CHAPTER TWENTY

“I see you’re awake.”

At the sound of the voice, Harry heeled over and banged his nose. He opened his eyes and stared at the rough, chiseled wood a few inches away from his face.

She’d put him in a packing crate.

He rolled on to his back and stared at the ceiling.

“I hope it was worth it.”

Dizzy. He squinted into the painfully bright light. His chest heaved with relief. The searing impetus that had driven him to her, battered and barely conscious, had diminished when he’d found her last night. It was only a temporary refuge, however. There was still the matter of Maurice Shappeis. Harry wouldn’t rest until the implicit danger represented by the mongrel had been removed.

“Well?” Dizzy demanded. “Was it worth it?”

“Was what worth what?” he mumbled, taking stock of his injuries. His left eye was swollen nearly shut. Carefully he felt along the ridge of his teeth, probing for any loose or missing member. He sighed with relief when he didn’t discover any. He was rather proud of his teeth.

“I cannot believe you have been so careless. So incredibly stupid. So abysmally cavalier.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” he asked.

Her face swam into hazy focus above the edges of the crate. She braced her hands on either side of him and leaned closer, peering intently. Behind her the sunlight turned her hair into a nimbus of spun gold. It streamed over her shoulders, lightly swinging against his bare chest. He could smell the lavender from her linen pillow cases still tangled therein.

For some inexplicable reason that fragrance aroused in him a welling of protectiveness. Nothing must ever happen to her. No part of anything he’d done must ever cause her harm. He’d do everything in his power to make it so.

“I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Harry,” she was saying. “Akhenaton’s tomb itself isn’t worth a beating such as you’ve undergone.”

“You can say that again.”

“You might have died.” Her face wore a thunderous expression.

“I know.”

“What did you do? Play one of your desert rat friends false? Skim a little too much profit off the top?”

Her bitterness hurt him. What irony. She thought his wounds were the result of a deal gone sour. And well she might. It was what he’d taught her to expect.

He had no answer for her disillusionment her disappointment. “You put me in a packing crate,” he said instead.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “I put you in a sarcophagus. The original owner wasn’t using it.”

He stared at her, nonplussed. “Couldn’t you have at least found a cot?”

And now, finally, her lush, tender lips found their natural habit in a smile. Albeit a dry one. “Foresight and planning,” she said. “Isn’t that what you always advocate? I simply took your advice.”

“How so?”

“This way, if you’d succumbed, we’d have been able to ship your remains back to England with the least amount of trouble.”

He broke out in a surprised laugh. “So expedient, Diz. I’m proud of you.” His chuckle became a cough. Immediately she hovered nearer.

“Desdemona,” she corrected him distractedly, her fingers moving with breath-stealing gentleness over his lips and cheeks and swollen eye. “You should have ice on this.”

“How’d I get here?”

“Your cousin carried you.”

Damn Blake. Not content with exerting all that brooding charm, now he had to play at knight-errant, as well. “Nice to see all that brawn is good for something.”

“I cannot believe you’re so ungrateful. Blake—”

“Blake?” He jumped on her use of his cousin’s Christian name.

She blushed and with that telling color ferocity stirred in his heart. He wanted to haul her into his arms and, with hand and mouth, erase that telling pink stain from her cheeks, replace it with a memory worth blushing over.

“Lord Ravenscroft, then.” She did not meet his eyes. “He carried you all the way from Jabbar’s mansion. Well, not all the way. We took a carriage most of the way. But he did carry you to and from the carriage. A good twenty yards.”

“Remind me to tip him next time we meet,” he said, trying to rise up on his elbows. Pain knifed through his side. “Chrissake,” he muttered. “Did they have the damn mule work me over, too?”

“Oh!” Her hushed distress caught him off guard. She straightened abruptly, her color high, her eyes flashing not with answering humor but with real ire. He stared back, confused and despairing.

“I’m sorry, Dizzy,” he said. “I am grateful to Blake. I’ll make certain to express that gratitude at the first opportunity.”

She turned her face from him, as if the sight of him were unbearable. He found, to his grim amusement, he could not bear that. “Please, Diz,” he said softly.

He reached out and braceleted her wrist with his fingers, pulling her hand to his mouth and pressing a light kiss across her knuckles. Her fingers trembled in his clasp. “Please, Diz,” he repeated. “Don’t look like that. I’ll write Blake a sonnet if it’ll keep you from looking so. You’ve never looked at me with loathing before. Disappointment frustration, suspicion … but not this.” He smiled lopsidedly. “I find I hate it.”

She snatched her hand away. “You idiot!” She dashed the back of her hand across her cheeks.

