As You Desire (5 page)

“What is that supposed to mean?” She rose up on her arms and her light blanket slipped to her lap. Harry’s light eyes skittered over her, jerking away.

“For God’s sake, Dizzy, have you no modesty?” He lifted the ragged lace strap from her shoulder. His fingers shivered as they brushed her shoulder. Or was that her own response? Her belly muscles tightened. “More important,” he said tersely, “have you no decent bedclothes?”

He was not so unsusceptible as he would like to be, she thought triumphantly. Drat him anyway, teasing responses from her body and then chastising her for her immodesty! Well, she wasn’t the only one prey to human failings, susceptible to certain unaccountable but undeniable attractions. And if rumor was to be believed, Harry was more “susceptible” than most.

“May I remind you that you are in my bedchamber uninvited? If my lack of modesty or my choice of
nightrails offends you so much, go.” She sat up straighter, aware of the swing of her unbound breasts beneath the thin, worn cotton nightrail, the flush blooming across her chest and flowing up her throat at her unaccustomed boldness.

“If you’d stay decently wrapped under your blankets instead of traipsing about in that flimsy—” He broke off. His eyes fixed somewhere over her left shoulder. “May
I
remind
you
that I am not your ancient eunuch, your cursed brother, or your feeble uncle? I’m a man, Dizzy,” he said, his breathing rapid and angry. “Just a man. But sometimes that’s enough.”

Her pulse quickened in response to his low, urgent tone. All of Cairo viewed this man as someone to be reckoned with, and all of Cairo’s women saw him as desirable. Including, damnation take it, herself.

But the ability to awake a man’s baser interests wasn’t the same as awakening his heart, Magi had adjured her on many occasions. And that is what she wanted, a man who loved as well as desired her. That man wasn’t Harry. He’d made that clear long ago. Regardless of how he teased her.

“Then don’t come in here unless you’re invited,” she snapped angrily, abandoning her plan to punish Harry with longings similar to those she felt. What purpose could it possibly serve? “And stop mocking me about my former … delusions. Someday, Harry Braxton, the tables will be turned. Someday you’ll be the one humiliated by an ill-conceived and absolutely unwarranted fascination.”

“So you promise … repeatedly.”

She wriggled down against the pillows, tucking the blanket up under her chin. “Someday you’ll be on your knees—yes,
on your knees
—because of some woman, Harry—”

“Sounds painful.”

“—and when you are, I’ll be there to see it.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said, suddenly serious. And then he grinned, switching from grave-eyed male to reckless, charming rogue and in the process confusing her. “You’re a fascinating woman, Diz.”

She snorted.

“I mean it. Just look at you,” Harry said with something that might, if one were of a fanciful disposition, have been approval. “Self-confident, competent, vivacious. Egypt has made a woman of you. Why ever would you want to go back to that mold manufacturing plant called England? Egypt reeks of romance and a good half of Her Majesty’s officers are madly in love with you—”

“For heaven’s sake, Harry, do you honestly believe that this palaver will twine me about your little finger?” she asked. “You just want me to stay here because I’m the cheapest of the translators you hire.”

“I want you to stay.” His gaze locked with hers. For a second, shadows moved in his bright eyes. “At any rate, Dizzy, my dear, until you’ve done my translations.” He chucked her lightly under her chin, but one finger lingered to touch her cheek. “Now, now. Don’t look like that. You have only yourself to blame. If you didn’t insist on indulging
your thespian impulses by dressing up and lurking about the bazaars looking like some poor fool’s angel or a
houri
—” He rose and thrust his hands deep in his pockets, sauntering away from the bed.

“I wasn’t lurking. I was attempting to blend in.”

“Exactly,” he muttered in a distracted tone. “You know you are much safer dressed as an English citizen than an Arab woman. You have no idea how poor Abdul was sweating when he discovered who, or rather
what
, his youngest son had brought home from market.” He stopped near her battered desk and hitched his hip up against it.

