by Lori Wilde
That had to be what this feeling was all about. It couldn’t be anything more.
Could it?
Sounds were either too distant or too close, smells too sharp or too muted. The lingering cinnamon taste on her tongue was too immediate and too raw. The texture of his nubby jacket beneath her fingers too authentic and yet at the same time too surreal.
Her mind spun topsy-turvily.
For the moment, she forgot there was a mummy lying in the courtyard with a knife in his back. She forgot all about the botched party and the missing guest of honor and the nervous horde surrounding them. She forgot about everything except the feel of this stranger’s virile arms around her and the echo of his sexy voice fading from her ears.
She was lost in time. Lost in the moment. Lost in the dark. It was the most erotic sensation she’d experienced in recent memory. Her reaction to the stranger was potent.
Whoa. Wait a minute.
Hadn’t he called her by name? He couldn’t be a stranger. He must know her. Who was he, her mysterious protector?
The pulse in her neck kicked.
At that precise moment the lights flickered on, and she found herself in Harrison Standish’s arms.
Holy crap.
She stared at him.
No, it simply could not be. She could not be having such stunning feelings for this geeky intellectual who dressed funny. Somewhere, somebody’s wires had gotten seriously crossed.
Harrison peered at her curiously through the lenses of his dark-frame glasses as if she were an interesting fossil he had just excavated.
“You,” she whispered.
Immediately they jumped apart as if they had received a simultaneous electrical shock. Cassie couldn’t have been more disconcerted if she had discovered she’d been French-kissing a boa constrictor.
Harrison glanced at the ceiling, the floor, out the glass door leading into the courtyard. Everywhere but into her eyes.
Everyone else seemed startled by the light as well. People stood around blinking and rubbing their eyes and shaking their heads.
And then Cassie remembered why she’d run screaming into the museum in the first place.
The mummy. His cryptic message. The knife.
“Murder,” Cassie croaked. “In the courtyard. There’s been a murder.”
The mummy lay in the courtyard, barely breathing. In his palm he clutched a half-dollar-sized copper circle that exactly matched the ring in the museum display.
He had to hide the amulet. The consequences would be dire indeed if he failed.
Because they were coming for him. They would stop at nothing. And they would assassinate anyone who got in their way.
The pain was so blinding he could barely see, but he could not get caught with the amulet. Desperately, he tried to raise his head, to look around for some kind of hiding place.
His gaze fixed on a bright red shoulder-strap purse resting against the stone bench.
There. Perfect.
Not much time. Hurry, hurry.
But each tiny movement jarred his back, stabbed throughout his entire spine. His body throbbed and ached and burned. He drew a shallow breath and his lungs cried out.
Fight it off. You can’t fail.
Gritting his teeth, the mummy pulled himself up on his elbows and dug them into the cobblestone walkway. Painstakingly, inch by awful inch, he dragged his body forward.
He didn’t know if the streetlamps had flashed off in unison or if he had suddenly gone blind, but all at once he could not see.
He bit down on his bottom lip, urging himself onward. Go, go, go.
In the distance he heard noises, loud voices, crashing sounds. But he wasn’t concerned with that. One thing dominated his mind.
Get rid of the amulet.
The pain was so agonizing that he didn’t know if a minute had gone by or if it was a millennium, but at long last his hand reached out and struck against the supple leather handbag.
He fumbled inside.
His hands, wrapped in white linen like mittens, were clumsy and cold from shock. His search yielded a zippered compartment.
He opened the hiding place and slipped the amulet ring inside the pouch. He zipped it shut again and then shoved the purse as deeply as he could reach into the nearby bushes.
Later he could come back for it.
If there was a later.
He lay there panting, hoping he had outsmarted his attackers. Sweat dripped into his face; salt burned his eyes. He blinked even though he could not see.
And that was when two pairs of rough, careless hands reached down, grabbed him by the upper arms, and hauled him away in the darkness.
All the occupants of the exhibit hall erupted into the courtyard.
