CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“So?” He balled the cursed sheet up and threw it aside. “How much do you figure I owe you?” Surely she felt the hammer beat of his heart beneath her ear.

“You said you’d pay me 10 percent of whatever you made. That Middle Dynasty papyrus sold for one hundred and six pounds.”

“I see.” He relaxed. At least now he knew how to go on. “Dizzy, Joseph may have gulled some fool into parting with one hundred and six pounds, but he only paid me forty and I distinctly recall handing you a five-pound note.”

His words deflated her righteous ire. She wrinkled her nose and glanced sheepishly up at him. “Oh.” A long pause. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have accused you.” She turned her head into his shoulder.

“You’re forgiven.” He rubbed his chin lightly over the top of her bowed head. Her hair felt as slippery and clean as the finest silk. And his secret was a secret still.

Word blindness.

He remembered the first time he’d heard the term. The doctor who’d said it. Not that the word or the doctor had made any difference. Whatever its name, his inability to read had permeated every part of his life, fashioned not only how others saw him but how he saw himself. It had created him.

Until he’d arrived in Egypt.

Here he’d found a place where his expertise and ambitions hadn’t relied on written words, words that one day made sense and the next were transformed into an incomprehensible mass. Here he’d fashioned how others saw him.

It hadn’t always been blamelessly done. He’d taken advantage of his native ingenuity, of the raw resources available to him, because a man who cannot read has nothing else. He’d manipulated his competitors into confrontation and then taken advantage of their distraction. He’d used guile and, when necessary, fists to get what he wanted. And it had worked.

He’d wrested a portion of respect from the scholarly community here, a feat he’d once thought impossible. He’d finally found an avenue for all the knowledge and ideas that burgeoned in his mind, mocking him with his inability to express them on the written page. The impossible had ever been his carrot and he, fate’s mule.

He’d learned early and in the harshest manner possible that some things were exempt for him. That no matter how strong his desire, how much he was willing to sacrifice to achieve his goal, there were some things he could not do, some things he could not have. He’d tried overcoming his deficit through sheer willpower. He’d promised himself that no matter what it took, he would somehow learn to read.

Well, he’d sweated, railed, petitioned heaven, and bargained with hell, and he still couldn’t read English. He never would be able to. But he learned an immutable lesson from that: Pain is the only reward for clinging to impossible dreams.

So he’d taken that lesson and transferred it to every area of his life. Including Dizzy. He’d given her up without ever telling her his secret.

What good would it have done? Dizzy was destined for England. And he would not go back to England. He could not become the Ravenscrofts’ halfwit relative again, the object of his parents’ well-meaning concern and his own self-scorn. And that’s all that awaited him as the son of scholars, the student with some of the highest oral exam marks in Oxford’s history … the man who could not read.

No, he couldn’t go back to England. But Dizzy would. It was her dream, and it wasn’t an impossible one. Doubtless some strapping young lad in country tweeds would sweep her off her feet. Or someone like Blake. His lips curled back and his hold on her tightened, and he cursed himself for a liar and a fool.

No matter how he’d warned himself and threatened himself and tried to convince himself, he hadn’t given Dizzy up.

His heart hoped in spite of being brutally cognizant of the dangers of self-delusion. His love refused to die no matter what reason and experience argued, in spite of her determination to go “home.”

Damn her, home wasn’t an island or a cottage. It wasn’t a place. Home was her. And she was leaving. God, how could he let her go? How could he ask her to stay? What, he wondered in anguish, would she do if he told her, if she learned of his … inadequacy? As always, his imagination offered myriad scenes, all of them untenable.

If she wrestled his dysfunction into some melancholy, romantic bit of—If she felt pity—If she nobly offered herself as compensation for his—

God. He closed his eyes. How would he survive that?

“I had lunch with your cousin today,” she was saying. She had reached up and was smoothing the roll of his shirt collar between her fingertips.

“What?” he asked, seizing on the distraction presented by her words.

“Lord Ravenscroft and I had lunch together. With Grandfather. We had a very interesting conversation.”

She was still lost in her fascination with his collar.

“Blake can be a font of information.” He took a deep breath. He had to know what Blake had told her. “Dizzy, did he—”

“I really do think you’ve been awful.”

He wondered if she could feel his arms trembling. “Oh?”

“He came here thinking you were barely making ends meet. Why did you let your family believe you’re just managing to scrape together the bare essentials of existence? Why don’t you share your wealth with your family?”

