Relentless (8 page)

He wanted to make more than a pass, and that was the problem. She wasn’t the kind of woman who’d go for a quickie, and he wasn’t in the market for anything more. Not his thing. Never would be.

It would help his dick if he remembered that soon he’d be neck deep in an important op at MI5, and females would be the last thing on his mind. At least
ones with home and hearth in their eyes, no matter how mind-boggling their kisses.

Isis dragged a box by the flaps across the cement floor. She’d made a fortress of boxes and paperwork across from him. She plopped down cross-legged in the center, not minding the cement floor, and pulled the box closer, then dug out a small notebook.

He’d checked in at Thames House, home of MI5, to see if they’d any new intel on Boris Yermalof. The man had made a fine attempt at amputating Thorne’s leg with an extremely sharp boning knife, and then, because Yermalof was all about overkill, shooting him in the chest. The answer was no. Yermalof was still in the wind.

But the bounty was still on his head, and the strong suggestion was to return to Seattle posthaste. Then he and his coworkers had gone out for drinks. Very civilized.

None of it was any of her damned business. And what the hell did she do?
Bathe
in cinnamon and ginger? He tasted the light fragrance of her on his tongue.
Goddamn it.
“If you plan on
reading
every damned scrap of paper your father donated to the museum, we’ll be here for the next ninety-nine years,” he told his client briskly without answering her question. “All we’re looking for are papers and/or artifacts from the last two years, remember?”

It was all there, in one claustrophobic, dust-free room until tomorrow, when the curator and a team of assistants would start moving artifacts to one of the seven Egyptian galleries upstairs to ready the displays for the well-publicized opening the following month. The Natural History Museum in London housed the world’s
largest and most comprehensive collection of Egyptian antiquities, and the Earl had been instrumental in obtaining, at his own expense, thousands of priceless pieces to add to their vast collection.

He’d championed August Magee for years, and Thorne knew his father would be damned if anything took away even a glimmer of his glory for bringing the fabled Egyptologist’s lifelong discoveries to the museum. The exhibit, he’d read last night, would comprise Professor Magee’s entire collection of artifacts and environmental remains from his excavations. Thirty bloody years’ worth of crap to look through.

“I have to read the papers to find dates,” Isis told him, flipping through another small notebook. “I have this box full of small items, but I have no idea which comes from which dig. And you didn’t answer the—”

“Let’s speed things up a bit.” Her mouth, wide and mobile, always looked on the verge of smiling.
What did she have to smile about?
Thorne thought, annoyed. Annoyed, more with himself for noticing the sparkle in her big brown eyes and her secret amusement, than at Isis. Clearly cinnamon was a secret nerve agent that caused normally prosaic and sensible government operatives to have the impulse control of an adolescent.

“Write down the locations of his digs for the past
five
years.” She’d given him two years; now he needed to widen the search if he didn’t want to be in here with her until they were both as dry as the antiquities they were pawing through.

“Here—” Thorne removed a small notebook and his
favorite Montblanc from an inner pocket of his jacket and handed her both. He hovered a breath from her lips. He wasn’t going to kiss her, but the memory of last night’s kiss lingered. The taste of her, the fragrance of her skin, the heat as he’d sunk into the heat and flash of their kiss—Fuck it. No. He shifted his head to avoid contact, but their hands brushed as the pen changed hands. The graze of her fingers gave him what felt like an electric shock that zinged all the way up his arm and resonated in the lizard part of his brain, which was helpless to resist her allure. Fortunately, he was made of sterner stuff than his hormones. He withdrew his hand. The hand that wanted to independently touch her skin and tangle in her hair. The hand that wanted to curve around her breasts and discover just how soft her skin felt.

Body flooded with heat, he gritted his teeth and kept his tone even and cool with effort. “I’ll use this”—he held up a handheld device similar to a GPS, but government issue—“and we’ll know where he was. I’ll compare artifacts to digs. Anything that doesn’t match up might—and I stress
might
—be from the tomb at the mystery location.”

This, he knew, was an exercise in futility. He’d humor her for today. Tomorrow he’d return to Seattle with or without her.

She chewed the corner of her lower lip, the pen poised over the pad as she tried to remember. “The Hor-Aha dig was 2008 and well into 2009. That was near—can you show me a map?”

Thorne removed the map he’d procured from his office last evening, unfolded it, and spread it on the
floor in front of her. When she leaned over it, he had a glimpse of the lightly tanned swell of her breasts. Jesus God. He was as randy as a schoolboy. He rolled his chair far enough away so that parallax hid her attributes from his avaricious view.

He’d endured Boris Yermalof’s brand of retribution with more equanimity than dealing with Isis Magee. She affected him more than she should. More than he wanted her to.

She glanced up to give him an inquiring look. “Do you usually carry a map in your pocket?”

“I carry whatever is required for the job.” Be it a map or an Uzi. He had to roll the chair closer to see where she was pointing on the large unfolded map. He inhaled cinnamon, which made him dizzy, which in turn annoyed him. The smell of her wasn’t seductive in any way, shape, or fucking form. Someone should send a memo to his dick. “Give me my pen back. I’ll write down the coordinates.”

