slid her fingers into the soft pelt of his hair, holding his head against hers as they both fought for breath. Her heartbeat sounded like a rock band in her ears. “I’m sorry I startled you.”
Thorne lifted his head, eyes glittering in the meager light. “It’s not all right. I almost killed you.”
“Well, fortunately you didn’t. Would you mind letting go? I’m getting sand in my hair.”
Still crouched over her, he kissed her gently, then helped her up, brushing the sand off her back and shoulders. “Sure I didn’t hurt you?”
“Positive.”
He looked around. “Are we alone?”
“Why? Were you expecting dinner guests?”
“How long have you been awake?”
“A few minutes. Thorne, you’re scaring me. Why are we out here? I thought you—” He put his finger over her mouth and uncoiled to get to his feet, then staggered in the sand before catching his footing. He held up a hand, cautioning her to stay where she was.
For such a large man, and with an injured leg, he moved with surprising speed once he got going. Isis watched as he searched around the tent, then looked inside. He motioned her to remain still, and made his way up the dune nearby. His cautious, careful movements ratcheted up her fear, and by the time he came back to her, she was on her feet, heart pounding painfully.
The breeze brushed chilly fingers over the film of nervous perspiration on her skin. She put a hand on his forearm. “What’s going on?”
“We were drugged in the car. Isoflurane or some other inhalation anesthetic. I smelled a musty odor, but attributed it to the air-conditioning. Fuck it.”
Isis frowned. What he was saying made no sense at all. “Someone put an anesthetic in the car?” Repeating the words didn’t compute, either. Who did something like that outside of a movie?
“It caused profound respiratory depression, and decreased our blood pressure. They put us to sleep. Fuck,” he said again.
“And then built us a campsite?” Isis asked incredulously. “Why? So we’d be comfortable until they come back to kill us?”
“I suspect we’re miles from civilization.” His voice was grim. “I don’t believe they have any plans to return for us.”
“Okay… Why then?”
“I think the idea is to make this look as though we came on a dig looking for your Cleo’s tomb—there’s a rough stone entrance on the other side of this dune—and succumbed to the heat, or ran out of supplies, or our vehicle was stolen. Or all of the above. Whatever the plan is, it’s a good one. Because we clearly are miles from anywhere. If those duffels are any indication, they’re filled with empty cans and wrappers so it looks like we ate and drank the contents. Check out the tire tracks—one car in, one car out. I’d bet our vehicle will be presumed stolen while we slept.”
“So they want us to die.”
His eyes were hard and cold. “They want it to look like we fucked up and died of stupidity. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sit well with me.”
A flush of heat washed over her skin. There was no way in hell she was letting Dylan make her death look like a stupid accident any college freshman on a dig would have had the sense to avoid. “So how do we beat them?”
“Instead of conveniently dying, we find what we came here to find.”
THIRTEEN
Let’s see if they left us anything useful,” Isis suggested, prosaically, sounding a hell of a lot braver than she felt. The starlight made deep pockets of black shadow in the dips and valleys of the surrounding sand dunes, and the scrape of sand blowing across the nylon fabric of the tent was like sandpaper on her nerves.
Still, if she had to be stranded in the middle of nowhere, she was grateful it was with Connor Thorne. He looked large and formidable with his face in shadow and his broad shoulders blocking the endless, shifting, barren hills behind him.
“If your hypothesis is true”—her voice seemed loud in the quiet so she lowered it—“we’re miles from civilization, right? It could be years before anyone came across us. So with that in mind, I say we rescue ourselves.”
His teeth flashed white in the ambient light. “You’re something else, you know that, Isis Magee?” he murmured, using a finger to tilt her face up so that her mouth was right where he wanted it. He combed his fingers through her hair to bracket her head between his large hands, holding her a willing