by Cherry Adair
He redirected his attention. She had a soft, delectable mouth slicked with glossy pink lipstick, and just looking at those shiny lips made him hard. And annoyed. Thorne wasn’t in the market for a lover at the moment, and he doubted the luscious Miss Magee was the one-night-stand type, even if he was. Pity, but there it was. “Look, Miss Magee—”
“Isis.”
Of course it was. Trust a crackpot archaeologist like August Magee to stick his kid with the name of an Egyptian goddess. “Let me be brutally frank here, Isis. Your father’s reputation precedes him. He was archaeology’s darling more than a decade ago, but he has a problem with veracity. He’s cried wolf more often than not. And frankly his drinking hasn’t done him any favors.” He pinched his fingers together as if holding a shot glass and tipped it back for illustration. “If the tomb really exists, and if this time the find is genuine, then he’s going to need evidence before he’s believed. Having you do it for him probably won’t do the trick.”
“He has Alzheimer’s,” Isis said flatly.
Thorne stared at her for a moment, waiting to see if there was anything else. Satisfied there wasn’t, he got to his feet. Not that he was walking anywhere. But he rose so she’d take the hint and leave. “Then it would appear you’re screwed.” His leg protested as if a great white shark had seized his thigh muscle between its teeth. He gripped the edge of the desk, keeping his expression neutral with effort, even though his knuckles were turning white. “Sorry I can’t help you.”
She beamed those big, tear-drenched eyes up at him like a surface-to-air missile with complex target tracking. “Please.”
Gut tight in reaction to her soft plea, he resumed his seat. “All I can tell you is that whatever was inside the box is somewhere in the museum in London. While my skills are pretty specific, the best I can do is give you the general location of what you’re looking for. Finding it could possibly take you months, if not years. There are in the neighborhood of seventy million items there.”
She frowned. “How could you possibly know that?”
“My father is one of the benefactors of the museum. The Egyptian section of the Natural History Museum in London, in fact.” Thorne was going to hand Zak his arse on a platter five minutes after the emotional Miss Isis Magee departed. He was supposed to be recovering, not dealing with emotional-baggage-laden weepy females.
“The Earl of Kilgetty is your father?” Her eyes went wide and she slid to the edge of her chair. “That’s terrific. He’ll be a big help. And I know every single artifact my father donated to the museum, right up to the last piece. We can go through the exhibits. Hands on. I know we’ll find something that’ll lead us to Egypt and Cleo’s tomb.”
We? “Unless you have a mouse in your pocket the answer to that is a resounding no. I have absolutely no desire to return to England under any circumstances.” For two excellent and compelling reasons that were none of her damned business. “Moreover, I loathe Egyptology, as many people in authority would be delighted to tell you.”
“My cousin Acadia assured me that Lodestone finds anything, anyone, anywhere.” There was now more than a bite to her words. “I believed her assurances that you were as good at this as Zak is.”
Ah. Her cousin Acadia. Zak’s lovely new bride. Suddenly all the puzzle pieces fit neatly into place. A small detail his friend had conveniently omitted before clasping him on the shoulder and telling him to “Take it easy” while he was out of the country.
“Well?”
Bugger it! “Is your photograph under the word tenacious in the dictionary?”
She sat back, crossing her long legs. She was wearing strappy purple sandals, and her toenails were painted an unexpected fluorescent pink. “I know that my father finally found Queen Cleopatra’s tomb. I believe it so much that I’ve liquidated all my assets to prove it. I’ve sold my condo, Mr. Thorne. And my car. And cashed in my stocks. I’ll do anything to prove once and for all—to everyone—that this time he did it. Will you help me find the tomb?”
Fuck. He understood high stakes. She was gambling everything on a roll of Lodestone dice—Thorne owed Zak. His capitulation had nothing to do with Isis. Life was for the living, not the dead. Thorne leaned back, steepling his fingers. His thigh throbbed, his chest ached like a mother, and he didn’t need a sixth sense to tell him he was going to regret this. “Start at the beginning.”
