CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Dizzy,” Harry whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Hmm.”

“Go back to sleep.” There was a smile in his voice and she nodded drowsily, nuzzling her cheek into the pillow. As if from a great distance, she heard him moving away.

Slowly her eyes drifted open and then widened. Harry, his back to her, naked as a Greek god, retrieved his trousers from the floor. He didn’t know she was awake and she took the opportunity to watch him, unobserved. He pulled on his trousers. Such a simple act and yet one she could watch for hours, years. He was so very handsome, so very casual about his masculinity.

If questions had arisen in the last few days, some answers had come to light, too. In his past Harry hadn’t been valued much. It had only enhanced his magnetism. For never having been taught his own beauty, he’d reached adulthood without self-consciousness or vanity, and so there was nothing measured or sentient in his grace. Only a lithe athleticism that riveted the eye.

Pale in the predawn light, his skin was clean and fine-grained. Her hands and limbs and lips still felt his smooth, warm texture. Exquisite. Shattering. Impossible to define what they’d shared. She closed her eyes, adrift in sensual memory and exquisite lethargy.

“I’m going to make us breakfast,” Harry’s voice drifted softly into her ear and then her lips were brushed by velvety warmth. It was a quick kiss but one that effectively demolished her languor. She rolled over, opened her eyes, and stretched her arms out just as he disappeared into the hall. The door closed with a quiet click.

Wide awake now, she blew a noisy sound of disappointment and swung her feet to the ground, twining the linen sheet around her body. For a second she debated whether to join him in the kitchen, but decided against it. She needed a few minutes without the distraction of his touch, his voice, his lips in which to think. There hadn’t been any thinking going on for the last six hours.

Overnight their relationship, already ill-defined and unrecognizable, had metamorphosed yet again into something unutterably sweet and tender and violent and passionate, and nothing like the lofty spiritual merging her books had outlined.

Desdemona rose and wandered to the window. Faint saffron and rose lights seeped from the dark horizon, staining the morning sky. She turned from the vista, smiling as she saw Harry’s few possessions littering the library desk. Inexplicably uneasy, needing something of his to touch, she straightened his ivory-backed bristle brush and tortoise-shell comb, deposited his gold collar stays in their enameled box. Her hand drifted tenderly over these few, so personal effects passing over each to an unfolded packet of papers on the corner of the desk. Harry’s name caught her eye.

Curious, she opened the sheets and began reading the top paper. Her face grew still. It was a will naming Harry the heir to Darkmoor Manor.

A tremulous sensation began in her stomach and raced along her nerves, anxiety slowly replacing contentment, emptiness threatening her former feeling of repletion. Like a poisonous black flower, suspicion unfolded in her imagination, a dozen images and thoughts spurring on its ugly blooming.

The intense sense of contention she’d noticed immediately between Blake and Harry. The open rivalry with decades-long roots. The sincere concern in Blake’s voice when he’d assured her Harry was not the man she thought. Harry’s expulsion from Oxford. Blake swearing he would get his birthright back. Blake’s telling Harry he couldn’t go back to England because he would have to face the “reminders” of what Harry couldn’t possibly have, and then Harry, his eyes brilliant with mockery, asking Blake if he meant Darkmoor.

She fell forward, her mouth opening to gulp the air that seemed to thicken in her throat. It couldn’t be the way it looked. Harry could not have somehow orchestrated Blake’s disinheritance. But, God help her, what else could it be? From the onset it had been clear Blake had not come to Egypt to recover from a broken heart, that his presence here had something to do with Harry.

Her hand crumpled the will. Another secret. Another lie. Some answers. Horrible answers.

She heard Harry a second before he backed into the room, carrying a wooden server stacked with cups and teapot and a basket of sweetbreads. He turned and spied her, grinning boyishly as he set the platter down on the floor. Her heart felt painful in her chest. Leaden and twisted.

“You’re awake,” he said, his voice filled with delight. He came to her, combing his hair back in a gesture appealingly boyish and self-conscious.

She thought of closing her eyes against the sight of his handsome face, his winsome smile, but couldn’t. He looked so damn happy.

“Dizzy—”

“I have to go.” She swallowed and gathered the linen sheet around her body, clutching the cotton over her breasts.