“My family? Papa and Mama Braxton and all the little Braxtons are doing very nicely, I can assure you.”

“I meant the Ravenscrofts. How could you, Harry?” She sounded acutely disappointed in him. “How could you let the Ravenscrofts struggle along while you enjoy yourself?”

“Struggle? My, my, Blake has been busy,” he murmured. He bounced her higher in his arms. “Listen, Dizzy. Though I realize your present condition makes it doubtful you’ll remember this, do try to attend.”

She blinked up at him.

“Blake’s family owns a great moldering pile of bricks—”

“Darkmoor Manor,” she chimed in like a student with the right answer to a question.

“Yes, Darkmoor Manor. It is a great rotting hulk of a house that squats among the most godforsaken rocks in England. For whatever reasons—and I strongly suspect mental instability—each successive line of Ravenscrofts cleaves to it as if they’d been bequeathed the Holy Grail itself.”

She nodded with drunken sageness.

“Blake and his father and his—our grandfather poured every bit of money they had into harebrained schemes. Schemes designed to generate enough money for Darkmoor’s restoration. They weren’t very successful. In fact, the Ravenscrofts barely find enough money to keep pace with Darkmoor’s deterioration.”

“Okay. Darkmoor Manor is a white elephant. What’s your point?” she asked.

He grinned. How could anyone with such syrupy fantasies about England be so astute and pragmatic in all other instances? “My point,” he answered, “is why should I pay a succession of repair bills that would never end?”

“That’s awfully cheap of you, Harry.”

“No, it’s not. Admit you’d do the same thing in my position. Why should I lay out money so Darkmoor can have a new yew maze?”

She scowled fiercely at that though her unfocused gaze still wandered unhappily over his shirt. She plucked at a button. “Well, perhaps.”

There was that honesty again, that unassailable clear-headedness and practicality that she tried so hard to deny and that was so much more appealing and so much rarer than mawkish sentimentality.

“Still, you shouldn’t allow Lord Ravenscroft to think so poorly of you. It’s obvious to everyone that there are hard feelings between you. And I suspect it has to do with more than money.”

“I really don’t give a damn what Blake thinks of me.”

She was going to try to convince him otherwise. Desdemona-Make-It-Right. It was there in the set of her jaw, the earnest compression of her lips. And all the time, she continued her unthinking exploration of him.

Slowly he had become aware of her hands on his body. It was so unexpected, so startling that he hadn’t even registered it until now, but fondling him she was. Little touches and pets, feathering like sunlight over his skin. Most astonishingly, he would have wagered his entire fortune she didn’t even realize she was doing it.

She frowned at his throat, moving her thumb gently to and fro over the nick he’d given himself shaving, as if by doing so she could erase it.

“Lord Ravenscroft thinks you’re a scoundrel,” she said in a distracted voice, her gaze still on his throat as the button slipped from its hole, exposing more of his skin to her regard—and breath-stealing caresses.

“Hm.” It was all he could manage.

She winnowed the hair from his temples, brushing it away from his face. “Of course, you are. But not in the way he thinks.”

“Hm.”

“You might try for a reconciliation.”

She had, he realized, lost all concept of the personal boundaries between them. It was as if she no longer recognized where her body left off and his began. She was touching him as familiarly as she would her own person, casually—shatteringly casually.

His breath quickened and he opened his mouth, stealing a breath between his lips before giving himself fully over to the sensation of her voluntary touch. Her fingers flowed up the back of his head, fingering the short nape hairs intimately. He went absolutely still, unwilling to do anything to remind her they were separate beings, that his body was not hers to touch and use and handle in any way she desired. Even though he knew the effects of the hashish were responsible for her hazy abstraction, he would not break that contact.

Her emotions were labile, her thoughts disjointed. He knew better than to seek honesty in her clouded gaze, but at least in this state her body revealed a certain clarity, certain undeniable reactions to him.

“You need a haircut,” she mused lazily.

“Yes.”

“Lord Ravenscroft’s hair is terribly long, isn’t it?” She sighed, her full lower lip just a shade exaggerated, the beginning of a pout. “He has lovely hair.”

“Gorgeous.”

“Very dark. Like a—” She searched for a word.

“Let me guess. A raven’s wing?” he supplied helpfully. She didn’t look very grateful but apparently couldn’t think of a better comparison.

