Mission: Irresistible Read online

  “No need for alarm,” he reassured the Egyptian. “Everything is under control.”

  Well, except for the small detail that his brother had yet to show up with Solen’s remains for the reunification ceremony. What was taking Adam so long?

  Ahmose glowered. “For your sake I hope you are correct, Dr. Standish.”

  “That sounds like a threat. Are you threatening me, Ahmose?” Harrison squared his shoulders.

  “It is not a threat. It is a guarantee. If anything happens to the amulet, the djed, or any of Kiya’s artifacts, your visa will be rescinded and you will never again be allowed inside Egypt.”

  Alarm shot through him. Surely Ahmose couldn’t be serious about this.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” Harrison reiterated.

  Why was Ahmose acting so strangely? He wasn’t by nature a dramatic man. Usually the Egyptian was quite reserved. His dark mood seemed infectious. The crowd shifted restlessly. People peered at their watches and mumbled negative comments.

  “Dr. Standish?”

  Harrison glanced over to see one of the young college students who had spent the past week helping him and Cassie assemble the exhibits. The lanky kid’s name was Gabriel Martinez, and he had a rare enthusiasm for archaeology. Harrison had considered inviting the young student to participate in his next dig.

  “Yes?”

  “A man asked me to hand this to you.” Gabriel passed him a white business-sized envelope with Harrison’s name printed in block lettering. It looked like Adam’s handwriting.

  “What man?”

  “That dude over there.” Gabriel pointed.

  “Where?” Harrison squinted at the crowd.

  “In the Indiana Jones hat.”

  The Indy hat stood out among the cluster of Egyptian headdresses. Immediately, Harrison knew whose head was under it, because he’d been there when his brother had bought the hat on a trip to London.

  But Adam wasn’t hanging around. He was headed for the front entrance at a fast clip.

  Where was he going?

  Clutching the envelope Gabriel had slipped him, Harrison jostled through the throng. He didn’t want to shout and attract undue attention, but he didn’t want Adam to get away either.

  “Excuse me,” he apologized as he careened into Isis, whose oversized headdress bobbled precariously. He’d had his gaze so fixed on keeping the Indiana Jones hat in sight that he hadn’t seen her meander into his path. He zigzagged around her, just as the moving Indy hat reached the foyer.

  The crowd was even thicker here because this area was much smaller than the main part of the exhibit hall. He had to move quickly, or his brother was going to disappear. To hell with his dislike for drawing attention to himself.

  “Adam!” he called.

  People turned to stare. Harrison pretended not to care that he was being watched. He had never been a center-stage sort of guy, and collecting stares made him uncomfortable.

  The front door opened.

  “Wait!”

  The hat disappeared and the door clicked shut.

  Harrison was still a good twenty feet and twenty people from the entrance. What parlor game was his brother playing? From the time they were small kids, Adam had had a penchant for pirate treasure maps and secret spy codes and fantasy role-playing.

  His fondness for outlandish pranks and schemes lasted into adulthood and frequently plunged him into trouble. One year, when they were collage students on a dig site in Peru, Adam had cooked up a scheme to fake a famous religious artifact. It had started out as a joke. He’d never meant for people to take it seriously.

  For several days he was touted in the media. He achieved instant celebrity status and actually started to believe he’d honestly found a real artifact. He had a way of buying into his own bullshit. When the artifact was proved a fraud and Adam found himself threatened with legal action, Tom Grayfield rushed in, threw his money around, and hushed everything up.

  Adam had confessed to Harrison that those few days of notoriety had been well worth the ass-chewing he’d received from his old man.

  Was his brother up to his old tricks? Could he have faked Solen’s discovery? But that was impossible. Solen’s tomb had been authenticated by highly trained specialists. Experts Harrison knew and trusted. Still, he wouldn’t put it past his brother to pull some crazy publicity stunt.

  He reached the door, pushed through it, and ended up on the sidewalk outside the main entrance of the Kimbell. The streetlamps glinted off the smudged lenses of his glasses and the reflected glare blocked his view.

