Relentless Read Online Free PDF Page A

look very comfortable but her discomfort was none of his business. If she woke up with a stiff neck that was her own fault.
    She wasn’t asleep. He could practically hear her mind working.
    He knew he wouldn’t find what he was looking for without her help at the museum. She at least knew which decade of artifacts and paperwork to check as a jumping-off point. He didn’t want to go; that was a given. But he’d performed numerous jobs for queen and country that he hadn’t wanted to perform. Sometimes a man had to shut the hell up and just do what had to be done. His father was one of two people in London whom Thorne had no desire to see, but to get Isis and himself into the back rooms of the museum, he needed his father’s help.
    Bloody hell . He’d then owe His Lordship a favor. No good deed went unrecorded in the Earl’s ledgers.
    Still, with Isis’s tenacious assistance, he could make the trip quick and relatively painless. If anything in the professor’s artifacts was from his recent dig, Thorne would give Isis the information she needed and send heron her way. He didn’t need to go to Egypt with her. Just point her in the right direction.
    She wanted the mythical tomb of Cleopatra? If her father had been in the Valley of the Scorpions and that’s where the tomb was, he’d find the connection.
    She’d leave; he’d go back to Seattle. The end.
    She’d have her answers, and he’d forget about the curly-haired woman who batted her long lashes from behind smudged glasses.
    He’d learned something else about his client—besides that she was as tenacious as a Rottweiler. She was a tightwad who made every penny work twice, once for each side. The heated conversation between them at Sea-Tac Airport had drawn a small crowd of amused onlookers. It was only when he informed her with all the superior arrogance of his ancestors that with his bad leg, sitting in steerage for nine hours was completely out of the question, that she had partially acquiesced. He could go first-class. She’d go coach.
    Thorne purchased two first-class tickets and told her to shut up and enjoy her heated nuts.
    “You can talk to me,” she said drowsily, without opening her eyes. “I’m not asleep.”
    He slipped off her glasses. Her mouth tightened at the unexpected contact. Not disgust; more like surprise. Thoughtful, he folded the earpieces and stuck the glasses in his shirt pocket, beside the photograph she’d given him—reluctantly—back at the Lodestone office. “How long have you been living with the Starks?” He’d takenher to Queen Anne Hill to pack and was not surprised that she’d directed him to Zak’s house.
    “A month. They’ve been kind enough to let me camp out there while I regroup.”
    Thorne could smell her hair and skin—cinnamon. She’d twisted her curls up on top of her head, and her face unframed by all that hair was pure and sweet. Opening her eyes, she gave him a drowsy smile. There were humor and charm in her big brown eyes and sensual mouth, elements oddly more insidious than overt sex appeal.
    He removed the picture from his breast pocket. “Tell me what you see.”
    She didn’t take the piece of paper from him, just touched his hand to bring it closer. An unwelcome frisson of awareness zinged up his arm at her touch. The speed with which she withdrew her fingers, the way her mouth did that tightening thing again, indicated she’d felt the same thing. Bollocks . He was a grown man, and she was the first woman on his radar in too long. “Need your glasses?”
    “No, I see fine close up.” She straightened to push her fringe out of her eyes. “It was taken in the evening. Seven or eight, I’d guess. You can tell by the angle of the sunlight.” Her arm brushed his when she pointed. “This is clearly a tomb entrance. See the way the earth slopes, but the size of the rock is not uniform to its surroundings? That was backfill. This section here is undisturbed. This section here, where the team