Night Of No Return
Eileen Wilks
When a lethal traitor
threatens to derail the top-secret SPEAR agency,
A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY continues….
Alex Bok
Tall, virile, potently sexy—lives every moment
as if it were his last.
On a deadly mission to bring down a traitor,
this hard-edged bachelor is reunited with the only
woman who had ever truly touched his heart.
Would he pay the ultimate price
for passion’s sake?
Nora Lowe
She has eyes the color of the pale blue dawn,
long, rippling black hair—and is saving all her
love for one unforgettable man.
She didn’t know what Alex Bok was doing on her
archeological dig—or why danger shadowed his
every move. So she engaged in a sweetly seductive
game of kiss and tell….
The man at the helm
Powerful, pragmatic—the shadowed entity
no one sees.
Jonah had given Agent Bok direct orders—
infiltrate the nearby terrorist compound
and ensnare the sinister Simon
in a deadly trap. But was one of his own
about to be neutralized by love?
Dear Reader,
As the Intimate Moments quarter of our yearlong 20
anniversary promotion draws to a close, we offer you a month so full of reading excitement, you’ll hardly know where to start. How about with Night Shield, the newest NIGHT TALES title from New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts? As always, Nora delivers characters you’ll never forget and a plot guaranteed to keep you turning the pages. And don’t miss our special NIGHT TALES reissue, also available this month wherever you buy books.
What next? How about Night of No Return, rising star Eileen Wilks’s contribution to our in-line continuity, A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY? This emotional and suspenseful tale will have you on the edge of your seat—and longing for the next book in the series. As an additional treat this month, we offer you an in-line continuation of our extremely popular out-of-series continuity, 36 HOURS. Bestselling author Susan Mallery kicks things off with Cinderella for a Night. You’ll love this book, along with the three Intimate Moments novels—and one stand-alone Christmas anthology—that follow it.
Rounding out the month, we have a new book from Beverly Bird, one of the authors who helped define Intimate Moments in its very first month of publication. She’s joined by Mary McBride and Virginia Kantra, each of whom contributes a top-notch novel to the month.
Next month, look for a special two-in-one volume by Maggie Shayne and Marilyn Pappano, called Who Do You Love? And in November, watch for the debut of our stunning new cover design.
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
Night of No Return
Eileen Wilks
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
A note from RITA Award Finalist Eileen Wilks,
author of ten novels for Silhouette Books:
Dear Reader,
A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY—wow! The name alone was enough to make me excited about being part of this continuity series. I feel privileged indeed to be in the company of so many stellar writers, and I fell hard for the heroes—men and women both—who are the agents of SPEAR. What’s not to love? With spies and bad guys, honor faced off against villainy and love pushed to its limits, A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY promises 12 extraordinary stories about the power and danger of love.
My story, Night of No Return, is set in a land of extremes. Alex Bok is on the trail of terrorists and stolen weapons in the Sinai Desert. He finds more than he bargained for, and his courage is pushed to its limits by the dictates of honor—and by a gutsy heroine who dares him to take the biggest risk of all.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Southern California, U.S.A., September 7
He didn’t want to die.
It was a disconcerting thing for a man like Alex to learn at the age of thirty-four. He sat at one of the wrought-iron tables on the western terrace, dripping with sweat as he watched the southern California sky turn gaudy with sunset over the darkening Pacific Ocean. If the air could have held one dram more of that eye-burning orange, he thought, he’d be able to pluck it like a guitar string.
Color. Life. He drank them both in, relishing the way the muscles in his thighs jumped and the burn in his calves. His heartbeat pleased him. It was almost back to normal, though he’d just finished a five-mile run in the scrubby mountains surrounding the resort. If he wasn’t quite at the peak of conditioning yet, he was well enough. His body had done everything he’d asked of it. He was fit again, ready for assignment.
And alive. He was so damned glad to be alive. The depth of his gratitude troubled him because it was rooted in fear, the same fear that shredded his sleep all too often.
He was the only guest on the large flagstone terrace at this hour. The heat was keeping most people inside, or in the pool. A waiter had brought him a glass and a pitcher of ice water when he’d first reached the terrace. The staff here at Condor Mountain Resort and Spa knew him; he’d stayed here before, though never for as long as he’d been here this time.
Too damned long, he thought. He needed to get back into action. Once he did, his fear would lessen. It had to. He couldn’t stand to live a timid life.
The glass of ice water he picked up was as sweaty as he was. He held it to his forehead, enjoying the shock of cold. The air was dry, smelling of dust and creosote…yet he could have sworn he smelled lilacs.
That was her fragrance. He frowned.
“Brooding again, Alex?”
The voice belonged to another woman—not the one he associated with lilacs. Alex looked over his shoulder and smiled, pleased with the company. He was a man who enjoyed people. Companionship, like sex, came easily to him. If there was a part of him that remained sealed off, untouchable no matter whom he was with, he’d lived with that too long to take much notice of it.
He especially enjoyed tall, slim-hipped women who wore shorts that showed off their legs. That the woman crossing the patio to him now was a fellow agent added to the pleasure of her company. “Hey, I don’t brood. I’m enjoying the sunset.”
“You do look like you’re having a good time melting. You actually like this heat, don’t you?”
“Heat is good. Come sit down and we’ll talk about it. There’s body heat, for example…”
Alicia Kirby pulled out the chair across from him. She was twenty-four, brilliant, and looked, he thought, like a forward on a high school basketball team, with her long, elegant bones and that boyish cap of auburn hair. When she shook her head, that pretty hair bounced with the motion.
Pretty, yes, but it wasn’t a long, rippling fall of hair as black as the desert sky, and smelling like lilacs…. Dammit. He had to stop thinking about a woman he’d never see again.
“Life must be painfully dull,” Alicia said, “if you have to flirt with me to add a hint of danger to your humdrum existence. No more than a hint, of course. East doesn’t take you any more seriously than I do.”
He put his hand over his heart. “I live for danger, but flirting with a beautiful woman is a different sort of spice.”
The edges of her high cheekbones took on a faint pink tinge, which pleased him. Alicia might not take him seriously—hell, he didn’t want her to, she was married to a man he considered a friend—but she enjoyed a compliment as much as the next woman. He had a feeling she hadn’t heard enough of them.
“Beautiful?” She managed to look skeptical despite her pink cheeks. “That’s laying it on pretty thick. I feel like roadkill.”
He straightened, alarmed. “Maybe you should go back inside. In your condition, this heat—”
“Not you, too! What is it about pregnancy that turns halfway sensible men into nervous idiots?”
“The fact that we can’t do it, I guess. Is East making a pest of himself again?” He liked the idea that the legendary East Kirby—legendary in some circles, anyway—had been reduced to a nervous wreck by his new wife’s pregnancy.
“Why do you think I came out here? I’m escaping.” She tilted her head. “Just like you.”
“Uh-uh. I might like to escape, but I’m stuck here until I hear from our mutual friend. Not that there’s anything wrong with your hospitality,” he added. Alicia and East ran Condor Mountain Resort and Spa for fun, profit, and the benefit of the occasional SPEAR agent in need of rest and rehab. Like Alex.
Though SPEAR had been founded by Abraham Lincoln, its existence had always been shrouded in such secrecy that few people knew it existed, even at the upper levels of government. Technically, SPEAR stood for Stealth, Perseverance, Endeavor, Attack and Rescue. In a deeper sense, the organization stood for much more. Honor, above all. Sacrifice. Service. Values that a confused, cynical world didn’t always recognize, but which the men and women of SPEAR understood and were willing to live for.
Or to die for.
Alicia had a skeptical look on her face. “So all that running you do is purely for the sake of fitness? Not because you’re trying like crazy to get away from something?”
Alex fought off a frown. Behind that youthful face of Alicia’s was an irritatingly observant woman. He took another drink of water. “Running is a great way to get back in shape. I’ve been using the gym, too.”
“Yes, but you’ve been running in the afternoons. In temperatures of ninety degrees or better. That seems like an odd thing for a man who nearly died in the desert to do.”
But it wasn’t heat he feared. It was darkness. Death was dark. That thick and sticky darkness clung to him still, clogging his dreams…sending him running through the sun-soaked hills. He saluted her with his glass. “Hey, I can take the heat. After all, I grew up in a part of the world that makes southern California seem air-conditioned.”
“You nearly died there, too.”
She was definitely beginning to get on his nerves. “It was a knife that nearly did me in, not the desert. Have you heard from Jeff lately?”
For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to accept the change of subject, but after favoring him with another thoughtful look, she spoke of the young man who was East’s adopted son. Jeff was Alicia’s age, a decade younger than East or Alex, and he’d recently been through an ordeal much worse than what Alex had endured. Not that Alex knew the details—SPEAR agents might discuss an operation among themselves in a general way, but specifics were shared only on a need-to-know basis. Apparently Jeff had come out of it okay.
The resilience of youth. Alex wanted to think that was why Jeff had rebounded from his experience so quickly. But maybe Jeff was just the better man. Stronger. Not given to waking up in the middle of the night with the icy sweat of terror drying on his skin.
Alex drank his water as he listened to Alicia talk about her new stepson. Jeff was in Los Angeles after spending some R & R time at another SPEAR operation in Arizona. His experience had propelled him to enlist in SPEAR, which was now covering the last of his med school. He’d just started his residency in the ER of a busy Los Angeles hospital.