  He whipped off his glasses and wiped them on his shirttail. One of these days he was going to have laser eye surgery and throw the damned spectacles away forever. His brother had been nagging him to do it for years. Adam was fond of saying, “Girls don’t make passes at guys who wear glasses.”

  Still rubbing his lenses, he squinted into the darkness. The grounds were empty. The street was deserted except for a nondescript white delivery van parked at the corner. No one else was around.

  Adam had vanished.

  Where’d he go?

  He heard the roar of a motorcycle engine, and just then a souped-up Harley, customized with lots of chrome and specialty tires, zipped around the corner. The powerful machine buzzed past him on the street, Indiana Jones seated behind the handlebars.

  Quickly jamming his glasses back on, Harrison waved his arms. “Adam!”

  His brother never glanced back.

  *

  The balmy April night air greeted Cassie as the double-glass door snapped closed behind her, muting the laughter and voices from inside the museum. Suddenly, she felt very far away.

  Isolated. Alone.

  Tingles skated up her spine.

  Her breath came in short, raspy gasps. Anticipation escalated her excitement. She looked right, then left. Where had the mummy gone?

  Maybe she’d misunderstood his intentions. Maybe he’d been signaling to someone else. Nah. She knew when a guy was sending signals. And the mummy had been telegraphing her big-time. Who was he?

  Old boyfriend? New boyfriend? Friend? Lover? Enemy? Adam Grayfield?

  The suspense was excruciating. And totally irresistible.

  Ambient lighting from quaint low-voltage streetlamps illuminated the courtyard. Well-manicured trees and dense shrubbery cast dark shadows over the walkway.

  “Yoo-hoo.” Cassie wandered around the maze of chest-high bushes. “Anybody here?”

  No sound except for the echo of her high-heeled sandals clicking against the flagstones.

  What if Adam was the mummy? What if he needed to tell her something important about the exhibit? What if someone had been following him, and he had dressed up like an extra from an old Hammer Films horror movie so he wouldn’t be recognized?

  “Don’t be silly,” she growled under her breath and plopped down on a stone bench. More than likely the mummy was just teasing her, heating things up a notch, escalating their flirtation. “Everything is just fine.”

  To prove it, she would call Adam right now. She took her cell phone from her purse, along with a tin of cinnamon Altoids and her address book. She looked up his number, punched it in, and then popped one of the curiously strong breath mints.

  The phone rang. Once, twice, three times.

  “Come on, Adam,” she muttered. “Pick up the phone. Lambert’s looking to serve my behind on a platter over you.”

  When his voice mail answered after the tenth ring, Cassie sighed and switched off the phone without leaving a message. She stuffed the cell back into her purse and crunched the remainder of the cool cinnamon mint between her teeth.

  A rustling noise emanated from the bushes behind her. Her stomach nose-dived. She turned her head and saw the mummy silhouetted in the light.

  “Hello?”

  He shuffled toward her.

  “Adam?” She stood, dropping her purse on the ground beside the stone bench. “Is that you?”

  He nodded, or at le
ast she thought he did. His head barely moved, but she could have sworn it was a nod.

  “What is it? Is something wrong?”

  He made a rough, gurgling sound.

  Cassie sank her hands onto her hips. “I have to tell you, this isn’t earning brownie points with me. Everyone is waiting for you inside the museum.”

  He lumbered closer, his hands outstretched, reaching for her. He mumbled something indecipherable in a foreign language. She was fluent in Spanish, but he certainly wasn’t speaking that. Neither was he muttering French or Portuguese. Greek? Latin?

  “Adam,” she repeated. “Is that you?”

  Maybe she’d made a boo-boo and this wasn’t him after all. She’d never met Adam in person.

  “Beware … ,” he whispered hoarsely, and then he started coughing.

  “Are you okay?” She took a step toward him. “Do you need a glass of water?”

  “Beware …” He raised a linen-wrapped hand to his throat and coughed again.

  “Beware of what? Dry crackers?”

  He repeated the foreign phrase.

