Danger in the Desert

by Merline Lovelace

  She pressed harder, her hips against his, her arms tight around his neck. And felt a spear of sheer exultation when his masculinity rose up to answer the urgent demand of her womanhood.

  With an oath, he pushed inside and kicked the door shut. A quick fumble set the door chain. To Jaci’s delight, his hands then got rougher, his mouth more insistent.

  She responded in kind, attacking his shirt buttons and dragging the tails free of his slacks. Her hands planed the sculpted contours of his chest. He yanked her short-sleeved tank up and over her head. Her bra came off next, with a skill that left her half gasping, half laughing.

  “You weren’t kidding. You’re good, Griffin.”

  Busy exploring her breasts, he flashed her a quick grin. “Thanks, darlin’.”

  Within moments her nipples were turgid and aching and her knees so weak they threatened to give out under her. Deke solved that problem by scooping her into his arms and carrying her across the room.

  It was a standard tourist hotel room furnished in an Egyptian motif. Moorish arches topped the windows. The spread and drapes were printed with palms and colorful figures from antiquity. If Jaci leaned over the balcony railing, she could just catch a glimpse of the Nile through the maze of hotels crowding the river.

  She didn’t spare the decor or the view a single glance as Deke deposited her on the bed. She lay there, aching for him, while he yanked the drapes shut. When he sat on the edge of the bed to remove his shoes and socks, she thought she heard the faint snick of Velcro.

  She started to ask him about it but he stood up again to strip off his shirt, slacks and shorts. Jaci’s mouth got drier with each article of clothing that hit the floor. And when he turned to face her, the erection jutting from its nest of dark hair almost made her swallow her tongue.

  “Remember those wall paintings we saw this afternoon in the tomb of the king’s physician?” she got out on a hoarse note. “The men with the, uh, exaggerated attributes.”

  Deke sent her a questioning look. “Yeah?”

  “They have nothing on you.”

  Laughter leaped into his eyes. It was still there when he put a knee on the edge of the bed and leaned over her. “First time I’ve ever been compared to dead guys.”

  “First time I’ve ever had occasion to make the comparison,” Jaci returned as she lifted her arms to welcome him.

  He turned to stone, his body half covering hers. She looked up, startled by the frown that suddenly creased his forehead.

  “Are you telling me you’ve never had sex?”

  “What? No!”

  “No, you haven’t had sex or no, that’s not what you’re telling me?”

  Of all the ridiculous conversations to be having with Deke’s naked body hovering two inches above her quivering breasts!

  “No, that’s not what I’m telling you. But since we’re on the subject, I’d better warn you my experience is probably somewhat more, uh, limited than yours.”

  His frown vanished, replaced by the grin that turned her bones to mush. “Not a problem. I’m willing to share my expertise.”

  More than willing.

  Ace wanted this woman so bad he hurt. He’d held back last night, forced himself to remember his mission. He’d been sent to determine her involvement, if any, in the bizarre plot supposedly being hatched by a wild-eyed fringe group determined to bring down Egypt’s present government.

  As far as Ace was concerned, he’d completed his mission. Both he and Kahil had agreed. Jacqueline Thornton had no part in the plot swirling around her.

  He was convinced of that…despite those odd moments. Like when Jaci was on the dance floor at the Golden Salamander. And a few minutes ago, when she made that crack about going with the cosmic flow. For a second there—just a second—he’d wondered again if she might actually have some spiritual link to this ancient Egyptian goddess.

  When he looked down at her flushed face and quivering body, the crazy notion slammed into him again. If there was such a thing as cosmic order, this had to be it. She was all woman, timeless in what she offered. He was male and determined to take that gift.

  Oh, hell! He was making this too damned complicated. He wanted her, she wanted him. Now his only need was to give her a healthy dose of hot, sweet pleasure.

  He took his time about it. She was so open, so eager that her every gasp, every moan and shiver of delight wound him tighter and tighter. Rock hard and aching, he figured he’d better perform while he still could.

