As You Desire (38 page)

A man rushed into the room, gesticulating and chattering. The others murmured in agitation.

“What did he say?” Blake asked.

“He says he sees twenty riders,” Abdul explained. “English army. Five kilometers. Coming fast.”

Abdul grabbed Blake’s hands and shoved the large, silk-wrapped parcel into them. It was heavy. Very heavy. The form it concealed was hard.

“Here. We have traded.” Abdul snatched the papyrus up and gingerly wrapped it in a clean tube of heavy silk. He barked an order at the men and they disappeared, leaving Abdul.

“Harry and Miss Carlisle need your help,” Blake implored.

“How far can they get on foot?” Abdul said, his smile disappearing under his veil.

“They’re both on horseback.”

Abdul stopped, uttering what Blake supposed was an Arabic curse. “Then they
are
in trouble. The landscape changes in a wind. Still, we are Tuarek and Harry is one of our own. We will find Harry. And his Desdemona.” And with that he disappeared.

Blake’s head fell back against the wall, his relief nearly palpable. Chesterton would be here any moment. He glanced at the object in his hand and carelessly flicked open the silk wrapping.

A golden bull gazed placidly up at him.

“Dizzy!”

She came awake slowly, the sound of his voice calling her back from the drugging lethargy. Tragedy and anguish laced his tone. She rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes and licked her dry cracked lips. It had been—days? hours?—since she’d drunk the last drops of water and laid her head on her knees to rest—

“Dizzy!”

She bent forward, her cramped shoulders and neck protesting dully, and peered woozily from her hiding place.

She could not see him clearly, his lean form was obscured and revealed by thick veils of blowing sand. The violent wind plucked his voice from his lips and carried it down the defile as he disappeared from sight.

She sank back against the rocky wall. Her head ached and her eyes felt heavy. So very tired. She smiled weakly. Her hero, her knight in shining armor had finally come.

Or so mirages would have her believe.

There was no chance even the most stalwart knight could find her in the vast magnitude that was the Egyptian desert. Still, it was a kind enough mirage and she’d little else left.

Her head drooped and her eyelids had nearly slipped shut when she saw him again. He emerged nearer her this time and here, in profile, she could see him in greater detail.

He was dressed in a soiled white shirt, a
khafiya
covering his head, one end flapping loose in the violent wind, flaying his throat and shoulders. Bold and athletic he moved with grace and assurance among the rocky boulders. His noble features were obscured by the capricious wind, but she could descry behind the pall of sand a countenance at once tragic and stern, sorrowful and resolute.

Poor grieving knight
.

“God, Dizzy, answer me!”

She must comfort him.

She rocked forward on to hands and knees and crept from the cave.

“Sir?” she called out in a hoarse whisper. He was beyond her now. All she could see of him was his shirt plastered to his broad back in the heightening wind.

“Sir!”

He spun. His light eyes blazed with an inner—

“Desdemona!”

She swallowed, reaching out for the man racing toward her, tears streaking his lean cheeks.

It wasn’t a knight. And it wasn’t Bertie Cecil.

It was Harry.

And that, after all, was all she’d ever desired.

L
ord Blake Ravenscroft hobbled down the promenade deck of the Thomas Cooke’s newest luxury excursion steamer. He found an unoccupied deck chair and lowered himself into it, staring broodingly out over the Egyptian landscape. He motioned for an attendant to bring him a scotch and water. The week-old wound to his leg throbbed and the blasted splint was a nuisance.

Only a few hours had passed since the wedding. He’d come directly from the church without bothering to change clothes. Though there had been no reason whatsoever to prolong his stay, he was pricked by the notion that he’d run away.

The bride had been lovely, Blake conceded, even though her gown had been an odd conglomeration of Eastern and English elements. The veil she’d worn had been some sheer piece of Oriental nonsense. Above the low décolletage she’d worn had been a collar, or a pectoral as Marta Douglass had
informed him in awed tones, fashioned in the form of what looked, for God’s sake, to be a jeweled vulture. The effect was disturbing.

But then, the bride was disturbing. Lovely and heart-stoppingly desirable, but decidedly disturbing. Bizarre, one might say. As was this entire Egypt, belonging as it did to no one though so many countries claimed it.

Blake’s gaze slipped wearily over the Nile’s tea-colored waters. In the far distance he could see the desert’s shoulders, muscular and dun-colored, hunched above the river plains.

No one would ever own that.

Perhaps ultimately Egypt belonged to the desert. Who could tell? He only knew this country held nothing for him, no appeal, no charm, no romance. It would always be the battleground upon which he’d been forced to confront his own nature. He’d done so bravely, facing the truth about himself like a gentleman. Why did he feel as if somehow this godforsaken land had revealed some unworthiness in his nature that honor did not address?

No, Egypt wasn’t for him. Just as Desdemona had not been for him. Both had proven to be enigmas he did not want to understand.

Well, he thought, accepting the iced glass of scotch the silent waiter offered him, at least he’d come away from this cursed place with some compensation. He slipped a hand into his inner jacket pocket, reassuring himself that the thick packet of American bills was still folded there. Ten thousand dollars for one bona fide Apis bull. The money would be
enough to get him reinstated as his grandfather’s heir. The old man was nothing if not practical.

Yes, Harry had Dizzy but he’d have Darkmoor Manor.

Blake’s smile faltered as he stared into his glass. The damnable thing was that he suspected Harry had gotten the better deal.

Abdul watched his youngest son pack the cooking equipment. For the next six months Rabi would be doing woman’s work, and he would be doing it uncomplainingly. It was Rabi’s punishment.