  She strained to listen. If she squinted real hard and turned her head in his direction, it sort of sounded like he was saying, “Wannamakemecomealot.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Wannamakemecomealot.”

  “Oh, I get it, you’re flirting with me.” She grinned.

  During their numerous transatlantic telephone conversations over the course of the past few weeks, as they made preparations for the exhibition, Cassie had nonchalantly let it slip that she adored surprises and fantasy role-playing games. Perhaps Adam had taken her suggestive comments to heart and decided to use the occasion of their first face-to-face meeting as an opportunity to seduce her.

  Too fun.

  “Let me guess. You’re pretending we’re in jeopardy. Bad guys are after us. Danger heightens the sexual attraction,” she said. “It’s a good game. You really had me going there for a minute.”

  He drew in another gurgling breath. He was doing a great job of sounding creepy.

  “Is it the vizier’s men? Are we pretending to be Kiya and Solen? Are they after us?”

  “Beware of the …” He wavered on his feet, just inches from her.

  Was he drunk? She hoped he wasn’t drunk. She didn’t like drunks.

  “Spit it out, man. Stop being so cryptic. I know it’s a game, but I can’t get into it if you don’t move things along. I have a short attention span. Everybody says so. Beware of what?”

  But he didn’t answer.

  Wait a minute. Something wasn’t right.

  Ever since her near-drowning accident as a kid when she had spent three months in a coma, she occasionally experienced a weird sort of hotness at the very base of her brain. The sensation almost always preceded an unexpected turn of events. And right now her medulla oblongata was sizzling like skillet bacon.

  Her nerve endings scorched a heated path from the nape of her neck to the tips of her ears. Burning, tingling, stinging.

  Run, leave, get out of here.

  Suddenly, the mummy pitched forward and Cassie thrust out her arms to catch him before he smashed face-first onto the stone walkway.

  And that’s when she saw the wicked, black-handled paring knife protruding from his back.

  CHAPTER 3

  An ominous feeling swept over Harrison. Something wasn’t right, but he had no idea what was going on.

  Stay calm, stay cool, stay detached from your feelings. He repeated his life mantra and exhaled slowly. Gradually his sense of dread abated.

  That’s when he realized he was still clutching the envelope Gabriel had given him. He ripped the flap open and dumped the contents into his palm. For some strange reason, he had expected to see Solen’s half of the amulet. Instead, he was puzzled to find an airport baggage claim ticket.

  Huh?

  What was his brother trying to tell him? Why had he given the envelope to Gabriel rather than delivering it himself? What did the ticket mean? Had Adam left Solen and his artifacts in baggage claim at the DFW airport?

  But why?

  Considering Adam’s look-at-me personality, whipping up an elaborate exploitation of the reunification ceremony was not a far-fetched notion. Harrison had a flash of insight. Although Adam claimed to believe wholeheartedly in the legend of the star-crossed lovers, his innate fear of ending up with egg on his face like Geraldo Rivera with Al Capone’s empty safe could explain his motives. Adam would have to make sure something happened when the pieces of the amulet were joined together.

  Harrison pulled out his cell phone. He hadn’t talked to his brother in so long he’d forgotten his number, and it took him several seconds to remember it. Adam’s voice mail answered, and Harrison left a message for him to call ASAP.

  He wondered when Cassie had last heard from his brother and decided to go ask her. On the way to the courtyard, he palmed the ticket into his jacket pocket. He shouldered past King Tut, who was lip-locking Nefertiti behind a replica of a Minoan sailing ship from 1100 BC, and moved toward the side entrance.

  He stopped with his hand on the exit door. Did he really want to meander into the courtyard and find Cassie in flagrante with a mummy?

  If the door handle had been made of plutonium, he couldn’t have jerked his hand away faster. He stepped back.

  The room was uncomfortably hot and getting hotter by the minute. The party was too loud. He was breathing too fast. He felt claustrophobic. More than anything, he longed to be alone in a library studying ancient Egyptian lore, or knee-deep in sand at a new excavation site.

  Calm down. Don’t let the crowd rattle you.

