Relentless (4 page)

TWO

F
ive hours later they were airborne.

The 747 from Seattle to New York and on to London was full, everyone crammed in like sardines. The first-class cabin was more spacious, but Thorne still felt like he’d been shoved inside a tin can. The air smelled of the steak they’d had for dinner, and a faint, underlying scent of Isis’s ginger cinnamon soap. The cabin lights were dimmed. Thorne’s light was off. Isis, sitting between himself and the window, had a halo where her light shone on her hair.

She’d changed at Zak’s place into pale blue jeans and a long-sleeved red T-shirt, and wore dangling red and gold earrings that kept tangling in her hair. As much as it annoyed him—tempted him to untangle the glinting metal plates, touch her hair—Thorne kept his hands to himself. The urge to touch her was already ridiculous and required a good deal more discipline than he’d anticipated.

“How will your skill work when we get to the museum?” Isis asked quietly.

Business. That was safe. “You suspect where your father was when he was attacked, right?” She nodded.
“I’ll touch the things you sent to the museum to complete his exhibit, and see if there’s a location match.”

Her eyes widened behind her glasses. “You do remember that there are thousands of artifacts in the collection, right?”

More than aware. “It’s a long shot, but it’s the only shot we have.” And given all that rubbish about assaults from mystery figures and murder, the quicker this was over, the better.

Even if a small part of him did settle into the instinct of years of training. In, out, put the bad guys down.

If there were even any bad guys.

“You won’t have to touch
everything
,” she countered, with what seemed like mild amusement in the dim light. “It’s thirty years’ worth of work. I can sort and eliminate things by obviously wrong locations and unlikely dates. That’ll cut down the time, won’t it?”

“Sure.” From ten years to five. Finding the right matching location, while not knowing what type of artifact would hold the GPS location, was akin to searching for a thief in a prison.

“I’m glad I can help you help me. I hate sitting around waiting, don’t you?”

Yeah. One of the things at the top of his list. He shifted in his seat so he could straighten his legs, and she moved her feet to give him more room. “You can stretch out some more if you like.”

“I’m good.” As good as it was going to get, anyway. He’d let the flight attendant take his suit jacket and cane, and had rolled up his sleeves in deference to the stuffiness
on board, despite the air blowing down on him. It wasn’t cooling his unwelcome attraction to Miss Magee any.

She looked up at him, eyes earnest behind her black-framed glasses. Her breath smelled sweet from the Diet Coke she was drinking. Thorne didn’t drink sodas, but he wondered absently what it would taste like on her tongue if he kissed her. Which, of course, he was absolutely not going to do.

Curling her legs up under her on the wide leather seat, she pitched her body closer to his. Her closeness, and the subdued lighting in the cabin, made the situation far too intimate and made Thorne want to bury himself in her heat and cinnamon scent. She licked her unpainted mouth as if she were reading his thoughts. “Were you in an accident?”

“Yeah.”
I accidently walked into Boris Yermalof’s boning knife.
He watched the attractive flight attendant bringing around coffee. It was natural to think of the Russian when he was on his way to London and talking about Egypt. The bloody Russian was the reason Thorne had been banished to Seattle in the first place. The chase through Egypt eight months ago had ended in Israel, where his two partners had been brutally butchered, and when Thorne had avoided being gutted like a fish, it was more by accident than design. Everyone considered his survival a miracle.

He resented being put in a holding pattern when all he wanted to do was track Yermalof down and do unto him as the Russian had done unto Thorne’s partners. Twiddling his thumbs wasn’t Thorne’s thing. Babysitting
a deluded big-eyed cutie while he served out his sentence was proving more challenging than he had time for. The fact that he was supposed to be recuperating didn’t make it less of a problem.

Isis predictably asked, “Was it a c—”

Without turning to look at her, he said unambiguously, “I don’t talk about it.”

“If there’s anything I can do…?”

“No.”

The flight attendant smiled and flashed her cleavage over the small tray holding china cups. The rich scent of Sumatra eradicated—for the moment—the smell of Isis’s skin. Thorne turned to glance at her.

“Do you want coffee?” He wasn’t a man who chatted. He didn’t want to be her friend, and he didn’t want to fucking
bond
. London. Hopefully he’d find something that would satisfy her. He’d go back to Seattle, where the weather suited his mood, and she could go… wherever the hell she wanted to go. None of his business.

“No thanks. I probably shouldn’t have drunk those two Diet Cokes.” She reached up and turned off her overhead light, then pulled the thin blanket across her lap, up over her chest. “I want to sleep so I’m fresh when we arrive.”

She was plenty fresh. He took a coffee, ignoring the woman lingering at his side until she pushed off. “Good idea,” he told Isis. The coffee was hot and black. Not French press, but drinkable. He drank it in two gulps, then placed the cup and saucer on the wide space between their seats. It wasn’t a wall, but it marked his space from hers.

Isis wiggled down in her seat, curling up to get more comfortable, her elbow pushing his cup dangerously close to the edge as she shifted, trying to balance her head on her hand.

Mentally shoring the barriers, he moved the cup after all.

Now he couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t looking at her instead of the discarded cup. Eyes closed, Isis was close enough for him to see the way her long lashes cast shadows on her creamy cheeks, and feel her warm breath against his upper arm. She didn’t look very comfortable but her discomfort was none of his business. If she woke up with a stiff neck that was her own fault.

