by Holly Rayner
Vanessa was laughing too hard to answer him.
“This blow to my honor is too much,” he said, shaking his head. “I will have to duel him to the death. I shall inform him immediately.”
He turned as though to march away decisively and Vanessa, still giggling, reached out to stop him.
“No, no, it isn’t him.” She laughed, holding his arm.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Ramin assured her. “I’ll make sure to lose the duel. I would never steal your one true love so cruelly.”
“It’s you!” Vanessa said through her laughter and put her arms around his neck to pull him down towards her. “It’s you.”
Chapter Ten
The kiss was at once a surprise and somehow inevitable, like she’d been waiting for it since the moment they’d met. His warm mouth moved against hers and her heart jumped in her chest, fluttering wildly as a bird in a cage with excitement.
His arms were strong and firm as they held her close, a frame she hung on as her knees felt weak. It could have lasted seconds or centuries, the slow slide of his hand into her hair all she ever cared to feel again. The heat of his skin, the scent of him so close, left her dizzy. Gradually, they parted for breath and, realizing what they were doing, stepped away from each other.
“It’s getting late,” Vanessa said, looking away, suddenly shy. “We should probably get some rest.”
“Yes,” Ramin agreed, avoiding her gaze. “I’ll find someone to show us to our rooms.”
He hurried away and she followed slowly after, leaving a gap between them, both of them a little overwhelmed by what had just happened and unsure how to treat each other now that it had happened. Vanessa’s heart and lips burned to kiss him again, but at the same time she knew it would be a mistake, and he seemed to feel the same, at least judging by the way he was avoiding even looking at her now.
A moment later, a maid was leading them upstairs to the guest rooms.
“Here we are,” the woman said, stopping before a pair of large doors. “The bed has been made for you and everything has been aired out.”
She opened the doors to the finely appointed room and its singular, king-sized bed. Vanessa covered her face.
“I believe there’s been a misunderstanding,” Ramin said to the maid with a small chuckle. “We aren’t together.”
“Oh!” the maid blushed. “My apologies, Your Highness. I’ll have a second room prepared at once.”
She hurried off, leaving them alone in the hallway.
“You take this room,” Ramin said graciously. “I’ll take the next one.”
“Are you sure?” Vanessa asked. “I don’t mind waiting.”
“I insist,” he said, urging her towards it with a hand on her shoulder. “You had a long day. You need the rest.”
“Thank you,” Vanessa said as she stepped towards the doors. “Really. For everything.”
“It was my pleasure,” he replied, his touch sliding from her shoulder down to her hand. “Truly.”
He let go reluctantly and, fighting the urge to ask him to share the room with her, Vanessa murmured goodnight and closed the doors between them.
She sank against them then with a sigh. She really shouldn’t be letting herself get swept away by this. Even if he wasn’t a womanizer like the magazines said, he was still a prince, miles out of her league, and not what she’d come here for.
She was here for the tomb of Amanirenas and the treasures it held. The thought, which had made her uncomfortable to begin with, now felt like a stone in her gut dragging her down. She didn’t want to do it. But the thought of the debt waiting for her when she finished her degree was terrifying. She shook it off, feeling foolish. That hardly mattered now. Ramin and Ansar’s promises to fix the situation were appreciated, but they had no chance against Peterson’s head start.
Her bags had been brought up to the room, fetched from Professor Van Rees’s apartment that morning when Ramin had assumed they would stay there during their expedition. She changed into a nightgown and fell into the huge, comfortable bed.
The night breeze blew, cool and jasmine scented, through the tall, open windows, the diaphanous white silk curtains catching the moonlight in pearly shadow. She turned restlessly between the Egyptian cotton sheets, thinking about Ramin and the kiss. He was making no attempt to hide the fact that he was interested in her, and she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t interested any longer. But there were just too many complications.