  He got his breathing under control just as a woman’s screams erupted from the courtyard, and then the lights in the museum went out.

  And all hell broke loose.

  *

  Panicked, Cassie backpedaled. The injured mummy slumped to the ground. She turned and ran full-out for the museum, her shoulder throbbing from the weight of his body, her nostrils filled with the smell of his blood.

  Sprinting wasn’t easy, considering the most rigorous exercise she got on a regular basis was blow-drying her hair straight, but she was scared witless and wanted out of there.

  Now.

  She reached the entrance and the lights winked out at the same time. The entire building was plunged into instant darkness. She couldn’t see whose chest it was that she slammed into when she barreled through the door, but she could tell it was a masculine one.

  Strong male arms embraced her.

  Safe.

  She couldn’t see anything. The room was totally black. She heard people gasp. Then came the exclamations of fear and concern. Everyone was in a tizzy.

  But she was all right. She felt the hardness of the man’s honed chest beneath her fingers and she trembled, not with fear, but with something just as elemental.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  It was almost as if he were inside her head and his mind was wrapped around hers. As if their hearts were beating to the same tempo. As if his breath were hers and hers his.

  Bizarre.

  Something about him arrested her. Something about his calm-in-the-storm aura filled her with a strong sense of déjà vu. She’d never felt such a compelling mental connection to any man in her life. She hadn’t even believed such a bond was possible. And yet, here it was. Deep inside her, something monumental stirred. Something long-buried. Something hoped for and dreamed of but never dared spoken aloud.

  Soul mate.

  All the headlong giddiness and impulsiveness that had defined her life to this point vanished. As if for the first time since birth, she was sobered.

  This was no mere flirtation. This was no simple tease. This was no ordinary male-female reaction.

  Her skin tingled as the warmth of his breath feathered the minute hairs on her cheek. Her heart lub-dubbed frantically. The rough material of his jacket lightly scratched her bare arm. His masculine scent, an odd but pleasing combinati
on of sand, soap, and old parchment paper, soothed her.

  He smelled intriguingly like the Prado museum in Madrid where Cassie had worked as a foreign exchange student when she was in college. Bookish, old-worldy, solid. He was as hard and firm as she was soft and pliable. He tightened his grip on her shoulder, squeezing gently.

  Her trembling increased.

  “Cassie,” he murmured. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you. You’re all right.”

  His voice was rich and earthy. He sounded the way mushrooms tasted, she found herself thinking dizzily—shiitake, cremini, enoki, portobello, chanterelle. But unlike mushrooms after a rain, his words did not sprout willy-nilly. He did not speak again, even while others crashed into things around them, cursing and complaining.

  He was a rock. Gibraltar. Atlas.

  Strong, present, unmoving.

  She heard Phyllis Lambert urging everyone to stay still and remain calm, reassuring the panicky crowd that the backup generator would kick on momentarily. But Cassie wasn’t listening to the curator. She wanted to hear him speak again.

  She curled her fingers around his wrist and whispered, “I’m scared.”

  “Nothing to be afraid of.” His tone was low, measured, controlled. “I’ve got you.”

  His quiet, deliberate words inspired her. She fought an urge to beg him to fling aside those precise vocal notes and let loose in a careless, heartfelt rush of verbiage. She wanted to hear him breathe a cornucopia of language. Each sound falling upon the next, like kernels of corn slipping through a tin funnel.

  Speak to me. Talk. Feed my ears.

  Her twin sister, Maddie, teased her because she compared so many things to food, but Cassie embodied sensual experiences. She saw nothing wrong in associating a man’s virile baritone with the lush sumptuousness of delicious mushrooms.

  She loved to taste and smell everything. To lick and sup and dine. It was probably the main reason why she wore a size 14 instead of a 9. But who cared? She’d take sated over skinny any day. Plus, she’d never had any complaints about her cushy upholstery from her numerous suitors.

  Cassie felt the heat of his hand at her waist, the pressure of his hip resting against her pelvis. She was disoriented, lost. All senses distorted. Thrown off balance by the lack of sight.