and necessary.

Leo’s intense gaze softened. “Our shared drive went dark. The relentless Dr. Vance, who emails me at 11:47 PM with thoughts on Venetian coinage, goes radio silent for six hours? Forgive me for thinking a rogue bookshelf had finally claimed you.”

The joke, the gentle teasing, was a lifeline thrown into the sea of her shock. She grasped it.

“It was a storm, not a bookshelf. Though the principle is the same,” she said, a real smile, small but genuine, touching her lips. She felt a strange, fluttering sensation in her chest. “I’m fine. Just… technologically disadvantaged.”

He gestured to the empty chair beside her. “May I? My meeting is finished. Two heads are better than one, especially when one of them has a functioning internet connection.”

She nodded, a quick, nervous motion. He slid into the chair, his presence immediately altering the atmosphere around her. The quiet of the library was no longer impersonal; it was intimate, charged with the soft rustle of his jacket as he moved, the faint, clean scent of his soap cutting through the familiar odor of old paper.

For an hour, they worked in a silence more profound than any they had shared online. It was a different kind of collaboration. She would point to a line on her screen, a tricky translation from a Ladino prayer, and he would lean in, his shoulder nearly brushing hers, his focus absolute. He would murmur a suggestion, his voice a low rumble meant only for her. She would feel the vibration of it more than hear it.

He was right. It was better. The synergy they had forged digitally was magnified in person, made tangible. The space between their minds seemed to vanish, leaving only the work, a shared, pulsing entity they were building together.

Finally, she sat back, stretching her stiff shoulders. “I think… I think that’s it. The first draft is complete.”

Leo leaned back as well, a slow, satisfied smile spreading across his face. It was a smile of pure, unadulterated intellectual triumph. “It’s good, Elara. It’s more than good. It’s…”

“It’s not an abomination,” she finished for him, echoing his words from their first meeting.

He laughed, a quiet, joyful sound that earned him a stern “shush” from a librarian three tables away. He winced in mock penitence, his eyes dancing. “It is decidedly un-abominable. I’d call it… groundbreaking.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said, but she couldn’t suppress her own answering smile. The pride was a warm glow in her chest. They had done this. Together.

“It’s past seven,” he said, checking his watch. “The library will close soon. And we have just co-authored what may be the most compelling paper on medieval economic spirituality of the last decade. This requires a celebration. Dinner.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, delivered with that familiar, unshakeable confidence. The professional part of their day was over; the personal invitation was clear.

Every instinct for self-preservation screamed at her to refuse. To retreat to her quiet hotel, to process this seismic shift in the safety of solitude. But looking at him, at the open, expectant face of the man who had just tracked her across two cities because he was worried, the scream faded to a whisper.

“Alright,” she said, her voice steady. “But somewhere quiet. My head is still full of 14th-century tariffs.”

“I know just the place.”

The place was a small, family-run Italian restaurant tucked down a cobbled lane in Bloomsbury, a world away from the bustling pub in Oxford. The air was rich with the smell of garlic, simmering tomatoes, and fresh basil. The proprietor, a jovial man with a magnificent mustache, greeted Leo like a son.

“Dottore! Your usual table?”

“If it’s free, Giovanni.”

It was a corner table, covered in a red-and-white checkered cloth, lit by a single candle in a chianti bottle. It was, Elara thought with a jolt, undeniably romantic.

Giovanni brought them a carafe of house red without being asked. Leo poured them both a glass.

“To the Ledger and the Liturgy,” he said, raising his glass.

“To a collaborative success,” she replied, clinking her glass against his.

They talked about everything and nothing. He made her laugh with stories of his disastrous first television appearance, where he’d been so nervous he’d repeatedly referred to the “Battle of Hastings” as the “Battle of Hamstrings.” She found herself telling him about her first academic conference, where she’d been so intimidated she’d hidden in the bathroom during the keynote address.

“Elara Vance, hiding?” he said, feigning shock. “The woman who took me down in a Viennese bar?”