CONNOR THORNE HAD A tightly coiled intensity that Isis found both mildly disconcerting and strangely compelling. He smelled delectable. Not cologne, but clean skin and some kind of outdoor-scented soap. Feeling an irrational need to touch him, she wished he’d offered her a handshake. He wasn’t her type at all, but that didn’t prevent her from feeling the tug of attraction. Either that, or it was the taco she’d hastily consumed for lunch before coming to the Lodestone office.
Having the window at his back was probably strategic, because it cast his face in shadow and spotlit her. He gave the appearance of strength without being muscle-bound. He was a large man, broad shouldered, probably tall although he hadn’t fully stood up so she wasn’t sure. Isis preferred men on a smaller scale, and a little easier to handle. He didn’t look like he could be handled at all.
His eyes were hazel, more on the green side; his dark hair, close-cropped in an almost military style, looked as soft and sleek as a seal’s pelt. Unlike his hair, his features appeared to be carved from granite. His mouth was bracketed by twin grooves. Isis doubted the man ever smiled. The expensive-looking dark suit he wore accented the breadth of his chest, emphasized by a crisp, pale blue open-necked dress shirt. The charcoal suit had probably cost as much as her car. Or would have, if she still had it.
He had a beautifully shaped mouth, and Isis had to use concerted effort to maintain eye contact. Just looking at him elevated her pulse to pleasant levels of anticipation. “First, what should I call you?”
His mouth thinned as he surveyed her out of cool, dispassionate eyes. “Thorne.”
Boy, was that an accurate description of the man or what? “Just Thorne?” The placard beside his office door said CONNOR THORNE. Connor suited him nicely, but then, so did Thorne. He was very prickly, and they’d barely exchanged a dozen sentences.
“Just Thorne; let’s not mix it up.”
“Right.” Having people calling him Thorne was just giving him positive reinforcement to be so prickly. But since she wasn’t in charge of his psyche, Isis let it go. She settled back and recrossed her legs.
He looked, so he wasn’t totally unaware of her.
Isis considered herself fearless. Spiders and snakes had never bothered her, but she wouldn’t want to bump into Connor Thorne in a dark alley.
“Assuming that’s fine…” he prompted after a long moment, and she shook her thoughts back into the present. Her predicament, not whatever shadows her own psyche wanted to paint around him.
“Several months ago my father put together a team of the best archaeology students and interns he could find.” Selling everything of any value to finance the dig. Nobody had wanted to fund him. He’d jumped ahead of himself one too many times, leaving himself without any allies other than the Earl of Kilgetty and herself.
Isis didn’t have any money to give him, and Thorne’s father, the Earl, had cut off funds when he realized his patronage was going into a deep, dark hole. The money had been like pouring millions of gallons of water onto the Egyptian desert.
Isis watched Thorne’s eyes to see if he was truly listening. The tears had worked, but she could tell he wasn’t a man who would fall for that more than once. The waterworks hadn’t been hard to pull off. She was at the end of her emotional rope, and a good, cleansing cry would be terrific right now. Some women thought crying was a sign of weakness, but Isis considered it a release valve for pent-up emotional pressure.
She’d save that indulgence for when she left his office.
Thorne leaned slightly to the side, resting an elbow on the arm of his chair. The light behind him cut a dark shadow ove
r one slashing cheekbone, and she suddenly wanted desperately to get a shot of him backlit by the runnels of rain hitting the window, the Seattle skyline a hazy backdrop. The whole scene was soft and gray and rather melancholy.
But not him. Thorne was right in the middle, vibrant and larger-than-life.
His green eyes boring a hole through her façade.
There was no law to say—even in the middle of her crisis—that she couldn’t enjoy the view. And the fact that the attraction didn’t appear to be reciprocated didn’t lessen her enjoyment looking at him. That just made it easier.
Everything she’d owned now belonged to Lodestone International; the price of Thorne’s help. But they were just things. And things were replaceable.
