by Cherry Adair
“Sure.” From ten years to five. Finding the right matching location, while not knowing what type of artifact would hold the GPS location, was akin to searching for a thief in a prison.
“I’m glad I can help you help me. I hate sitting around waiting, don’t you?”
Yeah. One of the things at the top of his list. He shifted in his seat so he could straighten his legs, and she moved her feet to give him more room. “You can stretch out some more if you like.”
“I’m good.” As good as it was going to get, anyway. He’d let the flight attendant take his suit jacket and cane, and had rolled up his sleeves in deference to the stuffiness on board, despite the air blowing down on him. It wasn’t cooling his unwelcome attraction to Miss Magee any.
She looked up at him, eyes earnest behind her black-framed glasses. Her breath smelled sweet from the Diet Coke she was drinking. Thorne didn’t drink sodas, but he wondered absently what it would taste like on her tongue if he kissed her. Which, of course, he was absolutely not going to do.
Curling her legs up under her on the wide leather seat, she pitched her body closer to his. Her closeness, and the subdued lighting in the cabin, made the situation far too intimate and made Thorne want to bury himself in her heat and cinnamon scent. She licked her unpainted mouth as if she were reading his thoughts. “Were you in an accident?”
“Yeah.” I accidently walked into Boris Yermalof’s boning knife. He watched the attractive flight attendant bringing around coffee. It was natural to think of the Russian when he was on his way to London and talking about Egypt. The bloody Russian was the reason Thorne had been banished to Seattle in the first place. The chase through Egypt eight months ago had ended in Israel, where his two partners had been brutally butchered, and when Thorne had avoided being gutted like a fish, it was more by accident than design. Everyone considered his survival a miracle.
He resented being put in a holding pattern when all he wanted to do was track Yermalof down and do unto him as the Russian had done unto Thorne’s partners. Twiddling his thumbs wasn’t Thorne’s thing. Babysitting a deluded big-eyed cutie while he served out his sentence was proving more challenging than he had time for. The fact that he was supposed to be recuperating didn’t make it less of a problem.
Isis predictably asked, “Was it a c—”
Without turning to look at her, he said unambiguously, “I don’t talk about it.”
“If there’s anything I can do…?”
“No.”
The flight attendant smiled and flashed her cleavage over the small tray holding china cups. The rich scent of Sumatra eradicated—for the moment—the smell of Isis’s skin. Thorne turned to glance at her.
“Do you want coffee?” He wasn’t a man who chatted. He didn’t want to be her friend, and he didn’t want to fucking bond. London. Hopefully he’d find something that would satisfy her. He’d go back to Seattle, where the weather suited his mood, and she could go… wherever the hell she wanted to go. None of his business.
“No thanks. I probably shouldn’t have drunk those two Diet Cokes.” She reached up and turned off her overhead light, then pulled the thin blanket across her lap, up over her chest. “I want to sleep so I’m fresh when we arrive.”
She was plenty fresh. He took a coffee, ignoring the woman lingering at his side until she pushed off. “Good idea,” he told Isis. The coffee was hot and black. Not French press, but drinkable. He drank it in two gulps, then placed the cup and saucer on the wide space between their seats. It wasn’t a wall, but it marked his space from hers.
Isis wiggled down in her seat, curling up to get more comfortable, her elbow pushing his cup dangerously close to the edge as she shifted, trying to balance her head on her hand.
Mentally shoring the barriers, he moved the cup after all.
Now he couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t looking at her instead of the discarded cup. Eyes closed, Isis was close enough for him to see the way her long lashes cast shadows on her creamy cheeks, and feel her warm breath against his upper arm. She didn’t look very comfortable but her discomfort was none of his business. If she woke up with a stiff neck that was her own fault.
She wasn’t asleep. He could practically hear her mind working.
He knew he wouldn’t find what he was looking for without her help at the museum. She at least knew which decade of artifacts and paperwork to check as a jumping-off point. He didn’t want to go; that was a given. But he’d performed numerous jobs for queen and country that he hadn’t wanted to perform. Sometimes a man had to shut the hell up and just do what had to be done. His father was one of two people in London whom Thorne had no desire to see, but to get Isis and himself into the back rooms of the museum, he needed his father’s help.
