As You Desire (25 page)

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.

T
houghtfully, Desdemona made her way toward the sitting room. She’d always assumed Harry had been the Golden Boy, favored and cosseted by adoring parents and sisters. Certainly his self-confidence supported such an estimation.

But he could not have won such poise from the unhappy childhood Blake described, in a schoolroom where he’d apparently been singled out by his peers to be tyrannized. Why would they do that? Harry could charm vultures into fasting should he set his mind to it. It made no sense.

And Harry had wanted to be an academician? Again, she’d always assumed that Harry had always achieved exactly what he had wanted to achieve, that there was no brass ring beyond his reach.

Her brows knotted. Harry
was
an expert. He could date an artifact after a casual perusal, find the single genuine shard in a mountain of rubble, descry an
eloquent history from a broken vase. Yet he’d been expelled from Oxford, fled England and his dreams. Even though he’d declared he’d done so for money, she didn’t believe him. There was more here. There was frustration, aspirations, abandoned dreams … failure.

A fallible Harry seemed all too human. It would be hard to believe his devil-may-care, bon vivant attitude could be mere window-dressing masking … sensitivity? She smiled at her own folly. She was romanticizing Harry again. If he had been beaten up by the other lads at Eton, it had very probably been a well-deserved thrashing. Still, her own companionless childhood probably prevented her from ever really understanding him. Or anyone else.

She lifted her chin in a consciously defiant gesture. She refused to believe that. There was something else going on.

“—from the turkey farm.”

Desdemona blinked. Duraid stood beside her, waving a scrap of paper under her nose, his face troubled. “What did you say, Duraid?”

“At the farm last night, a pack of dogs got into the pens. A quarter of the turkeys are dead and a full half have run off.”

The thought of turkeys leaving scarab-studded offerings throughout the streets of Cairo brought an unwilling smile to her lips.

“My friend there says already many of the boys have gone back to the streets, certain that the factory is closed for good.”

“Rubbish.” A seed of anxiety flavored her tone.

“Matin says it will cost fifty pounds to replace the turkeys and make repairs.”

“I don’t have fifty pounds, Duraid.” She didn’t have ten pounds.

“Yes,
Sitt.”
Duraid nodded, but his eyes pleaded with her for reassurance. “
Sitt
will think of something though, will she not?”

Always
Sitt
would think of something, come up with something, find something. She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers, struggling with this newest financial disaster. Those children
needed
the turkey farm.

“Won’t
Sitt
think of something?” he prodded. Duraid had once begged in Cairo’s streets. Several of his friends from those days depended on the scarab factory for their livelihoods.

She dropped her hand. “Of course I’ll think of something.” Somehow she invested confidence in her voice. “Soon. Now go to the kitchen and have Magi make some tea for Mr. Paget.” She opened the door and entered the sitting room.

Georges scurried to his feet, abandoning the thrice covered settee he’d been perched on. “Ah, Miss Desdemona! I hear you have a houseguest.”

“Yes. Harry met with some difficulty the other night and is recuperating here.”

The little Frenchman shook his head. “Difficulty, you say. Ah, Harry. He is incorrigible. Nothing too bad, I trust?”

“He’ll recover.” She motioned for him to retake
his seat and took the one opposite him. “Duraid said you were here on a matter of business?”

“Yes
. Last night you said you had acquired a papyrus.”

“Papyrus? Oh, you mean the poetry. But, Monsieur Paget, I also told you it was a forgery. Nothing the Cairo Museum would bother with,” she protested.

“I am not speaking of the museum, Miss Desdemona.” His tone was playful.

“Oh?”

“Sometimes, outside of my duties to the museum, I have been known to engage in a bit of independent commerce. I can find a buyer for such works.”

Though she had known this for years, Georges had never openly admitted his unofficial business practices before.

“I will take the fake papyrus off your hands for a nice profit to yourself. To a collector”—he lifted one slim brow—”it may prove valuable. May I see it?”

Business was business and she needed money. Though she’d hoped to sell the papyrus to a nice, distant New York publisher, if Georges Paget offered her enough money, it was his. She started to nod before remembering that it was in the library. Harry was in the library. She wasn’t going to reveal her secret hiding hole to his all-too-interested gaze. Georges would have to wait.

“I’m afraid that at the moment that’s not possible,” she said. “Perhaps tomorrow? Or the next day?”

“Oh.” His disappointment was nearly comic. His bland face collapsed into slack, aggrieved lines.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Paget,” she said.

“So am I,” Georges said unhappily, as Duraid arrived with the tea service. “So am I.”

“How did they catch up with you?” Blake asked, watching Harry struggle out of that … that
coffin
 … and limp across the room.

Harry stopped beside Sir Robert’s desk and began poking the various objects littering its top.

“Catch up with me?” Harry murmured in a distracted voice, tying the sheet around his waist and wincing as he did so. Apparently he found whatever he sought on the cluttered desk. His hand closed about a small figurine. “Duraid!” he shouted.

“Tell me how the men who were chasing you caught up with you,” Blake demanded. “You were always so bloody fast. How did they catch you?”

Harry spared him an annoyed glance. “Really, Blake, how would I know? They caught me. I wasn’t clocking them.” He used the tone an adult would when dealing with a tiresome child. Blake’s resentment swelled.

How dare Harry treat him so condescendingly? How dare Harry play the hero, forcing him to play the craven? “You
didn’t
run!”

Harry held up the statuette, scrutinizing it closely, ignoring him completely.

“Damn you. I said you didn’t run!”

Startled by Blake’s shout, Harry looked up. His gaze sharpened on him for a second before returning
to the figure. “No,” he murmured. “There was no place to run. The other corridor ended in a blind alley.”

“You knew that when you sent me up that corridor, didn’t you?”

“Yes. If you’ll excuse me?” Painfully he made his way across the room, favoring his bruised side. At the door he poked his head into the hallway. “Magi!”

“I won’t be beholden to you,” Blake said. “You may think you’ve proven something by forcing me to desert you, after you knew … after I told you how wretched I’d felt about abandoning you back at Eton …” He stopped, seeking control before going on. “You haven’t proven a thing, to me or to Desdemona. It was a pitiful act that in no way proves you’re a better man than I.”

“Magi!” Harry’s voice reverberated once more down the cramped passage before he turned his head. His expression was flat with dislike. Blake returned it, easily surpassing his cousin’s animosity.

“I don’t have time to address whatever grievance you’re nursing against me, Blake,” Harry said. “And frankly, even if I did have the time, I don’t have the inclination. I just don’t give a damn.”

Blake could hear the truth of Harry’s words in the tiredness with which Harry regarded him. It infuriated Blake. Harry held hostage his very birthright, had cost him the woman he loved. Harry threatened everything Blake valued. He was a defective, utterly inadequate, a victim who improbably wore the mien of the victor.

Rage and frustration clouded Blake’s thoughts, roiled darkly in his heart, and he fought the urge to lash out. His lack of self-control, these base impulses were intolerable.

Blake was the scion of the family. He had a heritage to uphold. A standard to maintain. By God, he would do what was right. He was a gentleman.

It was all that was left to him.

“Harry?” The housekeeper appeared in the doorway. “You called for me?”

Without wasting another glance at Blake, Harry stepped into the hall with the housekeeper. Blake stayed where he was, refusing to leave until he’d done what he’d come to Cairo to do. He would tell Harry about the new will. It was what honor demanded.