Osiris, Horus, two Nefertitis, three King Tuts. Anubis, Seth, Isis, and Ra. Harrison lost count as the courtyard filled up with more than a hundred curious guests. All the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt converging upon Fort Worth, Texas.
And then he caught sight of Ahmose, the real Egyptian royalty, standing off to one side.
Harrison followed the group, but his brain was back there in the dark, holding a trembling Cassie close to his chest. He would have bet hard cash she was truly frightened and not putting on, but he wasn’t about to place his trust in her.
Still, her sweet, delicate perfume enthralled him, clung to his clothes. She smelled like a garden, a bouquet, a spring event. Like some ripe, rich fruit in full bloom.
A scent like, oh, say, cherry blossoms?
The unexpected memory of that long-ago night in the Valley of the Kings when he had caught Jessica smooching Adam washed over him, and Harrison remembered why he’d started out to the courtyard in the first place.
To find out if Cassie knew what was going on with Adam.
But that had been before he’d held her in the dark, before the lights had come on and she’d looked both shocked and disappointed to discover he was the one holding her.
To Harrison’s own mind, in the darkness, he had been someone else. Someone more like Adam. An easygoing guy with a fun-loving grin. A swashbuckling hero who knew how to dress, could court the ladies as easily as he could pick out the right wine for a gourmet feast, and wasn’t so color-blind he couldn’t tell blue from green.
Enough.
He had to stay mentally tough. He couldn’t forget the woman was the antithesis of everything he valued.
“Well?” Phyllis Lambert said to Cassie. “Who got murdered? Where’s the body?”
The crowd murmured, echoing the curator’s questions. The courtyard was empty.
No body. No blood. No sign of a struggle.
Harrison pushed his glasses up on his nose and watched Cassie peer down at the cobblestones where she stood near the hedges. She looked confused.
And heartbreakingly vulnerable.
She nibbled her bottom lip and shifted her weight from foot to foot. She kept bobbing her head as if to convince herself she was right and everyone else’s eyes were deceiving them.
“He was here before the lights went out, I swear,” she declared. “A guy in a mummy costume, and he had a knife sticking out of his back.”
“So who was this mysterious stranger?” Phyllis sank her hands on hips so narrow her palms slid right down her outer thighs.
Harrison had never seen Cassie distressed. He had the strangest urge to shove himself between the two of them and tell the curator to step off.
“I don’t know,” Cassie admitted.
For a minute the earnestness in her voice almost had Harrison believing that she was telling the truth, that there really was a backstabbed mummy crawling around in the bushes.
“You expect us to believe some guy with a Ginsu in his back just got up and toddled off?” Phyllis tapped her foot.
“I never said it was a Ginsu. It very well could have been a Henckels. I really didn’t look that closely.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Phyllis snapped. “Where’s the damned mummy?”
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Cassie’s eyes widened. “Why don’t we search the courtyard? He could be lying in the shrubbery, slowly bleeding to death.”
Several people made a move to do just that.
Her urging aroused Harrison’s suspicions. Why was she so interested in having the guests search the courtyard?
Had Adam planted a surprise? Was Cassie in on his publicity stunt?
“I found a purse,” Osiris said, pulling a leather handbag from the bushes. He stood on tiptoe and peered down over the back of the hedge. “But I don’t see any dead mummies lying around anywhere.”
“That’s mine.” Cassie snatched the purse from him. “Thank you.”
“Where’s the blood?” Phyllis demanded, clearly growing tired of the charade. “Do you see any blood?”
“He wasn’t bleeding much. The knife blade must have stanched the flow.”
“A likely story.” Phyllis narrowed her eyes. “What do you take me for? An idiot?”
“It’s true. I came out here to meet him and …”
“You came outside to meet a man you didn’t even know, when you were the hostess of the party and I explicitly told you to locate Dr. Grayfield?”
“I thought the mummy was Dr. Grayfield.”
Now that was total bullshit.