Bloody hell. He’d then owe His Lordship a favor. No good deed went unrecorded in the Earl’s ledgers.
Still, with Isis’s tenacious assistance, he could make the trip quick and relatively painless. If anything in the professor’s artifacts was from his recent dig, Thorne would give Isis the information she needed and send her on her way. He didn’t need to go to Egypt with her. Just point her in the right direction.
She wanted the mythical tomb of Cleopatra? If her father had been in the Valley of the Scorpions and that’s where the tomb was, he’d find the connection.
She’d leave; he’d go back to Seattle. The end.
She’d have her answers, and he’d forget about the curly-haired woman who batted her long lashes from behind smudged glasses.
He’d learned something else about his client—besides that she was as tenacious as a Rottweiler. She was a tightwad who made every penny work twice, once for each side. The heated conversation between them at Sea-Tac Airport had drawn a small crowd of amused onlookers. It was only when he informed her with all the superior arrogance of his ancestors that with his bad leg, sitting in steerage for nine hours was completely out of the question, that she had partially acquiesced. He could go first-class. She’d go coach.
Thorne purchased two first-class tickets and told her to shut up and enjoy her heated nuts.
“You can talk to me,” she said drowsily, without opening her eyes. “I’m not asleep.”
He slipped off her glasses. Her mouth tightened at the unexpected contact. Not disgust; more like surprise. Thoughtful, he folded the earpieces and stuck the glasses in his shirt pocket, beside the photograph she’d given him—reluctantly—back at the Lodestone office. “How long have you been living with the Starks?” He’d taken her to Queen Anne Hill to pack and was not surprised that she’d directed him to Zak’s house.
“A month. They’ve been kind enough to let me camp out there while I regroup.”
Thorne could smell her hair and skin—cinnamon. She’d twisted her curls up on top of her head, and her face unframed by all that hair was pure and sweet. Opening her eyes, she gave him a drowsy smile. There were humor and charm in her big brown eyes and sensual mouth, elements oddly more insidious than overt sex appeal.
He removed the picture from his breast pocket. “Tell me what you see.”
She didn’t take the piece of paper from him, just touched his hand to bring it closer. An unwelcome frisson of awareness zinged up his arm at her touch. The speed with which she withdrew her fingers, the way her mouth did that tightening thing again, indicated she’d felt the same thing. Bollocks. He was a grown man, and she was the first woman on his radar in too long. “Need your glasses?”
“No, I see fine close up.” She straightened to push her fringe out of her eyes. “It was taken in the evening. Seven or eight, I’d guess. You can tell by the angle of the sunlight.” Her arm brushed his when she pointed. “This is clearly a tomb entrance. See the way the earth slopes, but the size of the rock is not uniform to its surroundings? That was backfill. This section here is undisturbed. This section here, where the team started to dig, is darker where the rocks and soil were excavated. The photographer was my father. He always manages to insert himself into picture
s.” There was a wealth of love and amusement in her quiet voice.
“Usually it’s his thumb; this time it was his shadow. He sent this from his phone soon after he took the picture.”
“Who do you think this is?” Thorne pointed to a shadow off to the left.
“I thought it looked like a second man standing with his back to the light. But I blew up the image in my lab several months ago, and it’s too hard to tell. It wasn’t clear enough to make out if it’s a person or a rock formation. And when I spoke to him he said he’d left everyone back at camp.”
Because a man with Alzheimer’s would remember. “Probably rocks, then,” Thorne said easily, tucking the photograph back into his pocket behind her glasses. Or the man Dr. Magee claimed struck him on the head. Thorne’s gut told him it was the latter. That complicated things. He’d rather hoped recovery would be easy. He suspected Isis Magee was like crabgrass: insidious and hard to get rid of. But if someone had indeed attacked Professor Magee, Thorne couldn’t let her go off in search of Cleopatra’s tomb alone.
Bloody, bloody hell.
“Try to sleep,” he told her, reaching up to adjust the air nozzle. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.” Probably long and hellish as well as hellishly long.