“I don’t expect we’ll hear much from him for a while,” Alicia said. “He plans on specializing in trauma medicine with an emphasis on on-site treatment.” She smiled. “When he isn’t working, he’ll be sleeping.”
“You’re probably right.” Alex heard the door to the resort open and glanced that way.
A tall man with shaggy brown hair stood in the doorway, one eyebrow raised. “Trying to make time with my wife again, Alex?”
“I do my best,” he said cheerfully. “Go away, East. I can’t get anywhere with you breathing down my neck.”
“You go away.” East walked over and pulled out a chair. “I just talked to Jonah. You’re to call him.”
At last. Alex was on his feet instantly. “I’ll let you take over with the flirting, then. Be sure to mention her gorgeous legs. I hadn’t gotten around to them yet.”
“Fickle.” Alicia shook her head. “Sadly fickle.”
“Come back down after you’ve talked with him,” East said. “I’m supposed to brief you on some background details.”
“Will do.” Alex was already at the door.
The shock of cold air from the air-conditioning hit him the moment he stepped inside the expensively rustic lobby. He passed the regular elevator, stopping at one that the other guests at the resort couldn’t use, and inserted the key required to operate it. His heart was pumping with excitement.
A call from Jonah could mean only one thing—an assignment. He was ready for it physically, and if he still had a way to go emotionally…well, he’d shake down just fine once he got into action again.
Contrary to what his parents believed, Alex had never had a death wish. Nor was he an excitement junky—not anymore, at least. He’d outgrown that years ago. He liked edges, though. A man never felt more alive than when he was challenging his limits. He’d teetered on the slipperiest edge of all more than once while on assignment, but until a month ago he’d never gone over. But when he’d been left for dead in the Negev desert, he’d skidded down that dark slope…until she found him. His lady of the lilacs.
It had changed him. For the last month he had been trying to come to terms with that change while strength eased back into his body. He’d hiked or run through the dry mountains that cradled the resort so he could enjoy the slide and flex of thigh muscles, the bunch and release in his calves. Life was good.
Alex’s suite was on the top floor. The view was breath-taking—rugged hills falling in sage and dust-colored humps into the vast blue of the ocean. The bed was king-size and comfortable, and the walls were reinforced with steel and an inner layer of sand. They would stand up to anything but a direct hit from a bomb. The steel had the additional property of making it difficult for anyone nearby to pick up the signal from the cell phone he grabbed as soon as the door closed behind him.
This phone, too, had special properties. The signal was digitized and encoded, so that even if someone did manage to intercept part of the transmission it wouldn’t do them any good. It wasn’t dependent on normal cells, either, but used a system established by orbiting satellites, rendering calls completely untraceable. With this phone, Alex could talk to anyone anywhere on the planet.
He punched in a number he knew well, hung up and waited. A few minutes later, the phone rang, then a cool, dry voice said, “Are you ready to go back to work, Alex?”
Ten minutes later he disconnected. He stood in his air-conditioned room and stared out the reinforced glass of the window, and he tasted the hot, dusty wind of the desert.
No surprise that he was going back to the Middle East. That was where his expertise lay. Among other skills, Alex spoke Arabic and Greek fluently and could make himself understood in Hebrew. He knew smugglers in five countries, and scientists in three. He’d be going in as an archaeologist—a cover he’d used often, since it dovetailed so neatly with reality. Nor was his assignment a surprise; the people who had left him for dead a month ago had ties to the terrorist organization whose base he would be hunting.
No, none of that was unexpected. But the dig he’d be participating in as part of his cover, and the person in charge of that dig—oh, yes, that had surprised him.
The scent of lilacs drifted across his memory again, and Alex smiled slowly. Never say never, he thought, his spirits rising. Not only was he going to have a chance to exorcise the fear that clung to him like a bad smell, he would get to work another distracting memory out of his system.
A memory named Nora.
Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, September 9
There were no songbirds in the Sinai. Not in this part of it, not at this time of year. To the north, the land rose in stony leaps to the barren height of the Tie Plateau before slipping down in sandy drifts to the dunes that met the Mediterranean. To the south, ragged mountains heaved themselves high again, bunching up into the gaunt peaks of the Sinai Massif, the range surrounding Gebel Musa— Mount Sinai. Here, in the Dividing Valleys, the land dipped lower. The rare rains of the desert had spent millennia wearing away granite and sandstone, limestone and dolomite, to leave a jumbled confusion of rock cut by canyons and wadis. Here there might be the sound of the occasional caw of a raven or the cooing of quail, but even that was unlikely this early. At this hour, the soft percussion of Nora’s footfalls in the sand and gravel was the only sound.
The vague light of dawn canted in steeply from the east, leaving the bottom of the wadi in shadow. It was cool there, cool enough that she’d barely broken a sweat, though she’d been running for ten minutes. The rough terrain kept her from running very fast, but the wadi’s course was downward; it would take her ten more minutes to reach the convergence of this wadi with the next, where she’d veer back uphill, toward camp.
Then she could expect to sweat. But now she ran easily, enjoying the flow of cool air over warm muscles, and she dreamed of another run she’d taken. Another desert. And the man she’d found there.
When Nora thought of him, she thought of darkness. The near-dark of the time when she’d found him. Dark, sun-bronzed skin. Hair as black as her own. And the darkness that men create, the darkness of violence and death.
Not that she’d seen the evidence of violence at first. The bloody trail he’d left as he’d staggered across the desert had been hidden by the scrubby growth nearby, and his clothes had been the color of the sand where he’d lain, curled into himself for warmth.
From a distance she’d thought him a heap of sand. As she’d loped closer, he’d looked like a bundle of rags.
Then she’d thought she’d found a corpse.
The blood that had covered his chest and shoulder had heightened that impression. But he’d been alive, alive and conscious…as she’d discovered when she’d touched her fingers to his throat, seeking a pulse.
Again, almost as strong in memory as when it had happened, she felt the shock that had gone through her when he opened his eyes. Amber eyes. She could think of no other word to describe them. Like the petrified resin that people the world over have prized for millennia as a jewel, they had seemed to hold trapped sunlight inside them.
“Hey, Nora!”
She stopped, one foot planted on a tilted granite slab, the other in a drift of sand between rocks, her mind shutting off her reverie as abruptly as her body obeyed her order to stop.
What had gone wrong now?
She looked up at the edge of the wadi, where a man stood—Tim, judging by the gangly outline he made against the pale pewter sky. “What is it this time? I haven’t finished my run.”
“I can see that. But you’d better head back to camp. Mahmoud just radioed that his truck is fixed and he’s nearly here. Looks like you didn’t have to send me to the oasis for drinking water yesterday, after all.”
“But I didn’t know that yesterday. Look, Tim, it’s nice to get good news for a change, but it could have waited until I got back to camp. I’ll only be another twenty minutes, and if Mahmoud beats me there, you can start unloading without me.”
“But he’s got something that wasn’t on your list. Someone, actually—some muckety-muck from the Cairo Museum who wants to look at the cave.”
Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “So soon? Providence and the mills of funding organizations usually grind slower than that.” The regret she felt about abandoning her run was quickly swallowed by a surge of excitement. Dr. Ibrahim must have been more interested than she’d realized when she’d reported their cave to him last month.
Or maybe he was hedging his bets. If what they’d found so far turned out to be as important as Nora hoped, he might try to have someone else put in charge of the dig. Someone with one of those dandy Y chromosomes. Damn.
“I’d better be in camp to welcome our colleague when he arrives, then, hadn’t I? Be right up.”
Typically, Nora didn’t bother to look for the easiest path up the side of the wadi, but headed straight up from where she stood. She was a long, leggy woman who moved with the awkward energy of a colt, all sudden starts and stops, yet there was a certain grace to her climb, the ease of a woman comfortable with her body. She reached the top only slightly breathless, and paused to unhook the small water jug on her belt, then downed half the contents in a few greedy gulps.
“Did Mahmoud say who our visitor is?” she asked as she moved past Tim. The path, what there was of it, wound through the knobby outcroppings of rock that made up the sizable hill that lay between them and the camp.
He grimaced. Tim had one of those elastic faces that turn every expression into comical exaggeration. “Probably. I didn’t catch it, though. I was concentrating too hard on trying to figure whether he said he’d be here in fifteen minutes, or that his cat was pregnant. Of course, if he’d asked me where the baggage claim was, I would have understood just fine.”
“Or the men’s room?” She grinned. Her assistant’s smattering of Arabic came almost entirely from a phrase book. “I’ll never understand how a student of language who’s been in Egypt for two years can know so little Arabic.”
“Everyone knows we Brits can’t cook or remember all those peculiar words some people use instead of a proper language.”
“You’ve managed to learn quite a few peculiar words. At least, Ibrahim seems to think so, or he wouldn’t have kept you around.”
“Hieroglyphics are different. I don’t have to speak them.”
Tim was totally absorbed by his specialty—the evolution of written language as evinced by the study of hieroglyphics. He was smart, funny and completely lacking in ambition, a trait more foreign to her than any language could be. “Where are Ahmed and Gamal? One of them could have translated for you.”
“Praying, I think,” he said, vague as usual about anything that didn’t interest him. “Do you think we’re going to be descended upon by a horde of eager Egyptologists?”
