She raised a brow. “Is anyone crazy enough to trust you, Phoenix?”
He shot her a smile. “Hey, I got you this far, didn’t I?”
She looked around the eerie buildings just visible in the shadows beyond the flashlight. “Yes, you did.” She turned her face up to him. “And we aren’t finished yet.”
He tugged on her ponytail. “Not by a long shot.”
Timeslike this made life seem good.
Dathan leaned back in the sand, a bottle of ale dangling from his fingers. He’d learned—even in the middle of a treasure hunt—to take his downtime where he could.
Niklas had cooked up a feast of some desert-dwelling animal BEll had assured them was edible. The stars were out like a thick, studded blanket, and there was treasure waiting somewhere in the ruins below. Nik was off poring over his records, and Z was fast asleep somewhere in theInfinitas—he’d never trade his ship for the sand and stars.
The beautiful woman added something to the ambience as well.
He watched Eos under his lids. She had her legs curled under her on the blanket they’d laid out. The firelight set her golden skin aglow. He wished she’d let her hair down, but tied back, it did accent her high cheekbones and beautiful features.
He’d wanted women before. Taken them easily to his bed and left them smiling several hours later. He’d never worked side by side with one, especially one as smart as Eos Rai.
She made him want things he could never have. He had nothing to offer a woman like her. Like it or not, his father’s blood ran through his veins.
“You’re staring,” she said.
She was watching him through the flames, one finger stirring through the sand.
“You’re easy to stare at.”
She snorted. “Bet you say that to all the girls.”
He stared off into the desert night. “Yeah. Right.”
“Where do we start in the morning?”
Right, the hunt. Exactly what he should be thinking about. Not licking at the luscious spot where her neck met her shoulder. “We’ll divide up the ruins into quadrants, and each take an area. Search it systematically.”
Her lips quirked, softening her face. “You’ve completely ruined my image of the rogue treasure hunter. I imagined the legendary Dathan Phoenix storming through ruins, dodging booby traps, and scooping up the treasure.”
He took another swig of beer. “That’s how my father liked to do it. I learned what not to do by watching him.” Brocken had wanted the rewards for the least amount of work. “He lusted after Terran artifacts. Especially theMona Lisa.”
“Is that why you want it?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He didn’t want to look too hard at his reasons. His eyes narrowed. “I suppose you also imagined me stomping historic artifacts under my feet, destroying history in my path.”
Her smile dissolved. “Yeah, I did.”
“Reality rarely lives up to legend.”
“You think the reality of Star’s End will prove to be a disappointment too?”
He hoped for her sake it didn’t. “First, we have to prove this is Star’s End.”
She stared down at the ruins, like she could see the residents still moving through the buildings, living their lives. “It must have been hard to leave your planet behind, abandon everything you knew.”
“I don’t know. Their world was tearing itself apart. No one agreed on anything, views had become polarized, countries were fighting over the smallest things. By the end of the war, the entire northern hemisphere had been decimated by nuclear weapons. Just a few survivors held on in the south until they too were destroyed in the final battle of the war.”
“You know your history,” she said. “But still, to leave loved ones and your planet behind and cast off into unknown space…”
“I like to think of it as starting afresh, discovering new and exciting things.”