His brow furrowed in perplexity but still he smiled. “First—”

He leaned forward and kissed her. She could not help herself, she moved to meet his mouth. Passion, so lately satisfied, leapt to life with that brief contact. Shaken, she pulled away. He cupped her face between his palms.

“Dizzy. I love you.”

He looked so sincere, with his wise, tender eyes and crooked smile. She had never dreamed that pain could feast on pleasure. But it could. She’d waited five years to hear those words. She had never imagined they could hurt so much.

“Oh, Harry,” she whispered, tears springing to her eyes, “I wish I could believe you.”

“What do you mean?” He tried to keep his voice calm but he had told her the simple truth, words he’d never spoken to another woman, and all he heard in response was doubt. Doubt. The hallmark of his life.

“You can’t hope to compete, Harry.”

“You won’t be able to make it through Oxford, son.”

“Why waste your money on paying the curate to read you all these books?”

She was supposed to say “I love you, too, Harry.” Fear burgeoned within him at her expression of resigned desolation.

“Harry,” she said, “I have loved you for five years—”

He surged forward to take her in his arms. She put her hand up, stopping him with her palm flat against his chest.

“No. Listen. Please! I threw myself at you. You laughed—”

“That was three years ago.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter now.”

“I beg to differ,” he said tightly. Only a supreme act of self-restraint kept him from shaking her. “I was not in the habit of stealing babies from cradles.”

“I was seventeen.”

“I don’t give a bloody damn if you were thirty. There’s a difference between chronology and experience.”

Once more she shook her head in that bewilderingly mature way. She would not be goaded, he realized, not be convinced. She would only come to her own conclusion. The thought appalled him, scared the hell out of him.

“You haven’t ever, not by word or deed, demonstrated that your feelings for me are that of a … a lover.”

That was what this was all about … romance? He raked his hand through his hair. “What did you want?” he asked fiercely. “Five hundred fucking roses?”

She paled and he cursed himself, his fists balling at his side.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” she whispered.

“What’s it?” he demanded.

“The roses. Blake. Five years and you have never acted on your feelings for me before.”

“No,” he said hotly. “That’s not it. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t think there could be any future for us. My loving you didn’t matter, it didn’t change anything. I couldn’t give you what you wanted. I couldn’t take you back to England. I couldn’t go back there.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t read.”

She froze, her eyes searching his face, her expression confused, wary. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s why I left England. That’s why I won’t go back. I got kicked out of Oxford, Dizzy. I couldn’t complete the written exam. Hell”—he didn’t recognize the bitter laugh as his own, it was so acid bright—“I couldn’t start the written exam.”

“What happened to you?”

He closed his eyes. She still didn’t comprehend. She thought some accident, some illness, had robbed him of a facility he’d once owned. “Nothing. Nothing happened,” he murmured tiredly. “I’ve never been able to read or write.”

“But I’ve seen you,” she protested.

“Simple, familiar phrases. Some words.”

A deep line scored the smooth place between her brows. “You went to Eton.”

“For two years. They stopped trying after that and sent me home.”

“I don’t understand,” she repeated.

How could she? No one did. Most of all himself. But he’d try. For her he’d try to find a way to explain the inexplicable.

“I see a word and it becomes in my mind many words and then any word. Sometimes I can recognize it and sometimes it seems as if it shifts through my memory, just beyond my ability to recall its meaning, taunting me with images I ought to recognize but can’t. And then sometimes I’ll be able to translate snippets from a page, a line, a word.” He turned his palm up in a gesture of frustration.

“But the hieroglyphics,” she said. “I know you translate them.”

He nodded. “I can read some of them, many of them, because I can touch them. I trace the words and my hand reminds me of what it felt and my eye sees and in my memory, I feel the words. It all comes together,” he said. He made a dismissive gesture, abandoning the effort to explain. “That’s why I couldn’t tell you I love you, Dizzy. Here, in Egypt, it doesn’t matter that I can’t read, that I can’t write. I can still be involved in a field I love”—his voice grew low, fervent—“do things that have value. Discover things. Explore.

“In England, I’m just a man who can’t read. I couldn’t go back there to be the subject of pity. Or scorn. I couldn’t.” He could not keep the bitterness out of his voice.

He looked up to find her trembling, her expression chaotic with confusion, remorse, and resignation.

“Couldn’t,” she said. “But now you can.”

He nodded, drew a deep breath. “Yes. I can. If you want. If you desire. I love you.”