Harrison stroked his jaw with a forefinger and thumb. He knew full well Adam couldn’t have been in the mummy costume, because he’d been tearing through the exhibit hall in his Indiana Jones hat not fifteen minutes earlier. There hadn’t been nearly enough time for him to park his motorcycle, swaddle himself in linen, run to the courtyard, get stabbed in the back, and then disappear again.
“Now why on earth would a man of Dr. Grayfield’s distinguished stature slink around the courtyard in a mummy outfit?” Phyllis questioned.
Cassie’s face flushed. “We’ve sort of been flirting with each other over the phone for the past few weeks while we made plans for the exhibit.”
It figured. Harrison snorted silently. Adam was probably pulling some kind of stunt to impress Cassie. She was the kind of woman men did foolish things over.
“I’ve had it with your impetuousness,” Phyllis snarled. “You know what I think?”
Cassie shook her head. Gone was her normally ebullient smile, and Harrison couldn’t figure out why that would cause his stomach to knot. Impatiently, he shoved aside the unpleasant sensation.
The crowd shifted, glancing from Phyllis to Cassie and back again, waiting to see what was going to happen next.
“I think you made the whole thing up because you’re a drama queen who can’t stand it when you’re not the center of attention.”
“No.” Cassie’s bottom lip quivered.
“And I never believed that line of malarkey you fed the FBI last year when you took off with that art thief. I think you were in on the deal all along, and when it looked like you were about to get caught and hauled off to prison, you pretended you were on the good guys’ side.”
Harrison couldn’t tolerate watching anyone get raked over the coals, but neither did he like confrontation. Normally, he just walked away from a fracas. But with every passing moment, he was becoming more and more certain that Adam was involved in some kind of publicity exploit gone awry.
One question remained. Was Cassie part of Adam’s scheme or not?
She looked pretty innocent with her wide, susceptible eyes and her silly Cleopatra wig knocked askew. Had Adam set up this mess and then disappeared on her? Or was Cassie a consummate actress who knew exactly what she was doing to elicit sympathy?
Either way, Adam had flown the coop, leaving only the baggage claim ticket in way of explanation. He’d put Harrison in something of a bind.
If the reunification ceremony didn’t come off as scheduled, the Egyptian government would get testy. And if the Egyptian government got testy, the university backing his excavations would end up looking bad. And if the university ended up looking bad, he could kiss his funding good-bye.
Dammit, Adam. Thank you so much for screwing me over yet again.
“I wanted to fire you the minute I took over this job,” Phyllis continued to harangue. “But the board of directors wouldn’t allow it. Well, this time you’ve gone too far. You’re out on your keister, Cooper.”
Cassie gasped. “Ms. Lambert, please, you don’t know the whole story. Let me explain.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” Phyllis held up her palm in a talk-to-the-hand gesture.
Harrison couldn’t allow Cassie to get fired. He might regret his decision later, but he had to do something to bail her out. He had to make her beholden to him. Then she couldn’t refuse to answer when he asked her some very pointed questions concerning her involvement with his brother.
“Excuse me, Ms. Lambert.” Harrison cleared his throat and fiddled with his bow tie. He had no idea what he was going to say.
“What is it, Harrison?” Phyllis’s tone quickly changed from waspish to syrupy.
The curator had to suck up to him. Without Harrison there would be no Kiya, no star-crossed lovers exhibit. No one hundred well-heeled guests willing to shell out a thousand dollars apiece to see the show.
“Call me Dr. Standish,” he said sternly. He didn’t like brownnosers.
“Of course,” Phyllis replied. “If that’s what you’d prefer, Dr. Standish.”
“I do prefer.”
The guests had gone curiously quiet. One hundred bated breaths.
Waiting.
Quick! Astonish her with your brilliance.
Damn. He was lousy under pressure.
It turned out he didn’t have to dazzle her with bullshit. At that moment a security guard came rushing from the building. The man pushed through the crowd, panting and gesticulating wildly. “Ms. Lambert, Ms. Lambert!”
