the men who’d hauled Thorne to safety the last time he’d been here. The man was instrumental in saving his life. If there was anyone Thorne owed a debt of gratitude, it was this man.
Heustis opened the door for Isis, then shut it to walk around the front of the vehicle with Thorne. “Drew the short straw for babysitting duty, Thorne. You can’t seem to keep your butt out of trouble.”
“It’s a skill,” Thorne said as he opened the back door. “Keep your eyes and ears open. We seem to have gained a fan club.”
“Will do.”
It was nine in the morning, and already heat shimmered on the streets and made the air thick enough to chew. Isis, wearing a new eye-popping orange T-shirt and loose-fitting white cotton pants, turned in her seat to look at him. Her glasses, as usual, were smudged.
“You owe me seventeen more answers,” she told him, as Heustis drove them to the souk without further comment. Oblivious to where Thorne’s thoughts were, she wanted to take responsibility for something that had nothing to do with her. But if he told her that neither she nor her father had anything to do with this, he’d have to tell her about the Russian.
She was scared enough as it was.
No. He’d make up some bullshit story, put her on a plane bound stateside, and hunt down Yermalof like the demented bastard that he was.
He used both hands to remove her glasses by the earpieces, then she waited, a smile curving her lips, for him to clean them on the hem of her shirt. Lifting the soft cotton exposed a smile of pale skin and her belly button. Thorne wanted to kiss her right there. Hell’s bells, he wanted to kiss her all over. He handed her back the clean glasses, drunk on cinnamon.
“If you stop touching them,” he admonished with more annoyance than the act warranted, “you wouldn’t have fingerprints blurring your vision.”
“Thanks.” Sliding them back on, she managed to leave a thumbprint right in her field of vision. “I’ll make a note of that. Although that wasn’t an answer.”
Last night over a late-night dinner he’d answered the questions he wanted to and evaded the rest. Isis was determined.
He was motivated to keep the truth to himself. Isis’s concern gave him a convenient excuse to hire a driver/guard. While she was busy confessing to a nonexistent crime, he had to protect them both from Yermalof.
Thorne was good, damned good at what he did, but even he wouldn’t be able to fend off a half-dozen professional assassins if that’s who they decided to send next. Not with his leg, not with Isis with him. Taking on a gang of cutthroats worked in movies, but real life didn’t have a director to yell cut, or a stunt double to take the bullet. If the attack had been instigated by Yermalof, screw Thorne’s ego. He’d take all the backup required to protect Isis until he saw her safely on a plane.
He had feelers out to see if Yermalof was anywhere near Cairo. Yermalof or one of his unsavory friends. If such was the case, he’d lead the son of a bitch as far away from Egypt and Isis’s business as possible.
“How do you feel about marriage?”
That came out of left field. He was pretty sure she wasn’t proposing marriage on such short acquaintance. “I have no feelings for it one way or another. In the short term, it’s a fine institution. For some.”
She twisted in her seat to face him, causing the seat belt to divide her breasts, which drew Thorne’s attention somewhere he didn’t want to look. “Not for you?”
He thought of his father, an emotionally cold, granite statue determined to master his universe, and his mother, calm and blank when medicated either by booze or pills. Certainly he was destined to bow to the same genetic coding. Few marriages, if any, could survive that. He changed his depth perception so she was slightly out of focus. “No.”
She cocked her head. “What if you meet the perfect woman for you?”
There was a snort from the front seat.
“My dear,” Thorne told her coolly, “there are hundreds of women perfect for me. If I married them all I’d be a polygamist. I have yet to see a marriage that endures. It’s an antiquated institution that leaves financial ruin in its wake, or two very unhappy people who ‘stay together for the children.’ I don’t like failing at anything, and I’m not stupid enough