She shook her head then, a tense, negative motion. Tears spilled over her eyelids and rained down her cheeks. He started forward once again and once again she stopped him, pushing him away.

“Don’t you see, Harry?”

“See what?” His voice contained a full measure of the fear and frustration coursing through him.

Truth. Well, there it was, bald and naked. He’d told her and now he saw that he’d been right for all those years when he’d withheld the truth from her. He’d related his defectiveness and he was going to lose her because of it.

“Blake arrives and it is all too clear that some long-standing rivalry exists between you.”

“Blake?” His voice mirrored his shock. What had Blake to do with this?

“You bear him a grudge and he bears one for you.” She lifted the papers and dangled them from her fingertips as if they were unclean. The damn papers Blake had brought. “You’re inheriting Darkmoor Manor. You’ve somehow taken his birthright from him. That’s why you can go back to England now. You’ve won the grand prize, Harry.”

“Prize?” He should have burned the damn papers. “For God’s sake, Dizzy, I couldn’t care less about Darkmoor Manor.”

She swallowed. “I know. That’s what frightens me. You don’t care about it but you’re inheriting it anyway. What does that say about me? About … us?” Her voice broke.

Stunned and furious, he stared at her.

Her gaze fell to the ground, masking her dark, liquid eyes. “It seems you’ve won me, too.”

“I don’t know what to say to convince you you’re wrong,” he said, the anger washed away in sudden comprehension, greater fear. “This wasn’t a contest. You weren’t the brass ring.”

The words rang false. Last night, in his own thoughts, he’d called her a prize and he had been frantic to win her when he thought she was becoming enamored of Blake. But not for the reasons she thought. He’d stake his life on it. He’d already staked his heart.

“I’ve always loved you, Harry.” She still stared at her feet, cold and pale beneath the pooling sheet she’d gathered around her. “No matter what you did, or what I thought you did. No matter what you can or cannot do. Scoundrel or not, I’ve always loved you.”

“Dizzy—” He lifted his hand imploringly, helplessly.

“I simply love you too much. I could not bear to watch your interest in me fade at the same rate as Blake’s passage home.”

“Jesus.” He shook his head and slumped down against the edge of the desk. His legs had gone numb, his heart, his thoughts were beggared of the ability to act. His hand fell between his knees and hung there limply as his world pitched into an endless black orbit. “I can’t … how could you believe … that of me?”

“I don’t think it purposeful, Harry,” she answered faintly. “I don’t know what to think. There’s so much about you I never knew … don’t know. So many secrets. So much you never told me. You’re a stranger to me, Harry. But I do know you wouldn’t intentionally hurt me.”

“Well,” he said bitterly, “thank you for that kindness.” God. She thought he’d been scoring off Blake without even being aware of his own motives. “Jesus, Dizzy.” He lifted his head, every ounce of his being concentrated in his bleak, blasted gaze. “I love you.”

She drew a shuddering breath. “If I stay here long enough with you, I’ll believe you only because I want to.” Her voice was faint.

“Believe it!”

“I can’t just take the easy course, Harry. It might not be as easy later on. It won’t be fair. To me or you.” She looked down at the papers in her hand and dropped them as if they burned. “I’m not plunder in this war you have against Blake or England or anyone else.”

He clenched his fists, his mind racing, groping, fumbling to think of something, anything, to persuade her, to shatter her awful certainty. The thought of a future without her sent his thoughts, spinning muddled and frantic, despair robbing him of reason.

When he looked up, she was gone.

Desdemona sat on the edge of her bed, staring out the window at the cool, winter sunlight. Her hands shook violently and she twisted the fingers until she felt some pain. Felt something, anything other than this overwhelming confusion and despair.

She’d hurt Harry when she’d only hoped to save them both from deeper pain. How could any pain be deeper than this?

Had she been right? Did the fact that he’d kept secrets from her, kept part of himself from her mean that he couldn’t love her honestly, wholly? Honesty and Harry seemed such incompatible words. She closed her eyes. It didn’t matter. She wanted to believe him. She’d never desired anything more. Maybe if she went back and he explained about Darkmoor …

“Sitt?” Duraid’s voice called from beyond her bedroom door.

“Yes, Duraid?”

He slipped inside the door. “I know it is very early, Sitt. But this was waiting beneath the door when I came down this morning.” He offered her a folded sheet of paper.