“What is it?” Phyllis snarled
“Come quickly. Kiya’s amulet. It’s been stolen!”
CHAPTER 4
The myriad gods and goddesses filed back into the museum with a grim-faced Phyllis Lambert marching at the head of the pack. Cassie brought up the rear, anxiously nibbling her bottom lip.
Which wasn’t like her.
She never lagged behind and she rarely fretted, mainly because she didn’t like thinking about anything that bummed her out. Plus, she hated chewing off her lipstick because she indulged too lavishly at the Neiman Marcus Lancôme counter. At twenty-eight dollars a tube, she’d learned to make her lipstick last.
But she’d just been fired. She was out of a job. So long, Smithsonian. Good-bye, Maddie.
Cassie swallowed the lump in her throat and told herself she would not tear up. She wasn’t about to give Phyllis the satisfaction of making her cry.
Just ahead of her in the multitude, she spied Harrison and her heart thumped illogically. She didn’t even like the guy. Why was her pulse speeding up?
As if sensing her gaze on the back of his head, he turned and glowered at her. Apparently he wasn’t any fonder of her than she was of him, but he had stepped in and interrupted Phyllis when she’d been reading her the riot act.
The question was, Why?
She searched his face, looking for answers, but found none. The man was a master at hiding his emotions. Which in this instance was probably a good thing.
The entire group skidded to a halt in front of Kiya’s now-empty display case. Phyllis took one look, narrowed her eyes, and spun around.
“Cooper!” she bellowed.
Cassie took a deep breath, marshaled her courage, and stepped forward. How much worse could it get? She had already been canned. What else could the irritable curator do to her?
“What is it, Phyllis?” she asked, making sure her tone sounded light, casual, and untroubled as she toed off with the woman.
“Now I realize what you were up to.” Lambert shook a finger in her face. “Screaming and claiming there had been a murder in the courtyard. You were creating a distraction, luring us outside, while your accomplice shut off the electricity to deactivate th
e security alarms and stole the amulet.”
The crowd inhaled a collective gasp of surprise. She could feel a hundred pair of staring eyes.
“Oh, no,” Cassie denied. “You’re wrong. That’s not what happened at all.”
She had been quite mistaken. Things could get worse. A lot worse.
“Detain her,” Phyllis barked to the security guard, “while I alert the police.”
The brawny security guard moved to firmly take hold of Cassie’s arm.
“What a minute,” Harrison blurted, nudging aside the guests until he was standing beside them. “Phyllis, obviously you didn’t get the memo.”
The curator looked puzzled. “Er, what memo?”
Cassie gaped at him, totally confused. What was he talking about? What was going on? Why was he trying to help? The guy hated her. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
Harrison sent her a look that said, Just go along with me on this.
As a rule, she wasn’t a liar. She did not prevaricate without a darned fine reason. And she wouldn’t allow someone to step in and take the blame for her. Especially not someone like Standoffish, who wasn’t even pleasant to her under normal circumstances.
“Phyllis, I don’t know what memo he’s talking—,” she started to say, but then Harrison gently but firmly trod on her toe.
Shut up, his chocolate eyes insisted.
Hey, hey, hey!
Purposefully, she jerked her foot out from under his brown tasseled loafer. She couldn’t believe he was behaving so out of character. What was up?
“What Cassie means is that she doesn’t understand why you didn’t receive your memo,” he said, muscling in and interrupting her in midsentence. “She sent it four days ago, after we cemented the plans.”
“Clyde, did you get their memo?” The curator glanced over at her executive assistant, a pie-faced balding man in his early fifties.
Clyde Petalonus was dressed as George of the Jungle in a cheetah-spotted loincloth with artificial kudzu vines draped around his neck. Poor Clyde didn’t really have the figure for the ensemble. Cassie presumed he’d either gotten his Brendan Fraser movies mixed up, or his sense of geography was so terrible he actually thought there were jungles in Egypt.