Bonnie Hamre - Thea's Goal.pdf - Bonnie Hamre - SilverWitch

An Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publication

www.ellorascave.com

Thea’s Goal

ISBN # 1-4199-0731-X

Edited by Briana St. James.

Cover art by Syneca.

Electronic book Publication: August 2006

This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written

permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-

3502.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales

is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

Warning:

The following material contains graphic sexual content meant for mature readers. This story has been

rated E–rotic by a minimum of three independent reviewers.

Ellora’s Cave Publishing offers three levels of Romantica™ reading entertainment: S (S-ensuous), E (E-

rotic), and X (X-treme).

S- ensuous love scenes are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination.

E- rotic love scenes are explicit, leave nothing to the imagination, and are high in volume per the overall

word count. In addition, some E-rated titles might contain fantasy material that some readers find

objectionable, such as bondage, submission, same sex encounters, forced seductions, and so forth. E-rated

titles are the most graphic titles we carry; it is common, for instance, for an author to use words such as

“fucking”, “cock”, “pussy”, and such within their work of literature.

X- treme titles differ from E-rated titles only in plot premise and storyline execution. Unlike E-rated titles,

stories designated with the letter X tend to contain controversial subject matter not for the faint of heart.

T HEA ’ S G OAL

Bonnie Hamre

Chapter One

Carefully, slowly, holding her breath, Thea Cooper unwrapped the protective

coverings of the artifact from the lending museum. Her fingers, deft with experience,

peeled back the last layer.

“What on earth?” she whispered, though there was no one in her small workspace

to hear. Two floors above her head, patrons, school tours and researchers moved

through the brightly lit display areas of the museum, but down here, tucked away

behind the storage cabinets of European whatnots too valuable to discard but not

important enough to display, she was on her own.

Thea stared down at the red clay figurine resting in its nest of packing material.

Why had anyone sent her this figurine? She wasn’t up on primitive art, if this was a

sample of that, but what else could it be? What value could it have? And why her? She

was an archivist, not a curator.

There was nothing remotely attractive about the figure. Childish, grotesque and

anatomically incorrect, it was almost eleven inches tall and at the widest, nearly three

inches where the arms extended in a curiously aggressive posture. The limbs were of

unequal proportions, the face a rudimentary sketch of overlarge eyes, bulbous nose and

wide-open mouth. The only distinctive feature was the etching on the broad forehead.

Thea moved her magnifying glass closer and studied the scratchings. The marks

looked like letters carved into the clay, but she had no idea what they signified.

Touching the tip of her finger to the markings, she traced the slight gouging in the clay.

Could the symbols be an inscription or some sort of identification?

She put down the magnifying glass, reached for the packet of documentation that

came with the figurine and tsked at her actions. If she’d read the letters of provenance

Thea’s Goal

first, she’d have known she was in receipt of a golem, undated, but thought to have

survived from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century.

“A what?” Thea murmured and read on, understanding now that the lending

museum needed assistance in dating the figure. “Must be a mistake in sending it to my

department. This is so not my subject area.” She set the documents aside and re-

wrapped the figurine to forward to the appropriate department.

As she worked, her hands gently handling the hardened clay, she couldn’t help

thinking of the fairy tale of the gingerbread boy who came to life and ran around

creating mayhem. She didn’t need havoc in her life, she reflected. She could do with

some order, particularly since she had just moved here and hadn’t settled her home or

made any friends yet. Once she got herself organized at work, she’d think about the

other things, but in the meantime, she had work to do. Thea sighed. Working in the

bowels of this building did nothing to solve her biggest problem. She was lonely.

So lonely that she craved companionship. Rather than place the golem artifact in

her internal out-basket for the inter-office courier to pick up and deliver to the right

department, she studied the floor layout tacked to one wall. By now, only a few weeks

into her job, she knew her way from the employee parking lot to her workroom, the

bathroom and not much else. Beyond her cramped patch, endless dim corridors

crammed with shelves of tightly packed containers and rooms full of statuary, large

relics and the museum’s miscellany made a maze out of the area. Her workroom was

one of many scattered wherever a small niche could be eked from the growing

collections, but if they did not know exactly where to look, people could pass her

workspace and never even notice it.

Thea consulted the guide and studied the map until she found the dating

department. Wish it were a true dating department , she thought ruefully. Instead of

radiocarbon analysis that dated once living things by the amount of carbon 14 in their

systems and the rate of decay since death, she needed living breathing things, people,

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