The only item of value she hadn’t liquidated was her three-year-old Canon 5d Mark II camera, which she was never without.
So it was a good thing looking was free. Not that she could afford even that after she’d paid the hefty retainer and tried to budget the daily expenses of keeping her father in a comfortable facility. Comfortable meant hellishly expensive. He had no insurance. Zak and Acadia weren’t aware of her financial difficulties, and Isis preferred to keep it that way. Yes, as a last resort she could ask for help. But for now, she still had options. She’d known three months ago that the money—his, and hers—would run out.
She’d debated doing the sure thing and keeping him there for another three months. Or opting to take a wild, crazy gamble and use some of her carefully hoarded funds to pay Lodestone to find her father’s treasure. There was only a month left before she had to find other accommodations for him. Twenty-eight days, to be precise.
Connor Thorne was her Holy Grail and Hail Mary.
And if she happened to enjoy looking at him, that just made things easier.
His English accent, coupled with the deep bass of his voice, made her stomach feel light and fluttery, and made her heartbeat speed up pleasantly. He might have the personality of a kumquat, but he was incredibly sexy to look at. Her artist’s eye wanted to photograph him against a rough wall, with a spear in his hand. In nothing more than a drape of a loincloth. The thought tempted her to smile. She had to settle for him fully clothed in his office. Ah. Imagination was a wonderful thing, and best of all, free.
For some perverse reason she enjoyed his pithy sarcastic responses. While she talked he kept his gaze on her face. She liked that. He might think she was full of BS, but he paid her the courtesy of looking at her, even if he was thinking about getting the oil in his car changed.
The energy humming off him was almost tangible, even though he was perfectly still. His eyes looked quite green as he steadily watched her. Observed her. “And?” he prodded not all that patiently as she considered the best way to bounce outside light to reflect off his face.
Right. The point. “Prior to that, he’d spent a year in Egypt with Dylan Brengard—that’s his assistant—searching and confirming. To make sure that when he published again, he had all his t’s crossed and his i’s dotted.” Because she’d threatened her beloved father with dismemberment if he was once more touting his find without sufficient proof—the actual tomb, ready to be opened and photographed.
“Miss Magee—” He caught himself. “Isis. I know you want to believe that he really did find the tomb this time, but the reality is that he’d ‘found’ it a half-dozen times before. And each time his peers and the international press became less and less gullible. He has Alzheimer’s—wouldn’t it be best for everyone if you allowed the media to forget as well? Surely in his condition, he can’t be as bothered by this as you seem to be?”
Not acceptable. She’d heard the same song and dance a dozen times, and she wasn’t having any of it. Not when she’d paid, and paid well, for his services. “There were fourteen of them on the dig. Some he’d rehired from various other expeditions. Half of them were new, fresh, eager to prove what he believed. He phoned me on the afternoon of the nineteenth day. He was almost incoherent with excitement.”
She put up her hand as he started to tip back his hand in the drink salute again. “No, he wasn’t drunk, Mr. Thorne. He was happy, jubilantly so. He told me they’d found the tomb. Really found the tomb. In the Valley of the Scorpions.” Not strictly true, but that had been her conclusion after he’d returned home.
“Not the Valley of the Queens?” When she shook her head, he continued with a hint of skepticism, his tone Sahara dry: “That’s an area of more than a hundred square miles. Was he more specific?”
“No. He felt strongly that if the information got into the wrong hands, someone with more resources would try to scoop him before he could get inside and document what he found.” She wrapped her fingers around the amulet her father had had made for her in a bazaar in Luxor in the good old days, when he’d been riding fame and glory for all he was worth. “Everyone on the team saw the entrance; a couple of them dug far enough inside to retrieve some small artifacts. He had all the tools and supplies they needed. They were going to start digging the next morning.”
“And did they?”
Isis hesitated, because this was the tricky part. “The team returned to their camp for the night. They’d gone just far enough inside the tomb to ascertain that it was Cleopatra’s. My father assured me he had some small artifacts to show he was right—”
“Why do I hear a giant but coming?”
