Relentless (9 page)

“Apparently,” she said, unoffended. Her father was grumpy a lot of the time because he was distracted, or hungry, or too hot. “Too personal?”

Thorne took a fresh pair of cotton gloves from the box by the door. “Is
anything
too personal in your book?” he asked, pulling on a glove while giving her a less than friendly look.

He had nice hands. Big and strong-looking. The bright overhead lights shone on several scars across the back of his right hand before he pulled on the other glove. Part of the same accident?

“How did your brother die?”

“Jesus—”

“I just wondered if your injury and your brother’s death were linked, that’s all.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw, and his eyes looked black.
“Garrett was swept overboard m—the family yacht. There was a squall, he… died.”

“That’s terrible.” Her heart ached for him. What a tragedy. She stopped what she was doing to look at him. He continued working as if she weren’t there.

“We were alone on the
Breeze
.”

“God. That’s even worse. You must’ve fought so hard to save him.”

“I did. Other people didn’t see it that way. He was the heir, and I was glad for it. He liked everything that entailed. It worked out well for everyone.”

“And then he died, and now you’re the heir.” Neither Thorne nor his father appeared to be very happy about it.

“I have absolutely no interest in being a wealthy dilettante. I have a job. I pay my own freight. If you’re going to chitchat and waste my time, you can go back to the cafeteria and read a guidebook while I work.”

Isis turned an imaginary key against her lips. “Just Thorne” was not amused. He went straight back to the drawer of artifacts he’d been touching before they left for lunch and before she’d started asking questions.

She too pulled on a pair of gloves. Being an only child, she couldn’t fathom what it was like to lose a sibling. Hideous, she imagined. “How much older was Garrett?”

He was quiet for so long, Isis thought he wasn’t going to answer. “If I tell you will you shut the hell up?”

“How do you get to know someone if you don’t ask questions?”

“
One
ruddy question. Choose wisely—it’ll be the only one you get.”

“How old was he?”

“Twenty-one when he died. And bonus answer? He was seven minutes older than I.”

“Dear God. You were twins.” The distance between Thorne and his parents now became a little clearer to her. They blamed Thorne for his brother’s death.

“Are you going to dog my footsteps for the rest of the day?” he demanded with a scowl as he rested his hand briefly on each item in a wide drawer, multitasking by giving her an irritable look as he did his work.

The question had been rhetorical, and since she could almost smell brimstone in the room, she backed off. “I like watching you work,” she told him easily. She liked looking at him. His shirt still looked crisp and fresh; he looked like a man on a mission, with those sleeves rolled up his muscular forearms. He had a nice straight nose, almost Roman, and his ears lay flat and neat against his head. Very sexy.

The planes of his face were hard, but she liked the soft look of his military-short haircut, and the no-nonsense, almost fluid way he moved. Even though he was a large man, and even with the limp, his movements were almost graceful. He was aware of the space he took up and filled it to capacity. Isis found it very sexy. He intrigued her.

Wanting to reach out to feel if the dark hair on his muscular forearms was crisp or soft, she instead folded her arms around her waist and said, “You have a very
delicate touch for a man with such big hands.” She leaned her butt against the cabinet next to where he worked. “Are the scars on the back of your hands from the same accident?”

He didn’t look up as he touched a gold and glass scarab bracelet she vaguely remembered her father letting her wear when she was about five or six. It had been way too big, and heavy on her wrist, but she’d loved the colors of the glass beads. Thorne moved his hand to a solid gold pendant studded with lapis lazuli. “What about ‘I don’t talk about it’ do you not understand?”

“Now, see, you never actually said that.
Implied,
perhaps, but not
stated
.”

He turned a steely look on her. “I have two things to say to you. Both are statements. One: I do not now, nor will I ever, discuss my injuries with anyone, and you in particular. Two: if you want this done, then you have to leave me the fuck alone to
do
it. Is that clear enough for you?”

Lord, the man was cranky. But it was hard to be pissed off at a guy with a bad limp wearing white cotton gloves. “I could sit over there and read my father’s diaries. Would that help you concentrate?”

“As long as you don’t talk, or breathe, or hum.”