“Yes. Yours is—I’ve never been able to say exactly what shade.” She was serious, her inability to define the color of his hair actually troubled her. “Cured tobacco, maybe, or burnt almonds? Or the color of a desert shadow. More bronze than gold, but nothing so hard or metallic. Like warm sand at twilight. But soft.” Her expression reflected her dissatisfaction. “You know that color?”

“I know.”

She nodded and gave another gusty little sigh. “He’s broader than you are.”

Damn that troglodyte Blake, he thought. Her fingers slipped across his chest as if measuring its span inch by lingering inch. He felt marked with liquid fire. All thoughts of Blake fled.

“Is he?” He could barely hear himself.

“Much broader. But not as tall.” She paused, frowned. Her palm covered his breast, pressing, testing his firmness. “I wonder if he’s as hard as you are.”

He felt his loins tighten instantly and hoped desperately that she wouldn’t notice exactly how hard he had become.

“There’s no give to you. None at all.” She sounded plaintive.

“I’m sorry.”

“I am, too,” she whispered. “Why must you be hard? Too hard.”

He wouldn’t even begin to guess at her meaning. She was an enigma to him, had always been.

Three years ago she’d come to his house, bent on seduction. He’d been first stunned, then stimulated, and finally angered when he’d realized that she had come to offer herself to some hero she’d dreamed up, a hero that would sweep her up on his silver charger and race her straight back to England. With Sir Robert riding pillion.

He hadn’t handled the situation well. His gut instinct had been to take advantage of her infatuation and her youth and make love to her. Well, he’d been young, too. He gave himself credit for not acting on the impulse, driving though it had been.

Too bad he hadn’t been able to think of any wonderful, tactful way to get her quickly out of his house, maidenhead intact. Instead, he’d done the only thing he could think of in his highly stimulated and tense state; he’d laughed.

He’d not realized then that his laughter had, if nothing else, banished his chief rival: himself. It would have been an understatement to say he’d fallen from his pedestal. He’d plummeted. Which had been fine with him. He wanted Dizzy to see him as he was in truth, or as much of the truth as he was willing to allow.

Until now.

Until Blake.

Until Blake he hadn’t realized that she thought him irredeemable, in fact worse than he was. It was almost laughable that in seeking to disabuse her of one fantasy, he’d merely replaced it with another.

He couldn’t find a smile for the painful absurdity of it. Not now, here, when she was suddenly so meltingly attainable. Her mouth was close, her eyes drowsy and unguarded. And it was getting harder by the minute to remember his resolve not to take advantage—

“Lord Ravenscroft has a nice mouth.”

—especially when he wanted to seal her lips with his, keeping them from forming Blake’s cursed name again. Ever.

“But not as nice as yours. You have the most wonderful mouth, Harry,” she said, and sighed. “Your lips look like they could tell the difference between grains of sand.” She touched her index finger to the center of his mouth, and his eyes drifted closed with that intoxicating sensation.

Who was more drugged? He couldn’t tell anymore. His body was tense and liquid, a hard veneer filled with molten energy.

Her fingertip tickled his upper lip. “I think it’s the way your upper lip dips down in the center here,” she said thoughtfully. “Or maybe”—she traced the underside of his lower lip—“maybe how firm and yet extravagant your lower lip is.”

She tugged his lip open and gently stroked the slick inner lining. He shuddered. She inhaled on a breathy little hiss and caressed him again. Her pupils had merged with the fluid darkness of her irises.

“Sometimes,” she confided in a faraway voice, “when I look at your mouth, the very tips of my breasts tingle, inside, where they can’t be itched. It almost hurts. And I think about your mouth and I wonder if your lips could—”

“Jesus! Stop it, Dizzy.” She was a hair’s breadth away from finding out the answer. His arms were tightening involuntarily and the faint, delicious, but unmistakable scent of feminine arousal inundated his senses. He wanted to find its source.

Her hand dropped away. Her brow furrowed. “You talked about my breasts,” she said in an accusing tone. “Why can’t I?”

“I didn’t—” He stopped. He had. But he hadn’t played with her body while he was doing so, hadn’t fingered her lips, though in his mind he had been roving every satiny inch of her flesh with hand and mouth and tongue.

“Aha! You did. If you can talk that way, so can I.”

She was drugged, unaccountable for her actions. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

With a conscious effort he slipped his arm from under her knees, easing her to her feet. She looped her arms around his neck and he could feel her breasts, dragging softly down his chest. Her eyes were … shining? Cloudy? Damn, he couldn’t tell.

