Midnight Jewels

meshed his growing attraction to Mercy into his private world view and completed one of his damn inner Circles. When everything was in place, understood and accepted in that labyrinth loosely termed a male brain, he had presented the finished product calmly, as if it were nothing more or less than a fact of life and the universe.
    Then he had left without allowing Mercy any emotional farewells or prolonged pleas to be cautious. She was stuck there while the man she loved and who claimed to love her went off on his lone crusade for truth, justice and the Way of the Circle.
    She must be crazy to be in love with him. She barely knew him.
    Except that she
did
know him. That was the puzzling part. Somehow, in the few days they had been together, she had come to know him better than she had ever know anyone in her life. The paradox of the matter was that she really knew very few facts about him. The short, bleak history he had given her that afternoon in a rare moment of confidence was the only summary of the details of his life she had gotten, and that summary had made no difference one way or the other in her feelings for him. She would have loved him even if he had chosen never to confide the details of his life.
    Her understanding and acceptance of him had happened on another level entirely, one that had little to do with facts or logic. From the first moment she had met him she had been aware of a new and different sense of awareness around him. It was as if he had the power to bring to life something within her that had slumbered, undetected, all these years, a sixth sense that did not have much to do with facts. That preternatural sense of awareness had its own means of bypassing facts and logic.
    What good were facts and logic in a situation such as this, anyway? After all, Mercy reminded herself grimly, she had had plenty of facts about her ex-fiancé. She had known everything about him from the schools he had attended to the stores in which he preferred to shop for his designer running shoes. She had discussed his career goals with him and his tennis scores. She knew his taste in films and his taste in cars. She had known everything important about Aaron Sanders except the most important thing of all: He couldn't be trusted with a woman's love or with her valuables.
    Mercy was willing to stake her entire investment in Pennington's Second Chance on the bet that Aaron Sanders had never spent more than two seconds in his entire life contemplating his own sense of honor or integrity, let alone building a philosophical base on which to ground himself.
    That wasn't entirely Aaron's fault, Mercy decided. A person couldn't spend much time contemplating something that didn't exist.
    Restlessly she moved across the room and opened her suitcase to take out the copy of
Valley
. It was nerve wracking to know that Croft was going to risk his life because of the stupid book. He had almost gotten himself killed the previous night because of it. They had both nearly been killed.
    What was it about the book that made it so important to Erasmus Gladstone?
    Mercy took the volume over to the small table by the window and sat down to study it. She had read a great deal of the thing already, and although it certainly made interesting reading, she had a hunch it wasn't Gladstone's kind of erotica. She was convinced now that it wasn't written for men at all. There was too much romance in
Valley
, too much genuine passion, too much emotion to be a man's kind of erotica. It was more sensual than sexual. When all was said and done, Burleigh's
Valley of Secret Jewels
was a love story, not a mechanical treatise on exotic sex. And while it was valuable, it certainly wasn't rare enough or unusual enough to warrant such interest on Gladstone's part.
    On the surface,
Valley
simply wasn't worm attempted murder.
    The conclusion was obvious. There was something else about the book that made it valuable to Gladstone.
    Mercy turned the book over in her hands, examining the worn leather binding. If there was a secret code imbedded in the text, there was no point in her looking for it. She had trouble getting through the crossword puzzle in the daily paper.
    But she did know a few things about old books.
    Mercy turned the thick pages slowly, letting her mind toy with possibilities. The beautiful, high quality paper used in the eighteenth century still felt good to the touch and it was still in excellent condition. The scattered handwritten notes that