by Cherry Adair
The bedside lamp flashed on. “Just call me Thorne” was lying on the bed, hands stacked behind his head. “Where the bloody hell have you been all night?”
Isis gave him a cool look. He looked delicious, his hair rumpled, a pillow crease across his cheek. “Would you like to rephrase that?” she asked pleasantly as she put her bag on the desk and started removing her coat. His cane leaned against the back of the chair.
“Where have you been, and with whom?”
“Camilla and Charles invited me for dinner. I hated to say no.” She walked to the narrow closet and hung up her coat and scarf. “And how did you get into my room? I locked the door when I left.”
He sat up, swinging his bare feet to the floor. He had huge feet, even for a man over six foot three. Just looking at his feet turned her on. “To go where?” he demanded tightly. “You didn’t bother leaving a note, or a phone message. For all I knew, you were abducted.”
Isis sat in the chair by the desk, out of his pacing path, and shot him an amused look. He was mad. She could see that as he limped-stalked, limped-stalked. But his anger was over-the-top and totally illogical. “Really? By whom?” She toed off her shoes. Damn, her feet were cold. She rubbed them together as he prowled.
Raking his fingers through his short hair, he glared at her.
Amused, she grinned. Her smile slipped a bit as she said casually, “I might ask the same question. Were you with a woman?” She didn’t like the idea that her Thorne had been out carousing with another woman, but she was hardly going to tell him that. Nor, quite frankly, did she want to claim ownership, even to herself. He wasn’t hers. Would never be hers. She cocked her head, considering how she might just borrow him for a while.
He arched a brow. “If I was, it would have absolutely nothing to do with you. We’re here on business, remember? We go to the museum tomorrow; maybe we’ll find something, maybe we won’t. If we do, I’ll give you the location. I’ll go back to Seattle and you can go and find this tomb that no one has any interest in.”
No longer amused, she felt her entire body bristle at his condescending, supercilious tone. “That suits me just fine. The museum opens at ten. We’ll leave the hotel at nine forty-five.”
He closed the gap between them in two long strides to close his fingers around her upper arms and lift her out of the chair.
“All I could think about for the last five hours was the taste of you.”
“You don’t sound particularly happy about it,” Isis muttered as he pulled her onto her toes.
He slid one arm around her waist, his hand gliding up her back, easing her forward in small degrees, until she was molded to him, thigh to thigh. His body couldn’t lie. He was very happy to be with her. “I don’t do flowers and romance.” His fingers slid inexorably up the furrow of her spine until he tangled his fingers in the hair at her nape.
She gave him an exaggerated look of shock. “Color me not in the least bit surprised.” A little dazed at the powerful sensations coursing through her, she felt her lips curve. “I’ll add that to the list. Number two: don’t do romance. Check. I already have that you ‘don’t do tombs.’ Got it. Anything else you don’t do?”
His eyes looked very green and extremely annoyed as he yanked her incrementally closer until not even a breath came between their bodies. “Why the hell did you kiss me?”
“I wanted to.” The more annoyed he got, the more amused she became. “You looked like you needed a kiss. You liked it. I liked it.” A lot! “We’re both adults. Why not?” She noticed the nerve jumping in his jaw and the pulse racing at the base of his throat. She placed both hands on his chest and felt the thud-thud-thud of his heart beneath the hard muscles of his chest, through the crisp cotton of his starched shirt.
“You can’t just kiss a man senseless, then walk away.”
His skin was scorching hot through the fabric. She kept her hands still, though she wanted to glide them all over him in exploration. But for now, simply touching him was enough. She enjoyed the sizzle and pulse of the electricity arcing between them. She didn’t have to act on it to enjoy the moment. She liked the feel of him. The smell of him. The complexity of him.
The knowledge that there couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, anything beyond attraction and momentary satisfaction was at once tempting and a strong deterrent. She wanted an emotional connection with a lover. As far as she could tell, Thorne wasn’t the kind of man who’d connect with a woman with anything more than his libido.