  “Don’t move,” he ordered, planting a hard kiss on her mouth.

  “Why? What are you doing?” she asked as he rolled off her.

  “Making sure you don’t take any incoming.”

  “Huh?”

  “Once a fighter pilot, always a fighter pilot, sweet heart.” Scooping up his slacks, Ace fished a condom out of his wallet and held it up. “We’re always prepared to engage.”

  While she dissolved into giggles, he ripped the packet open and sheathed himself. The moment he rejoined her in bed, her levity vanished.

  Ace braced himself on his forearms and felt an unaccustomed twinge of guilt push through the heat. He should tell her who he was—why he’d appeared on the plateau above the Giza pyramids when he had.

  He’d get clearance from Lightning, he decided. Later. At that moment, all he wanted was to bury himself in her warm, welcoming flesh.

  Two hours and two mutually explosive orgasms later, Jaci dropped into exhausted slumber. Ace cut off the lights and cradled her against him, waiting until her breathing evened and her body grew slack.

  Strange. At this point he was usually calculating how to make a graceful exit from the hotel room. Now he had to fight the urge to hold her like this until they were both ready for round three.

  Reluctantly, he rolled her onto her side and eased off the bed. Force of habit had him reaching for the ankle holster he’d hidden out of sight, under the mattress. One pat verified the weapon was still there and easily accessible.

  Retrieving his cell phone, Ace dragged on his slacks. He padded barefoot through the darkened room to the balcony. The sliding glass doors closed behind him, and Cairo’s noxious night smog seeped into his lungs as he flipped up the phone.

  Rebel’s face materialized on the screen mere seconds later. A spiderweb of red showed in the whites of her eyes and her usually sleek honey-blond hair looked as though she’d combed it with a rake. Ace knew she wouldn’t turn the desk over to her backup unless she dropped, though. He wouldn’t, either.

  “Yo,” she said with a smile that belied her obvious weariness. “What’s happening?”

  “Tell Lightning that Kahil had the scarab evaluated by experts at the Cairo Museum. Looks like it could be the real thing.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I wish.”

  “So there may be something to this crazy legend?”

  “If there is, Thornton doesn’t know anything about it. Or believe it, for that matter. She couldn’t stop giggling when Kahil told her the story.”

  They didn’t usually go after targets who giggled or targets who got Ace rethinking his whole modus operandi concerning women.

  “Kahil and I agree she’s an innocent bystander. I’m going to hustle her out of Cairo tomorrow.”

  “Want me to make the arrangements?”

  “Yeah, thanks. In the meantime, I…”

  He broke off, his entire body coiling as a thin sliver of light suddenly lanced through the dimness across the room. Jaw locked, Ace watched the door to the hall crack open another inch.

  “Well, hell,” he muttered to Rebel. “We’ve got visitors.”

  The chain lock went taut. Ace was already yanking on the handle to the sliding glass doors when a pair of bolt cutters severed the chain.

  Chapter 8

  Always afterward Jaci would shudder every time she remembered the terrifying sequence of events that night.

  Something jerked her from sleep. A thud? The rattle of the sliding glass door? When t
he mattress seemed to heave on one side of the bed, she raised her head and blinked in confusion at the shadowy silhouette looming over her. All she saw, all she had time to see, was a slice of his midsection. Dark slacks. Bare chest. A white-knuckled fist gripping a pistol.

  Then a hard hand clamped over her mouth and pinned her to the pillow. Still confused and disoriented, Jaci reacted without thinking. She bit down hard on the fleshy part of the hand, heard a swift hiss and scissor-kicked off the bed. Or tried to. Her legs caught in the tangled sheets, and her panic-driven momentum sent her careening into her attacker.

  “Dammit, Jaci, get down!”

  Deke? That was Deke holding a gun on her? The terrifying realization spurred her to frenzy. Kicking, flailing, fighting desperately to get free of the sheets, she grabbed his gun hand with both of hers and screeched at the top of her lungs. “Help! Help!”