“One person doesn’t constitute a horde. Although, if we can impress him with the potential here….” She shrugged, impatient with her own eagerness. “Or her, I should say, though that doesn’t seem likely, given Ibrahim’s prejudices. I’m surprised he sent anyone at all. I didn’t think he was even listening when I talked to him last month.”
Nora had tried not to get her hopes up when she’d made the trip to Cairo to present her report in person, but her reception by the director of the museum had been chilly enough to depress Pollyanna. She’d received permission to follow up on her find, but none of the funding or support personnel she required to do the job properly.
Needing advice, she’d made a second stop before returning to the dig—a short trip across the border into Israel, where an old professor of hers lived on a kibbutz in the Negev.
Deep inside, something tugged at her, a feeling sharp and insistent, clearer than memory but less easy to name. Enough, already, she told herself. She’d known the man for no more than an hour—oh, it was ridiculous even to say she’d known him. She’d found him, that was all, and she’d done what she could to keep him alive. She didn’t even know his name. If she still felt somehow connected to a man she didn’t know, that wasn’t surprising, was it? Under the circumstances…?
She remembered the shock of his eyes opening and meeting hers, the sense that the world had just tilted, sending her life spinning off in an unplanned direction. Romantic foolishness, but not surprising, really. Under the circumstances.
When Tim sighed she glanced back at him, ready to be distracted. “Wishing for that horde, are you?”
“With hordes, come funding. Another generator would be nice. We could get a new air conditioner. Hey, isn’t the path thataway?”
“This way is shorter.” The path Tim had indicated was a fairly easy track that went around the rocky hill. Nora preferred a more direct route, up the hill and through a narrow notch between thrusting boulders. “You’ve been in Egypt long enough for your blue blood to have adjusted to the heat. We already have an air conditioner.”
“No, we don’t. We have a noisemaker you turn on for a few hours that occasionally coughs up a little cool air.”
“It’s better than nothing.” Which summed up most of their equipment. Theirs was a shoestring operation, and with all the small disasters that had beset them lately, those strings were getting frayed. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she said, addressing herself as much as Tim as she eased out of the vee-shaped cleft and back onto more nearly horizontal ground. “Even if this fellow gives Ibrahim a good report, we’re not going to get any substantial increase in funding. Not unless we make a major find.” She started up the hill.
Tim followed slowly. “We’d have a much better chance of that if we had the people and equipment to do the job right.”
Didn’t she know it. “I could have sworn I gave you my speech about ‘paying our dues’ when you signed on, but if you need to hear it again—”
“I know, I know. This is my opportunity to get out of my ivory tower and learn the basics of fieldwork. The problem is, I like my ivory tower. It’s air-conditioned, and there are no bugs.”
He slipped, grabbing awkwardly at the rock, swore, and finally managed to clamber out and stand beside her. “And there aren’t a lot of mountains to cross to get to my office at the museum, either. Look at this.” He held out his hand, displaying a scraped palm. “I’m damned if I know why you have to play mountain goat just so you can find a place to run. Don’t you get enough exercise on the dig?”
A smile tugged at her mouth as she turned back to head down the hill. Camp lay below them. “You like air-conditioning. I like to run.”
“Well, aside from being a blasted nuisance and hard on my epidermis, your runs aren’t safe. Especially with everything that’s been happening lately.”
“A few petty thefts don’t make it unsafe here—as safe as you can be in the desert, anyway.”
“If we stay in camp. But you keep wandering off by yourself.”
Out of consideration for Tim’s scraped hand, she chose the easiest way down, circling around a large sandstone outcropping that wind and weather had sculpted into a shape she could only call phallic. “There’s a lot of poverty among the tribes. Not that I mean to accuse the Bedouin, but they’re the only people out here other than us.”
“Just them, us, and the occasional terrorist.”
“Are you still harping on that theory? Terrorists blow up things. They don’t steal a couple of cases of canned food for the glory of the cause.”
“What about our first generator?”
“We don’t know that it was tampered with.”
“The mechanic said—”
“I know what he said. I wish he’d kept his dire mutterings to himself, since you seem to have taken them so much to heart. He also said it could have been damaged in transport.”
“Mahmoud’s gas tank didn’t get sugar in it by accident.”
“Mahmoud isn’t exactly Mr. Congeniality. The man collects enemies the way dogs collect fleas. Look, Tim, there are times when I appreciate your stubbornness—”
“You ought to. You could teach a camel the meaning of the word. Hey!” he said as they rounded the outcropping. “Looks like our timing is right on the money.”
They had come out on a rise just above the camp, which was located in one of the larger wadis—a much wider channel than the one where she liked to run. A cloud of dust was moving slowly along the dry watercourse, nearly obscuring the truck that caused it.
“If we hurry, we can get there about the same time as Mahmoud,” she said, picking up the pace.
“About your morning run—”
“Tim,” she said warningly.
“Nora, even if terrorists aren’t lurking nearby, it isn’t safe for you to go running alone. You could turn an ankle or get bitten by something nasty.”
“That’s why I always run in the same place. If I’m late getting back, you’ll know where to come looking for me.”
“I don’t want to have to come looking for you. Why can’t you exercise in camp?”
“Aside from the fact that I enjoy running?”
“Yeah, aside from that.”
She shrugged. Her reasons were too private to speak aloud. Wildness calls to wildness, she thought. When she was running along a twisting wadi, away from everyone, she could allow herself to dream. Weren’t dreams as important to life as safety? Yet maybe…maybe she’d been dreaming too much lately. Dreaming about one thing, the same thing, over and over. The man. The one she would never see again.
The truck pulled up in a cloud of dust just as Nora reached level ground, and every member of her small crew descended upon it. The small crowd wasn’t enough to block her view, but the truck itself kept her from seeing who climbed out of the passenger side. She lengthened her stride, as curious as the others were about their visitor.
Mahmoud headed straight for the cookstove in front of the main tent, where a pot of coffee was perfuming the air. Nora greeted him briefly.
Their guest was speaking to Gamal in fluent Arabic, his back to her, when she rounded the front of the truck. He’s Egyptian, then, she thought. Not surprising, if he came from the museum. His clothing, however, spoke of the West—khaki shorts much like her own, a plain pullover shirt and Nikes. A lot of Egyptians did wear western clothing, though the more devout would have disapproved of his shorts.
He wore no hat, which made her frown, but she would hold off on the lecture until she saw if he was foolish enough to do that in the heat of the day. His short hair was as black as her own, and his body told her he was younger than she’d expected—young and attractive, with a lean, muscular body.
The sight of those masculine shoulders, slim hips and strong legs made her hormones kick in with a pleasant little rush, but Nora didn’t doubt her ability to keep any tickle of desire under control. She’d been doing it for years.
DeLaney, however, was another story. The youthful college student might start mooning after their guest instead of Tim.
Of course, Tim would probably be relieved if she did. Nora was smiling when she spoke. “Welcome to the dig. I’m Dr. Nora Lowe.”
“Yes,” he said, in a low, pleasant voice as he turned to face her. “I know.”
His eyes met hers. Amber eyes. Clear as sunlight trapped in time, smiling down at her.
Chapter 2
Alex looked at the astonished face of the woman he’d crossed an ocean to deceive, and his mind emptied of all but scattered impressions. Smooth skin, tanned to honey. Unpainted lips. Eyes the color of the dawn sky overhead, startling pale in that tanned face…soft blue eyes that looked as dazed as he felt.
A single thought appeared from nowhere: It couldn’t really happen like this, could it?
Immediately, he was irritated, and the irritation cleared his mind. What kind of question was that? What couldn’t happen? Because the question made no sense, he shoved it away.
Long habit had him smoothing his features into an amused grin. “We weren’t properly introduced the last time we met, were we? I’m Alex Bok.” He held out his hand.
The dazed look hadn’t cleared from her eyes. “Alex.” She took his hand and he felt a second shock, but this one was purely sensual. Understandable, and distinctly pleasant. “Alex Bok?” Her gaze sharpened, and he knew she’d recognized the name. “Any relation to Franklin and Elizabeth Bok?”
He smiled crookedly. “You could say that. They’re my parents.”
She laughed. “Good heavens, you’re an archaeologist! If you knew what all I had imagined…”
He hadn’t released her hand after shaking it. Nora Lowe had narrow palms, with the callouses of a woman who works with her hands. She wore no rings. Her skin was warm…and she smelled of lilacs. “Why, what did you think I was?”
“Oh, all sorts of things—a smuggler, a reporter, a pilgrim. Archaeologist never made the list.” She tilted her head. “I think we have a friend in common. Myrna Lancaster.”
It took him a moment to place the name. “Myrna. Of course. We got to know each other on a dig in the Eastern Desert two years ago.” He’d been on the trail of a particularly bloody assassin, and Myrna had provided welcome relief from the grim hunt. A delightfully energetic young woman, he recalled, and no more interested in permanent entanglements than he had been.
A short, curvy young woman with glasses that wouldn’t stay up on her dot of a nose tugged at Nora’s sleeve to get her attention. “So who is he?”
“The son of the couple who wrote the book on Old Kingdom pottery. Literally.” That came from the man Alex had seen returning to camp with Nora when he arrived. “You must have studied it in one of your classes.” He didn’t sound excited. More like suspicious.
Or jealous?
“He’s also the man I found in the Negev,” Nora said. Then, apparently realizing Alex still held her hand, she flushed and pulled it away.
