Dangerous Entanglement

‘I see.’ He shook his head with what she could almost have taken for genuine regret. ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to give you that long. We’ve a contract to meet. We start blasting in three weeks.’

She stared at him in startled horror. ‘Blasting? You mean you’re going to use dynamite!’

That oddly intriguing mouth quirked into a mocking smile. ‘Well, what did you think we were going to use?’ he taunted. Picks and shovels?’

She returned him an angry glare, not amused by his humour. ‘You’re just going to blow everything up?’ she demanded, blazing.

‘Well, not quite as drastic as that,’ he conceded. ‘But modern quarrying methods are pretty efficient.’

‘It’s nothing but licensed vandalism!’ she flared. ‘You’re just going to destroy all that history…’

‘The decision isn’t mine,’ he pointed out drily. ‘It’s the Egyptian government’s. The country needs the foreign exchange that exporting the ore will bring in. You can’t eat history, or put it on your kid’s feet instead of a pair of shoes.’

She felt her fist clench. He was perfectly right, of course—but she’d be damned if she was going to admit it. ‘Well, since I have so little time, I’d better not waste any more of it,’ she rapped, a bite in her voice. ‘Good morning, Mr Marshall.’

That cynical mouth curved into a mocking smile. ‘Thank you for showing me around,’ he drawled. ‘I shall probably be seeing you again, Miss…? Or is it Mrs?’ he added, deliberately provocative.

‘Ms.’ Why, three years after her divorce, was she still so defensive? ‘Holloway.’

He acknowledged the stilted introduction with a slight inclination of his head. ‘I see. Well, Ms Holloway, it’s been very pleasant meeting you. I’m sorry my arrival signals the end of your work here—I can imagine how frustrating that is for you.’

She found that he was holding out his hand, expecting her to shake it, but with a sudden rush of embarrassment she remembered how rough her own hands were from all the work and neglect she had been subjecting them to for the past six months, how damaged her nails.

‘Yes, well…’ Instinctively she tucked her hands out of sight behind her back. ‘There’s nothing much I can do about it, is there?’

‘No, I’m afraid there isn’t.’ Again that mocking smile. ‘Goodbye, then.’

‘Goodbye.’

She watched him go, her mind a tangle of confusion. Why had she acted like that down in the tomb—like some prim little schoolroom miss? Had she been too long out here in the desert, that she had forgotten how to respond when a man showed her even a spark of admiration? He must have thought she was crazy.

Or more likely, she reflected ruefully, that she wasn’t accustomed to it. She twined one finger around the strand of hair that had slipped from beneath her hat, feeling the rough, dry ends; she had neglected it terribly these past couple of months—out here in this hot, dusty climate she really ought to take better care of it. And her hands were just awful—she couldn’t remember the last time she had given herself a manicure.

Not that she cared a damn what he thought of her, she reminded herself forcefully. She didn’t want him here. Unfortunately there was nothing much she could do about it—Mr Makram had made it clear, when he had arranged for her to be granted the licence to explore the tombs, that she couldn’t be allowed to hold up the mining of the mineral ores, so essential to the country’s economy.

Well, if she only had a short time, she had better get on, she scolded herself, dismissing all thoughts of Alex Marshall with a shrug of her slim shoulders. She had no intention of letting any man—least of all one with a reputation like the boss of Marshall Mining and Marine—distract her from her objective.

‘Oh, just my luck, that he should come while I wasn’t here!’ Annette protested, gurgling with laughter. ‘It isn’t fair.’

Joanna grunted, her attention all on rigging a tripod for her camera, to photograph the wall-decoration in the last burial-chamber they had found. ‘You didn’t miss much,’ she commented dismissively. ‘Did you manage to get everything we needed?’

‘Almost. The hypo-crystals haven’t arrived yet—he said to try tomorrow.’

Joanna frowned impatiently. ‘He said that yesterday,’ she complained. ‘We’re nearly out, and we can’t afford to wait—we’ve got to get everything finished before they start quarrying.’

Annette’s brown pansy eyes sparkled with mischievous speculation. ‘I wonder…Maybe we could persuade him to give us a few more weeks?’

‘I very much doubt it.’ Joanna responded a little too forcefully. ‘He can’t get in here quick enough with his bulldozers, and start smashing everything up. The only thing he cares about is his profits—he’s not going to let anyone stand in his way.’

Annette looked a little startled by the venom of her reaction. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked innocently. ‘Didn’t you like him?’