  She heard the sound of running feet, or thought she did. Hanging on for dear life, she wrestled with the man she’d surrendered herself to so completely such a short time ago….

  “For God’s sake!”

  With a vicious curse, he wrenched free and shoved her to the floor beside the bed. She landed with a thud, still caught in the sheets. Frantic, she kicked them off and scrambled up enough to see Deke charge across the room and race through the door.

  Light spilled into the bedroom from the hallway. Panting, Jaci stared at that patch of corridor. Terror roared in her ears. Her mind spun with shock and confusion.

  Was he gone? Had her screams scared him off? Or…or… Oh, God! Was that the door chain dangling in two pieces?

  He’d cut it, she thought on a fresh spurt of panic. Or shattered it when he’d bolted out. She was on her knees, scrambling for the phone beside the bed, when the fact that the door had already been open when Deke charged across the room penetrated her blind panic. She was trying to make sense of that when another realization slammed into her. The room phone was dead. There was no buzz. No beep as she repeatedly stabbed the keys. Nothing!

  She leaped to her feet, determined to get the hell out of there, and realized she was naked. She grabbed Deke’s shirt on the run, got one arm in a sleeve and skidded to a stop.

  He’d reappeared, blocking the exit. His bare chest heaved, and his eyes were savage. The gun, she saw on an icy shaft of terror, was still gripped in his right hand. In his left, he clutched a green-and-white-striped cloth.

  “Wh…? What do you want?” She backed away, clutching his shirt to her breasts. “Money? My credit cards? Take them!”

  “Jaci, it’s all right.”

  He lowered the gun. In direct contrast to her panic-laced cry, his voice was calm, deliberate.

  “This isn’t what it seems. I’m not who I seem.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Listen to me. I’m an undercover operative. I work for a U.S. government agency, one you’ve never heard of.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain later. Right now, you’d better get dressed. I need to call Kahil before they decide to come back and try again.”

  “Before who comes back?”

  When he hefted the striped cloth, she caught a whiff of an obnoxious—and strangely familiar—odor.

  “Your camel driver, for one. I didn’t get a good look at the other two.”

  Gaping, Jaci struggled with the astounding possibility that a camel driver and two accomplices had tried to break in to her room.

  “They’d hit the bottom of the fire escape and jumped in their car before I got halfway down the stairs,” Deke informed her. “You put up quite a fight, woman.”

  “I tend to do that when I wake up to find a pistol two inches from my nose!”

  “Sorry about that.”

  He didn’t look sorry. Just the opposite, in fact. His expression got scary again as he shut the door behind him.

  “Get dressed,” he said again. “I’ll call Kahil.”

  “The…the room phone’s dead.”

  “Not surprised. They probably used a jammer to scramble the phone and jimmy the electronic door lock. The security cameras in the hall, too.”

  When he flipped open his phone, Jaci decided she had two choices. One, she could take his word for it that he was some kind of government agent. Two, she could yank open the door while he was dialing the number and run like hell.

  Her glance went to the broken door chain again. Now that her panic had subsided, she could see the links had been cut. She’d gotten up close and personal enough with Deke—if that was really his name!—to feel confident the man hadn’t been packing bolt cutters anywhere on his person.

  Then again, she’d had no idea he’d carried a weapon, either. Gulping, Jaci gathered her scattered clothing and retreated to the bathroom.

  When she emerged some moments later, her room swarmed with people. A fully clothed Deke introduced her to two serious-looking hotel security personnel and a uniformed police officer. Another guest wearing one of the hotel’s terry cloth robes had also materialized. He was one of Jaci’s fellow tour group members and had heard what he described as a commotion in the hall.

  “I tried to call the front desk,” he related to the police officer, “but the phone in my room didn’t work. Then I peeked through the door and saw this man.” He pointed to Deke. “He was running down the hall—with a gun in his hand.”

  “Did you see any other persons?” the police officer asked in heavily accented English.

  “No, only him.”

  “Thank you, sir. You may…”

  He was interrupted by a fierce demand. “What’s going on?”