That wasn’t enough for her, no matter how badly she craved his touch, No matter how much she wanted to fall into bed with him. Emotionless sex wasn’t what she wanted or needed. No matter how loudly her body screamed otherwise. “We were in a cab,” she pointed out reasonably as he stroked her back, which was in no way soothing, nor did it help her resolve. Her breasts felt heavy, and the ache in her very center pulsed with every heavy heartbeat. “You chose to drive off into the sunset without a backward glance.” That wasn’t really fair to say, but it was fun lobbing the ball back into his court just to see his eyes narrow and glitter.
“Clearly a tactical error.” His gaze was hard, his intent crystal clear. Either he was going to kill her or kiss her senseless. She couldn’t wait to find out.
She rose on her toes, leaning in so their mouths were closer. Was his heartbeat a little erratic? She thought so. Hers certainly was. He’d been drinking brandy. She smelled it on his breath and wanted to taste what he’d tasted. “Wars have been lost on less,” she murmured against his mouth. He smelled so good, she was drunk on it. Brandy and starch and the unique smell of his skin combined to make her dizzy with longing.
He said roughly, “Damn it, Isis—” Then groaned as he crushed his mouth on hers.
Her mouth opened willingly, letting him in, tasting the tang of brandy on his tongue. Heat flared at every pulse point as she slid her hands up his chest and around his neck. His hair was too short for her fingers to tangle in the strands, but she cupped the back of his head, urging the kiss to deepen, loving the slick tangle of tongues and the hard edge of his teeth on her lower lip. Her muscles turned to water. Seething, hot water that melted her bones and flushed her skin.
He lifted his head, his breath fragmented as he dragged in air. “You must stop kissing me, Isis Magee.” His lips skimmed her mouth, trailed to her jaw as his arms tightened around her with steely strength. The words were hardly out of his mouth before he swooped his mouth back on hers and took the kiss from hot to incendiary. It was a kiss unlike any Isis had ever had, and had only imagined earlier that day in the cab. She’d thought that was hot. But this was no-holds-barred vertical sex, even though their hands were in noninflammatory places.
“Okay.” She pressed her damp mouth against his hot neck so she could get a few breaths. “Sure.” Felt the hard, rapid pounding of his pulse in the cord of his neck, and took a little bite, then laved the wound with slow sweeps of her tongue, tasting salt and need and wanting more. “Fine.”
She disengaged, then thought better of it, and reached up and kissed him on the mouth again. Faster this time, but no less satisfying. “You have to go now.”
“Go?” He blinked her into focus. “Go where?”
“To your own room. I’m not having sex with you tonight, Connor James Thorne.”
“You’ve got to be—Why the bloody hell not?”
“Because you’re just not ready for me.”
THEY ARRIVED AT THE museum precisely at ten and were taken into the bowels of the building to the large room housing Dr. Magee’s contribution, which was being readied for exhibition in the Egyptian wing.
The Earl had made the call, and his request had opened the door, literally. They had until closing to be alone with Professor Magee’s artifacts. Given the sheer volume of the task, Thorne had better move fast.
He surveyed the walls lined with shelves and drawers and visually divided the room into zones as he removed his suit jacket and hung it over a chair back. Thorne’s one indulgence w
as clothes. He favored custom shirts and suits, and this Fioravanti had been hand-delivered to him just before he left London several months before. Not quite the correct garment to wear in the basement of a museum, but it was what had been close at hand when he’d dressed this morning.
There must be thousands of objects, small and large, and boxes and boxes of papers and files. Everything neatly cataloged.
The prospect of finding anything connected to the mythical tomb was daunting. Especially since Thorne didn’t believe said tomb even existed in the first place.
Hot, sweaty, hard-driving sex was what he needed, Thorne thought as he watched Isis’s shapely jean-clad arse bent over a box. With her. Get it out of his system and off his mind. The woman blew hot and cold, making him insane, and they’d barely known each other two bloody days.
Instead of waiting to have breakfast together, she’d eaten at the tearoom across the street. So when he, being a team player, knocked on her door to escort her down at eight in the damned morning, she informed him she wasn’t hungry.
So now, hours later, he was starving, and she, perversely, wasn’t hungry at all. She was also too damned cheerful. Without cause.