God, she was crying. He pushed himself upright, ignoring the lance of pain piercing his side, stretching out his arm for her. “Dizzy—”

“Idiot!” she repeated forcefully, backing away. “I don’t give a bloody damn if you write Blake a hundred thank-you letters. Don’t you ever risk your life for some useless piece of junk again! You might have become septic and died, you bloody, bloody fool!”

His mouth fell open.

“I’ve patched up your hands and plastered your cuts and, from time to time, I’ve even taken a few stitches in your miserable hide. But never anything like this. And I won’t ever do it again. Do you understand?” Her voice was loud, strident. “Do—you—under—stand?”

“God help me, I think so. I hope so.”

“You scared me!” she wailed. She backed into a chair and toppled down onto the seat. She promptly buried her face in her hands.

“Dizzy, I wasn’t trafficking. I wasn’t.” He hitched a leg over the side of the crate, ready to go to her. It was a bare leg. Surprised, he hauled it back. He stared down at himself. Except for a sheet winding around his loins, he was naked. “Who took my pants off?”

She ignored the question. “Semantics. Trafficking, illegal dealing, theft … all the same thing.”

“I hadn’t stolen anything. I didn’t betray anyone.”

“Am I supposed to believe that? Am I supposed to believe anything you say? I don’t feel like I know you anymore!” she said. “There’s this odd animosity between you and Blake, and I find that your self-professed ‘standard English boyhood’ is shrouded in secrecy and hints of impropriety, and now this madness!” She sniffed noisily.

“Is that what he’s hinted at. Impropriety?” He trailed off helplessly, unable to answer the one charge, unwilling to answer the others.

“I wasn’t involved in any sort of deal gone bad, Diz.” This at least he could explain. “Do you remember a brute named Maurice, worked as Georges Paget’s foreman?”

“Big fellow, womanish features?” she asked in an odd, defeated tone.

“That’s him. Well, he and I had a bit of a confrontation during the last excavating season.”

“Yes,” she said consideringly, “I recall. You were supposed to have administered a drubbing to him.” She screwed up her mouth. “No one ever told me about what so I didn’t put much stock in the story.” She peered at him. “Should I have?”

“We fought,” he answered. “He lost.”

“So, he beat you up for revenge?” She raised her brows, openly skeptical. “Come now, Harry. I know revenge is a dish best served cold and all, but that incident happened last year. His revenge would be glacé by now.”

Harry grinned. She charmed him, absolutely. Even suspicious and cold as she was now. “He wasn’t motivated by revenge. It just helped his enthusiasm for his job. Someone paid him to work me over.”

Her dark houri’s eyes flashed. “Why?”

“I don’t know. But I have my suspicions.”

“What? And do not tell me you suspect Blake is responsible.” Something immediate and hard chilled her tone. “It’s clear you’re in competition with him, that you mean to discredit him. How better than to accuse him of orchestrating your beating?”

“I don’t think Blake is at fault,” he answered, hating her acid tone, hating the distance that seemed to be opening up between them, desperate for some way to bridge it. “Maurice never said who it was, he was having far too much fun beating me up to answer any questions.” He shrugged. “Luckily, I have a low pain tolerance and winked out pretty damn quick.”

“Oh, Harry. I wish I knew what to think.” For an instant pity was betrayed in the stark look she gave him. He smiled and it vanished abruptly. “Oh, no. I won’t fall for that little-boy-lost look. I’ve spent far too many hours fretting over you as it is. Not anymore. How did you get away?”

“Bribery.”

Her brows rose questioningly.

“Honest.”

“Aren’t you afraid of lightning bolts, tossing out words like that?”

He grinned. “Really, Maurice’s sort doesn’t attract a fanatically loyal following. All I did was promise his henchman twenty pounds and I was hightailing it through the back streets of Cairo.”

“Crawling” better described his progress, but she needn’t know that, just as she needn’t know how long Maurice had “merely followed orders to make him uncomfortable” before leaving for his dinner.

“Twenty pounds? And the man believed you?” she asked incredulously.

“Whatever you think of me, Dizzy, I have a reputation for being bound by my word.”

She wandered to her grandfather’s desk and picked up a broken piece of a funerary vessel, her expression absorbed.

He followed her movements, his lingering gaze tabulating each subtle, rich variation of the desert hues that comprised her beauty: the dark buff-colored gown, tawny streaked hair, burnt-toffee eyes, buttery glazed complexion. She might have been an exquisitely crafted amber goddess in some ancient’s tomb. Might have, except she was not nearly as durable.

She was small. He often forgot just how small. But seeing her dwarfed behind her grandfather’s desk, it distressed him to see how very fragile she’d been formed. Maurice could hurt her without even trying.

“I want you to take care, Dizzy.”

She stopped toying with the shard. “Excuse me?”

