Page 59

It wasn’t his finest turn of phrase, but it was the best he’d been able to come up with.

“So…” Adam started.

“This is all patently ridiculous!” Neil burst out. “We’ve paraded into unsurveyed burial chambers, crawled through unstable tunnels—and now we’re hiding in the house Sayyid didn’t even tell me he had—and for what? Because Ellie thinks the British Athenaeum for Egyptological Studies is in the pocket of some cabal of dastardly villains looking for magical artifacts?”

“That’s… well, not entirely inaccurate,” Adam awkwardly admitted. “But the way you’re putting it…”

“My funders aren’tunreasonable.” Neil paced along the bank of the canal, gesturing with his bowl still in his hand. “They certainly won’t be happy that we entered the burial chamber contrary to their instructions, but I’m sure that if I… if I just explain…” He stopped short, his face pale with panic. “Mr. Forster-Mowbray is perhaps not themostscholarly in his inclinations, but I’m sure if I tell him that it was all a terrible… Or scorpions!” he burst out, clutching the bowl to his chest. “I could say that we were assaulted by a… a whole… flock?”

“Nest,” Adam filled in tiredly.

“—A whole nest of scorpions! So of course we had to retreat to the burial chamber for safety reasons!” Neil closed his eyes and let out a moan. “Oh, blast it. This is a mess! And you—you, of all people! Showing up on the wrong bloody continent, waving around enormous knives and talking about gunshots and glowing bones… I know you enjoy a good prank, Bates, but this is really beyond the pale!”

“Prank?” Adam echoed.

The word sounded a little dangerous. He hadn’t intended for it to come out that way. After all, he was there to apologize to Neil, whatever that ended up requiring of him—not get his hackles up in the first two minutes.

“What else could it be?!” Neil waved his arms—one hand still precariously clutching the bowl. “Unless it’s all part of some bizarre scheme to win over my sister—and I haven’t even begun to share my thoughts onthatsubject. What are youdoinghere with her? I can’t imagine what I’m going to tell David and my mother about all of this. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but my best friend hasruined your daughterand dragged her off to the other side of the world where she is now invading people’s tombs and raving about magical artifacts!’”

Part of Adam distantly recognized that this was the point at which he should start apologizing. Unfortunately, that part was rapidly drowned out by a fierce and indignant burst of temper.

“Ellie’s not raving,” Adam shot back.

“She thinks she has aglowing bone!” Neil raved back.

“That’s becausewe found one!” Adam yelled. “Along with a four-foot-wide, creepy as hell, extremely magical mirror! And before you start calling Ellie crazy, you’d better know that I touched the damned thing too, and it showed me exactly where to find my knife! So what—you gonna think both of us are lunatics?!”

Neil gaped at him as though that were precisely what he was thinking, but he was just prudent enough not to blurt it out.

“And how did you and my sister find this magic mirror, then?” he retorted instead on what he clearly thought was safer ground. “When you were gallivanting around the wilderness together, completely unchaperoned, with no mind at all for the utter havoc that would wreak on her reputation? How did she even end up in British Honduras in the first place? Was that your fault, too?”

“Ellie made it to British Honduras all on her own,” Adam snapped back, anger heating his skin.

Neil blanched. “How is that better? That’s not better! That’s… that’sterrifying!How am I going to explain this to our parents? This is Egypt—it’s not the middle of nowhere! Somebody is bound to recognize her, and then what? If word gets back to London of what the two of you have been up to…” He stopped, eyes widening. “Whathavethe two of you been up to?”

Adam’s anger deflated.

“Er… about that…” he started awkwardly.

Neil gaped at him with a new level of horror. “But you did say you hadn’t yet… yerrgh,” he finished, choking on the rest of the words.

“We haven’t!” Adam quickly assured him. “There hasn’t—yet—been any… of that…” He caught himself, pulling in an uncomfortable breath. “I mean—if we’re talking about the thing that I think we’re talking about.”

“That… That’s…” Neil backed up a step, stammering. “Do you realize that implies that there areother thingswe aren’t talking about?”

Adam shifted uncomfortably in his boots. “I mean, in a purely rhetorical sense, there are always going to be things other than the things that we’re talking about…”

He trailed off weakly.

“Just tell me what you’ve been doing with my sister!” Neil demanded.

Adam drew in a breath. This was what he had come out here for, after all. He owed it to Neil—and to Ellie. He needed to tell the truth, and then take whatever hell broke loose as a result.

Now he just had to figure out where to start.

“Well,” he began carefully, “first there was some… boating. And then we had this little problem with a waterfall. Some… kissing might have happened after that. And then some more kissing on another boat—the one to Egypt—and, uh…”

“Is that all, then? Just kissing?” Neil pressed hopefully.