She did so, and he managed not to brush her fingers with his, and even managed not to inhale the warm scent of her skin. Waiting until she moved away to take a breath, he wrote down the approximate location of each of the professor’s findings. In this case, approximate was good enough. He didn’t need to go there, just eliminate each as he touched the artifact. Whatever remained unaccounted for, would, in a perfect world, be the tomb of Queen Cleopatra. Since Thorne knew how damned imperfect the world was, he wasn’t holding his breath.

“Is that it?” he asked when she’d finished identifying
where her father had been for the past five years. That should be far enough back.

“Oh! Wait, I think he helped a friend on the Neferirkare dig for a few weeks three years ago. It’s right… here.” She pointed at the location on the map, then met his gaze. “Yes. That’s everything.”

There was a gap of a few months where he’d been stateside, and then the months he’d spent nailing down the location and ostensibly found the tomb.

Ready to go to work, Thorne made a makeshift desk from a stack of boxes, then placed his map, GPS device, notepad, and pen out. He sat down to make some notes, glad to get off his leg for a minute or two. It ached and burned.

Two seconds later Isis walked her chair right up beside him. “Now what do we do?” Thorne didn’t get it. He’d lain in a swamp in Central Africa, oblivious to the stench surrounding him as he out waited his quarry. He’d smelled his partner’s blood as well as his own when Yermalof had tortured the crap out of them. Why the bloody hell couldn’t he ignore the fragrance of this woman’s skin?

“
We
do nothing.
You
feel free to read whatever you like to your heart’s content. I’ll touch an item and eliminate it. The faster I go, the faster I—we—can get out of here.”

“I know a way to speed things up,” she told him, leaning forward so that his entire body clenched in response to her closeness. “We can eliminate anything bigger than a bread box. The artifacts he brought back will be small.” She gave him a cheeky smile, which chipped another flake from the rock of his heart.

He stared back at her for a beat or two—debating—then decided that if he put his mouth anywhere near her mouth, he’d be screwed. He’d been hired to do a job. He’d do that job. No more. No less.

That meant no fraternizing with the client.

No touching.

No inhaling.

Absolutely no kissing.

“Small enough not to declare when he came through customs? Then they wouldn’t be here,” he pointed out, trying to get out of her gravitational pull, but without success. “The museum wouldn’t countenance—”

“Small enough to have in his
pockets
when he was knocked out. He had handfuls of small rocks and things in his pockets, notes and little bits of pottery. I didn’t really look. The museum asked that I send them
everything
. I just tossed the last bits and pieces into a box and shipped it. I’ll look for the box. Maybe they haven’t had a chance to go through it yet.”

“Right.” He checked the map a couple of times, broadening the latitude and longitude for each location to be eliminated, then got to his feet, pulling on the white cotton gloves given to them when they’d been let into the storage area. She was sitting far too close. He’d been attracted to a lot of women—some even at first sight. But never like this.
Attraction
was a mild word for it. He was in a state of semi-arousal all the time. Uncomfortable as hell. “You can go shopping if you like. We can meet back at the hotel later.” Where, given half a glance of encouragement, he’d have her naked
and flat on her back in minutes flat. Mutual satisfaction guaranteed.

No. Fucking. Fraternizing.

What did he need to remind him? A two-by-four across the head? There was somewhere a lot lower where a hard blow would be more effective. Unfortunately, he was far too conscious of that region of his body already.

“I didn’t come all this way to go shopping,” she responded cheerfully. “What?” she asked, when he gave her a pointed look.

“You’re blocking my workspace,” he said briskly, wondering how long before she realized this was a hopeless task and called it quits.

She grinned. “You do your thing, and I’ll see if any of his papers give us a clue.” He waited for her to roll her chair back across the room, then observed her graceful return to her cross-legged position among the boxes.

She left a drift of spicy cinnamon in her wake.

FOUR

I
sis adored her father. But Holy Mother of God, the man loved writing notes. Copious, rather dry notes, hundreds and hundreds of pages of them, many of them accompanied by extraordinarily bad sketches. She read until her eyes crossed, then persuaded Thorne to take her to lunch in the cafeteria, since they weren’t allowed to eat in the storage rooms.

He’d been taciturn while they ate, then hurried her back downstairs. “I really appreciate how dedicated you are to helping me; it’s very sweet of you,” she told him as they walked downstairs. His slight limp and the use of the cane didn’t impede his speed, and she suspected that without his injury he’d take the stairs three at a time and leave her in the dust.

He paused midstep to raise a brow. A muscle jerked in his jaw.
“Sweet?”

She smiled at his clear distaste at being called that. “
Kind
of you.”

“I’m neither sweet nor kind. You paid for my services, I’ll do my best to ensure you get your money’s worth.”

“Does your leg hurt?” She knew it
hurt
—she wanted
to know to what degree. Isis was pretty sure he wouldn’t be so bad-tempered and surly if he weren’t in pain.

He glanced at her as they reached the landing. A group of teachers and a gaggle of schoolkids clattered past them, and they stepped aside to let the herd pass. “No,” he told her succinctly when they resumed their descent.

She was worried about him standing for hours, but the only way she could get him to sit down had been to insist she was hungry so they could go upstairs to the cafeteria.

They unlocked the door and turned on the lights. “Why is your injury such a big secret?”

“It’s not a secret. It’s none of your business.”