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.
Greg grinned sheepishly. ‘Sorry. But there’s no harm in getting to know our neighbours, is there? After all, I’m the one that’s going to be stuck out here doing all the hard work—you’ll just be buzzing in and out in your little toy helicopter, looking important.’
Alex snorted at that friendly dig at his pride and joy, his Bell Jetranger, which he piloted himself. ‘The privilege of rank,’ he returned loftily. ‘Besides, they won’t be here much longer—once we start blasting, they’ll have to clear out.’
He lifted his binoculars again, watching the girl as she finished hauling up a trolley-load of rubble, and tipped it into a wheelbarrow. All that heavy work certainly kept her in good trim, he reflected, somewhat revising his earlier opinion. Most of the women he knew dieted to the point of tedium, and spent hours working out in aerobics classes, but any one of them would have killed for a shape like that.
But he had an unpleasant suspicion that she was going to prove herself to be