“That was a moment of temporary insanity,” she said, taking a sip of wine. “Fueled by inferior house white.”

“I’m glad it was,” he said, his tone shifting, becoming serious. “If you hadn’t, I might never have looked up the Von Dannen letters. I might never have…” He trailed off, his eyes searching her face in the candlelight. “I might never have had the privilege of seeing how your mind works up close.”

The directness of his admiration was breathtaking. It wasn’t flattery; it was a statement of fact, and it was more potent for its simplicity.

Their food arrived—a simple, perfect spaghetti carbonara for him, a delicate mushroom risotto for her. As they ate, the conversation drifted to deeper waters. He asked about her mother, the poet. She found herself speaking of the loss, the quiet emptiness that had settled in their house, how the myths her mother told had felt like the only things that remained solid.

“I think that’s why I gravitated toward the mystics,” she realized aloud, the insight forming as she spoke the words. “They were building their own myths, their own solid things, in a world that was constantly trying to silence them. They were writing their own poetry in the margins.”

Leo listened, truly listened, his full attention on her. He didn’t offer platitudes or try to steer the conversation back to himself. He simply let her talk, his presence a silent affirmation.

In turn, he spoke of the pressure of his “brand,” the expectation to be always clever, always accessible. “Sometimes I just want to bury myself in a single, obscure tax record for a year and not have to explain it to anyone,” he confessed. “There’s a freedom in your obscurity, Elara. A purity.”

It was the first time anyone had described her life as one of freedom and purity. To her, it had always felt like a necessary isolation. Through his eyes, it was transformed into something noble.

By the time Giovanni brought them two small glasses of limoncello, the last of the formal barriers between them had dissolved. The candle had burned low, casting long, dancing shadows.

“The Thorneley committee meeting is in three weeks,” Leo said, swirling the yellow liquid in his glass. “We’ll have to present this together. Stand in front of them, a united front.”

The reality of their situation came rushing back. They weren’t just two colleagues sharing a meal. They were two finalists for the same life-changing prize.

“A united front,” she repeated, the words tasting strange. “And after? What happens then, Leo? Only one of us can win.”

He looked at her, his expression unreadable in the flickering light. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’ve been trying not to think about it. This… us working together… it’s become more important than I expected.”

Us. The word hung in the air, small and monumental.

He paid the bill despite her protests, and they stepped out into the cool London night. The city lights were reflected in the damp pavement, a thousand shimmering stars at their feet. They walked slowly towards the tube station, a comfortable silence settled between them. His hand brushed against hers, once, twice, a deliberate, questioning touch.

Outside the entrance to the Underground, they stopped. This was where they would part—her back to Cambridge, him to Oxford. The temporary world of the library and the restaurant was ending.

“I’ll see you in three weeks, then,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Three weeks,” he nodded. He looked as reluctant to end the evening as she felt.

The noise of the city faded into a dull roar. He reached out, and this time, his touch was not an accident. He gently tucked the same stray piece of hair that had escaped in the library behind her ear. His fingers lingered for a heartbeat against her cheek, a touch so tender it made her breath catch.

“Goodnight, Elara,” he said, his voice thick with an emotion she was afraid to name.

Then he turned and walked down the steps into the bright, humming mouth of the station, disappearing into the crowd without a backward glance.

Elara stood rooted to the spot, her skin tingling where his fingers had been. She touched the spot, as if to seal the feeling in place.

The equation was no longer just complex. It was a mess of new variables, beautiful and terrifying. The privilege of seeing how your mind works. This has become more important than I expected. Us.

She had come to London to fix her internet connection. She was returning to Cambridge with her entire world overturned. The grant, her life’s work, her carefully guarded heart—it was all entangled now with Leo Thorne. And as she walked towards her own train, the cold night air doing nothing to cool the warmth in her veins, she knew with a terrifying, thrilling certainty that for the first time in her adult life, the outcome of a historical puzzle was not the thing she cared about most.