“I’ll breathe just enough to keep me conscious in case you find something,” she told him cheerfully, backing up with both hands raised as he gave her the evil eye.

It was companionable working silently among her father’s things. Thorne was pretty fast as he opened a drawer, ran his hand slowly over each item, and moved
on to the next. Starting to get sleepy from the inactivity, Isis took out her camera and framed some shots of him as he worked. Without looking over at her, he snapped. “Three: no pictures of me.”

Unoffended, Isis put her camera back in the camera bag and picked up one of her father’s ubiquitous small black notebooks, flicking through what were mostly rough sketches. It took her a moment to recognize what she was looking at.

“Oh, my God! Of course. Damn it, why didn’t I think of this before?” She jumped to her feet, not waiting for his response. “My father was always paranoid that someone would steal his notes and trump him on his discoveries. When he wanted to keep things close to his chest he’d draw a
tyet,
the hieroglyph knot of Isis, somewhere on the page. He always left himself cryptic clues to jog his memory.”

“Let me see that.” Thorne held out his hand. He’d taken the cotton gloves off, and Isis had a moment to admire how strong-looking his hand was, before she gave him the book. Normally she wasn’t that fond of people telling her what to do. She’d pretty much raised herself, running wild in whatever camp her father was digging in during the summers, and living with her aunt in Seattle during the school year.

She could either choose to be thoroughly annoyed by his crappy bad humor or else be sympathetic and give his overbearing personality a pass while he was helping her. Besides, honey was more attractive than vinegar. Isis considered his crankiness almost part of his charm, because
he did it with such grim deliberation. The more he pushed, the more curious she became, so if he thought that by being rude, she’d be turned off, he was sadly mistaken.

His eyes ran over one page, then another as he flicked through the book. “This doesn’t tell us any—” He stopped talking so abruptly, Isis took a small step toward him, putting a hand on his wrist with concern. His skin was hot to the touch. “What is it?”

“Cairo
. Not just a general direction. I know specifically where he had this diary last.”

SIX HOURS LATER THEY
landed in Cairo. The city was hot, muggy, and filthy for most of June through August. Even the locals fled the fly-ridden city for cooler climes, not that anyone could tell from the insane traffic, a mixture of vehicles with engines, vehicles that were animal powered, vehicles that were being pushed, and pedestrians who considered they had right-of-way—everywhere. Driving in Cairo was a contact sport and no one was chicken.

It was in the mid-seventies at ten at night, but the daytime temperatures would rise to the nineties, and the thick, odoriferous air still held high humidity due to the city’s location in the Nile delta valley.

After Isis flatly refused to hire one of the more reputable—and high-priced—taxis, he’d agreed to a local cab company and negotiated the fare from sixty pounds to fifteen.

“Brace yourself,” he warned as they lurched out of the taxi line and did a wheelie out of the terminal at breakneck
speed—miraculous considering the vintage of the vehicle.

In passable Arabic, Thorne gave the driver directions to the Zamalek region, where he’d booked them into the Marriott hotel while waiting for their flight from Heathrow. Isis would protest the cost, but he didn’t give a shit. He wanted a clean bed and a decent night’s sleep. His leg hurt as if fire ants were crawling in and out of his thigh. He’d been crouching and standing on a hard cement floor at the museum for hours, followed by a six-hour flight in coach. He’d pay for the rooms himself, which would please his pinchpenny client.

The ubiquitous black, white, and rusty taxi had no springs—either on the chassis, or beneath the blanket—and probably flea-covered seats. They were lucky there were bloody seats at all. They passed through the security checkpoint, where Thorne signed their names in the book, showed his fare receipt, and proceeded without incident.

They passed a burning car, and the thick, oily smoke filled the vehicle, making Isis cough. Thorne silently handed her his handkerchief and she pressed it to her nose.

She was way too bloody
perky
. Too cheerful, too… fresh and appealing in an annoying, girl-next-door way that made his teeth ache. None of that had any kind of adverse effect on his dick, which liked her a great deal. Of course, he hadn’t had sex in almost a year, which would account for his irrational attraction to a woman he wouldn’t have given the time of day to a year ago.