“The one who was stabbed?” The young woman’s eyes widened behind her glasses in delicious horror. “By bandits? The one you stumbled over when you were visiting your old professor?”
Nora glanced at Alex apologetically. “The story was too good not to share.”
He’d counted on it. “That was inevitable, I suppose.” He reached back inside the truck, taking out an olive-colored duffel bag, and bent to pull an envelope from its side pocket. “This is from Dr. Ibrahim. I gather it introduces me and explains why he sent me.”
She took the letter, but didn’t open it. “Let me introduce you more formally—now that I know your name.” A quick, shy grin lit her face. “This is DeLaney Brown, our resident cheerleader.”
The young woman with the slippery glasses made a face. “Just think of me as part of the cheap labor.”
“Glad to meet you, DeLaney.” He already knew who she was, of course. Jonah had supplied him with backgrounds for the Americans and the single Englishman at the dig. DeLaney Brown was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at the university where Nora Lowe taught. Her father was a successful surgeon; her mother was deeply involved in charity work. No siblings. She was bright, impulsive, and prone to throw herself at political causes of all sorts, though there were no known ties to any of the Arabic fringe groups. He held out his hand.
DeLaney’s palm was sweaty. She gave his hand a single quick squeeze before pulling her hand back so she could push her glasses up again. “What on earth did you do to make someone stab you, anyway?”
“Good God, DeLaney, you have the manners of a small child sometimes. I’m Lisa.” The third woman present held out a broad, blunt-nailed hand. “More cheap labor.”
Lisa was also a graduate student, Alex knew, but she was more than twenty years older than DeLaney, having returned to college after a messy divorce. She had dark skin, grizzled dark hair cut very short, three earrings in each ear, and an ex-husband with gambling debts. Her handshake was firm.
“Welcome to the dig,” she said. “I can’t place your accent. You American?”
“Yes, but I grew up in this part of the world.”
“That would explain it. You sound almost like Tim.”
“Speaking of whom,” Nora said, “this is Timothy Gaines, my assistant—Dr. Gaines, actually—but we don’t bother much with titles out here. But maybe the two of you have met? Tim is with the British Museum, but he’s currently attached to the Cairo Museum.”
Alex held out his hand again. “I’m not on staff at either museum, so I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Technically, I’m not on staff in Cairo, either, but they do give me office space. Good to have you here, Bok.” At twenty-eight, Timothy Gaines had the bony, stretched-out frame of Abraham Lincoln, a basketball player’s hands, and the suspicious manner of a dog whose territory has been invaded. Gaines didn’t play any childish games with the handshake, though, keeping it brief and businesslike.
“Dr. Ibrahim sends his regards.” Alex hadn’t actually spoken to the museum’s director, but it seemed a safe thing to say.
“Tactful bloke, aren’t you? I can just imagine what he really said. Ibrahim tends to forget I’m around, and when he does remember, he doesn’t like me above half.”
Nora gave Tim a puzzled glance, as if she sensed his hostility but didn’t understand it, and then went on to introduce the last two members of her crew. Alex knew less about Gamal and Ahmed than he knew about the westerners. He needed to learn more, fast. He was hoping one of these people was connected to the terrorist group that called themselves El Hawy. It would make finding the boss a lot simpler. Not easier, necessarily, but simpler. The Egyptians were the likeliest plants.
Ahmed was in his twenties, a quiet young man with a formal manner. Educated, judging by his accent, which made Alex wonder what he was doing here, rather than in one of the cities. Gamal was older and more talkative, with a wide, gap-toothed grin.
And then, of course, there was Nora Lowe, the woman who had saved his life. He’d been too out of it to retain a clear image of her face, but her voice—that had stayed with him. Her voice, her scent, the feel of her hair, her warmth. Most of all, he remembered the warmth of her. He’d been so very cold, when she’d found him.
Alex tried to look at her objectively, as she laughed at something DeLaney said. He knew quite a bit about Nora Lowe. He hadn’t been able to fit the dry facts in the report to his memory of soft hands, warmth, and clouds of dark hair. He was having trouble now, fitting either facts or memory to reality.
According to the report, Dr. Lowe was thirty, unmarried and brilliant. Also determined. She came from poverty, yet had put herself through college and graduate school with the help of scholarships, loans and grants. Her mother was dead, her father unknown; she had two sisters, both older than her. One of her sisters had been married twice, the first time while still in high school. The other sister had earned her GED from a jail cell, where she’d served time for passing hot checks.
The woman standing in front of him had a quick smile and a sexy mouth, wide and fluid. Her nose was slightly crooked, and her face was too narrow for real beauty. The clouds of midnight-dark hair that he remembered were pulled back today in a braid that hung halfway down her back.
Her pale-blue eyes, fringed in black, were nothing short of stunning.
“I imagine you’re tired,” she was saying. “The drive from Feiron Oasis isn’t that long, but the last stretch is pretty rough, and Mahmoud’s insistence on driving at night means you haven’t had much sleep. What would you rather have first—breakfast, a nap or a look at the dig?”
You. “All of the above, except for the nap. I don’t need much sleep. But first, maybe you could show me where to put my things until I can get my tent up?”
“Sure.” That mobile mouth turned up in a smile. “I’m glad you brought your own tent. We’re a bit crowded.”
“I’ll be glad to show him around,” DeLaney said eagerly.
“Nope. You need to help unload. Okay, everyone—” Nora waved her hands in a shooing motion “—make like good little worker ants. The faster we get the supplies unloaded and stored, the faster we can get some real work done. Alex, I’ll show you where to set up.”
With a measure of good-natured grumbling, the others headed for the back of the truck. Except for Tim. “So, are you really here on Ibrahim’s behalf,” he asked, “or did your parents send you?”
“Tim!” Nora sounded half-amused, half-appalled. “What’s with you this morning? Have you been eating your own cooking or something?”
“Am I being rude? Sorry. I haven’t had my coffee yet.” He spoke to Nora, but he watched Alex.
“For heaven’s sake, then, grab a cup. You can drink it while you help unload.”
“All right, all right. I can take a hint.” The younger man tossed her a salute and moved off to join the rest.
Nora’s clear blue eyes looked puzzled when they met his. “I am sorry about that. It isn’t like Tim to take pot shots at someone else’s professional background. He’s usually so laid-back it’s hard to be sure he’s awake.”
“I’m used to it. With my parents being who they are, I’ve had opportunities that others haven’t.” Not all of those opportunities were part of his public record, of course.
“But it isn’t up to him to question your credentials, is it? This is my dig.” Her faint emphasis on the possessive pronoun suggested she thought there might be some doubt in his mind about that.
“Of course.” Alex had no intention of challenging her authority. “Dr. Ibrahim didn’t send me here to look over your shoulder. I’m here to work, not just to watch.”
She nodded thoughtfully, as if she were considering taking him at his word but hadn’t made up her mind. “We can go into all that later, maybe over breakfast. Right now, why don’t we take care of your things?”
Alex noticed the way Tim kept track of them when Nora showed him where to put up his tent. Definitely jealous, he decided. Was there something going on between Nora and her long, tall assistant?
He didn’t like the quick snap of temper that idea brought.
“This is the guys’ side of camp,” she was saying. “The latrine is on this side, too, about fifteen feet further down the wadi. We’ve got a shower, too. It’s on the other side of the main tent.”
“So the men get the latrine on our side of camp, while you ladies get the shower?”
Her eyes brightened with humor. “It wasn’t intentional. Honest. We situated the shower as close to the well as possible.”
“You have a well, then?”
“It was here before we were, and needed only a pump to be useful. The water is too brackish too drink, but it washes the dust off. That tent is Tim’s,” she said, nodding at the nearest one. “You can probably guess that the goat hair tent belongs to Gamal. He shares with Ahmed.”
“I noticed a small green tent on the other side of the big one.”
“That one’s mine. Lisa and DeLaney bunk in the main tent. They used to have their own, but…” She shrugged. “Someone has decided we’re here to increase their standard of living.”
“It was stolen?”
“I’m afraid so.” A small, worried vee appeared between her brows. “We’ve had a problem with theft.”
Their problem was a lot more serious than she realized, but he couldn’t tell her that. Alex put his folded tent down in the space she’d indicated. “I can put this up later. Why don’t I help unload?” It was best if the others thought of him as one of them, part of the close community that usually formed on a dig. He was aware of a tug of impatience, though. He wanted to get Nora Lowe alone.
“We don’t put our guests to work right away,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like some breakfast first? I can even offer fresh eggs. I saw Lisa carrying some in.”
“Think of me as an extra pair of hands, not as a guest.”
“I do usually throw a crust or two of bread at my workers before I hustle them out to the dig.”
“As appealing as that sounds, I ate before I left Feiron. I’m not hungry yet. How about taking a couple of cups of coffee out to the site? I’d like to get a look at the cave.”
“I wouldn’t mind a cup myself. I usually have some after my run.”
“Is that where you were? I, ah, saw you and Gaines coming into camp about the same time I did.”
“I run most mornings.” She started toward the main tent, where the cookstove was set up. “Partly to stay fit. Partly because I just like to. Tim came to get me this morning when Mahmoud radioed that he was bringing a visitor to camp.”
“Me.”
“Yes.” Her gaze flicked to his and a smile touched those full, unpainted lips. “Though I didn’t know it.”
