made her skin prickle, and an unhappy swish curled through her stomach. Isis tried not to be an alarmist. Just because trigger-happy people had chased them—twice—didn’t mean Dylan was part of some nefarious plot. The men in the underpass the night before had beaten the crap out of Thorne, not her. Her reaction was just a knee-jerk reaction to what was going on.
“It’s not such a stretch,” she told him, trying to be reasonable instead of reactive. “This is where his work is, after all. He worked for my father for years, but he’s probably working for someone else now.”
“Let’s find out who.” He lifted his hip to remove his phone from his pocket.
He didn’t greet whoever answered the phone, merely gave his name, paused, and then said, “Give me a full report on a Dylan Brengard—who he’s working for, and when he arrived in Cairo. Give me dates. Any intel on my old friend?” Pause. “Yes,” his voice was curt. “I am. And I will.” He didn’t say goodbye, just shoved the phone back into his pocket.
“Who was that?” Isis demanded, resting her bent knee on the seat as she turned her whole body to face him. The time for his prevarication was over. Clearly Connor Thorne was not just some private eye. His connections went deeper than that, and his incredible fighting and defense skills screamed military. She wanted answers, and she damn well wanted them now. “What old friend?”
He blatantly ignored her question and fired off one of his own in return. “How many years did Dylan work for the professor?”
“Damn it, Thorne! Answer my questions first.”
“Your questions aren’t a matter of life and death.”
“You’re full of crap! You just don’t want to answer me. If you refuse to answer any of my perfectly reasonable—and, I might add, pertinent—questions, then how can I be the judge of that? For all I know you’re the bad guy and you’re doing all this to scare me into…” She had no idea what because she was so mad her mouth was going faster than her brain.
“. . . leading you to my father’s discovery.” She finished, knowing she was being illogical, and not giving a damn. He was infuriating.
He tore his eyes away from the road for one moment to glance at her. “You hired me, remember? I have no bloody interest in what two days ago I was pretty damn sure was your father’s pie in the sky. Answer my questions, and when I’m sure we’re safe, I’ll answer some of yours. How long did you date Dylan?”
“Off and on for two summers. I spent quite a bit of time with my father here because I was commissioned to do a coffee-table book. He was here. I was here. We went to dinner, the movies when we were in town. Normal dating stuff.” She glanced at him. “Now one of mine. Who are you and who do you really work for? Because you have skills you didn’t learn from a mental GPS tracker.”
He passed four cars at eighty miles per hour before answering. “I work for Lodestone.”
Then Lodestone was more than just a company that found people and things. “Is that who you just called?”
He hesitated, eyes locked on the road. “MI5.”
“MI5? What’s that? A branch of the IRS?” She frowned. And why would he have them on speed dial? No one wanted to talk to them.
“British Secret Service.”
“You’re a spy?”
“No. I’m a Lodestone agent here to help you find a tomb.”
Isis didn’t know what to believe.
Traffic came to a sudden crawl. An accident involving three cars and a herd of camels blocked most of the road. While the men and the camel owners argued loudly and gestured with swinging arms and waving hands at one another, all the cars pressed into one narrow channel, bumpers kissing as they wound around the melee. An errant camel swung its back end into the roadway, nearly blocking their progress. Thorne stomped on the brakes, forcing Isis to brace herself against the cracked vinyl dashboard.
“A spy?! Seriously? So all this running, chasing, shooting, beating people to a pulp is child’s play to you?”
He cursed under his breath and locked gazes with her for a moment. The intensity stole the air from her lungs.
“It’s never child’s play, and I’m not here in that capacity.”
“Well, actually, you are,” she pointed out—reasonably, she thought—“since we’ve done little else besides running and shooting since we got here. Is that how you hurt your leg?”