Eileen Wilks - Night Of No Return

“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?”

“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.”