Part of her knew she was just making excuses. She was good at them; she’d spent the last four years dating men she knew she wasn’t interested in so that it would be easy to let go when they decided they weren’t interested in her.
She was afraid of what would happen if she ever let herself really fall for someone. She wasn’t sure she could handle it. She knew, with almost total certainty, that if love ever came between her and her work, she would choose her work. But she didn’t want to know what it would feel like to make that decision, so she’d avoided it as much as she could. And here it was now, sneaking up on her in the guise of a man almost too perfect to be real. It was, to be honest, terrifying.
After an hour or more of tossing and turning, her thoughts full of the Sheikh and her own stubborn fears, she gave up on sleep and slipped out of bed, lighting a candle and taking from her bag the case containing the ancient map of Nubia. She set it up on the vanity in the corner of the room and spread her papers across the delicate surface.
If she wasn’t going to sleep, she could at least work. She could continue her translation of the map. She’d been meaning to plot out the best possible dig sites—though that seemed a bit pointless now that Peterson was already camped out on her primary location. She doubted they’d take well to her digging twenty feet away from them.
For an hour, she worked steadily, eyes itching with tiredness in the flickering candle light, transcribing names and comparing them to the Greek. One good thing would come of this, at least: Peterson couldn’t steal her work on the Meroitic language. That would be hers alone, and thanks to this map she was very close to a full translation. The kind she could apply to all the hundreds of un-translated Meroitic steles and engravings that had been discovered and thus far left a mystery. Like those that might be in the tomb Peterson uncovered.
She sighed at the thought, sending one of her papers fluttering off the desk. She bent tiredly to pick it up, rubbing at her eyes. It was a listing of the locations of the Sahara’s edges by year. The sand spread a little bit more every year. Desert encroachment was a real danger to neighboring biomes, not to mention human habitations. It was also a pain in the ass for archeologists trying to guess the locations of sites in the Sahara based on landmarks long swallowed by the sand and borders that no longer existed.
She was always forgetting to adjust her calculations…
Vanessa stopped cold as sudden realization washed over her. When she’d translated the name on the map, she’d been so excited and moved so quickly. Had she remembered to adjust for the Sahara’s moving edges?
She began scribbling calculations frantically, working out the difference the drift had caused. Her heart hammered as she looked down at the new location of the tomb site, more than a mile east of where she’d been looking before.
She got to her feet, slamming her bedroom door open to run across the hall to where the maid had prepared a room for Ramin, hammering on his door.
He opened it, shirtless and dazed, and stared at her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I found it!” she said, elated. “I got the calculations wrong before! I forgot to account for desert growth! Peterson is digging in the wrong place!”
It took Ramin, half asleep, a moment to process what that meant. Then, he suddenly laughed, triumphant and delighted, and lifted her by the waist, spinning her around before he pulled her into an elated kiss.
“We still have a chance!” he said as they broke apart. “We’ll leave tomorrow morning!”
Chapte
r Eleven
At dawn the next day, after a few hours of restless, excited sleep, they had breakfast with Sheikh Ansar, who eagerly arranged a proper expedition for them. By the time the sun fully rose, they were leaving with a party of hired laborers, with sufficient supplies for a multi-day dig.
As they neared Peterson’s dig site, Vanessa urged the party to remain quiet and go the long way around, trying to avoid notice. The longer they could search before Peterson knew they were there, the better.
“We’ll start here,” she said as they reached the area on the map and the excavation crew began unpacking the supplies. “And grid the rest out. We want to clear each area as fast as possible, so we’ll just do a quick comb of each square—half an hour, an hour at most—before moving on.”
“You’re not worried about missing something?” Ramin asked.
“If we don’t find anything after we’ve checked the whole grid, we’ll go through and look again,” Vanessa said, rolling up her sleeves. “But an initial sweep will help us eliminate the most unlikely sites and narrow down our options. Let’s get to work.”