“Why didn’t you come get me straight off?”

“I didn’t know where you were. I just about went mad—” For an instant his expression tightened into something resembling pain. No. Frustration. Harry would have hated being thwarted.

“Abdul was so distraught by the situation he neglected to impart that rather pertinent bit of information in his note.” Incredibly, his gaze fell away from hers, as if
he
were uncomfortable. “So I scouted around until I found you.”

“It took you long enough.”

“I started north of the city. He went south. Poor Abdul.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry. They’re
slavers.”

“Abdul is not a slaver,” Harry said. “It’s enterprising young Rabi who wishes to expand the family business into a new, lucrative sideline.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t thought of it.”

“Oh,” he said, “I’ve thought of it.”

Desdemona’s mouth twisted in disgust. “Have you no decency?”

“Certainly,” Harry said. “I just choose to ignore it. As you did when you took advantage of poor Rabi and accepted …?” He trailed off invitingly.

“Aha!” Desdemona crowed. “Now we get down to it. That’s the real reason you’ve sneaked in here.”

“Why
is
Braxton here?” her grandfather asked from the doorway.

It said much about her grandfather’s confidence in her that he did nothing more than raise his eyebrow at Harry’s appearance in her bedchamber. And, too, Harry insisted on acting under the completely unfounded assumption that he was somehow looked upon as a member of the family.

“Why are you here, Braxton?” her grandfather repeated.

“I came to see how Dizzy was and to ask you both to dinner at Shepheard’s this Friday evening.”

“Why?” Sir Robert asked suspiciously.

“My cousin is here, healing from a broken heart. Or so my mother writes. I promised her I’d introduce him to the assorted
Inglizi
littering the place.”

“Cousin?” Desdemona asked.

“Lord Blake Ravenscroft.”

Desdemona’s interest awoke. She knew Harry had a family in England. An extensive, loving one. After each Christmas he sported new shirts for weeks on end. She hadn’t realized there was a lord among them.

“Really?” she asked.

Harry gave her a sardonic smile. “Oh, you’ll love
him, Desdemona. He’s so damn English I expect he carries a piece of Buckingham Palace around as a talisman. And romantic! Broad, dark … bulky. I assume he spends a good deal of time pouting—though you’ll doubtless call it ‘brooding.’ At least he did as a child. The most boring, humorless companion I’ve ever been forced to spend a summer with. I can’t think that a dozen years will have changed him much.”

Harry didn’t like his cousin; she was half in love already.

S
ir Robert glanced out into the hallway and then back at the alabaster cylinder in his hands. He was having a hard time dating the dratted thing and as of yet there was still no sign of Harry. What in God’s name did Desdemona and Harry spend so much time discussing? He blew his cheeks out in self-mockery. Hieroglyphics and chronologies, of course. The tie that binds.

He looked around his environs and sighed. The makeshift library cum office cum sitting room was ugly, granted. But even though cluttered and crammed with artifacts and relics, at least its contents had the virtue of authenticity. The rest of the small, cramped domicile did not.

Narrow, drafty, and in need of repair, the house was outfitted with second-rate furnishings and reproductions, an odd and eclectic conglomeration of English furniture Desdemona had scrounged from English military couples returning to Great Britain
and the odd bits and pieces she’d dragged home from the marketplaces, the
suqs
.

It was not a proper home for a young Englishwoman, though it was more than adequate for his own needs. In fact, he could think of no place he’d rather be than here, among his beloved treasures, a stone’s throw away from a land that had fascinated him since he’d first read of it over fifty years ago.

He didn’t want to leave Egypt.

But if there was one thing he loved more than Egypt, it was his granddaughter. He’d spent the first decade and a half of her life nearly unaware of her existence except for the infrequent mention of her as a child prodigy in some scholastic journal that found its way to his desk or the sporadic letter from his son, a son he knew only slightly more than the granddaughter.

