Her Unforgettable Royal Lover(41)

He might have to change his tactics if and when Natalie’s memory fully returned, Dom acknowledged. At the moment she considered him an anchor in a sea of uncertainty. He couldn’t add to that uncertainty by demanding more than she was ready to give.

“For now,” he said with a lazy smile, “this is good, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes.”

She leaned in, brought her mouth to his, gave him a promise of things to come. He was ready to take her up on that promise when she made a brisk announcement.

“Okay, I’m done wallowing in self-pity. Time to get back to work.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She glanced at the files on the bed and caught her lower lip between her teeth. Dom waited, remembering how antsy she’d been about letting him see her research when he’d shown up unannounced at her New York hotel room. He’d chalked that up to a proprietary desire to protect her work. With Andre’s call still fresh in his mind, he couldn’t help wondering if there was something else in those fat folders she wanted to protect.

“I guess you could start on those,” she said with obvious reluctance. “There’s an index and a chronology inside each file. The sections are tabbed, the documents in each section numbered. That’s how I cross-reference the contents on the computer. So keep everything in order, okay?”

Dom’s little bubble of suspicion popped. The woman wasn’t nervous about him digging into her private files, just worried that he’d mess them up. Grinning, he pushed out of the chair with her still in his arms and deposited her back at the desk.

“I’ll treat every page with care and reverence,” he promised solemnly.

She flushed at little at the teasing but stood her ground. “You’d better. We archivists don’t take kindly to anyone who desecrates our files.”

* * *

It didn’t take Dom long to realize Natalie could land a job with any investigative agency in the world, including Interpol. She hadn’t just researched facts about lost cultural treasures. She’d tracked every rumor, followed every thread. Some threads were so thin they appeared to have no relation to the object of her research. Yet in at least two of the files he dug through, those seemingly unrelated, unconnected tidbits of information led to a major find.

“Jesus,” Dom muttered after following a particularly convoluted trail. “Do you remember this?”

She swiveled around and frowned at a scanned photo depicting a two-inch-long cylinder inscribed with hieroglyphics. “Looks familiar. It’s Babylonian, isn’t it? About two thousand years old, I’d guess.”

“You’d guess right.”

“What’s the story on it?”

“It went missing in Iraq in 2003, shortly after Saddam Hussein was toppled.”

“Oh, I remember now. I found a reference to a similar object in a list of items being offered for sale by a little-known dealer. Best I recall, he claimed he specialized in Babylonian artifacts.”

She rubbed her forehead, trying to dredge up more detail. Dom helped her out.

“You sent him a request for a more detailed description of that particular item. When it came in, you matched it to a list the US Army compiled of Iraqi antiquities that were unaccounted for.”

“I can’t remember…did the army recover the artifact?”

He flipped through several pages of notes and correspondence. “They did. They also arrested the contractor employee who’d lifted it during recovery efforts at the Baghdad Archeological Museum.”

“Well! Maybe I’m not so pathetic after all.”

She turned back to the laptop with a smug little smile that crushed the last of Dom’s doubts. Those two inches of inscribed Babylonian clay were damned near priceless. If Natalie was into shady deals, she wouldn’t have alerted the army to her find. The fact that she had convinced Dom. Whatever screwup had led to her arrest, she was no hacker or huckster.

He dug into the next folder and soon found himself absorbed in the search for a thirteenth-century gold chalice studded with emeralds that once graced the altar of an Irish abbey. He was only halfway through the thick file when he glanced up and saw Natalie’s shoulders drooping again, this time with fatigue. So much for his anticipation of another lively session under the featherbed. He closed the folder, careful not to dislodge any of its contents, and stretched.

“That’s it for me tonight.”

She frowned at the remaining files. “We’ve still got a half dozen to go through.”

“Tomorrow. Right now, I need bed, sleep and you. Not necessarily in that order, although you look as whipped as I feel.”