she’d realized when she’d reported their cave to him last month.
Or maybe he was hedging his bets. If what they’d found so far turned out to be as important as Nora hoped, he might try to have someone else put in charge of the dig. Someone with one of those dandy Y chromosomes. Damn.
“I’d better be in camp to welcome our colleague when he arrives, then, hadn’t I? Be right up.”
Typically, Nora didn’t bother to look for the easiest path up the side of the wadi, but headed straight up from where she stood. She was a long, leggy woman who moved with the awkward energy of a colt, all sudden starts and stops, yet there was a certain grace to her climb, the ease of a woman comfortable with her body. She reached the top only slightly breathless, and paused to unhook the small water jug on her belt, then downed half the contents in a few greedy gulps.
“Did Mahmoud say who our visitor is?” she asked as she moved past Tim. The path, what there was of it, wound through the knobby outcroppings of rock that made up the sizable hill that lay between them and the camp.
He grimaced. Tim had one of those elastic faces that turn every expression into comical exaggeration. “Probably. I didn’t catch it, though. I was concentrating too hard on trying to figure whether he said he’d be here in fifteen minutes, or that his cat was pregnant. Of course, if he’d asked me where the baggage claim was, I would have understood just fine.”
“Or the men’s room?” She grinned. Her assistant’s smattering of Arabic came almost entirely from a phrase book. “I’ll never understand how a student of language who’s been in Egypt for two years can know so little Arabic.”
“Everyone knows we Brits can’t cook or remember all those peculiar words some people use instead of a proper language.”
“You’ve managed to learn quite a few peculiar words. At least, Ibrahim seems to think so, or he wouldn’t have kept you around.”
“Hieroglyphics are different. I don’t have to speak them.”
Tim was totally absorbed by his specialty—the evolution of written language as evinced by the study of hieroglyphics. He was smart, funny and completely lacking in ambition, a trait more foreign to her than any language could be. “Where are Ahmed and Gamal? One of them could have translated for you.”
“Praying, I think,” he said, vague as usual about anything that didn’t interest him. “Do you think we’re going to be descended upon by a horde of eager Egyptologists?”
“One person doesn’t constitute a horde. Although, if we can impress him with the potential here….” She shrugged, impatient with her own eagerness. “Or her, I should say, though that doesn’t seem likely, given Ibrahim’s prejudices. I’m surprised he sent anyone at all. I didn’t think he was even listening when I talked to him last month.”
Nora had tried not to get her hopes up when she’d made the trip to Cairo to present her report in person, but her reception by the director of the museum had been chilly enough to depress Pollyanna. She’d received permission to follow up on her find, but none of the funding or support personnel she required to do the job properly.
Needing advice, she’d made a second stop before returning to the dig—a short trip across the border into Israel, where an old professor of hers lived on a kibbutz in the Negev.
Deep inside, something tugged at her, a feeling sharp and insistent, clearer than memory but less easy to name. Enough, already, she told herself. She’d known the man for no more than an hour—oh, it was ridiculous even to say she’d known him. She’d found him, that was all, and she’d done what she could to keep him alive. She didn’t even know his name. If she still felt somehow connected to a man she didn’t know, that wasn’t surprising, was it? Under the circumstances…?
She remembered the shock of his eyes opening and meeting hers, the sense that the world had just tilted, sending her life spinning off in an unplanned direction. Romantic foolishness, but not surprising, really. Under the circumstances.
When Tim sighed she glanced back at him, ready to be distracted. “Wishing for that horde, are you?”
“With hordes, come funding. Another generator would be nice. We could get a new air conditioner. Hey, isn’t the path thataway?”
“This way is shorter.” The path Tim had indicated was a fairly easy track that went around the rocky hill. Nora preferred a more direct route, up the hill and through a narrow notch between thrusting boulders. “You’ve been in Egypt long enough for your blue blood to have adjusted to the heat. We already have an air conditioner.”
“No, we don’t. We have a noisemaker you turn on for a few hours that occasionally coughs up a little cool air.”
“It’s better than nothing.” Which summed up most of their equipment. Theirs was a shoestring operation, and with all the small disasters that had beset them lately, those strings were getting frayed. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she said, addressing herself as much as Tim as she eased out of the vee-shaped cleft and back onto more nearly horizontal ground. “Even if this fellow gives Ibrahim a good report, we’re not going to get any substantial increase in funding. Not unless we make a major find.” She started up the hill.
Tim followed slowly. “We’d have a much better chance of that if we had the people and equipment to do the job right.”
Didn’t she know it. “I could have sworn I gave you my speech about ‘paying our dues’ when you signed on, but if you need to hear it again—”
“I know, I know. This is my opportunity to get out of my ivory tower and learn the basics of fieldwork. The problem is, I like my ivory tower. It’s air-conditioned, and there are no bugs.”
He slipped, grabbing awkwardly at the rock, swore, and finally managed to clamber out and stand beside her. “And there aren’t a lot of mountains to cross to get to my office at the museum, either. Look at this.” He held out his hand, displaying a scraped palm. “I’m damned if I know why you have to play mountain goat just so you can find a place to run. Don’t you get enough exercise on the dig?”
A smile tugged at her mouth as she turned back to head down the hill. Camp lay below them. “You like air-conditioning. I like to run.”
“Well, aside from being a blasted nuisance and hard on my epidermis, your runs aren’t safe. Especially with everything that’s been happening lately.”
“A few petty thefts don’t make it unsafe here—as safe as you can be in the desert, anyway.”
“If we stay in camp. But you keep wandering off by yourself.”
Out of consideration for Tim’s scraped hand, she chose the easiest way down, circling around a large sandstone outcropping that wind and weather had sculpted into a shape she could only call phallic. “There’s a lot of poverty among the tribes. Not that I mean to accuse the Bedouin, but they’re the only people out here other than us.”
“Just them, us, and the occasional terrorist.”
“Are you still harping on that theory? Terrorists blow up things. They don’t steal a couple of cases of canned food for the glory of the cause.”
“What about our first generator?”
“We don’t know
