"We're going to find Atlantis and show the wonder of it to everyone else. Mark my words, babe. It's there and our family is the one that's been chosen to uncover its magic."

That had been his lunatic dream. One he'd spent a lifetime trying to give to her, but unlike the rest of her kookie family, she wasn't stupid enough to buy into it.

Atlantis was a bogus myth made up by Plato as a metaphor for what happened when man turned against the gods. Like Lovecraft's Necronomicon, it was only a fictional invention that people wanted to believe in so badly they were willing to sacrifice everything to find it.

Now her father lay in his grave on the island he'd loved so much. He'd died broken and bitter, a shell of a man who'd buried his beloved brother, his son, his wife…

And for what? Everyone had laughed at him. Ridiculed him. He'd lost his job, along with his respectability, as a professor years ago, and the only way he'd been able to have his research published was in vanity presses.

Hell, even the vanity publishers had laughed at him and several had turned him down, refusing to even take his money to publish his ridiculous work. Still he'd carried on in his feverish desire to give people even more reason to laugh at him, which they'd done with relish.

But even with that, at least she'd seen him one more time before he passed and he hadn't died alone as he'd feared. Somehow, against the doctor's prognosis, her father had managed to hold on until she caught a plane from the U.S. and made it to his hospital room to see him. Though their meeting was brief, it had been enough to make peace with him so that he could die without guilt over abandoning her for his search.

If only she could have found a bit of that peace for herself. There still was no such forgiveness inside her where he was concerned. No matter how much her grandfather had tried to explain her father to her, she knew the truth. The only thing that man had ever loved had been his dream, and he had sacrificed his entire family… her entire family for it.