She wasn’t asleep. He could practically hear her mind working.

He knew he wouldn’t find what he was looking for without her help at the museum. She at least knew which decade of artifacts and paperwork to check as a jumping-off point. He didn’t want to go; that was a given. But he’d performed numerous jobs for queen and country that he hadn’t wanted to perform. Sometimes a man had to shut the hell up and just do what had to be done. His father was one of two people in London whom Thorne had no desire to see, but to get Isis and himself into the back rooms of the museum, he needed his father’s help.

Bloody hell
. He’d then owe His Lordship a favor. No good deed went unrecorded in the Earl’s ledgers.

Still, with Isis’s tenacious assistance, he could make the trip quick and relatively painless. If anything in the professor’s artifacts was from his recent dig, Thorne would give Isis the information she needed and send her
on her way. He didn’t need to go to Egypt with her. Just point her in the right direction.

She wanted the mythical tomb of Cleopatra? If her father had been in the Valley of the Scorpions and that’s where the tomb was, he’d find the connection.

She’d leave; he’d go back to Seattle. The end.

She’d have her answers, and he’d forget about the curly-haired woman who batted her long lashes from behind smudged glasses.

He’d learned something else about his client—besides that she was as tenacious as a Rottweiler. She was a tightwad who made every penny work twice, once for each side. The heated conversation between them at Sea-Tac Airport had drawn a small crowd of amused onlookers. It was only when he informed her with all the superior arrogance of his ancestors that with his bad leg, sitting in steerage for nine hours was completely out of the question, that she had partially acquiesced. He could go first-class. She’d go coach.

Thorne purchased two first-class tickets and told her to shut up and enjoy her heated nuts.

“You can talk to me,” she said drowsily, without opening her eyes. “I’m not asleep.”

He slipped off her glasses. Her mouth tightened at the unexpected contact. Not disgust; more like surprise. Thoughtful, he folded the earpieces and stuck the glasses in his shirt pocket, beside the photograph she’d given him—reluctantly—back at the Lodestone office. “How long have you been living with the Starks?” He’d taken
her to Queen Anne Hill to pack and was not surprised that she’d directed him to Zak’s house.

“A month. They’ve been kind enough to let me camp out there while I regroup.”

Thorne could smell her hair and skin—cinnamon. She’d twisted her curls up on top of her head, and her face unframed by all that hair was pure and sweet. Opening her eyes, she gave him a drowsy smile. There were humor and charm in her big brown eyes and sensual mouth, elements oddly more insidious than overt sex appeal.

He removed the picture from his breast pocket. “Tell me what you see.”

She didn’t take the piece of paper from him, just touched his hand to bring it closer. An unwelcome frisson of awareness zinged up his arm at her touch. The speed with which she withdrew her fingers, the way her mouth did that tightening thing again, indicated she’d felt the same thing.
Bollocks
. He was a grown man, and she was the first woman on his radar in too long. “Need your glasses?”

“No, I see fine close up.” She straightened to push her fringe out of her eyes. “It was taken in the evening. Seven or eight, I’d guess. You can tell by the angle of the sunlight.” Her arm brushed his when she pointed. “This is clearly a tomb entrance. See the way the earth slopes, but the size of the rock is not uniform to its surroundings? That was backfill. This section here is undisturbed. This section here, where the team started to dig, is darker where the rocks and soil were excavated. The photographer
was my father. He always manages to insert himself into pictures.” There was a wealth of love and amusement in her quiet voice.

“Usually it’s his thumb; this time it was his shadow. He sent this from his phone soon after he took the picture.”

“Who do you think this is?” Thorne pointed to a shadow off to the left.

“I thought it looked like a second man standing with his back to the light. But I blew up the image in my lab several months ago, and it’s too hard to tell. It wasn’t clear enough to make out if it’s a person or a rock formation. And when I spoke to him he said he’d left everyone back at camp.”

Because a man with Alzheimer’s would remember.
“Probably rocks, then,” Thorne said easily, tucking the photograph back into his pocket behind her glasses. Or the man Dr. Magee claimed struck him on the head. Thorne’s gut told him it was the latter. That complicated things. He’d rather hoped recovery would be easy. He suspected Isis Magee was like crabgrass: insidious and hard to get rid of. But if someone had indeed attacked Professor Magee, Thorne couldn’t let her go off in search of Cleopatra’s tomb alone.

Bloody, bloody hell.

“Try to sleep,” he told her, reaching up to adjust the air nozzle. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.” Probably long and hellish as well as hellishly long.

Isis pushed back her seat to recline more fully and gave him a small smile as she snugged the thin blanket
to her chin. “I’m equal parts excited and terrified,” she murmured as her lids dipped lower and lower.

Unfortunately
, Thorne thought as he watched her eyes flutter and close,
I feel exactly the same way
.

London

ISIS LOOKED UP AT
the imposing Georgian edifice with its warm brick façade and neat rows of blank-eyed sash windows. The building looked rigid, precise, and boringly symmetrical. If this was a hotel, there wasn’t even a discreet brass nameplate outside the glossy black front door.

The sun was shining, but the chill in the air caused her to snug the collar of her red Windbreaker up around her ears and stuff her hands deep in the jacket’s pockets. She’d thrown together her clothes for the trip based on digging through dusty antiquities in the museum and, hopefully, for a trip to Egypt, where the temperatures in June hit the high nineties. Not for fancy hotels or London’s chilly version of summer weather.