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 was 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