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or whimpered or something. She made herself stand perfectly still until he finally—somewhere around ten minutes later—relaxed and turned her loose.
    “My ribs,” she said temperately, “are cracked. At least three of them.”
    “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength,” he apologized solemnly.
    She followed as he strolled casually out of their hiding place and into the hall, reasoning from his lazy attitude—and the fact that his deep voice was no longer unnaturally quiet—that he knew the other thieves had gone. “What happened to the security guards?” she asked him in a normal voice.
    “It’s just a guess,” he answered, walking through the hall with more briskness now, “but from the way they were snoring when I checked on them earlier, I’d say they had been drugged. And nicely trussed as well. You heard the charming Ed say that the phone lines had been cut; the alarm system has naturally been deactivated, and none of the outside doors was damaged when they came in—Damn.” The oath, uttered with more resignation than heat, escaped him as they stood in the doorway of what had been meant to be the Egyptian exhibit.
    Morgan said something a great deal stronger. In fact, she said several violent and colorful things, the last few of which caused Quinn to turn his head and look down at her with a definite gleam in his vivid eyes.
    “Such language,” he reproved.
    “Look at what they
did,
” she very nearly wailed, gesturing wildly at the room as the echoes of her bitter cry bounced mockingly back at her. It looked, she thought painfully, like a room after a child’s party: messy, depressingly empty, and rather pathetic.
    The thieves had been thorough. Into their little brown satchels had gone all the literally priceless jewelry of the Pharaoh as well as everything else they could carry away. Figurines, the gold plates and goblets meant to hold the food and drink of divine royalty in the afterlife, even—
    “The mummy case,” she gasped. “They took it too?”
    “Carted it out before you crashed the party,” Quinn answered, still maddeningly calm.
    Morgan turned and seized fistfuls of his black turtleneck sweater, rather pleased when he flinched visibly as her nails dug into his chest. “And you didn’t even try to stop them?” she demanded furiously.
    Quinn looked down at her. “Ten to one,” he reminded in an absent tone. “And they had guns. Don’t hit me, but you look rather magnificent when you’re angry.”
    She snarled at him and gave him a shove as she stepped back. The shove didn’t budge him, which also, obscurely, pleased her. “You are a soulless man,” she told him. “How anybody—anybody at all—could stand here and look at this . . . this
rape
in total calm passes the bounds of all understanding.”
    “Appearances,” he said softly, “can be quite deceiving, Morgana. If I could get my hands on the man who ordered this done, I would probably strangle him.” Then, in a lighter and rather mocking tone, he added, “Such wholesale thievery has a distressing tendency to enrage the local constabulary, to say nothing of persons with valuables to protect. And it’s so greedy, aside from the trouble it causes we honest craftsmen.”
    “Honest?” she yelped.
    “I have my living to make, after all,” he said in an injured tone. “Can I help it if my natural skills set me in opposition to certain narrow-minded rules?”
    She looked blankly after him as he turned away, then scurried along behind him. The floor was cold under her stockinged feet, and it reminded her . . . “Oh, hell, I hope they haven’t killed Peter,” she muttered almost to herself as she caught up with Quinn.
    “The boyfriend?”
    “My date,” she corrected repressively. “He’s the curator of this place.”
    “And he brought you here after hours? Let me guess. He wanted to show you his etchings?”
    If she could have seen his face, Morgan knew it would have looked sardonic; she didn’t have