“I want you to be very careful, Dizzy. Don’t go anywhere alone. Stay with people.” Stay with me. His palm opened toward her, an involuntary movement. He shut it.

“What are you talking about, Harry?”

“Maurice knows that …” He didn’t know how to explain. She wouldn’t recognize or believe the truth if he told her, that she was in danger because he loved her. She’d be angry and offended and think he mocked her. “Maurice might come here, looking for me.”

She returned to his side and patted his hand. “I’ll be fine, Harry.” She sounded as if she were reassuring her maiden aunt. “You yourself have always said no sane Egyptian would even consider harming an Englishwoman.”

“No one has ever accused Maurice of sanity. And he’s not Egyptian.”

“Semantics again. Don’t you worry on my account,” Dizzy said in that balmlike voice. Don’t fret the invalid. She had no intention of heeding his warning.

“Good.” He nodded, not in the least relieved, and lay back in his sarcophagus, his mind racing as he formed a plan to keep Dizzy safe. He’d have to act fast, before Maurice disappeared into the backwash of the criminal underworld.

“Harry—” Whatever Dizzy had been about to say was interrupted by a discreet tap on the door. “Come in,” she said.

Magi entered followed hard on her heels by Blake. His expression lightened upon spying Dizzy. Dizzy, Harry noted with a twisting in his chest, returned his welcoming smile.

“Lord Ravenscroft, how kind of you to call.”

“Desdemona.” Blake strode into the room and took her hands. “You look as lovely and fresh as if you’d just woken from a delightful dream rather than spent hours laboring over my reprobate cousin. I trust your patient hasn’t—” He glanced at Harry. “Who took his pants off?”

“Ah, Blake.” Harry lifted himself into a sitting position, allowing the cotton sheet to slip from his bare chest and settle over his hips. Yawning, he stretched one arm and then the other high over his head, keeping the smile plastered on his face even though his side screamed in protest. “Diz here tells me I owe you a debt of thanks. Thanks.”

“Go get him a shirt,” Blake snapped at Magi. She glared at his preemptory tone, but went. “You don’t have much regard for Miss Desdemona’s sensibilities, do you, Harry?”

Dizzy’s gaze found his. Reproach clouded their wild honey clarity. Damn Blake, he’d won that point.

“It’s all right,” she said, lifting her chin. “It’s just Harry, after all.”

His face ached with his effort to keep his supercilious grin in place.

Blake shot him a savagely triumphant look. “Ah! ‘Just Harry.’ Oh, well, then …” His amused gaze passed insolently over Harry’s sarcophagus and suddenly Harry saw himself as absurd, his nakedness as vulnerability.

“Amazingly, Harry old man, you don’t look half bad. I imagine you’ll be able to scoot back to your little ghetto today.”

“I suspect I—”

“No.” Magi reentered, carrying one of Sir Robert’s clean white shirts. “Infection,” she said sententiously, “is still a distinct possibility.”

“Magi is right,” Dizzy agreed. “Harry should stay here. He has no one else to care for him.”

“Surely he has a valet or a houseboy or someone?”

Dizzy shook her head. “No. No one. He relies strictly on himself. His secretaries live in their own homes; even the housekeeper is only employed thrice a week.”

“Yes,” Magi declared. “Master Harry should most definitely stay here. Look and see how red this cut is.” She leaned over the sarcophagus and, her action concealed by its wooden sides, jabbed the cut on his cheek.

“Ow!”

Dizzy hastened forward. Harry moaned loudly as he slipped his arm through the shirt sleeve Magi held for him.

“It does look angry.” Dizzy’s fingers brushed his forehead. “And he feels warm to the touch, too. Magi, get him some water.”

“I’m sure it’s just his body’s natural defenses,” Blake said as Magi left. “And besides, remember your grandfather is gone. In Sir Robert’s absence you cannot have him here for any extended period of time.”

“Sir Robert is gone?” Harry asked. Given that happenstance, there was no possibility that he would leave Dizzy alone in this house with only Magi and Duraid for protection.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence in my manly vigor, Blake, but I can promise you,” he said weakly, struggling to look pitiful as he buttoned his shirt. It wasn’t nearly as much play-acting as he’d have liked, “that playing fast and loose with Dizzy is the last thing on my mind.”

His statement didn’t appear to reassure Blake. He sneered, an exaggerated pull of his upper lip exposing one gleaming canine.

“That makes two of us,” Dizzy said. “But much as I might like it otherwise, I have a duty to him. A Christian duty. I can’t take chances with his health.”

She turned to Blake but her fingers still glided lightly along Harry’s cheek, over his swollen eye. If she kept this up, he might purr.

“That’s right.” Harry nodded. “You have your Christian duty. My back hurts, too.”