He wanted to taste that smile. The urge was strong and troubling—and it was shared, he could tell. Their gazes held for another second before she turned away to kneel beside a large plastic box that sat near the stove.
It was the memories, he knew. He’d gotten her tangled up in his mind with nearly dying. After all, Nora Lowe had been the one to find him, to save him. He could sort out his reaction to her objectively, but he couldn’t seem to stop reacting. He wondered how much of a problem that was going to be. When pretense and reality blurred, it was easy to make a misstep. And when a man in his line of work made a misstep, people died.
“You take anything in your coffee? It’s strong,” she warned, taking two mugs out of the box and snapping the lid back on. “Not quite as stiff as the stuff the Bedouin make, but stronger than most Americans are used to.”
“I like it strong. And hot.”
“Good,” she said briskly, standing. “Getting things hot is no problem around here.” If she noticed any innuendo in his words or her own, she didn’t show it.
“Does Gaines run with you?” Or did they go just far enough away from camp to be alone?
“Are you kidding?” She chuckled and handed him his mug. “Tim’s idea of morning exercise is getting out of bed. He thinks I’m crazy.” Again that slightly shy smile flickered. “But that’s how I found you, you know. I was visiting a former professor of mine at a dig near Kibbutz Nir Am, and I’d gone out for my morning run.”
He knew that—now. At the time, he’d thought her appearance a miracle. “Funny. I like to run myself, but I never realized quite how important it was to my health before.”
She laughed.
A loud yelp hit the air a second before an even louder crash. Alex spun around, and saw Timothy Gaines lying flat on the ground near one of the tent ropes. Plastic bottles of Gatorade had spilled from the box he’d been carrying, and were rolling merrily around on the dusty ground.
Alex grinned. He suspected Tim had been trying so hard to keep an eye on him and Nora that he’d tripped.
His grin slipped away after a second, though. Everything was falling into place perfectly. Tim was jealous…and Nora was fascinated. Everyone was going to think exactly what he wanted them to think.
Pity it made him feel like such a heel.
Alex took a mug of coffee with him as he and Nora walked along the dry wadi toward the quarry. Nora had brought a mug along, too, as well as a thick slice of the grainy native bread smeared with the soft cheese the Bedouin made from goat’s milk. Alex enjoyed the strongly flavored cheese himself, having eaten it innumerable times as a child, but most westerners considered it, at best, an acquired taste.
There was a clarity about the desert that appealed to Alex, the raw virtue of extremes. The land was badly broken, the earth’s cracked bones thrusting up through its thin skin, their nakedness dusted in places with sand and spotted with the tough, bleached vegetation of the desert. Overhead, the sky was vast and cloudless. The dry air stirred against his cheeks in a baby breeze. Alex looked over the rugged landscape, and thought about death.
It wasn’t his own death that preyed on his mind this time. It was the death that others—one man in particular—wanted to carry across the ocean to the U.S. The many deaths he was here to prevent, and the traitor he needed to catch, a man they knew only as Simon—a man determined to bring down Jonah and the entire SPEAR agency.
Alex walked beside the woman he needed to charm in order to maintain his cover, sipping coffee as he considered means and ends, and when one justified the other. The coffee was exactly what she had claimed it would be—hot and strong. He glanced at Nora.
Heat and strength there, too, he thought. The strength showed physically, in the lean lines of her body. Lord, about half of the woman was legs—long, honey-gold and gorgeous. But she wasn’t just physically strong. Not many people tested themselves against the desert every morning and called it fun.
The heat didn’t show, but he sensed it. “You’re very quiet.”
“I was taught not to speak with my mouth full.” She popped the last bite of bread into the mouth in question and dusted her hands without looking at him.
In fact, she’d scarcely looked at him directly since the moment he’d turned around, seen her, and their gazes had locked. “I was expecting you to have more questions about why I’m here, what my qualifications are.”
“Isn’t that what you’re here for? To ask questions?”
“I’m here because you’ve found a burial chamber where there shouldn’t be a burial chamber. But that isn’t the only reason.”
“No?”
“Nora.” He stopped her with his hand on her arm. “Are you uncomfortable with me?”
She sighed and, at last, faced him directly. “Yes. Yes, I guess I am, silly as that sounds. I never thought I’d see you again, you see. After our, ah, dramatic first encounter, you took on this larger-than-life quality in my mind. Not quite real. Now here you are, sent by Dr. Ibrahim to check us out. Real as can be.” Her mouth quirked up. “It’s disconcerting. Life is certainly full of coincidences, isn’t it?”
Her honesty made things easy for him. Too damned easy. “My arrival isn’t entirely a coincidence.”
“What do you mean?” A few wisps of hair had worked loose from her braid, and that breeze tossed them against her cheek.
“Dr. Ibrahim did send me here, but it was at my request.” He turned away, running his hand over the top of his head. Reality and pretense were blurring in an uneasy alliance. “I’m at loose ends right now. I…the attack changed things. Once I recovered physically, I flew to Cairo to see my parents, and while I was there, they had Dr. Ibrahim to dinner. He mentioned your dig. I was interested professionally…and personally. I talked him into sending me instead of the man he’d had in mind. He wasn’t hard to persuade.” He grinned. “Like DeLaney and Lisa, I work cheap.”
She looked at him steadily for a long moment. “I’ve heard of you. You have the reputation of being something of a dilettante.”
“I’m lucky enough to have a private income, which lets me work when and where I choose. If that makes me a dilettante, or a dabbler—” He shrugged. “I suppose to some it does.”
“I read your paper in the Archaeological Review. It wasn’t the work of a dabbler.”
He felt a small, absurd warmth at her words. He’d been proud of that paper. For a moment, pretense and reality merged. “I love what I do.”
She nodded, and he knew she was considering him, thinking over what he’d told her. He wished he could get inside her head and find out what those thoughts were.
She started walking again. “Working on a dig is physically hard. You know that, of course. Are you fully recovered?”
“The doctors think so.”
“I never knew…I couldn’t find out anything about you. I knew you’d been airlifted to Tel Aviv, but when I went there the people at the hospital wouldn’t tell me anything except that you were alive and couldn’t have visitors. I guess I can’t blame them. I didn’t even know your name.”
He hadn’t known she’d come to the hospital; it disconcerted him. “I was pretty much out of it. I’m told that they pumped me up with other people’s blood, operated, and then shipped me back to the States.”
“You don’t remember?”
“Only snatches.” Snatches of cold and pain and fear, no soft voice to anchor him, no one there at all…not even himself, after a while. “They tell me I died on the operating table.”
“What?” She stopped and stared at him.
“My heart stopped.” He didn’t know why he’d told her that. Too much truth. What’s wrong with me? He forced the grimness back behind a grin. “Death proved temporary, I’m happy to say. They got my heart started again, finished what they were doing, and sewed me back up. Not that I remember any of it.”
“You actually died?” She shivered. “I’ve wondered so often…you’d lost a lot of blood by the time I found you, I couldn’t believe you were still alive. Then you opened your eyes.”
He’d thought he’d heard someone calling him. It had been a hallucination, of course, created by a mind fooled by blood loss and shock. Nora hadn’t known his name, so she couldn’t have called him, could she?
Yet he had heard it, or thought he had. Somehow he’d swum up from the murky place where the cold had driven him, and found that he wasn’t alone. She had been there, and she’d lain down with him, loaning him the heat of her body to hold the cold at bay. And talking to him. Her quiet voice had given him something to hold onto as he fought the sucking darkness.
As always, those memories made him restless. He started walking again, intending to turn the conversation to the dig, to the thefts, to anything that would move him forward instead of back.
Instead, he heard himself say, “I was a bloody mess when you found me.” He’d made it to within a handful of kilometers of the kibbutz, first staggering, then dragging himself onward. But he’d lost too much blood. By the time Nora had stumbled across him, he’d been going into shock. “Why did you stay instead of going for help?”
“Fear,” she said wryly. “I was more afraid to leave you than to stay with you. I knew someone would come looking for me when I didn’t return from my run on time, and they’d be able to follow my tracks in the sand. What I didn’t know was how long I’d have to wait.” She shook her head. “I’d taken some first aid courses before I came out here, since I knew there wouldn’t be a doctor or a nurse close enough to count on in an emergency. So I was pretty sure you were in shock. Your skin was cold to the touch. But I was scared stiff I’d made the wrong decision.”
Scared, she might well have been. But not stiff. She’d been supple and very much alive. “You were right.” It came out husky. Too damned real again. He jerked his mind back to his purpose, only to discover that it had changed slightly while he wasn’t watching.
He had to have a good reason to stay here for a couple weeks, and part of that reason was walking beside him now. No one would wonder if he lingered here, dabbling in archaeology while he pursued a woman. He’d spent years cultivating the reputation of a man likely to do just that. A dilettante, just as she’d said, who enjoyed both archaeology and women with the same temporary enthusiasm.
But this time he would pursue without catching. Nora didn’t deserve to be used as a means to an end, no matter how important that end. “I never got a chance to thank you,” he said more lightly. “That’s part of my reason for being here.”
She slid him a curious glance. “And the rest of it is professional?”
