"I can't believe I'm hearing this."
She threw him a mock, inquiring look. "Don't you want to marry me?"
It took a few moments for Pitt to absorb her words. "As I recall, I proposed marriage in the Sonoran Desert after the Inca Gold affair and you turned me down."
"That was then," she said airily.
"I never asked you again. How do you know I haven't had second thoughts?"
She stared into his eyes, not certain whether he was serious or simply being funny. "You've gotten cold feet?"
"Can we both really change our lifestyles?" he asked with a straight face. "You still have your seat in the House of Representatives and a luxurious town house in Alexandria. I have my apartment and car collection in an old rusty hangar with noisy aircraft taking off and landing overhead. How can we possibly work it out?"
She put her arms around him and stared at him through eyes misty with love. "I've had my day playing the independent, individualist woman. I enjoyed it. But now it's time to get practical. There are other projects I'd like to take on."
"Such as?"
"I've been asked to take over the directorship of the National Child Abuse Foundation."
"That takes care of the career. What about the lifestyle?"
"We can alternate- one week here, one week in my town house."
"You call that practical?"
She suddenly became flippant. "I don't know what your problem is. We spend most of our free time together anyway."
He pulled her close and kissed her. "Okay, since you begged me nicely, I'll give some thought to marrying you."
She pushed him away and acted as if she were pouting, knowing full well he was teasing her. "On the other hand, I just may look around. There must be hundreds of men out there who would appreciate me. I'm sure I can do better than Mister High-and-Mighty Dirk Pitt."
Pitt pressed her body against his tightly, stared into her violet eyes, and said softly, "Why waste your time? You know that's impossible."
"You're incorrigible."
"A lot can happen in the next year."
Loren curled her arms around his neck. "That's true, but the fun is in making it happen."
POSTSCRIPT
In 1960, archaeologists discovered the ancient bones of a woman on Santa Rosa, one of the channel islands off California. After she lay in the basement of the Santa Barbara museum for forty years, a team of scientists conducted sophisticated DNA and radiocarbon tests on the skeletal remains. Results revealed the bones to be as old as thirteen thousand years, making the lady the oldest known human skeleton found in North America.
During the era in which she lived, the lady would have seen glaciers the size of Australia, woolly mammoths, and saber-toothed tigers, and she could have walked from island to island, since the sea level was 360 feet lower than it is today. Her discovery challenged traditional theories that the first people to live in the Americas came across the land bridge over what is now the Bering Sea between Siberia and Alaska.
The Spirit Caveman, as another human relic is called, lived more than 9,400 years ago in Western Nevada and has a cranial profile that suggests his origins are Japanese or East Asian. The Wizard's Beach Man, whose skull was also found in Nevada, closely resembles both the Norse and the Polynesians. Other skulls found in Nebraska and Minnesota, all at least eight thousand years old, resemble both Europeans and South Asians.
New evidence suggests that the first settlers might have been Polynesians and Asians who inhabited the western end of North and South America while the eastern seaboard was settled by Europeans who arrived by boat, navigating along the ice pack that spanned the North Atlantic during the ice age and following the migratory birds that flew west.
It is known that people traveled by boats from southern Asia to Australia more than forty thousand years ago, so sea travel is hardly an invention of civilizations around the Mediterranean. The seas beckoned ancient mariners, who explored and discovered far more of the world than they were given credit for, and whose history is only now being written.