She accepted it, slowly focusing on Duraid’s bleak expression. “Is something wrong, Duraid?”

The boy nodded miserably. “It is the turkey farm, Sitt. The owner of the property is demanding higher rent.”

“Why wasn’t I told of this?”

“Matin did not wish to worry you, Sitt. He knows you are trying to find the money to replace the turkeys. He was hoping to change the landlord’s mind. But”—he lifted his shoulders and spread his palms wide—“the landlord will not wait.”

Guilt added its piquant flavor to her misery. She’d completely forgotten about the turkeys. She’d failed the children. She got up and went to the sideboard and opened the empty silverware drawer. She withdrew the five-pound note she kept there for emergencies and pressed it into Duraid’s palm. “Take this. Ask the landlord to wait. One week. Tell him I will pay interest on what is owed.”

“Yes, Sitt. Thank you, Sitt. I will go right now. Immediately! Allah shines his face upon you, Sitt.” The boy backed out of the room, dipping and bowing.

She dashed a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand and realized she still held the folded paper Duraid had given her. Incuriously, she opened it. It was written in a coarse hand in Arabic.

The bull she sought … an Apis bull?

She sighed at her foolishness. Rabi had probably manufactured some shabby facsimile. Still, however remote the chances were that he actually had an Apis bull in his possession, she needed to look into it. The letter offered her a chance to do something, for the turkey farm, for Matin, for her grandfather. She couldn’t ignore her responsibilities.

She glanced at the gilt clock on her desk. It was already eight-fifteen. She pocketed the note and went to the armoire where she’d hidden the papyrus she’d taken from the library. From inside, she withdrew it and the small hard-sided cylinder her grandfather used to transport papyrus.

Quickly she draped a dark shawl over her head and slipped into the hall, looking for any sign of Magi. Magi would never allow her to go to the bazaar without a male escort, and with Duraid gone, there was only one male available. With one last despairing glance at the door to the library, she stole down the quiet hallway and out the front door.

Outside, the residential area was quiet. Only a closed carriage stood at the corner of the street, the horses sleeping in their traces. She’d nearly made the corner when she heard the click of European heels behind her. She looked around.

Marta Douglass, her thin elegant face set in determined lines, hastened toward her house.

“Mrs. Douglass?” she called, puzzled by Marta’s appearance so early in the day. She started back toward the house.

Suddenly a thick arm looped around her, hauling her off her feet. She twisted frantically against her unseen assailant, opening her mouth to scream only to have a rag thrust into it. Her frantic gaze locked with Marta’s shocked one. And then she was being dragged into the waiting carriage.

Marta wheeled around, looking somewhere, anywhere for help. There was no one around but a ragged-looking Arab boy who slunk quickly into the shadows when he realized he’d been spied.

From inside the carriage that man, Maurice, barked an order.

“El Aguza?” The driver called down the name of a district south of the city.

“La!” Maurice yelled the Arab word for ‘no.’ “El Bawki. Yalla!”

Hurry. Marta’s Arabic was rudimentary, but she knew enough to understand that the man had ordered the driver to an ancient desert road. She hastened up the steps of the Carlisle house. Harry would know what to do. He’d save—

She stopped, her hand raised to knock, her heart racing in her throat. Fear warred with self-interest. If Harry saved Desdemona, the girl was bound to finally realize his feelings for her. And Harry would never look at Marta again.

Last night … Last night had been wonderful. Cal and she—But there wasn’t going to be any “Cal and she.” She clenched her teeth in anger at her stupidity. She wasn’t going to trade one alien culture for another, Egypt for Texas, even if Cal was to ask. Which he hadn’t. She wasn’t going to risk it all, ever again. She wouldn’t fall in love with him. She couldn’t. She wanted Harry.

But Harry was smitten with Desdemona and Desdemona was infatuated with the British viscount, the arrogant and powerful Lord Ravenscroft. Marta’s hand dropped and she looked down the street. Dust still billowed from where the carriage turned the corner.

A thought, born of panic, formed bright and tempting. Let Lord Ravenscroft play knight-errant to Desdemona’s damsel in distress.

She spun around. With a speed no one had ever witnessed in her before, she ran down the street.

Behind her, Rabi Hakim emerged from the shadows and trotted off in the opposite direction.