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