Eileen Wilks - Night Of No Return

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.”

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?”