Keep her charmed, he told himself, keep her interested—but keep your hands to yourself. If he didn’t touch her, maybe he wouldn’t hurt her. “Not entirely.” Because looking at her made him want her, he looked ahead without giving her the smile or the slow, appraising glance that would have made his meaning obviously personal. He forced himself to change the subject. “That’s the quarry up ahead, isn’t it? Tell me about the cave you found.”
Chapter 3
Alex had been right, Nora thought as they closed the distance to the quarry. She did have questions. Lots of them.
But it wasn’t professional matters she wanted to ask him about.
She wanted to know if his wound still troubled him, whether he had any brothers or sisters, and why a man with his background wasn’t working for the Cairo Museum or some similar, prestigious institution. She wondered if he preferred dawn or sunset, classical music or rock, and what he thought about before falling asleep at night.
Most of all, she wanted to know what he thought of her, and if he had really wanted to kiss her earlier. She was almost sure he had. But just because she’d helped save his life didn’t mean he owed her answers to the highly personal questions buzzing in her brain, so Nora let him steer the talk back to safer shores.
It was better this way. Nora knew how to handle herself professionally. She relaxed as they discussed the dig. The quarry they were headed for had supplied copper to one of the dawn kingdoms of the Bronze Age—Egypt’s Old Kingdom—over four thousand years ago. The period fascinated Nora, and was her particular specialty. In many ways, civilization had been invented then, with all its banes and blessings.
They weren’t here to excavate the quarry itself, however. That had been done long ago. Recently, a cave had been discovered after being blocked by a rockfall for many years, and preliminary investigation indicated that it had been used as temporary living quarters by the overseers and slaves sent to work the quarry. That cave was Nora’s objective.
Or it had been—until she found the second cave. And the tunnel leading off it.
“An unlooted burial,” she said now. “Think of it! Admittedly, it won’t be a rich find—the provincial governors were still being interred near the pharaoh at the time the tunnel was blocked, so whoever ended up here couldn’t be terribly important.”
“Are you sure it is a burial?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of a tomb so far from the central kingdom.”
“What else could it be? The tunnel started out as a natural one, but it’s been shaped. No mistake about that. The marks from the tools are easy to read. And the debris used to block it is typical of the fill used in burials for later Dynasties of the period.”
He grinned suddenly. “I hope you’re right. I’d love to be part of a dig that uncovers an unlooted burial, even if it does belong to some minor official. The puzzle of why anyone would have been entombed so far from the Nile is enough to get your blood pumping all by itself, isn’t it?”
“If only I could get Ibrahim’s blood pumping, too. Without his backing, the Ministry won’t approve bringing in more equipment or workers. We’re doing the best we can, but we’re damnably limited.”
They’d reached the quarry. It wasn’t deep at this end, and the side was sandy and sloping. Nora automatically started to take her usual headlong route down, stopping in mid-stride when she realized she ought to at least point out the easier path to Alex.
She looked back up at him. “Most everyone goes down over there.” She gestured at a more gradual slope, where the tramping of many feet had formed a discernible trail.
“You don’t, though.”
Something about the way he stood, with the morning sky behind him gathering brightness as the fleeting colors of dawn faded into day, made her breath catch.
He looked so very solid. Strong. It was hard to believe he’d nearly died—actually had died, for a few minutes—just a month ago. “I don’t see much point in taking the long way around if I don’t have to.” Oddly flustered, she turned away and took the slope in long, sliding strides.
He came down right behind her. “Are you impatient,” he said when he reached the bottom, “or just fond of taking the most difficult route to your goal?”
“I save my patience for when it matters—like over there.” She nodded at the other end of the small quarry, where scaffolding had been erected to make it easier to reach the cave she’d discovered last month. The cave’s entry was a narrow crevice nearly twenty feet above the floor of the quarry. “Do you want to go inside?”
“Definitely.” He started walking, and she fell in step beside him. “I don’t see how you spotted it. The entry is almost invisible from down here. Unless you’re a caver?” He gave her another of those charming smiles he seemed well-stocked with. A personal sort of smile that invited her to move closer, to share space and thoughts. “I have a friend who climbs, walks or crawls into every hole in the ground he can find. He considers it great fun.”
“Not me.” Small, dark spaces spooked her, they always had. There was no particular reason for it. Nora hadn’t mentioned her minor phobia to anyone on her crew, and didn’t intend to. As long as she had light and something to occupy her mind, she was okay. “But I think my brain was permanently warped towards spotting them the last time I was in the Sinai.”
“That must be when you learned to like goat cheese.”
She grinned. “As a matter of fact, it was.”
“What were you doing here?”
“I wasn’t here, exactly. I was farther south, at Gebel Musa. That’s Mount Sinai—but you know that, of course.” She kept her attention on where they were going. It was easier than looking at him to see if he was smiling in that personal way again.
“How did working at Gebel Musa warp your brain?”
“I spent the summer before my senior year in college mapping and cataloging the tiny caves used as cells by religious hermits in the Byzantine period. One of my professors was keen on tying some theories of his about the period to the hermitage movement.”
“Students do make good cheap labor.”
“Exactly. Let me tell you, I got very good at spotting caves. Put me anywhere near a good-sized heap of rock and dirt, and I automatically look for caves.”
“What made you decide to investigate this one, once you spotted it? Especially if you aren’t into caving. It would have been a difficult climb.”
“A dream.” She laughed at the faint skepticism that crossed his face. “I’m not claiming psychic powers, but the unconscious mind does notice things the waking mind misses. See along here?”
They’d reached the scaffolding at the base of the cliff. She pointed up at the cave’s entrance. “There used to be a path along there, a ledge. It came down recently—maybe only two or three hundred years ago. You can see that the edges of the rock where it broke away aren’t worn, and there’s a lot of the rubble here at the base. I didn’t notice all of this consciously, but some corner of my mind did. I dreamed about finding a cave here, so naturally the next day I checked to see if my dream had any basis in reality.”
“Not everyone has such confidence in their dreams.”
She shrugged. “It made me curious, that’s all. We knew they’d used one cave as living quarters, so it seemed possible they might have used this one for something, too.”
“I should have known you’d be a dreamer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Aren’t all archaeologists dreamers?” His eyes were opaque now, the light blocked. It made them unreadable. “Caught in the romance of the past, more fascinated by the traces left by people who lived and died long ago than by the lives being lived around them in the present.”
“That sounds more like criticism than a compliment. I could have sworn you were an archaeologist yourself.”
“I don’t claim to be immune to the disease. Don’t look so worried,” he said, reaching out to tug lightly on her braid. “Archaeology may not be curable, but it’s seldom fatal. It just causes those of us afflicted to do strange things…like live in a tent in the Sinai during Al-kez.”
She grinned, recognizing the Bedouin name for the hottest of their five seasons: Al-kez, ‘the terrible summer.’ “Since you’re among the afflicted, you’re probably eager to have a look at my hole in the ground.”
She turned, grabbed the ladder that led to the top of the scaffold, and started up.
“I don’t see a generator.” His voice told her he was following, several rungs below her. “Is it inside the cave?”
“Yes. I thought it best to move it after the thefts started. It was a real pain getting it in there, too.” She was halfway up, moving automatically. “We had to—hey!”
With a quiet crack, one rung of the ladder gave way beneath her. Off balance, she tightened her grip on the rails and got that foot down onto the lower rung, where her other foot rested.
It broke, too.
She slid. The rough wood of the rails shredded her palms, slowing but not stopping her. Acting instinctively, she swung her feet up, connected with something solid—and pushed off. The world whistled by.
She landed hard.
Years ago, Nora had had the breath knocked out of her during her one and only attempt to ride a horse. She’d forgotten how terrifying it felt. She lay on her back, darkness fluttering at the edges of her vision, and tried desperately to breathe.
She couldn’t. Stunned muscles refused to work, her lungs refused to inflate, and panic flooded her, breaking the next few moments into disjointed impressions.
Alex’s grim face appeared over hers. He was speaking, but she couldn’t hear him for the roaring in her ears. The light was getting dim. Hands ran over her arms, her legs, her sides. At last, just as she was sure she had killed herself, that her body was broken too badly for breath, things started working again.
Her chest heaved. That first lungful of air tasted sweeter than any she’d ever had. She sucked it in gratefully, then gulped down another.
“Where do you hurt?” That was Alex’s voice.
Her own voice was more of a gasp. “Everywhere.”
Even as she spoke, the pain came flooding in—her chest, her shoulders, her back. But her legs moved easily enough when she shifted them slightly. “I don’t think anything is broken,” she managed to say, her voice rising all the way to a whisper. “But my chest hurts. And my hands.”
“You had the breath knocked out of you. No, stay flat.” His hands on her shoulders kept her from sitting up when she tried. “I didn’t feel any broken ribs,” he said, but he ran his hands along her sides again, then moved them to her front.
He was feeling the front of her rib cage now—right below her breasts. She wanted to protest, but something about his expression stopped her. Or maybe it was his lack of expression. His face was hard. His eyes were…strange. Dark. Focused. Empty. “I’m okay.”
If he heard her, he ignored it. His hands continued their businesslike exploration, moving now to her collarbone and shoulder. He pressed here and there, then manipulated her arm. “I don’t think you’ve dislocated anything, but you shouldn’t move. Your back—”
“I really am all right.” She summoned the energy to push his hands away and tried again to sit up. This time he helped, sliding an arm behind her back. The position left his face very close to hers.