“No wonder.” She abandoned his face and ran her hands lightly over his now blamelessly covered shoulders. They may as well have been bare, he felt her touch so keenly. “You have welts. We have some liniment that I, er, Magi could rub in.”

Blake, having lost his bid to have Harry removed from the house, dragged a chair over toward the head of the sarcophagus and sat down. “What did you do?” he asked.

This close, with the sun full in Blake’s face, Harry realized that his cousin was angry. No, more than angry. Though his voice was light, his black eyes were filled with rage, his ridiculous aristocratic nostrils positively flared. He was furious, Harry realized, and for the life of him he could find no reason for such extravagant emotion or why Blake held it so rigidly in check. It was like watching oatmeal about to boil over. It looked as if Blake might erupt any minute.

“Well?” Blake demanded. “However did you manage to make someone so angry with you, Harry?”

“Just a knack.”

“Reminds me of school,” Blake said. “Always showing up with some new mark or other. The other lads made your life rather tiresome, didn’t they? Spent more time being patched up than in classes, didn’t you? Not that it mattered much.”

Damn him.

“You went to school together?” Dizzy asked. “I thought you went to Christ’s College and Harry was at Oxford.”

“Harry and I were at prep school together. Eton,” Blake said. “I’m afraid Harry was a prime target for the cruelties of the other lads.”

“Wasn’t I though?” Harry murmured softly.

“They hurt you?” Dizzy’s voice registered her shock. Damn him again.

“Yes, they did,” Blake said, and now the rage in his eyes was swamped by other emotions—remorse and pity and satisfaction—a black, fetid pool.

“Lucky Harry,” he said tightly. “He’s found a place for himself here. Desdemona is under the impression that you’ve made quite a name for yourself as an Egyptologist of sorts, if you can warrant that.”

“Desdemona is given to impressions, I’m afraid.” Harry contrived calm.

“Come now, Harry. I’ve seen how you live. I’ve spoken with some people. You’re quite highly regarded here. I can’t see you leaving to return to England. Here you’re a success. There …” He shrugged apologetically. “I can’t see you returning to England no matter what the incentive.”

“Can’t you?” Harry returned mildly. He kept his face bland, composed. He’d learned early never to give the satisfaction of exposing one’s pain to public scrutiny.

He had the satisfaction of witnessing Blake’s pity become frustration. Poor Blake, Harry thought, didn’t stand a chance. Harry had been baited by experts. Compared to them, Blake was an amateur.

“Things would be difficult for you there,” Blake said tightly. “All those reminders of what you can’t possibly … have.”

“What can’t Harry have?” Dizzy asked, her brow furrowing.

“Darkmoor Manor?” Harry offered ironically. Blake swallowed his anger. No, he would never go back to England. But he wasn’t going to tell Blake that. Blake glared at him and Dizzy’s face was set with concentration.

“You,” Blake suddenly said, snapping his head in Dizzy’s direction, “you would love London. And London would love you, Desdemona. I can see you riding in Hyde Park or visiting the galleries, in a box at Ascot, or gracing one at the opera.” She smiled, entranced by the picture he painted.

Blake leaned back, his gaze sliding back to Harry. Blake hadn’t finished with him yet. “You had quite lofty aspirations at one time, as I recall. Wanted to be a scholar, didn’t you, Harry?” Bleak and savage gladness filled Blake’s voice, and now Harry thought he understood Blake’s passionate response.

Blake, the consummate gentleman, was pithed on honor’s point. Blake believed it was his duty to warn Dizzy about Harry. At the same time his aristocratic cousin recognized that such a warning was disloyal to family. Thus he both hated and delighted in the telling.

“You wanted to be an academician, Harry?” Dizzy was asking.

“Something of the sort.”

“Why didn’t you? You would have made a splendid scholar. You already know more than nine-tenths of those who come here. You have so much knowledge to impart—”

He cut her off. “I saw how ridiculous such a desire was. There’s no money to be had. What good are academic lauds when one can’t afford to fix a leaky faucet let alone purchase the champagne to toast one’s own success?” He meant to taunt Blake, but Dizzy’s little catch of breath alerted him to his error. He’d never meant to remind her of her material poverty. “Dizzy, I’m sorry.”

“It’s quite all right.” Her cheeks wore brilliant ruddy flags.

“Please, I never meant—”

“Sitt,” Duraid said, stepping inside the room.

“Yes, Duraid?”

“There is a Mr. Paget to see you. He says business.”

“Oh? Show him to the sitting room, Duraid,” Dizzy said. She rose. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen?”

Blake stood up. “Of course. I’ll just keep the invalid company for a while, shall I?”

“I’m sure that would be nice,” Dizzy said.

Harry wasn’t nearly so sanguine.