The kiss was at once a surprise and somehow inevitable, like she’d been waiting for it since the moment they’d met. His warm mouth moved against hers and her heart jumped in her chest, fluttering wildly as a bird in a cage with excitement.

His arms were strong and firm as they held her close, a frame she hung on as her knees felt weak. It could have lasted seconds or centuries, the slow slide of his hand into her hair all she ever cared to feel again. The heat of his skin, the scent of him so close, left her dizzy. Gradually, they parted for breath and, realizing what they were doing, stepped away from each other.

“It’s getting late,” Vanessa said, looking away, suddenly shy. “We should probably get some rest.”

“Yes,” Ramin agreed, avoiding her gaze. “I’ll find someone to show us to our rooms.”

He hurried away and she followed slowly after, leaving a gap between them, both of them a little overwhelmed by what had just happened and unsure how to treat each other now that it had happened. Vanessa’s heart and lips burned to kiss him again, but at the same time she knew it would be a mistake, and he seemed to feel the same, at least judging by the way he was avoiding even looking at her now.

A moment later, a maid was leading them upstairs to the guest rooms.

“Here we are,” the woman said, stopping before a pair of large doors. “The bed has been made for you and everything has been aired out.”

She opened the doors to the finely appointed room and its singular, king-sized bed. Vanessa covered her face.

“I believe there’s been a misunderstanding,” Ramin said to the maid with a small chuckle. “We aren’t together.”

“Oh!” the maid blushed. “My apologies, Your Highness. I’ll have a second room prepared at once.”

She hurried off, leaving them alone in the hallway.

“You take this room,” Ramin said graciously. “I’ll take the next one.”

“Are you sure?” Vanessa asked. “I don’t mind waiting.”

“I insist,” he said, urging her towards it with a hand on her shoulder. “You had a long day. You need the rest.”

“Thank you,” Vanessa said as she stepped towards the doors. “Really. For everything.”

“It was my pleasure,” he replied, his touch sliding from her shoulder down to her hand. “Truly.”

He let go reluctantly and, fighting the urge to ask him to share the room with her, Vanessa murmured goodnight and closed the doors between them.

She sank against them then with a sigh. She really shouldn’t be letting herself get swept away by this. Even if he wasn’t a womanizer like the magazines said, he was still a prince, miles out of her league, and not what she’d come here for.

She was here for the tomb of Amanirenas and the treasures it held. The thought, which had made her uncomfortable to begin with, now felt like a stone in her gut dragging her down. She didn’t want to do it. But the thought of the debt waiting for her when she finished her degree was terrifying. She shook it off, feeling foolish. That hardly mattered now. Ramin and Ansar’s promises to fix the situation were appreciated, but they had no chance against Peterson’s head start.

Her bags had been brought up to the room, fetched from Professor Van Rees’s apartment that morning when Ramin had assumed they would stay there during their expedition. She changed into a nightgown and fell into the huge, comfortable bed.

The night breeze blew, cool and jasmine scented, through the tall, open windows, the diaphanous white silk curtains catching the moonlight in pearly shadow. She turned restlessly between the Egyptian cotton sheets, thinking about Ramin and the kiss. He was making no attempt to hide the fact that he was interested in her, and she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t interested any longer. But there were just too many complications.

Part of her knew she was just making excuses. She was good at them; she’d spent the last four years dating men she knew she wasn’t interested in so that it would be easy to let go when they decided they weren’t interested in her.

She was afraid of what would happen if she ever let herself really fall for someone. She wasn’t sure she could handle it. She knew, with almost total certainty, that if love ever came between her and her work, she would choose her work. But she didn’t want to know what it would feel like to make that decision, so she’d avoided it as much as she could. And here it was now, sneaking up on her in the guise of a man almost too perfect to be real. It was, to be honest, terrifying.

After an hour or more of tossing and turning, her thoughts full of the Sheikh and her own stubborn fears, she gave up on sleep and slipped out of bed, lighting a candle and taking from her bag the case containing the ancient map of Nubia. She set it up on the vanity in the corner of the room and spread her papers across the delicate surface.

If she wasn’t going to sleep, she could at least work. She could continue her translation of the map. She’d been meaning to plot out the best possible dig sites—though that seemed a bit pointless now that Peterson was already camped out on her primary location. She doubted they’d take well to her digging twenty feet away from them.

For an hour, she worked steadily, eyes itching with tiredness in the flickering candle light, transcribing names and comparing them to the Greek. One good thing would come of this, at least: Peterson couldn’t steal her work on the Meroitic language. That would be hers alone, and thanks to this map she was very close to a full translation. The kind she could apply to all the hundreds of un-translated Meroitic steles and engravings that had been discovered and thus far left a mystery. Like those that might be in the tomb Peterson uncovered.

She sighed at the thought, sending one of her papers fluttering off the desk. She bent tiredly to pick it up, rubbing at her eyes. It was a listing of the locations of the Sahara’s edges by year. The sand spread a little bit more every year. Desert encroachment was a real danger to neighboring biomes, not to mention human habitations. It was also a pain in the ass for archeologists trying to guess the locations of sites in the Sahara based on landmarks long swallowed by the sand and borders that no longer existed.

She was always forgetting to adjust her calculations…

Vanessa stopped cold as sudden realization washed over her. When she’d translated the name on the map, she’d been so excited and moved so quickly. Had she remembered to adjust for the Sahara’s moving edges?

She began scribbling calculations frantically, working out the difference the drift had caused. Her heart hammered as she looked down at the new location of the tomb site, more than a mile east of where she’d been looking before.

She got to her feet, slamming her bedroom door open to run across the hall to where the maid had prepared a room for Ramin, hammering on his door.

He opened it, shirtless and dazed, and stared at her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I found it!” she said, elated. “I got the calculations wrong before! I forgot to account for desert growth! Peterson is digging in the wrong place!”

It took Ramin, half asleep, a moment to process what that meant. Then, he suddenly laughed, triumphant and delighted, and lifted her by the waist, spinning her around before he pulled her into an elated kiss.

“We still have a chance!” he said as they broke apart. “We’ll leave tomorrow morning!”