His gaze flickered to her mouth, but his expression didn’t change. Her heart was beating hard—which was only natural, she told herself. Under the circumstances.
“What in the hell,” he said in a low, controlled voice, “did you think you were doing? Why did you shove off into thin air like that?”
Her eyebrows went up. “In case you didn’t notice, the ladder broke.”
“So you pushed yourself backward.” Now there was something in his eyes. Anger. It made them lighter, the color of dark honey.
Her tongue came out to lick her lips nervously. “I didn’t want to slam into you and knock you off, too.”
“Hell.” He pulled away. “Stay there. Don’t move.”
She didn’t much feel like moving yet, so she didn’t argue. She watched as he went up the ladder quickly. “Be careful. If any of the other rungs are loose—”
“Shut up.”
Her eyebrows went up again. The man had an annoying way of reacting to an accident.
Alex stopped just below the broken rungs. After a quick inspection, he came back down just as fast as he’d gone up. “The rungs weren’t loose,” he said tersely. “They were cut.”
On the third morning after Alex’s arrival, Nora woke up much as she had on the first two. Aching. Restless. With the edges of a dream slipping away the moment her eyes opened, and the evidence of that dream still throbbing in her body.
Alex had been naked in her dream. So had she. That much she remembered.
No point in trying to recall the details, she thought as she blinked at the darkness in the tent. Her subconscious couldn’t conjure up more for her in the way of experience than she’d actually had.
She glanced at the luminous dial of the battery-operated clock on the folding table near her cot. Thank goodness. It would be light enough to run in another fifteen minutes or so. She threw back her covers and sat up, sliding her feet onto the canvas floor. Various bruises protested, but not as severely as they had for the last two mornings.
She would stretch out thoroughly, she decided. But by damn, she’d have her morning run. She needed it.
Nora hadn’t been able to run since her fall. She’d missed it. Sexual frustration, she reflected wryly, was an excellent reason to enjoy running. And a woman who was still a virgin at twenty-nine years, eleven months and twenty-eight days of age might not know a lot about sex, but she knew a great deal about sexual frustration.
She stretched, yawned, and lit the small oil lamp next to the clock. The main tent had electricity, but none of the others did.
Her bare arms and legs were chilly. Though the temperature didn’t dip much below seventy at night at this time of year, that was a drop of forty degrees or so from the daytime temperature. To Nora’s heat-adjusted body, anything under seventy degrees felt pretty nippy.
And to a body whose systems were faltering due to loss of blood, sixty-some degrees could be cold enough to kill. Alex’s skin had been cold to the touch when she had found him in the Negev. He’d been suffering from exposure, and blood loss had driven his body into shock.
She shivered, pulled off her T-shirt and kicked off the baggy boxer shorts she wore with it. Her clean things were already set out, waiting. She grabbed the panties first.
Alex. Blast the man. He’d invaded her thoughts as well as her dreams, and she couldn’t decide what to do about it. Or even if she should do something.
Last night after supper she’d offered oh-so-casually to walk back to the quarry with him. He’d pitched his tent there rather than in camp, saying he wanted to discourage further vandalism. He’d turned her down flat, and lectured her on safety.
Nora uncapped the large plastic bottle that held the lilac-scented lotion she loved, and that the dry climate demanded. It was just as well he’d turned her down. She didn’t have any business encouraging him. She remembered what Myrna had told her about Alex and their brief affair all too well.
Perfect for a fling, Myrna had said. According to her, Alex was a wonderful lover—charming, fun, and sexy enough to melt a woman’s bones with a glance.
And temporary. He’d made that clear to Myrna. Apparently, Alex was one of those commitment-shy males who preferred quantity to quality in his relationships. It was an attitude Nora despised. How many men with the same attitude had she seen waltz through her mother’s life?
Yet, for some reason, she didn’t despise Alex.
He puzzled her. His reaction to her casual suggestion that she walk back to his tent with him had been weird. You’d think she had offered to go strolling through Central Park with him at midnight. If he thought walking to the quarry at night was that dangerous, he shouldn’t be there.
Nora frowned as she pulled on her running shorts. She didn’t like the idea of his being out there alone every night. She didn’t know why anyone would have wanted to sabotage the ladder, but the act had been intended to cause harm. That was disquieting.
She didn’t like having her authority undermined, either. He hadn’t asked for permission to pitch his tent there. He’d just done it. Admittedly, Alex wasn’t exactly her subordinate. He’d been sent by Ibrahim. But she was in charge at this dig, and she didn’t like the way he forgot that when it was convenient.
He had come in handy, though. With Nora stiff and sore from her fall, Alex’s strong back had been as welcome as his expertise. He’d repaired the ladder and had spent hours digging into the hard-packed fill in the tunnel, and they were making real progress.
Professionally, they were making progress. Personally, they were stuck in a dance where he called the steps—and he was making some very mixed moves. He seemed interested in her, giving her those special smiles, sitting with her at meals, talking. He had a way of getting her to talk about herself, but he didn’t say that much about himself.
And he didn’t do anything. Like try to get her alone. Or let her get him alone.
Or kiss her. Her mind veered to that thought and got stuck. She wondered what his kiss would be like. Not gentle, she thought, though she wasn’t sure why. He acted perfectly civilized.
Yet he didn’t look civilized. Maybe it was those hard, sharp cheekbones, maybe the odd color of his eyes, but she had the sense that there was something wild about him. Power, she decided, dragging a brush through her hair. He felt like leashed power.
He came from money, she knew. Not on any grand scale, but his parents had private incomes, long pedigrees and two permanent homes, one in Cairo and one in New England. Perhaps she was simply picking up on the confidence that came from growing up wealthy and assured of his place in the world.
It was a type of confidence she’d never know. But real self-worth came from actions, not heritage, she assured herself as she fastened a band at the end of her braid. She knew she could take care of herself, that she wasn’t dependent on the whim of a man or the grinding, inadequate charity of the system. That was what counted.
Whatever the basis for the impression Alex gave of being a wild thing that had somehow wandered into camp, he behaved well enough. In fact, he was so darned pleasant and polite she couldn’t tell if he shared any of the feelings that assaulted her around him—shivery, excited feelings that were part physical need, part something else. Maybe imagination. Heaven knew she had plenty of that.
She sat on the cot to tug on her socks. She picked up a pair of athletic shoes and thunked the heels against the ground to dislodge any creepy crawlies that might have curled up inside for a snooze overnight.
It was entirely possible that she’d fantasized about him so much before he showed up that she now imagined some sort of connection between them that didn’t really exist. She was a romantic. Nora admitted that, made no bones about it. And she’d been waiting a long time for the one man, the special man, to come along. The man she could give her heart and her body to.
Maybe she had persuaded herself there was something special about Alex just because she wanted him so badly.
In the dune-rippled Negev desert, dawn is a sudden arrival. Not so in the broken land of the southern Sinai. Although the tumbled hills Alex walked now were every bit as much a desert as the one that had soaked up his blood last month, here dawn seeped in more gradually, announcing itself in graying skies before the sun peeked over the crags that had hidden its first appearance at the rim of the world.
The dim light now blending night into day told Alex he’d stayed out too long and would have to hurry to get back to camp before he was missed.
Distances and directions were hard to gauge in such rough country. He had a map, of course. It had been built by combining the twenty-first century digital wizardry of computers and satellite and reconnaissance photographs with the only detailed on-ground survey of the Sinai’s interior in existence—the maps drawn by Professor Edward Henry Potter of the British Ordnance Survey Expedition to the Sinai in 1868.
Alex knew that the terrorist base was close to the dig. He knew it was underground. That much he’d managed to learn before someone took exception to his questions and left him for dead in the Negev. But that was all he knew. Using the map, he’d selected the likeliest locations and had begun a methodical search, heading out in a different direction every night once the moon was up.
He hadn’t found the base, but last night he’d found evidence that someone had been camped on a bluff overlooking the camp. A watcher, he thought, which might mean that El Hawy didn’t have anyone planted with Nora’s crew, after all.
Alex wasn’t depending entirely on his own wanderings to find the base. He’d left word in Feiron Oasis for a man he’d worked with before to come here to the dig. Farid Ibn Kareem was a smuggler, a businessman, a thief—a canny scoundrel with an unrivaled information network, and good reason to hate El Hawy.
In the meantime, Alex would search, and he would keep track of the comings and goings of the others at the dig. Just in case. Alex hoped there was a plant. He or she would have to make contact with El Hawy at some point. Following one of the terrorists to their base would be the easiest way to locate it.
He had more than one reason now to find the base quickly.
Apparently, the mild discouragement of petty thefts was no longer enough. The damaged ladder was meant to cause an accident—an accident that, added to the other misfortunes, might cause the nosy foreigners to pack up and leave. It wouldn’t matter to the terrorists if someone died or was badly hurt—not if it accomplished their goal.
It hadn’t, of course. Nora had no intention of leaving her tunnel unexcavated.
Alex paused at the crest of a ridge, scowling at the burning sliver of sun nudging itself above a knobby hill to the west. He was not in a good mood.
He should have been. Though he hadn’t found the base, he was in a good position to search for it. With the moon nearly full, he had had decent light for his search, and his biggest problem had been solved the day he arrived. The vandalized ladder had given him a reason to pitch his tent in the quarry. He could come and go at night without anyone knowing.
