Relentless (27 page)

With a frown, getting more scared by the minute, she reached out to brush the sand off his face, wishing he’d wake up and tell her why the hell he’d brought her way out here.

Isis barely touched his cheek and he erupted into action, throwing her on her back, his forearm a steel band across her throat, his fist raised to strike. “Connor!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, grabbing his arm to keep him from choking her. “Stop, it’s me, Isis!”

His fist dropped out of sight and he eased his arm from her throat. Dropping his forehead to hers, he rasped, “Bloody hell.”

“It’s okay.” She slid her fingers into the soft pelt of his hair, holding his head against hers as they both fought for breath. Her heartbeat sounded like a rock band in her ears. “I’m sorry I startled you.”

Thorne lifted his head, eyes glittering in the meager light. “It’s not all right. I almost killed you.”

“Well, fortunately you didn’t. Would you mind letting go? I’m getting sand in my hair.”

Still crouched over her, he kissed her gently, then helped her up, brushing the sand off her back and shoulders. “Sure I didn’t hurt you?”

“Positive.”

He looked around. “Are we alone?”

“Why? Were you expecting dinner guests?”

“How long have you been awake?”

“A few minutes. Thorne, you’re scaring me. Why are we out here? I thought you—” He put his finger over her mouth and uncoiled to get to his feet, then staggered in the sand before catching his footing. He held up a hand, cautioning her to stay where she was.

For such a large man, and with an injured leg, he moved with surprising speed once he got going. Isis watched
as he searched around the tent, then looked inside. He motioned her to remain still, and made his way up the dune nearby. His cautious, careful movements ratcheted up her fear, and by the time he came back to her, she was on her feet, heart pounding painfully.

The breeze brushed chilly fingers over the film of nervous perspiration on her skin. She put a hand on his forearm. “What’s going on?”

“We were drugged in the car. Isoflurane or some other inhalation anesthetic. I smelled a musty odor, but attributed it to the air-conditioning.
Fuck it
.”

Isis frowned. What he was saying made no sense at all. “Someone put an anesthetic in the car?” Repeating the words didn’t compute, either. Who did something like that outside of a movie?

“It caused profound respiratory depression, and decreased our blood pressure. They put us to sleep. Fuck,” he said again.

“And then built us a
campsite
?” Isis asked incredulously. “Why? So we’d be comfortable until they come back to kill us?”

“I suspect we’re miles from civilization.” His voice was grim. “I don’t believe they have any plans to return for us.”

“Okay… Why then?”

“I think the idea is to make this look as though we came on a dig looking for your Cleo’s tomb—there’s a rough stone entrance on the other side of this dune—and succumbed to the heat, or ran out of supplies, or our vehicle was stolen. Or all of the above. Whatever the plan is, it’s a good one. Because we clearly
are
miles from
anywhere. If those duffels are any indication, they’re filled with empty cans and wrappers so it looks like we ate and drank the contents. Check out the tire tracks—one car in, one car out. I’d bet our vehicle will be presumed stolen while we slept.”

“So they want us to die.”

His eyes were hard and cold. “They want it to look like we fucked up and died of stupidity. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sit well with me.”

A flush of heat washed over her skin. There was no way in hell she was letting Dylan make her death look like a stupid accident any college freshman on a dig would have had the sense to avoid. “So how do we beat them?”

“Instead of conveniently dying, we find what we came here to find.”

THIRTEEN

L
et’s see if they left us anything useful,” Isis suggested, prosaically, sounding a hell of a lot braver than she felt. The starlight made deep pockets of black shadow in the dips and valleys of the surrounding sand dunes, and the scrape of sand blowing across the nylon fabric of the tent was like sandpaper on her nerves.

Still, if she had to be stranded in the middle of nowhere, she was grateful it was with Connor Thorne. He looked large and formidable with his face in shadow and his broad shoulders blocking the endless, shifting, barren hills behind him.

“If your hypothesis is true”—her voice seemed loud in the quiet so she lowered it—“we’re miles from civilization, right? It could be years before anyone came across us. So with that in mind, I say we rescue ourselves.”

His teeth flashed white in the ambient light. “You’re something else, you know that, Isis Magee?” he murmured, using a finger to tilt her face up so that her mouth was right where he wanted it. He combed his fingers through her hair to bracket her head between his large hands, holding her a willing captive.

Isis closed her eyes as he slanted his mouth over hers in a leisurely kiss that was completely at odds with their circumstances. He deepened the kiss, his tongue teasing hers in a game that made her pulse race, crowding fear from her mind and replacing it with heat and need. The kiss became hard, filled with longing. She hoped from both sides, because her heart pounded erratically against her rib cage, and she was vaguely aware it was more from passion than fear.

Sand shifted beneath her feet and blew against the back of her legs as he drew her more tightly against him. The heat from his body warmed her everywhere they touched. Waves of pleasure rose like a tide inside her, the swells getting incrementally bigger as the kiss deepened.

The kiss, the embrace, was an affirmation of life in this desolate place and Isis soaked it up like rain on the parched desert sands. She needed this right now. Needed him.

She sighed, slipping her hand around his neck, and up into the short strands of his hair at his nape. She used her other hand to cup his firm butt, which flexed as her fingers tightened. She felt the small twitch of his lips at the contact.