Her pale blue jeans accentuated her long legs and tight butt, and a canary-yellow long-sleeved T-shirt outlined her breasts to the point of distraction. As usual her glasses were smudged. Itching to take them off her face to clean them, he reminded himself he was not the woman’s nanny. The reality was, he didn’t trust himself to touch her, even casually. She was maddening, pure provocation disguised beneath innocuous, innocence-scented skin. Isis might smell like a damned cookie, but just looking at her brought out a primitive me-Tarzan, you-Jane need to strip her bare and take her right there on the cement floor.
She shouldn’t be so enticing, and Thorne was damned sure that once he’d had sex with her, he’d go back to normal.
But all he could think of was how it would feel to rip off her clothes and feast on her pale skin. How it would feel to slam into her wet heat and feel her legs wrapped tightly around his waist.
Her wild curls were held on top of her head this morning with some lethal-looking stick, but half of her hair had already sprung loose, and dark spirals danced around her face as she worked. She needed tidying up. But that would require he touch her. Not going to happen.
She’d left the hotel with glossy pink lips, which had been sexy as hell, but now Thorne realized her unpainted mouth was even sexier. Her big brown eyes looked bigger subtly smudged with color, the black-framed glasses making her look like a sexy schoolteacher.
Despite his foul mood, which he made no effort to conceal, she remained as smiling and friendly as the girl next door.
But there hadn’t been a girl next door, and no girl next door smelled as mouthwateringly sensual as Isis Magee. She wore perfume guaranteed to drive him insane in such close quarters. Was cinnamon even a perfume? Spice and sex. He wished he could open a window to dissipate the pheromones. Go to a larger room. Another continent. Instead he was stuck in the small, Isis-scented room for the duration.
His debt to Zak Stark was going to be marked PAID IN FULL.
“How should we go about this?” Isis asked, looking around, suddenly misty-eyed as she saw her father’s life’s work collected in one place. Or because—God only knew why women cried.
“By not bursting into tears because you miss Daddy,” he told her unsympathetically.
She blinked back moisture and gave him a tremulous smile that nibbled a little hole in his heart. “You’re absolutely right. We’ll honor his legacy by finding Cleopatra’s tomb and showing the world just how brilliant he is.”
Or spin their wheels, find absolutely nothing, and prove Magee was indeed a charlatan. “Right. Let’s get to work.”
“Did you know all Ptolemaic queens were called Cleopatra or Arsinoë or Berenice?”
No, and neither did he care. What had she meant last night, anyway? He wanted to demand an answer to the “You’re not ready for me” statement. But to ask meant he was thinking about it, and he didn’t want her to know he’d given her rejection a moment’s thought. Damn her. It was some kind of psychological game she was playing. Well, he wasn’t a player. Either she wanted him or she didn’t. It was only sex, for God’s sake.
He could, and damn well should, get his itch scratched somewhere else. Sex was nothing more than a physical release. Hell, he could take care of that on his own.
“She was queen of Egypt, but Cleo wasn’t Egyptian.” Isis took a pile of papers out of the bottom drawer of the cabinet and settled them in her lap to look through. “She was the last of the Macedonian Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt from the time of Alexander the Great’s death to about thirty BCE. She co-ruled with her father when she was about eighteen, then married her much younger brother, which is a big ew, but that’s how it was done in those days.”
Putting the papers back in the drawer, she closed it and swiveled on her behind to survey a pile of nearby boxes. She didn’t appear to have a system, but it kept her out of his hair. Apparently she couldn’t work without chitchatting, and he half tuned her out.
“Pharaohs married siblings to ensure rulership, but her kid brother had powerful guardians, and when they got wind she was trying to get rid of him, they instigated a revolt and expelled her from Alexandria. Where were you last night anyway?” she asked, without a segue.
Thorne glanced up with a puzzled frown. Where was the connection between Cleopatra and his absence the night before?
Annoyed with himself—a., for caring, and b., for having to look at her—he scowled. The woman got under his skin and burrowed there, whether he wanted her there or not. If he had to be here, if he had to be here with her, why couldn’t she be plain and plump? The old adage about men never making passes at girls with glasses was bullshit.
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 h
is 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.