Abdul shook his head. Not only had his youngest apparently lost his mind and kidnapped Harry’s woman but then, as if to compound his crime, Rabi had given the woman the scroll!

Well, thought Abdul, pointing at a pan that had escaped Rabi’s eye, by the end of his penance the boy would have a keener appreciation of his family’s duty. A duty untold generations old. Though to be fair, Abdul thought, pointing impatiently at some bedding Rabi had yet to pack, it had not been completely the boy’s fault.

Abdul should never have removed the scroll from the tomb. Occasionally, throughout the years and decades, it had been necessary, in order to ensure his family’s well-being, to sell off some small bit from the enormous trove. Always they were small things, indistinguishable as coming from any specific cache. It was only after he’d translated a bit of the scroll that he’d realized it would lead a canny scholar immediately to its source. They were, after
all, poems the beautiful queen had written her husband, Akhenaton.

And now Harry, one of the few men Abdul knew would be able to identify the papyrus for what it was, was in possession of a scrap of it.

Abdul had broached the subject of the papyrus on the journey back to Cairo as Harry cradled the
Sitt
tenderly in his arms and she had drifted in and out of slumber. The Tuareks had helped him find his woman, Abdul had explained, now Harry must return the piece of papyrus.

For a long minute their gazes had met and held. Abdul knew, perhaps more than any other man, what such a discovery could mean to Harry. Harry would obtain much honor among the scholarly community. He would finally achieve the recognition his inability to read had hitherto excluded him from. Abdul had held his breath. Though Harry was an honorable man, and he owed the Hassams much, even Abdul could not tell how he would answer.

Finally Harry’s gaze had broken from Abdul’s and he had looked down at the woman nestled close to his heart. Pure contentment spread over his features.

“I have in my possession only one piece of paper. It is”—he’d lifted his eyes to Abdul and passion and sincerity shined in their pale depths—“a private missive. To me it is priceless. I will never part with it, let it be seen by another, or sell it. To you or anyone else.”

That had been an end to it. Harry never lied.

Abdul sighed and picked up the bedroll at his
feet. He threw it at his frightened-looking offspring before relenting and giving the boy a small smile. To give him his due, Rabi had found the woman and the scroll before any serious damage had been done.

Perhaps Rabi would soon be ready for the real family business: guarding Nefertiti’s tomb until such a day as Egypt belonged to Egyptians.

Harry withdrew the vial suspended from a gold chain around his neck. It was warn from resting near his heart. Tightly rolled within the delicate yet strong crystal carrier was a piece of papyrus and on that scrap was a set of simple hieroglyphics.

“You are my own, my always love.”

Even now, the simple message had the power to make his hand shake. He looked up, eagerly awaiting his wife. He could hear her moving about in the adjoining room. He could damn near feel her presence.

His wife
.

Five days ago they’d struggled out of the desert under Abdul’s escort. Harry had returned her to her frantic grandfather vowing—or, as Sir Robert later claimed, threatening—he’d be back to marry her.

He’d spent the next few days preparing for their wedding. First Harry had confounded Sir Robert’s gruff reservations by offering the old man the first pick of whatever treasures Harry came into possession of—at in-law rates, of course. It had been painful to watch Sir Robert’s paternal impulses war with his archeological ones. Dizzy, Magi later told him, had tipped the balance by declaring in irrefutable
terms that she did not want to go to England, had never wanted to go to England, and that she’d only said she had so that Sir Robert would feel free to return to London and achieve the recognition he deserved.

Apparently Sir Robert’s face had grown comical with extravagant relief. He’d actually teared up; the only words he’d been able to push past the constriction in his throat were, “I hate tweeds.”

That obstacle overcome, Harry had next bribed the necessary Egyptian and English officials—with Simon Chesterton’s blessing—into hastening the licensing procedure. All the while he’d rehearsed ways to convince Dizzy of the sincerity of his love.

If she wanted to live in England, in England they’d live. He’d live anywhere on the bloody planet as long as she was with him.

She hadn’t wanted England; she’d wanted him. When he’d appeared in her bedroom the night before last and told her he loved her and she’d be a damn fool not to realize it and just let them live happily ever after, in whatever the hell country she desired, she’d told him she’d found what she most desired—or rather whom.

The memory of her words pierced him with happiness, and he looked around impatiently. He heard her a few seconds before she came into the room, a vision of silken skin and silken gown, gold and tawny and altogether lovely. She stopped before the open window, shoving the shutters apart so that midafternoon sun flooded the room. The sudden light glowed on her skin, turned her hair into a
shimmering veil that spilled over her shoulders and down her back.

“You’d think at the rates they charge Shepheard’s would endeavor to keep their rooms aired,” she grumbled.

He laughed. “I love you, Desdemona. Lord knows, I love you.”

She turned, a smile lighting her face.

He couldn’t seem to say the words often enough, at first because it had been the simple truth that had gone for so long unvoiced but then because of the wondrous change each repetition wrought in her. From wonder to contentment to self-confidence, she flourished.

Just a few days ago, she would have blushed, her gaze would have dropped shyly from meeting his. Now her whole face lit with pleasure.

“You just love me because I can read and in marrying me you think you’ve gotten a free scribe for life.”

His breath caught in his throat. A further illumination. All of his life his inability to read had been something to hide, a source of pain. But she … she
teased
him about it, gently, tenderly, casually. The effect of her teasing was astonishing. He’d never felt so empowered. So capable of doing anything. He might well author that treatise Sir Robert had for years been badgering him to do. Perhaps the method he’d used to learn hieroglyphics could be used to learn English. Anything was possible now.

Dizzy loved him.

“Don’t try to deny it,” she said, one brow lifted.

“How did you know?” he asked gruffly.