Page 70 of A Discovery: Love and Other Things

“Excuse me?!” I had to do a double take to make sure I had heard him correctly. “You’re clearly delusional!”

He shook his head. Denial was clearly not just a river in Egypt, or whatever that joke was. “I’ll have you know that my crew has no complaints.”

I laughed so emphatically that it came out as a snort. “Yeah, because if they did, they’d never work in this town again,” I said, mimicking his British accent. “I thought you were going to be gone all afternoon? Did the ministry get sick of you or something?”

“As if they could ever do without me. They need me.” He had a hell of an ego on him, but I supposed that made him even sexier—that and his fat dick. “We finished up early. They just had a few more questions about our research at the temple.”

James had been working overtime wrapping up his work on the temple. He was at the Luxor Museum almost daily, working with museum curators to properly catalog and organize all artifacts, photos, and notes taken during the excavation. The ministry had been all over him to make sure that his final report was complete before publishing to secure wealthy donors with deep pockets to help in the preservation of the temple. The board combed over every draft only to chuck more corrections at him.

But still, their attitude toward James now was a far cry from how they had treated him when they’d found out about our relationship.

After deliberating over our punishment, Mr. Emara, the head of the ministry, had called James and me back into the boardroom with his tail tucked between his legs. James had been permitted to resume his research in exchange for a detailed account of our finding—Ankhesenamun’s cartouche. The board had been flabbergasted when I’d finally shared my discovery. James had informed them of the composition analysis of the bracelet that I had also found and how it seemed to have been made from the same meteorite material as Tutankhamun’s burial dagger.

Overcome with excitement, the ministry had immediately extended James’s dig permit to continue work at the site for another month even though the summer heat had already become unbearable. They had also doubled the size of his crew to help excavate deeper under the ground. The ministry was desperate to continue with the project.

James had gone straight back to work after being re-hired and had ended up uncovering what appeared to be a workshop adjacent to the temple. It seemed that Ankhesenamun had hired an entire team of artisans, scribes, and priests to create gifts and offerings to the gods in her husband’s honor.

It was the first temple to be uncovered that had been commissioned by the wife of a pharaoh to honor her husband.

As for me, Mr. Emara had completely pretended that he hadn’t berated me like a child in front of the board. Instead, he’d fawned over my discovery and theory that Ankhesenamun was the true patron of the temple. I had been permitted to continue the tail end of my internship without any word getting back to Stanford about my relationship with James.

I had extended my stay for another month after the internship ended to continue working alongside James. Honestly, it had felt liberating to be with him and not have to worry about keeping it a secret. Although we still hadn’t shown affection in public, the crew had known that we were together but never said much of anything about it. The initial shock had worn off and almost everyone had accepted it, even Mo.

I had come clean about everything to Mom when I’d told her I would be staying in Egypt for another month. She hadn’t been very happy with me hooking up with my professor, but I had convinced her that the relationship was deeper than it might have seemed on the surface. She’d been a bit wary of me spending more time away, especially knowing I’d be with James.

James had been serious when he’d said he loved me. He had refused to let me stay at the hostel another moment longer and had moved me and all my things into his house, where I’d stayed until the end of the dig. We had immediately fallen into a comfortable relationship: work all day, then come home and shower, eat dinner together, and curl up in bed with a movie until we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer.

Sex had been a morning event for us. Like clockwork, I’d been awakened to the feeling of James’s weight on me. Some mornings, he hadn’t waited until I woke up; I’d just come to with his cock between my legs.

The man was insatiable, and I was drunk off him.

After the dig was over, I’d flown back home, and he’d had to return to England. My heart had ached from the separation. Keeping in touch had proved to be a challenge, too, with the time change and his crazy work hours, but somehow, we had made it work. I’d visited him once in the fall and had gotten to see where he lived and where he worked. The library in Oxford was ideal for finger-banging, if anyone was curious.

When James had suggested I visit him over winter break, I’d jumped at the chance to come back to Egypt with him. As soon as we had crossed the threshold, it had been like no time had passed between us.

It had been blissful so far. The lust and passion for each other was still there, as was the ease of being together. I could see myself being with him forever, though I feared it was premature to be making that observation. A semester and my capstone project still stood in the way of graduation. I was far too busy to be thinking about marrying James Campbell and having little archaeologist babies of our own with golden-blond hair and blue eyes. Much too busy.

And who’s to say that James even wanted to settle down at all? There was a little more than a fifteen-year age gap between us, and if he hadn’t thought about marriage with anyone else by now, then maybe it was off the table for him.

James leaned against the desk and nodded to my laptop. “Any luck while I was gone?”

I tossed my phone aside and heaved out a huge sigh, rubbing my palms into my eyes to wipe away the tiredness. “None. Thanks for letting me borrow your office to work, but it was a complete waste of time.”

The office in his Egyptian penthouse was massive. It boasted the most comfortable leather desk chair my ass had ever had the pleasure of sitting on, and the shine on his mahogany desk rivaled the best car buff I had ever seen. I would have had a better time taking a nap in here rather than straining my brain.

James took my hands in his big ones and pulled me up. Trading places with me, he patted his lap, gesturing for me to sit.

I did as he asked, feeling his warm thighs under my legs.

He assumed control over the mouse pad on my device, his arm caging me in as his fingers glided around. I could feel his breath on my neck as he scanned my edits.

For my capstone project, I’d written a research paper on my theory about Ankhesenamun building the temple for Tutankhamun. I’d included all the findings from the dig that supported my statement. James had been helpful by filling in the holes from the beginning of the project, which had taken place the year before I’d arrived for the internship.

“The paper looks complete,” he said.

“Oh, thank God.” I huffed out an exasperated breath.

He kept scrolling. “Except...where’s the title?”

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