Joanna slanted her young assistant a sardonic smile. Still of the age to believe in romantic dreams, Annette had been drooling for weeks over the prospect of meeting the celebrated Alex Marshall in the flesh. And if anyone could succeed in melting that rock-hard heart, she reflected with an odd twinge of an emotion she didn’t care to explore too deeply, it could well be Annette. Small and extremely pretty, with a cloud of dark curly hair and huge brown eyes, fringed by the longest, silkiest lashes, she could wind almost any man around her little finger.

But Joanna felt a certain responsibility for her; after all, she wasn’t even twenty-one yet, and she was here to complete the field-course portion of her degree, not to flirt with a man as dangerous as Alex Marshall. ‘I…hardly had time to form an opinion,’ she responded, taking a slightly flexible approach to the truth. ‘He was only here for a few minutes.’

‘Yes, but what was your first impression?’ Annette persisted eagerly.

Joanna shrugged her slender shoulders, hoping to convey the most supreme indifference. ‘He seemed rather too full of himself for my taste,’ she dismissed casualty.

Annette regarded her with naïve sympathy. ‘You’ve never really fancied anyone much, though, since your divorce, have you? Oh, I’m sorry…’ she rushed on anxiously as Joanna’s jaw tensed. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it…I…’

Joanna laughed drily. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she assured her, all her attention on checking the focus of the camera. ‘I certainly don’t. I was very well rid of the rat, and I have no intention of falling into the same trap ever again.’

‘You mean…you don’t ever want to get married again?’ the younger girl protested, aghast at such a prospect.

‘No, thank you,’ Joanna asserted with calm certainty. ‘Marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I’m afraid. I much prefer being single.’

‘You can see the strata the ores are in.’ Alex pointed out, sweeping his powerful binoculars along the ridge of yellow hills on the far side of the valley. ‘It runs right along—that line of slightly darker rock.’

His young companion nodded. ‘I see it. What were the final results of the drilling tests?’

‘Most of the ore is very high grade.’ Alex confirmed, rolling out the large-scale map on the bonnet of the Land Rover. ‘We’ll start blasting here, beneath that outcrop to the left, and work our way along this way.’

Greg bent his fair head over the map, checking the contours of the hills against the area Alex had marked. ‘I see. Where do you intend setting up the work-camp?’

‘Where would you suggest?’ Alex returned to him.

Greg frowned, concentrating. Newly qualified with an engineering degree, he felt it was important to make a good impression; Alex wasn’t the sort to do him any favours just because he was his cousin. ‘I’d say…just there.’ He pointed to an area closest to the river, at the opposite end of the ridge from where blasting was to begin, and lifted his binoculars to check that it was as suitable as it appeared from the map.

It looked a pretty inhospitable place—a rough, rocky, sun-baked hillside, with just a few straggling thorn bushes and some parched grass for vegetation. The back door of hell. He swung the glasses along the ridge, and then back again abruptly. ‘What’s going on down there?’ he asked, focusing in to take a better look.

Alex felt himself tense with unreasoning annoyance. So the damned girl was proving a distraction already!

‘I forgot to mention it,’ he remarked dismissively. ‘I just found out about it last week. There’s some female doing an archaeological dig. Don’t worry—it won’t be a problem to us. I checked with Makram—she’s only got permission to stay until we’re ready to start blasting.’

‘You forgot to mention it?’ Greg slanted him a quizzical glance. ‘You run into an angel like that out here in this God-forsaken place, and then forget all about it? Pull the other one.’

Alex raised one dark eyebrow in surprise; ‘angel’ was hardly the word he would have chosen. He lifted his own binoculars, sweeping along the ridge to find the half-hidden hollow where the tombs were clustered. But there was no sign of the aggravating Ms Holloway—just one of Greg’s pint-sized brunettes, squatting on the ground, mending the handle of an old shovel. He vaguely recalled that there had been some mention of an assistant, but he couldn’t remember her name.

‘That’s not her…’

At that moment she emerged from the entrance of the tomb. As he watched, she reached up for a rope suspended from a block and tackle, and began to haul on it. God, she must have muscles on her like a navvy, he reflected in horror—a man could get quite a shock trying to cuddle up to that at night!

‘There she is,’ he told Greg. ‘The one in the yellow T-shirt.’

Greg looked, but didn’t seem impressed. ‘You can keep that one,’ he accorded generously. ‘I’ll take the brunette.’ He let his gaze linger for a long time. ‘Mmmvery nice indeed.’

Alex laughed with sardonic humour. ‘You’re supposed to be here to work, not admire the scenery,’ he reminded him drily.