Queen of Time

Lucasta Hilary has spent her life in the past, and sees her future shrinking. An untenured Classics professor at a Midwest state school, she's all but resigned herself to academic obscurity and loveless middle age. Forced by circumstance to oversee a student archaeology dig at Hadrian's Wall, she soon finds the Roman ruins an embodiment of her inner alienation, which her friend and colleague Dunstan Lightner's gallows humor does little to dispel.
But one night, following the cryptic hints of a Roman re-enactor, Lucasta literally falls into an amazing, life-altering discovery-an underground temple forgotten for millennia, dedicated to the ancient god Mithras, patron deity of warriors. The find brings her only minor fame, but far greater changes await. Upon returning to her university, Lucasta makes the uneasy acquaintance of the impossibly-named military historian Byron Steele.
During an intense encounter, Steele mockingly offers Lucasta a Faustian bargain-ten years of absolute, unreflecting pleasure in exchange for her soul. Lucasta cynically accepts, but soon after Steele's mysterious death she is at first frightened, then elated to find herself growing beautiful, youthful, desired. A decade later Lucasta is fabulously wealthy, incredibly lovely...and miserably bored by a life devoid of meaning.
But her day of reckoning arrives at a lush Yucatan resort, where not only Byron Steele but Dunstan Lightner re-enter her life to battle for immeasurably more than just her soul. Lucasta learns that not only has she lived many lives in the past, but the two men have played a key part in them as forces of light and darkness. The outcome of her demonic bargain merges with world-threatening crisis as temptation, damnation, and redemption inextricably entwine.