Isis pushed back her seat to recline more fully and gave him a small smile as she snugged the thin blanket to her chin. “I’m equal parts excited and terrified,” she murmured as her lids dipped lower and lower.
Unfortunately, Thorne thought as he watched her eyes flutter and close, I feel exactly the same way.
London
ISIS LOOKED UP AT the imposing Georgian edifice with its warm brick façade and neat rows of blank-eyed sash windows. The building looked rigid, precise, and boringly symmetrical. If this was a hotel, there wasn’t even a discreet brass nameplate outside the glossy black front door.
The sun was shining, but the chill in the air caused her to snug the collar of her red Windbreaker up around her ears and stuff her hands deep in the jacket’s pockets. She’d thrown together her clothes for the trip based on digging through dusty antiquities in the museum and, hopefully, for a trip to Egypt, where the temperatures in June hit the high nineties. Not for fancy hotels or London’s chilly version of summer weather.
Jeans, T-shirts, underwear, socks. Two pairs of shoes. Her camera bag, which doubled as a purse. Although she was rarely without her Canon, she’d left it locked in the hotel safe for this “quick” trip. Too bad; she’d like to take some angled shots of the building, which looked like a buttoned-up virgin on her wedding night. The thought made her smile.
She didn’t care much about what she wore, but her silent companion was dressed in another beautifully cut business suit, which he’d changed into at the hotel, where they’d stopped long enough to drop off their luggage and wash up.
His clothes shouted armor. His crisp blue and white pinstriped shirt was open at the throat; his short dark hair ruffled in the breeze like the pelt of a seal. He looked deceptively at ease. But her artist eye saw the slight tension in his shoulders, and the grim line of his mouth.
Connor “Just Thorne” wasn’t casual or particularly approachable. In fact, he was a bit on the surly side and hoarded his words as if they were currency. Which was too bad, because Isis bet he’d be fascinating if he opened up. She spent her life getting silent things to speak, at least in her photographs. He’d be no different. She would search to find just the precise angle, and the form of lighting, that would reveal the story.
What drove the man?
What kind of accident had caused the limp? Why wouldn’t he talk about it? She wanted to pry him open like the clam he was. She wondered, as she glanced around, just what kind of crowbar would be necessary to pry inside his secrets.
He hadn’t clued her in to whom they were seeing or why, other than a brief mention that his father had something to do with the museum they needed to visit.
He rang the highly polished doorbell, the sound echoing discreetly inside.
“Where are we?” They’d already checked in to the hotel, and one wouldn’t ring a doorbell at a hotel in any case. Trying to guess where they were and why they were there, she glanced around at the neatly trimmed boxwood hedges surrounding a beautifully manicured Stepford-perfect flower bed filled with deep purple salvia. Bright red petunias would look better than the stick-straight salvia, she decided.
There wasn’t a bend or a curve to be seen. Everything was precise, straight, uniform. In fact, she bet that whoever was in charge of the plants had cut back any stragglers so they were exactly even in number on each side.
Before he could respond the door was opened by a distinguished, unamused man with snow-white hair and a beak of a nose. He wore a starched black suit so stiff it appeared to have the hanger still in it. Isis buried her instant levity, wondering if the man was aware he’d caricatured himself. “Master James,” he said in round, self-important tones. “This is something of a surprise.”
“To all concerned,” Thorne replied dryly as the man stepped back to let them inside. “Is His Lordship at home, Roberts?”
The butler glanced down his nose at Isis for a moment, his nostrils flaring, as if he smelled something unpleasant. “I’ll inquire, sir. Shall I bring tea to the yellow room?” The butler held himself with stiff dignity.
“Coffee and a diet cola. Heavy on the ice.”
“Certainly.” Roberts half-bowed and went right, while she followed “Master James” to the left. Roberts, she noted, disappeared like magic, and it was only her imagination that had her smelling sulfur in the air, which otherwise bore the scent of lemon polish and flowers.
Wowza! She’d been in hotels smaller than this place. “Your name’s James?”
He picked up speed, his hard-soled shoes and cane landing slightly uneven, staccato strikes on the marble floor. “Thorne.”