“He was found the next afternoon, dehydrated and disoriented and with a scalp laceration, indicating he’d been hit with a blunt instrument and left for dead. The entire team had been brutally murdered.” The thought of it still gave her goose bumps. “The authorities said by local tribesmen.”
“It didn’t strike you as odd that out of all those strong, able-bodied members of his crew, he was the only one left alive?”
Not at the time. “I was just happy that he was alive,” she admitted. “I had no reason to question it then. At first, after I brought him home, he remembered absolutely nothing. He’d suffered blunt head trauma. He didn’t even recall that he’d gone back to Egypt. It took several months for the memories to start coming back. He remembered leaving the group at dusk while they were preparing the evening meal. He said he wanted to go back to the tomb to take more pictures. He swears he took a bunch of images before the light went.
“He remembers getting into the Jeep and riding back to camp. His memories after that are spotty. He recalls coming back into camp and smelling the meat burning for the evening meal. He remembers seeing everyone lying about as if they’d taken a nap where they’d fallen—only there was so much blood. Then he doesn’t remember anything else. He swears someone struck him on the head. Sometimes he remembers being pulled from his vehicle. Other times he swears someone was lurking at the dig. His injuries substantiate that he was hit, hard, but obviously not where he was at the time the attack happened.”
“And when the authorities went to the location? Did they find the tomb?”
Isis took a deep breath, knowing that what she said just reinforced the unbelievability of the story. Mystery killers, kidnappers, tomb espionage? It sounded like something out of a movie, even to her. She was losing Thorne, fast.
Tears again? Nah. That was a trick that’d only work once.
“My father and his dead team members were found at the Dafarfa Oasis, two hundred miles from where he’d told me he’d been. There isn’t a tomb there for more than a hundred miles.”
“And did the authorities find who’d murdered all those people?”
“No.”
“Any leads?”
“Not as far as I know.”
Thorne made a condescending sound deep in his throat. “Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s a terrible track record for anyone, even to a loving daughter. Given the professor’s penchant for hyperbole, why do you believe him this time when he’s lied at least half a dozen times before?”
“He didn’t lie.” Exactly. “He didn’t have all the information. And this time is different—because this tim
e I have a picture to prove it.”
TWO
Five hours later they were airborne.
The 747 from Seattle to New York and on to London was full, everyone crammed in like sardines. The first-class cabin was more spacious, but Thorne still felt like he’d been shoved inside a tin can. The air smelled of the steak they’d had for dinner, and a faint, underlying scent of Isis’s ginger cinnamon soap. The cabin lights were dimmed. Thorne’s light was off. Isis, sitting between himself and the window, had a halo where her light shone on her hair.
She’d changed at Zak’s place into pale blue jeans and a long-sleeved red T-shirt, and wore dangling red and gold earrings that kept tangling in her hair. As much as it annoyed him—tempted him to untangle the glinting metal plates, touch her hair—Thorne kept his hands to himself. The urge to touch her was already ridiculous and required a good deal more discipline than he’d anticipated.
“How will your skill work when we get to the museum?” Isis asked quietly.
Business. That was safe. “You suspect where your father was when he was attacked, right?” She nodded. “I’ll touch the things you sent to the museum to complete his exhibit, and see if there’s a location match.”
Her eyes widened behind her glasses. “You do remember that there are thousands of artifacts in the collection, right?”
More than aware. “It’s a long shot, but it’s the only shot we have.” And given all that rubbish about assaults from mystery figures and murder, the quicker this was over, the better.
Even if a small part of him did settle into the instinct of years of training. In, out, put the bad guys down.
If there were even any bad guys.
“You won’t have to touch everything,” she countered, with what seemed like mild amusement in the dim light. “It’s thirty years’ worth of work. I can sort and eliminate things by obviously wrong locations and unlikely dates. That’ll cut down the time, won’t it?”