After her parents had died and she’d arrived here, he’d learned more of his son. That knowledge had horrified him. Sir Robert had spent the last five years scrambling for a way to rectify the grave injustices his son and his wife had done to their only daughter.

Desdemona, the protégée, the fascinating linguistic oddity, had never had a childhood. She’d been hauled all over Europe, from city to city, from conference to convention. She’d spent her youth on podiums and in libraries and on stages, amazing brittle scholarly old men with her uncanny ability to translate ancient written languages.

When she’d first arrived here, Sir Robert had asked her what she wanted. He’d never forgotten
her response: shy, hesitant, and heartbreakingly brief. She wanted, she’d said, to be a normal English girl.

He’d do anything to see she fulfilled that gentle aspiration, and it certainly wasn’t going to be achieved in Cairo in the company of ex-patriots, obsessed archeologists and dilettantes, politicians and despots. Sir Robert knew his duty and his heart, but he also knew Desdemona. The only possible way she would return to England was if she thought he wanted to go, too. Desdemona was so damn willing to sacrifice herself to others’ needs. She’d never leave him here.

But now—a beatific smile touched Sir Robert’s lips—perhaps there was a way they could both achieve their desires. A footfall in the hallway alerted him and he rose from the desk. As unlikely as it was, Harry Braxton might be the answer to all their problems.

“Braxton!” Sir Robert called as Harry passed by.

Harry reappeared, framed by the door, hands thrust into his pockets, his expression a trifle suspicious. “Sir?”

“Come in, m’boy. Come in and have a seat.” Sir Robert set the alabaster piece aside and smiled.

Looking behind him as if to assure himself there was no other “boy” in the hall, Harry entered. Sir Robert indicated a chair near an empty sarcophagus and Harry lowered himself cautiously into it.

“Well.” Sir Robert steepled his fingers in front of his lips and nodded invitingly.

“Well.”

The silence hung between them.

“Well, then. Anything interesting happening with you, Braxton, m’lad?”

“No.” Harry smiled pleasantly and Sir Robert gave an inward curse. Leave it to Harry to do nothing to help an awkward silence. Casting about for some subtle, ingenious way to introduce the subject he wanted to broach, Sir Robert rifled through the disarray of papers on his desk. He found an article on Aton and monotheism and handed it to Harry. “What do you think of this drivel?”

Harry barely glanced at the pages before handing them back. “Fascinating. Did you have anything in particular you wanted, sir?”

“Oh, no. No. Just haven’t had the opportunity to have a chat with you lately. Man-to-man sort of thing, you understand.”

Harry’s expression grew uncharacteristically grave. “If this is about my being in Dizzy’s room, sir, nothing—”

“Of course nothing happened!” Sir Robert sputtered. “What do you take me for, boy? You and Desdemona!” He snorted. “Most unlikely thing I can imagine. Oh, granted, at one time I know she had rather a
tendre
for you. Thank God, she grew out of it. ’Spect you were relieved, too.”

“Oh, yes.”

“No. That ain’t what I wanted to talk to you about. I was, er, wondering about this cousin of yours.”

Harry relaxed. He stretched his legs and crossed
his ankles, folding his hands across his chest. He raised his brows expectantly. “Yes?”

“A lord, you say.”

Harry nodded.

“Thought your father was a dean or a don or some such thing.”

“He is.”

Sir Robert toyed with a pen, studying the nib as he asked, “But gentry, too?”

“No, sir. I am related to my cousin through my mother’s side of the family.”

“He’s broken-hearted, you say?” This gambit brought no response, and Sir Robert ground his teeth in frustration. “Would he have … been at fault in the matter? Not, you understand, that I’m prying. I just wouldn’t want to expose Desdemona to company unbefitting a young, sheltered girl.”

Harry burst out laughing and Sir Robert stared at him, his ire rising at the thought that Harry would laugh at Desdemona.

“You are really a blackguard, Hairy,” he said tightly. “Have you no sense of what is proper? No nicer impulses?”