“Okay by me,” she said easily, looking around with interest as she trailed behind him. Tension rolled off him in almost visible waves. Isis closed the gap between them in a probably misplaced sense that he needed someone to stand with him. She kept her tone light as she tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and adjusted her steps to match his. “My father always said, ‘A child with many names is a child loved.’ ”
He didn’t shake her off but made a derisive noise under his breath as they circumvented a large wood and marble table with an enormous floral arrangement dripping from a blue and white vase half as tall as she was. That many hydrangeas and Casablanca lilies couldn’t possibly get enough to drink, they were crammed in so tightly. “Not in every case,” he said coldly, finally disengaging from her hold to slip his hand in his jacket pocket.
Ow. “This is your parents’ home?” Isis asked in exaggerated hushed tones as their shoes clicked loudly on marble the color of beach sand and the tap of Thorne’s cane echoed in surround sound off all the hard surfaces.
“Already amused, I see.” Thorne let her catch up to him again in the vast entry hall. He wasn’t letting the grass grow under his feet. Whatever the reason for the cane and slight limp, the man moved fast. She had to trot to keep up.
She couldn’t imagine a child scampering through the halls or sliding down the magnificent curved teak banister. Not that she could imagine Thorne as a child, either. Feeling his unbearable tension as if it were a living thing in the too-still, unbearably grand house, she forced a small smile. “I was just thinking I’d like to get Roberts into a room filled with white Persian cats and photograph his reactions. I bet fluff never lands on that suit of his—it has super-repellent on it, doesn’t it?”
His lips twitched. “You have a very interesting mind, Isis Magee.”
She would have loved to linger, because the place was magnificent in an overly gilded, museumy kind of way, and her fingers itched for her camera. She got the quick impression of miles of pale marble, busy wallpaper, and gold… everything; of potted palms and large portraits of stern-faced people in period costume, as she hurried to keep
up with Connor’s long-legged, if slightly uneven, strides.
“House. Not home. But yes. Rosebank House is their primary residence.”
The “House” seemed too tame a name for the palatial mansion. “Did you grow up here?” Isis asked, doing a quickstep to sync her steps with his.
“Third floor, corner bedroom. I fled the scene on my eighteenth birthday and never looked back.”
His fingers brushed hers as they walked. A pleasant little zing of electricity ran up her arm. He didn’t appear to notice. She wondered with amusement what he’d do if she slipped her hand into his. She liked touching him. Liked the smell of him, and the look of him. Resisting the impulse to twine her fingers with his, she said, “I suspect this house casts a long shadow.”
He gave her a surprised look. “Long and extremely… heavy. This way.”
The room he ushered her to was not yellow, but rather a pale Wedgwood blue complete with white plaster accents and an enormous crystal chandelier. Everything in the room looked expensive—as if there should be a velvet rope preventing visitors from entering. Even though James Connor Thorne, or Connor James Thorne, or Just Thorne, was a thoroughly modern man and should’ve looked completely out of place in a room filled with baroque furnishings and silk upholstery, he appeared quite at home. But then Isis suspected he’d look at home wherever he was. He had self-confidence to spare. It was very sexy on him.
She took it all in, her eye for detail cataloging the furnishings as if she were preparing for a photo shoot. He crossed to the fireplace to stand beneath a large painting, circa seventeen hundreds. The stiffly posed man exuded self-control and moral strength. Like Thorne, he stood, one hand in his pocket, his expression grim as he stared defiantly at the artist as if to say, “Hurry the hell up. I have things to do and people to kill.”
“He looks…” Isis observed. Surly and extremely unhappy. “Important,” she finished.
Thorne flicked a glance upward. “That was painted by Joshua Reynolds.”
“How many Thorne relatives back is this guy?” She crossed the thick area rug to inspect a portrait of a man in formal dress of the period. He had a strong face and piercing green eyes, and his hair was powdered and tied back. He wore a long, wide-collared lime-green frock coat over a silver waistcoat, a froth of white lace at his throat and wrists. His hand, with an enormous emerald ring on it, was on one hip as if to say, “So there, you peasant.”