With a smile, she grabbed a shovel and jumped in beside the laborers, laying out the plans for each area they would search before they started shifting sand. Vanessa kept her eyes peeled for any sign of a potential site somewhere under the sand. They’d know they were in the right place long before they found any structures.
The day was long and hot. Vanessa and Ramin worked alongside the diggers, taking frequent breaks during the worst heat of the day. But even when they weren’t actively working, the possibility of finding the tomb was all either of them could talk about.
“This is going to change everything we know about this culture,” Vanessa gushed late that afternoon as they rested on their shovels, exhausted and dirty and still practically humming with excitement. “Between the translation of the map and the wealth of artifacts in the tomb, who knows what we might learn about them and their involvement in the ancient world? Roman records are notoriously thin and generalized about the sub-Saharan region. Who knows what was really happening in this part of the world?”
“Hopefully us, soon enough,” Ramin answered with a laugh. “What do you expect the tomb will be like? Are we going to be excavating a pyramid?”
“Possibly!” Vanessa said with an excited grin. “Kushite pyramids were a bit different from the Egyptian variety, however. The Nubians built more than two hundred pyramids that we know of, vastly more than the Egyptians. Their pyramids tended to be smaller, with steeper walls. But there’s a possibility the tomb may be beneath a tumulus, a burial mound, with the tomb itself dug into the bedrock.”
“Forgive me if I really hope it’s a pyramid,” Ramin said.
“That would be rather more spectacular, wouldn’t it?” Vanessa confessed.
They were interrupted as one of the laborers shouted for their attention. They hurried towards the man, Ramin conversing with him in Arabic as Vanessa knelt to see what had been dug up, carefully brushing the sand away.
“Oh, it’s pottery shards!” Vanessa exclaimed.
“Is that good?” Ramin asked, kneeling beside her to look.
“It’s fantastic!” Vanessa said, elated. “The Kush broke pottery on graves as part of the burial ritual! And look at the quality of these pieces! This was an incredibly fine vase, probably made for the occasion.”
“Fine enough for royalty?” Ramin asked, a smile beginning to spread across his face.
Vanessa nodded in agreement and Ramin waved the other laborers over, telling them to concentrate on that area. They hadn’t been digging more than an hour before they discovered the first opening, shifting a stone seal away from a dark shaft.
“Is it an entrance?” Ramin asked, peering down into the darkness.
“No, but we’re close!” Vanessa said excitedly. “It’s probably a vent, for letting in air and light while the workers were building the tomb below. God, I can’t believe the seal held so long! It looks like the sand has barely reached the tomb at all!”
“Should we go down?” Ramin asked, ready to start climbing at once.
“Oh, no,” Vanessa said with a small laugh. “It’s probably sealed off at the other end. It’s only a vent after all.”
“Oh good, that will make this much easier.”
Vanessa looked up in surprise as the familiar voice interrupted their conversation, to see a gun pointed at her face. Around her the team of diggers were backing away, hands raised, from Terrance Peterson’s line of mercenaries, their weapons raised. It was Taggert who had his gun trained on Vanessa and Ramin. Peterson himself stood behind the man, looking smug and self-satisfied. Behind him, Renée Dubois looked on, bored, while Professor Van Rees shuffled uncomfortably.
“You,” Vanessa hissed in undisguised animosity. “Get off my dig site, you Luddite.”
“I think you mean my dig site,” Peterson said mildly. “I’m the one with the official sanction of the university and the Sudanese government.”
“This isn’t Sudan,” Ramin said, bristling. “This is the sovereign territory of Ksatta-Galan and I—”
“Oh, shut up,” Peterson said, rolling his eyes. He gestured to Taggert, who struck suddenly, cracking the butt of his gun against Ramin’s head. The Sheikh slumped, dazed or unconscious, and Vanessa caught him with a yelp of fear and concern, holding him to her chest. His head was bleeding and his eyes were unfocused and unresponsive as Vanessa shouted his name.