From a professional standpoint, the sabotage had been a stroke of good luck. From a personal standpoint… He had no business having a personal standpoint.
He paused. That narrow slice of sun told him he’d better hurry. He had been following one of the smaller wadis, using it as a guide to get back to the quarry, but moving alongside it rather than at the bottom. He briefly considered moving to the bottom of the wadi, where he could make much better time, but the idea made the nape of his neck prickle. This particular wadi was too narrow and too exposed. A perfect place for an ambush.
He continued along the top of the wadi, his thoughts much darker than the gradually brightening air around him.
Nora was in danger. She didn’t realize that there were people who didn’t want her here routinely used mutilation or death to express their opinions. The thefts that worried Nora had reassured Alex. They had indicated that El Hawy hadn’t wanted to draw attention with anything as overt as murder.
But the open act of sabotage was a warning. The terrorists were getting nervous. The arms were on their way, and the buyer of those arms—the traitor named Simon—would be arriving once they did. El Hawy didn’t want outsiders nearby.
It was not healthy to be camped near a bunch of nervous terrorists.
The worst of it was that he couldn’t tell Nora she was in danger. He couldn’t even mention the watcher, much less tell her what was going on. He couldn’t afford for her to become too frightened or discouraged, because he needed her to continue to work the dig. He had to have a reason to be here, where few outsiders came.
Tourists didn’t venture into the Sinai’s interior. Religious pilgrims visited Mount Sinai and St. Catherine’s Monastery, while pleasure seekers stayed at resorts scattered along the coasts. Foreigners weren’t even allowed to leave the few main roads without special permits.
No, he couldn’t say anything, couldn’t even—
Alex’s thoughts stopped as suddenly as his body. He froze, head up, listening. Footfalls, coming this way down the wadi. Fast.
He moved quickly behind a boulder that overhung the dry waterbed. A perfect spot for an ambush, yes. Which was fine—as long as he was doing the ambushing.
Nora had finally managed to run her mind blank, free of all the problems that had beset the dig—and free of the man who kept invading her dreams. Her whole being was focused on the challenge and exhilaration of moving swiftly over rough terrain, in spite of the aches that still plagued her from her fall.
She was breathing hard and sweating lightly. A tight curve loomed ahead where the wadi narrowed drastically, banked by a huge boulder on one side and crumbling rock on the other.
The ground was littered with gravel and loose stones. She slowed, not wanting the complication of a turned ankle.
Something hit the ground, hard, right behind her.
She stopped dead.
A hard voice demanded, “Why the hell didn’t you keep running?”
She spun around.
Alex. He stood four feet from her. There was no mistaking him now for civilized. From the savage readiness of his stance to the beard stubble on his cheeks to the glittering anger in his eyes, he was everything wild and unpredictable.
Her hand went to her throat. “Good grief! Where did you come from?”
“You’re a fool, you know. I could have slit your throat before you turned around. You would have been dead before you hit the ground.”
Chapter 4
Nora took a step back, fear balling up in her stomach. “You need a new line, Alex. That one won’t impress many women.”
“You think I’m trying to impress you?” He closed the distance between them, stopping close to her. Too close. “That’s as stupid as coming out here alone.”
She licked suddenly dry lips. “I’ve been out here alone almost every morning ever since we set up camp. So far, you’re the only thing that has happened to worry me.”
His mouth twisted in what looked more like a threat than a smile. “At least you’ve got the sense to be worried now.”
Should she try to get away? Somehow, in spite of the way he was acting, she couldn’t believe Alex meant to hurt her. But fools seldom recognized their folly while they were busy committing it, did they? “What are you doing out here, anyway? Did you follow me?”
He hesitated. “I was following someone, but not you. I must have lost him.”
“Did someone come messing around the quarry? And you took off after him!” Anger licked in, freeing her from the fear. “And you’ve got the gall to call me stupid! I knew I shouldn’t have let you camp away from the rest of us, but I didn’t realize you’d turn into a one-man vigilante squad!”
“I wasn’t in any danger.”
“But I am?” She shook her head, disgusted. “You went chasing after someone who is either a thief or a vandal or both. I’m out here by myself, yes, but I’m no threat to anyone.”
“You could be, if you see something you’re not supposed to see. The Sinai is a major drug smuggling route.”
And he had been nearly killed—by bandits, maybe, as she’d first guessed. Or maybe by drug smugglers. That might explain his odd behavior. “Is that what happened to you?” she asked more quietly. “Did you see something you weren’t supposed to?”
He turned away abruptly and started down the wadi, heading back the way she’d just come. “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
Nora fell into step beside him. She supposed that talking about whatever he’d seen might be dangerous. The authorities wouldn’t want their investigation jeopardized, either. “Look, I appreciate your concern, even if I don’t like the way you went about expressing it. But most smugglers aren’t as bloody-minded as the ones who stabbed you.” A grin flickered. “Take Mahmoud, for example.”
He frowned. “Your driver? You think he’s connected to smuggling?”
“Probably. This odd quirk he has about driving at night—he claims he doesn’t like the heat, but I suspect it’s habit. He’s used to driving after dark to avoid patrols. Smuggling is an old, honored tradition among many of the Bedouin, you know. They don’t consider it wrong.”
“It’s a tradition that has become tainted by the drug trade.”
She sighed. “I suppose so. So many of their ways have been changed, and often not for the better, by what passes for modernization. But that’s another subject.” She reached out to stop him, laying a hand on his arm.
He was warm to the touch. And hard. She pulled her hand back quickly, because her blasted heart started thumping again. “Alex, I’m not claiming that I’m perfectly safe, but I’m probably safer on my dawn runs here than a lot of joggers are in big cities. I do take precautions.”
“Precautions.” One lifted eyebrow loaded the word with a wealth of skepticism. “Such as—?”
“Why do you think I always run in the same place at the same time?”
“Do you?”
“Yes. If I’m predictable, I’m less likely to surprise someone who wouldn’t appreciate it. So I run at the same time, along the same route, every day. I made sure Mahmoud knows this, just in case, and I’ve mentioned it to people in Feiron Oasis, too.”
Grudgingly he nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. But…” His glance slid down her body, then back up to her face. “Let’s keep moving. You could use some cool-down time.”
Nora bit her lip. She ought to ignore him and finish her run.
She went with Alex instead. “We’ve talked about my safety. Now let’s talk about yours.”
“My safety isn’t your concern.”
“Not personally, no. But professionally—”
“Let’s not pretend, Nora. You and I will never have a truly professional relationship.” He said that coolly, as if he were mentioning the weather. “There’s too much heat between us.”
That messed up her breathing, even as it infuriated her. She got both breath and temper under control after a moment. “Still, the last time I checked, I was in charge of the dig. You may only be here temporarily, but while you are here you are under my authority.”
“You’re in charge of the dig, yes. You’re not in charge of me.”
“You’re quibbling. I assume you went chasing off after this intruder you spotted because of the vandalism at the site, which makes your actions my business. I don’t want you doing such a foolish thing again. Is that clear?”
“We don’t always get what we want, though, do we? I don’t want you taking these blasted solo runs of yours.”
She wanted to kick something. Maybe him. “You sound like Tim. He’s always nagging me to give up my runs, but it’s terrorists he’s got on the brain, not smugglers.”
A pause. “Terrorists?”
“Ridiculous, isn’t it? I’ve tried to tell him that terrorists are interested in headlines—big, splashy acts that will draw attention to them and their cause. Pestering a handful of archaeologists in the middle of the Sinai isn’t going to do that.”
“Americans are targeted for kidnapping sometimes.”
Good grief. He sounded as paranoid on the subject as Tim was. “What good would it do anyone to grab me? I’m not connected to the government or to any big, rich corporation that might pay to get me back. And though there’s always tension in this area, there isn’t anything going on right now that has people especially stirred up against the U.S.” She shook her head. “They’d have to be pretty stupid to waste time on me.”
“There’s no rule that says terrorists have to be smart.”
“Oh, come on. Do you really think there’s a danger of some under-bright terrorists snatching me on my morning run?”
“Are you willing to bet your life that there isn’t?”
She thought about it. “There are risks in everything,” she said at last. “I’m from Houston originally. Have you ever seen the traffic there? People risk their lives on the way to work every day, taking the chance that they won’t become a statistic, the victim of road rage or another driver’s inattention. Or their own.”
“That’s not risk taking. It’s habit, coupled with the comforting conviction that the bad stuff only happens to other people.”
She nodded. “Partly. But I think people do automatically take risks when we feel the outcome is important—whether that outcome is a good job, a new house, or time alone in the desert. I’m not going to give up my morning runs unless I can see that the risks outweigh the benefits.”
“I take it I haven’t persuaded you of that.”
“No.”
The silence that fell between them then wasn’t entirely comfortable. In spite of her confident words, Nora had to wonder if she was being foolish. Ibrahim had included a professional bio of Alex with the letter he’d sent her. Not only had Alex Bok spent large parts of his childhood in this region, he’d spent a fair portion of his adult life here, too, on various digs. He was much more familiar with the area than she was.
She glanced at him. According to Myrna, he was a great deal more familiar with other things than she was, as well.
Sex. Any woman would think about that around a man like Alex. It wasn’t any pleasant, pastel version of romance he conjured up, either, but the raw, blunt side of passion. Tangled sheets and straining bodies. Sweat and need and urgency.
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