  A grimly determined Mrs. Grimes pushed her way into the room, hefting a bedside lamp in both hands like a baseball bat. Her short, snowy hair lay flat against her temple on one side and sprouted in all directions on the other.

  “Jaci! Are you all right?”

  “I am now. Took me a while to push my heart out of my throat and back down into my chest, though.”

  “What happened?” The older woman’s nose wrinkled. “And what’s that awful smell?”

  Deke nodded to the green-and-white cloth now draped over the back of the desk chair. “One of Jaci’s late night-visitors left it behind. Look familiar?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “Jaci was wearing a head scarf made of this material when you took pictures of her aboard that camel.”

  “You’re right! But how…” Mrs. Grimes stopped, her eyes widening. “Dear God! White slavers. I had the right idea but the wrong villain.”

  Her face drained of all color. Aghast, she turned back to Jaci.

  “That man…that camel driver. He led you away from our group deliberately. I bet you anything he was trying to kidnap you.” She shuddered. “He must have come back tonight to finish the job. Thank heavens Deke was here to foil his plans. Again.”

  The reason for Deke’s handy presence suddenly dawned on Mrs. Grimes. She darted a quick look at the unmade bed but refrained from comment. Just as well. She’d given her travel companion more than enough to think about.

  Jaci’s mind was whirling with the possibility her aborted camel ride might have been the prelude to a kidnap attempt! She was still trying to grasp the incredible possibility when Colonel El Hassan appeared on the scene. Mrs. Grimes and the other tour member had gone back to their rooms, reluctantly persuaded by the presence of the police and security personnel. And by Deke’s grim assurance that he didn’t intend to let Jaci out of his sight until they got the situation sorted out.

  The situation, as he termed it, took on even grimmer overtones with Kahil El Hassan’s arrival. He brought several men with him and barked out orders like the senior officer he was. Since the orders were in Egyptian, as was his lengthy conversation with the men who’d arrived first on the scene, Jaci began to feel more like an observer than a participant. She huddled on the edge of the bed and tried to remind herself that she could get mugged in Gainesville, Florida, as well as Cairo. But kidnapped?

  Sold to wh
ite slavers?

  Maybe. Women disappeared off the streets all the time, at home and abroad. She’d just never imagined it could happen to her.

  Nor had she ever imagined she would wake up to find Deke Griffin standing over her with a gun! That searing image unsettled her almost as much as the thwarted invasion of her room.

  She chewed on her lower lip, studying Deke as he and Kahil conversed out in the hall. Now that her terror had subsided, the realization that she’d made wild, uninhibited love with someone who claimed to be a secret agent was just starting to sink in.

  Her lip was almost raw when the two men reentered the bedroom. The remainder of the crowd dispersed. At the request of Colonel El Hassan, hotel security officials went to review their surveillance tapes. The uniformed police officer departed with the green-and-white scarf in an evidence bag.

  Now she was left alone with Kahil El Hassan…and the man she pinned with a hard stare.

  “Who are you?”

  The quick look the two men exchanged confirmed her growing certainty that they knew a whole lot more about what was going on here than she did. It also generated a wave of volatile emotions. Disgust at her own naïveté and embarrassment at how easily she’d been duped topped the list. But it was hot, searing anger that brought her off the bed.

  “Who are you, dammit?”

  “Exactly who I said I was,” Deke answered.

  “Right,” she sneered. “The CEO of an aviation consulting company who, by the way, just happens to be a secret agent.”

  “That pretty well sums it up.”

  The laconic reply stoked her fury.

  Jaci rarely got angry. She could probably count on the fingers on one hand the number of times she’d ever lost her temper. And she’d never resorted to violence! At this moment, though, she seriously considered hurling something heavy at Deke Griffin’s head. In fact…

  Propelled by the sickening certainty that she’d made a complete and utter fool of herself, she followed Mrs. Grimes’s example. Two strides took her to the nightstand beside the bed. One swift yank separated the lamp’s cord from the plug. With the heavy lamp in hand, she faced two extremely astonished men.