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 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