Night Of No Return
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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.