Her Dirty Archeologists by Mika Lane

4

DRAKE BANCROFT

Have you ever had a nightmare that, when you woke up, you were totally relieved to know wasn’t real?

Yeah, this wasn’t one of those times.

I was already wide awake, so the nightmare before me was one there was no waking from. Unfortunately for me.

I’d arrived at the airport early because that’s what I did. It was my thing. Part of being organized and in control.

Then Jonas arrived with his brother Penn in tow. I’d never met Penn before.

Jonas hadn’t mentioned that his brother was his twin. An identical twin. Like so fucking identical, I didn’t know how anyone could ever tell them apart.

Penn and I shook hands.

“Jesus. I didn’t know you guys were twins. You look so much alike.”

They looked at each other and laughed.

Jonas pointed toward the floor. “Damn, Drake, that’s some nice luggage you got there. Mine is from Costco crap.”

I looked down at the Tumi luggage that had been the last gift from my father before he’d passed.

It was a generous gift, but one I also suspected might cause me some trouble. Just like I didn’t wear my Rolex watch around the university setting, I also needed to keep my expensive luggage out of sight.

No one liked a guy who showed off his family money.

I hadn’t even wanted my wife to wear her diamond ring around our colleagues. Not that that was an issue any longer.

A lot of academics are one step above broke. No need to throw in their face that I was a lucky son of a bitch who’d never be hurting for money, thanks to my grandfather, the Wall Street financier.

His largesse had allowed me a comfortable life in academics without having to worry about money.

Sure, I could have joined the family business and chased the almighty dollar like my own father had, but that would have made me so miserable I’d have ended up in an early grave.

Penn checked the time on the board displaying departing flights. “Are we all set? Looks like we’re boarding soon.”

And then she appeared.

Accompanied by someone who looked just as overwhelmed, Fleur, and I supposed a woman who was her sister, had grabbed a luggage cart onto which they piled four giant suitcases, which kept slipping off as they tried to push it.

It didn’t help that she was wearing high-heeled platforms and a short skirt that, every time she bent to push a suitcase back on the cart, very nearly exposed her ass.

“Oh. My. God,” Jonas said quietly.

Yup.

Welcome to my archeological dig. We weren’t even through airport security yet, and I already needed a stiff drink.

* * *

“I’ll have a tequila, please.”

Speaking of stiff drinks.

“Um, it’s a long flight, Fleur. You should probably really be drinking water.”

She waved her hand at me. “You’re so funny. First you thought I couldn’t handle my own luggage, now you think I can’t handle my liquor.”

Well, she couldn’t handle her luggage. Why would I think she could handle her liquor?

When she’d finally showed up at the airport, Jonas, Penn, and I rushed to help with the obscene amount of shit she’d packed for the trip, each of us grabbing one suitcase so that the fourth could stay on the cart.

“Hi! This is Soleil,” she said cheerfully, introducing her sister to us. “Wow. You guys are serious identical twins,” she said to Jonas and Penn.

They looked at each other again.

“Fleur, are you sure you need all this?” I asked.

What could possibly be in all those bags?

Her sister put her hands on her hips. “See, Fleur? I told you this was overkill. You do not need all that shower gel.”

“Especially since there will be no shower,” I added.

Both women looked at me with the type of horror reserved for people who kill babies.

Fleur spoke first. “Um, wha… what did you say, Professor Bancroft?”

She was trying to hang on to her smile. She really was. But it was melting fast.

Jonas cleared his throat and checked the time. “Yeah, Fleur. There’s no shower. But we gotta get a move on.”

Still in shock, she said a tearful goodbye to her sister. We helped her check her bags and got through security and onto our plane before the color returned to her face and she got chatty again.

I had to give her credit for resilience. Or at least pretending.

So, yeah, she could handle her own luggage—by getting three strong men to help her.

And now she was ordering another tequila while babbling about some guy who’d just thrown her over because he needed a ‘different’ kind of woman for the next stage of his life.

I could kind of relate to that, having been dumped myself, although why my wife wanted a nineteen-year-old kid would always baffle me.

After a lousy airline meal was served and Fleur was sufficiently slurring her speech, she reached for her carry-on bag, crammed under the seat in front of her, and began rummaging through it. While she did this, her short skirt crept up higher and higher.

But I was strong. I looked away like the gentleman that I was, but not before appreciating her strong, smooth thighs, and the tiny little blonde hairs that dotted them.

I did not need any more trouble on this goddamn trip than I already had.

Having retrieved a thick paperback, she kicked her bag back under the seat, adjusted her skirt unselfconsciously, and cracked her novel open to about halfway. Relieved that she seemed to be done talking my ear off, I had more time—like I really needed it—to lament the state of my expedition, and wonder how it had gotten so goddamn off track.

And while I was telling myself to buck the hell up, a soft snoring sound welled up from beside me. Not the loud and annoying kind of snore, but more of a light girl-snore.

I had to admit, it was kind of cute.

She’d not made much progress on her book before dozing off, and it had tumbled into her lap. I gently lifted it and found she was reading a romance novel called Hot Days in the Desert. On the cover was a bare-chested man in an Indiana Jones-type fedora. Rolling sand dunes in the background.

Is this what she thought our trip was going to be like? If so, she had another think coming.

Something told me not to, but I couldn’t help but flip through the book. If the back blurb were anything to go by, it was a story about a damsel in distress kidnapped by unsavory nomads.

And god did I end up regretting my curiosity.

The page where Fleur’s bookmark had fallen was an explicit description of the kidnapped woman sucking the dick of one of her captors.

Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse.

* * *