He had a preference for tall, bosomy blondes who disliked commitment as much as he did. This woman was all up in his face as if, by paying Lodestone’s fee, she had a goddamned right to ask him questions that were none of her bloody business. She smelled wholesome, not sexy at all.
Like something one should eat,
he thought with irritation. Well, yes, there was that, Thorne thought wryly.

Out of sorts, and anticipating staying that way for the duration, Thorne braced one hand and his good leg on the seat back as they screamed around a corner, narrowly missing a pack of ragged kids darting across the busy street. The kids scattered like buckshot.

Isis shouted, “Thanks.” And Thorne realized too late that he’d slammed his forearm across her chest to prevent her from being thrown through the windshield. He removed his arm, but not before he felt the imprint of her soft breasts as a tingle on his skin.
Bloody hell
. He glared out his window.

Cairo was, to Thorne, the seventh level of Hell.

He’d never encountered such brazen flies. They were everywhere, and no amount of encouragement dispersed them from clothes or skin. They just stuck around for the free ride.

“I haven’t been here since last year.” Isis held her hair at her nape to lean out the window. Thorne grabbed her arm and drew her into the relative safety of the interior of the taxi. She wore a pink T-shirt, and his fingers clamped on bare skin. Silky soft, satin smooth, lightly tanned, bare skin.

Releasing her arm, he shifted as far to his corner as was possible without riding outside the vehicle. No touching, he decided.

He imagined he could smell cinnamon.
Nonsense
. The windows were open, blowing muggy Cairo-stinking air around them. He was delusional because he didn’t want to be here.
Here
reminded him of eighteen hours in surgery, a month in traction, more months of physical therapy.
Here
reminded Thorne of Boris Yermalof. A sharp boning knife, high-velocity bullets, bone fragments, and metal rods. Plates and pins and the possibility of fucking-well hobbling for the rest of his life.

Here
was exactly where Thorne did not want to be.

He didn’t like heat. Or sand. Now he could add cinnamon to the list.

There were no working streetlights in the city, making it a free-for-all, with every man for himself as they slalomed through the busy thoroughfares without the benefit of the horn. Most people didn’t bother with headlights, either, so cars came out of the darkness at breakneck speeds. The only good thing Thorne could say about the taxi was that the brakes worked. Worked
loudly,
but functioned. Which was imperative since the driver used them often, with no warning, and accompanied by a litany of yelling, screaming, and arm waving.

Thorne didn’t care for the pungent stink of the streets, or the dust clogging his nose, or the lunatics sharing the road, but Isis was wide-eyed and happy as hell to be risking whiplash. One step closer to her goal.
He’d forgotten that he’d promised himself to send her on her merry way once he found a jumping-off point for her in Cairo.

He’d leave her tomorrow, head back to Seattle.

“I’d like to go straight to the location,” she told him, looking around eagerly. With the temps in the seventies, it was downright tropical compared to a London summer, which compared favorably to a Seattle summer: chilly.

Warm, dry wind from the western desert blew in through windowless openings, sending Isis’s cinnamon-scented hair across his face. She’d changed into a breast-hugging pink T-shirt tucked into her jeans before they’d left the London hotel. Her strappy sandals revealed the fluorescent pink polish on her toenails. If Thorne didn’t have a shitload of things to worry about right then, he could become quite fixated on her pretty feet. As it was, he had more pressing concerns.

Since leaving London earlier that evening, he’d had a fucking itch on the back of his neck. The kind of itch that warned him he was in someone’s crosshairs.

Returning to London before the Boris Yermalof investigation was resolved had been a mistake of monumental proportions. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been warned.

“We won’t find anything at this time of night in the dark,” he told her, keeping an eye on the driver’s fly-speckled rearview mirror to watch the traffic behind them.

The driver seemed oblivious to the swinging ornamentation hanging in the middle of the cracked windshield, which was adorned with a Christmas tree air
freshener so old it curled at the edges, and a dozen dangling
hamsa
, palm-shaped five-fingered protection amulets. One would think his view impaired. Or maybe that was why he slammed on his brakes every few hundred yards whether he needed to avoid the car in front of him, a pedestrian, or animal, or nothing at all.