God, he smelled so—male. The smell of his sweat, the scent of cold desert air on his skin, and the welcome heat of his hard body pressed tightly against hers turned her on like nothing else.

She knew what it felt like to have him buried deep inside her, knew the pull and pulse of her internal muscles in response to his every thrust and parry. She knew
the sounds he made, and the feel of his hair-roughed chest against her sensitive breasts. She knew the sounds he made when he climaxed, and the weight of his body when he was replete.

And she wanted to feel all those things
now
. It was only when he brushed his fingers over her cheeks that she realized how cold she was everywhere they weren’t touching. He disengaged slowly, leaving her lips damp and chilled. “Fortunately,” he told her, his broad hands sliding down to cup her upper arms to hold her steady as she swayed unsteadily, “we have a lodestone that will take us straight back to your Valley of the Scorpions.”

“We do?” She blinked back her good sense. “Oh! We do!” She dug it out of her back pocket and handed him the little chamois pouch.

He took it and stuck it in his front pocket, then stepped back, scanning the area. “Unless they left us with my GPS or watch, which I doubt, it’ll be a little harder to pinpoint the location, but I know when I’m heading in the right direction.”

“You’re right, let’s gather everything we can use, then get a good night’s sleep. We can set out at first light.”

“Sorry.” Thorne cupped her cool cheek. “No good night’s sleep for us tonight. We don’t know if or when they might come back. We’ll do better walking while it’s cool. Hopefully we’ll reach civilization at sunup.”

Briskly she rubbed the goose bumps on her bare arms, the cold invading more than just the surface of her skin. She’d had other plans in mind that had nothing to do with sleep or walking through the wilderness. “Seriously?
Wasn’t it enough to dump us out here? Now you think they’re coming back to finish the job.” Wrapping her arms around her body, she shivered. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.”

“Tuck your pants into your socks to discourage wildlife, then grab that bag over there, and let’s see what they’ve given us to work with.”

“I still have my camera bag. There’s a little money if we need to pay someone for transportation or food.” That was, if they didn’t end up walking in circles until the vultures or heatstroke got them.

“Water’s our priority. Okay, let’s see what we have to work with.”

Glad to have something constructive to do, Isis stuffed her pant legs into her socks, then hauled the light duffel bag over to where Thorne was dumping the other two. Heavy boots would better serve them out in the desert than running shoes, but at least they hadn’t been wearing sandals when they’d been taken. She was grateful for small mercies.

Unzipping the bags, they tossed the contents onto the sleeping bag. Some clothing, his and hers. Isis held up a familiar T-shirt. “Isn’t this the shirt you wore in London? It is! And here’s my bra! This is the stuff from our suitcases that we left in the cab from the airport.”

“I suspected it might be. They’d want it to look as though we came prepared to stay for several days.”

Isis shuddered. “Dear God. They’ve set up a perfect crime scene.”

“Yes, well, the only thing missing will be the bodies.” He handed her a wad of fabric. “Layer. Put on what you can.”

“These bastards have been tracking us for
days
.” Her voice rose as she pulled a long-sleeved T-shirt over the short-sleeved one she was wearing. She wasn’t just surprised at the bad guys’ forethought. She was furious. Each incident had blended with the fright of the one before it, but now, in the quiet and darkness of the barren desert, the realization of the machinations that swirled around them put the fear of God in her. They hadn’t just been followed. They’d been relentlessly
hunted
.

“That certainly appears to be the case.” Thorne sounded calm, his voice strong and even.

She shot him an annoyed glance from where she knelt beside the bag of clothes. “I guess you’re
used
to people trying to kill you.”

“It never gets old.” His attempt at levity was replaced with concern. He crouched beside her, taking her in his arms. “Hey, you remember I’m a professional, right? We’ll figure this out
and
live to see another day.”

“It’s a good thing you’re a man of your word.”

“Depend on it. Isis, I—”

He was so close, his face etched in black-and-white. Starlight glinted in his eyes and cast a silver sheen on the stubble on his chin. Her heart clutched because Isis saw him in fifty years, and she wanted to be
with
him in that distant future when he was stooped, his hair silver. She brushed his jaw with her fingertip. The hair was springy and tickled her hand. “What is it?”

“I’ve had extensive wilderness training. I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise.”

She was pretty sure that hadn’t been what he’d been
about to say. But whatever it was, it could wait. Extensive wilderness training right this second was probably more important. When he started to rise, she placed her hand on his wrist. “I promise I won’t let anything happen to you, either.”

He smiled, then pushed to his feet stiffly. The man’s leg was mangled. It must be painful to walk on the uneven, shifting sand, but he didn’t show it. How the hell did he think he could walk them out of the desert?

Upending a heavy bag, he said briskly, “Nice of them to give us a frying pan. Too bad they didn’t include anything we could cook in it.”

“Three bottles of water,” Isis said, relieved. Three bottles wasn’t enough, but it might mean the difference between life and death. Food they could do without, but not water. As soon as the sun came up and started baking the sand, dehydration would kill them. She’d heard of an archaeologist who’d been so excited by his find he’d forgotten to drink. He’d been dead within hours.

Three bottles of water was good.

“I found this.” He turned on a small flashlight, and a thin stream of yellow light illuminated the dancing sand blowing around them. He turned it off. “Anything in any of those packages?” Thorne asked, as Isis picked up a handful of candy and food wrappers.