Pushing the Limit by Emmy Curtis

“There’s not much I can do about that except ask you to trust me.”
Please don’t mention Danny’s trust. Please.
    He paused, frowning at her words. But as if he’d heard her silent plea, he just shook his head. “I’ll see you at the site. I’ll be about thirty minutes behind you.”
    Molly was hanging out of Mueen’s truck door, looking for her. She pulled her ubiquitous scarf up over her hair and pushed through the hotel doors. A waft of dry hot air hit her, and it lifted her spirit a little. She loved the climate here. If only she could get Matt off the ledge he seemed to be perpetually on, maybe he’d see something here beyond the country he was at war with. And maybe not.
    “What are we wasting our time on today, boss?” Jason asked.
    What? “Excuse me?” she said.
    Molly looked back from the front seat with a frown.
    “Well, it’s clear we’re not going to find anything here. Why don’t we pack up, write that report, and go home? I spoke to the girl on Rapson’s team.”
    Now Molly really turned around in her seat, and the two women eyed each other.
    “And?”
    “They have tentative plans to leave tomorrow. They think it’s a bust.” He smiled smugly. “I do, too. I mean Rapson has a more… experienced team, so they should know, right?”
    Wow. Maybe she’d made a huge mistake hiring him for this contract. There probably wasn’t a maybe about it. Thank God he was a freelancer.
    “Firstly, the ‘girl’ you spoke with is not a girl. If she’s working for Rapson, I’m fairly sure she’s a woman. Secondly, you don’t work on Rapson’s team, you’re on my team. If you want to see if he will take you on, then you are free to do that. But we will fulfill the contract I signed as planned. We have at least one more day of geo-phys to do, and one day of report preparation. And that’s assuming we don’t find anything. But again, Molly and I have worked bigger sites than this by ourselves, so if you don’t want to be here, you can go. No hard feelings.”
    His eyes flicked to Molly as if for support, but her eyes were covered with her big sunglasses, and her expression was difficult to define. She certainly didn’t say anything in his support, and for that, Harry was grateful. She wondered if it was a gender thing. Maybe he valued Professor Rapson’s opinion over hers. She mentally shrugged. He was entitled to think what he wanted.
    “I… didn’t mean anything by it. I was just saying what that g—that wo—what Katherine had said.”
    Harry hid a smile. “Okay,” she said mildly and looked out of the window as if she’d never seen the desert before.
    As soon as they arrived at the site, Jason jumped out, and without being asked, for the first time, started prepping the ground-penetrating radar and the laptop that read its results. Mueen climbed nimbly onto the roof of their trailer and settled in for the day again.
    Molly exchanged a big grin with Harry as she lugged a cooler filled with ice and water into the trailer. Maybe Molly wasn’t so interested in Jason. Certainly the tide of opinion seemed to have turned since his epic loss at chess. Maybe they were only just now seeing everything in him that a résumé couldn’t reasonably tell them.
    * * *
    Matt let himself into Molly’s room first. She’d left her laptop and phone on the desk in a devastatingly huge display of disregard. The locks were truly so flimsy that he was amazed they were still there. Still, now he couldn’t tell her to put them away.
    He checked under the desk chair for a bug and found nothing. He looked at the rotary phone that was on the desk but figured someone as young as Molly probably wouldn’t even consider using it. He knew that practically every hotel phone in Iraq was bugged anyway. Whether anyone still listened after Hussein was deposed was a different question.
    He sighed. What he really wanted was to be taking a morning swim in the Pacific by his house. Fate was cruel. That was sure. He