“I do have to thank you for finding the correct location, Miss Hawkins,” Peterson said. “We’d barely started on that other site when Taggert spotted your little expedition here trying to sneak around us. I thought it would be prudent to keep an eye on you and, wouldn’t you know it? I was right.
“Once again, I couldn’t have done it without you, Vanessa. I’ll make sure there’s a footnote about you, or a plaque or something once they find your bodies.”
“What?” Vanessa and Professor Van Rees said at once.
“Peterson, you can’t just murder them!” Abraham said, horrified.
“Of course not!” Peterson said with a snort. “I’m just going to put them in that hole and let the desert do the hard work. A couple of idiots, a student and an amateur, fooling around on a dig site, stumble into a vent hole and are tragically lost. If anything, it’ll be great for publicity.”
“I won’t let you,” Van Rees insisted, grabbing Peterson by the arm.
“Well, that’s a shame, professor.” Peterson sighed. “You could have been quite useful. Taggert?”
Taggert whacked his gun over the professor’s head, and Vanessa shrieked as she saw him topple to the ground. Two more of Peterson’s goons dragged Abraham over to Vanessa’s side and, as she watched, stricken, dropped him into the vent. Vanessa watched him vanish into the darkness, as she still clung to Ramin.
Ramin shifted, trying to gather himself, and Taggert reached down to drag him out of Vanessa’s arms, shoving his gun in her face when she tried to hold on to him. Vanessa was helpless to do anything as the goon pushed Ramin into the hole after Abraham.
“You next, Miss Hawkins,” Peterson said lightly as Taggert dragged her to her feet and nudged her backward with the gun until her heels were against the edge of the opening. She watched sand sliding in past her heels and felt cold terror heavy as a stone in her gut. There was no way out.
“All of you,” Taggert yelled to the laborers, his gun trained on Vanessa. “If you want to survive to work another day, you work for us now. Get back to it.”
With that threat, the laborers scrambled to continue digging.
“You really should have accepted my offer back at Columbia,” Peterson said, shaking his head. “You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble. Then again, I still would have needed to eliminate you before you published your work on the Meroitic language. That would have been far too damaging to my work, you know. I suppose this was inevitable, really.”
“You’re a bigger idiot than I thought if yo
u think anyone is going to believe you,” Vanessa said, summoning all her courage for a last spiteful moment, spitting at his feet. “You’re going to rot in prison for this.”
“That remains to be seen,” Peterson said with a shrug. “But by that time you will most certainly be dead. Goodbye, Miss Hawkins.”
Before Vanessa could say anything else, Taggert shoved her backward. With a shriek of terror, she fell down into the darkness of the tomb.
Chapter Twelve
It was a long fall, but not as long as she’d feared. She landed on a slope of soft sand, rolling to a crashing stop on a bedrock stone floor. Dazed, she struggled up onto her knees and looked up just in time to see the vent seal being dragged back into place, cutting off the light. For a moment, she sat in the cold and the dark, feeling incredibly alone.
Then, a light blossomed in the darkness beside her. She jumped, frightened, until she recognized Ramin’s face. She threw her arms around him at once, making him drop the match he was holding as he hugged her back.
“I’m so glad you’re alive!” she sobbed.
“Are you hurt?” he asked. “Were you injured in the fall?”
“I’m fine!” she said at once, shaking her head as he fumbled for another match. “What about you?”
“Well, I have a splitting headache,” he admitted with a laugh, the match illuminating the gash on his scalp and the blood drying on his face. “But I don’t think it’s serious.”
“Where’s Abraham?” Vanessa asked, remembering he’d fallen first. “Is he all right?”
“He’s here,” Ramin said, moving to reveal the older man, unconscious on the stone floor. “I think he hit his head coming down. He hasn’t woken up yet. I found the matches in his bag.”
“He might have a flashlight,” Vanessa said, moving towards him. “Check again.”