“Have you ever wondered what it would be like if we made love?” Her tone was detached, quizzical. Her body was not. He could feel her nipples, hard and delicate, like pearls, through his shirt.

He couldn’t answer, could barely breathe.

“Well?” She cocked her head. “Why don’t you answer?”

“You want a yes-no answer or is this an essay test?”

She ignored his words, staring into his eyes. “You look at every woman like you’re looking at me, don’t you?” she asked mournfully. “You can’t help yourself.”

“Jesus.” He really could not take any more. He was beyond frustrated working well into recklessness. He couldn’t seem to untangle his gaze from her lambent one, and when she smiled at him—trusting, uncomprehending—he made one last bid to keep her impromptu and utterly unconscious seduction under control, to shake her from this sweet, befuddled incomprehension.

“Dizzy, if you’d like to find out how far you can tease me, I suggest we go inside. Now. I’ll be more than happy to show you.” His voice was strained, harsher sounding than he’d intended.

It acted like cold water on her drowsy mind. Her musing, unfocused gaze sharpened, her soft lips snapped together. “Tease you?” she echoed.

“Yes. Tease, as in arouse without giving satisfaction.”

She laid her hands flat against his chest and pushed. “Me tease you?” she asked. “You’re the one who filled my head with all that nonsense about being a desert and a river and being your ‘country’! What do you call other women … your continent? Your hemisphere?”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it. She hadn’t been as serenely unaffected by his words as she’d pretended. She had everything he’d wanted and dreamed of in a lover: wit and competence, shrewdness and generosity … and a nice right jab.

She thumped her fist into his chest. “You are the most monumentally low-minded, disreputable, unromantic—” she said. “Why can’t you be more—”

His humor vanished. “More what?”

“More … more …” She stumbled around his name. Harry didn’t.

“Like Blake?” he finished in soft, glacial tones. His arms tightened. Damn it, he’d not give her up to Blake. Nor to anyone.

“Exactly like Lord Ravenscroft,” she said, falling gleefully on his suggestion. “He would never be less than a perfect gentleman. He would never say such crude things to a lady.”

God, he hated the way she said Blake’s name. Like she was proclaiming a new king’s ascension to the throne.

“No,” he said tautly. “He’d tell you he was in danger of being ‘carried away’ by your beauty—your roselike beauty—before striding manfully off to some brothel to do with a courtesan what he wanted to do with you. Well, I’m not going away, Dizzy.”

He knew frustration was responsible for his anger, frustration, and jealousy. They burned clearly, hotly, rending into ashes his resolve never to want that which he couldn’t have. It left one essential truth: He loved Dizzy.

His beloved set her jaw and swung her fist at him, nearly falling over with her impetus. There was no possible way she was going to navigate the way to her house under her own power.

He plucked her off the ground and slung her over his shoulder, dropping her upside down.

“Put me down!” she demanded. “I hate being carried like this!”

“Too damn bad.”

She pounded her fists against his back. He ignored her, striding down the empty street that led to her home and stalking angrily up to her front door. Without a word, he set her on her feet and reached past her, pounding on the door.

She sagged against the wall, her knees starting to buckle. He caught her under her arms and she sank against him, her unblinking gaze still locked with his.

“What do you want from me, Harry?” she whispered, her chin angled upward, her eyes so damn innocent.

“Dizzy—” He didn’t get any further. His mouth covered hers in a hard, succulent kiss. Her lips opened on a purr, and he took advantage, unable to help himself, unable to stop, delving his tongue into her mouth. She was yielding, supple, making little whimpers of pleasure deep in her throat. It was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard.

He moved closer, catching her face between his hands and using his thumbs to tilt her face up so he could—

—hear a carriage clatter noisily down the street. He stopped, lifting his head, breathing hard, senses slowly returning. Damn it, he was making love to Dizzy in the streets, in full view of all Cairo, as if he were some randy soldier and she was a doxy.

And she was drugged.

He leaned her back against the wall.

Her eyes were dark, her lips ripe. He wanted to taste her again. “Please,” she whispered, “don’t stop.”

“Allah, God, and heaven.” He raked his hair with shaking fingers.

“Please.”

He swayed forward. The sound of the bolt on the inside of the door being driven back stopped him. “I can’t.”

She shook her head. “No. You won’t. Again.”