Relentless - By Cherry Adair Page 0,20

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.

Body flooded with heat, he gritted his teeth and kept his tone even and cool with effort. “I’ll use this”—he held up a handheld device similar to a GPS, but government issue—“and we’ll know where he was. I’ll compare artifacts to digs. Anything that doesn’t match up might—and I stress might—be from the tomb at the mystery location.”

This, he knew, was an exercise in futility. He’d humor her for today. Tomorrow he’d return to Seattle with or without her.

She chewed the corner of her lower lip, the pen poised over the pad as she tried to remember. “The Hor-Aha dig was 2008 and well into 2009. That was near—can you show me a map?”

Thorne removed the map he’d procured from his office last evening, unfolded it, and spread it on the floor in front of her. When she leaned over it, he had a glimpse of the lightly tanned swell of her breasts. Jesus God. He was as randy as a schoolboy. He rolled his chair far enough away so that parallax hid her attributes from his avaricious view.

He’d endured Boris Yermalof’s brand of retribution with more equanimity than dealing with Isis Magee. She affected him more than she should. More than he wanted her to.

She glanced up to give him an inquiring look. “Do you usually carry a map in your pocket?”

“I carry whatever is required for the job.” Be it a map or an Uzi. He had to roll the chair closer to see where she was pointing on the large unfolded map. He inhaled cinnamon, which made him dizzy, which in turn annoyed him. The smell of her wasn’t seductive in any way, shape, or fucking form. Someone should send a memo to his dick. “Give me my pen back. I’ll write down the coordinates.”

She did so, and he managed not to brush her fingers with his, and even managed not to inhale the warm scent of her skin. Waiting until she moved away to take a breath, he wrote down the approximate location of each of the professor’s findings. In this case, approximate was good enough. He didn’t need to go there, just eliminate each as he touched the artifact. Whatever remained unaccounted for, would, in a perfect world, be the tomb of Queen Cleopatra. Since Thorne knew how damned imperfect the world was, he wasn’t holding his breath.

“Is that it?” he asked when she’d finished identifying where her father had been for the past five years. That should be far enough back.

“Oh! Wait, I think he helped a friend on the Neferirkare dig for a few weeks three years ago. It’s right… here.” She pointed at the location on the map, then met his gaze. “Yes. That’s everything.”

There was a gap of a few months where he’d been stateside, and then the months he’d spent nailing down the location and ostensibly found the tomb.

Ready to go to work, Thorne made a makeshift desk from a stack of boxes, then placed his map, GPS device, notepad, and pen out. He sat down to make some notes, glad to get off his leg for a minute or two. It ached and burned.

Two seconds later Isis walked her chair right up beside him. “Now what do we do?” Thorne didn’t get it. He’d lain in a swamp in Central Africa, oblivious to the stench surrounding him as he out waited his quarry. He’d smelled his partner’s blood as well as his own when Yermalof had tortured the crap out of them. Why the bloody hell couldn’t he ignore the fragrance of this woman’s skin?

“We do nothing. You feel free to read whatever you like to your heart’s content. I’ll touch an item and eliminate it. The faster I go, the faster I—we—can get out of here.”

“I know a way to speed things up,” she told him, leaning forward so that his entire body clenched in response to her closeness. “We can eliminate anything bigger than a bread box. The artifacts he brought back will be small.” She gave him a cheeky smile, which chipped another flake from the rock of his heart.

He stared back at her for a beat or two—debating—then decided that if he put his mouth anywhere near

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