Must Have Been The Moonlight (3 page)

Major Fallon tipped her face into the light to look at the bruise. “I should be asking you that question, my lady.”

Brianna could hear the seriousness in his voice, yet, there seemed to be a hint of deviltry in his words. “I think it is I who will have a headache to remember this meeting.”

Wiping the strands of damp hair from her eyes, Brianna let her gaze stray to his unshaven profile as they continued to speak.

She’d heard his name mentioned more than once since her arrival in Egypt. Though she’d never actually met the British officer whom the khedive called El Tazor, the Barracuda, she’d not been immune to the lurid gossip in the ladies’ parlor at the consulate.

Infamous for his war against the slave and hashish trade in Egypt, Major Fallon was a legend in some circles at the British consulate, heatedly despised by others. To the priggish, he was the man who openly cavorted with a native mistress.

Lady Alex’s eyes did not leave Major Fallon’s face, bent so near to her own. They seemed to have forgotten Brianna’s presence as he dabbed at her mouth, like some nomadic Prince Charming, which was probably not far from the truth, considering who he was.

Brianna left the tent.

Clasping the blanket, she stood immobilized in the clearing before lifting her face to the cool desert breeze. A morass of glittery stars filled the velvety sky, the beauty a harsh contradiction to the horror it shielded. To the horror inside her.

Afraid to leave the comforting glow of the fire, but ashamed of that fear, Brianna sat on a pack and buried her chin in a blanket.

She and Alex had endured the terror of being chased by murderers. Even now, as she looked out over the desert, she still felt as if she were running for her life.

Behind her, she sensed rather than heard Major Fallon’s approach. The dusty toe of his boot came into focus. She raised her head. He looked at her sitting near the fire. For a moment she sat frozen beneath the weight of his stare. Then she watched his gaze take in the surrounding area before he crouched in front of her and poured a cup of coffee.

“She has a fever.” He handed Brianna the cup. “But she’ll
sleep better now that she has something in her stomach. She’s been shot.”

“Yes, I know,” Brianna said, her hands wrapped around the cup. “Lady Alexandra wanted photos for her book.” For a long time she said nothing else, then suddenly the words were on her tongue, and she couldn’t pull them back.

“We weren’t in the camp when the raiders attacked,” she explained, holding the cup in her hands. “We’d gone to find the Coptic temple that we’d glimpsed that day. The temple had never been documented. This was to have been a big opportunity for her. We’d left with one of the guides and a soldier to escort us.” Brianna drank. “We were there longer than we should have been. We must have been less than a mile from the camp when the attack came.”

She looked up to find Major Fallon’s gaze intent on her face. “One always imagines how one would react when faced with danger. It wasn’t how I’d ever expected. I could only stare in frozen horror as riders swarmed over the dunes from the west. I don’t know how long we all sat on our camels. Maybe ten seconds, maybe five minutes. I don’t know.

“Then the man—our guide—raised his gun and shot the soldier in the back of the head. He turned his gun on Lady Alexandra. But she’d pulled the camel around and the bullet hit the camel’s head. The shot must have grazed her arm. When she went down, I thought the fall had killed her. When the man turned on me, I already had my revolver in my hand. I shot him.” Her hands held the tin cup tightly. Much needed heat infused her. “After that…” Brianna raised her gaze. “I took the rifle the soldier had been carrying and managed to get Lady Alex from beneath the camel. We rode away on my camel. I stayed to the harder ground for a day. When we reached the sand, I dragged the canvas tent that I’d used to develop my photographs to hide our tracks. The sand shifts so fast, you see…” she said, her voice trailing away. “There were merchants’ families traveling with us. Children.”

“Who was the officer in charge of the detail, Miss Donally?”

Brianna remembered the dashing officer in charge with the sunburn on his nose. “Captain Pritchards.”

His quiet oath focused her gaze on his. “You knew him?”

He was looking at her, or rather, through her, when she felt herself come into focus in his gaze. The contact brought breath into her lungs.

“You should sleep before we leave in a few hours.”

She stood when he stood. He hesitated when her palm touched his forearm. She felt the coiled strength of him beneath her fingertips. “What about the other man who was trailing us?”

Major Fallon looked down at her hand before raising his gaze back to hers. She felt her pulse quicken. His expression was half indolent and half…something no decent woman should ever think about with a stranger. Brianna could feel it pulsing through her.

With a hot flush, she removed her hand and stepped away.

“The second man is no longer a threat, Miss Donally.”

His footsteps made no sound in the soft sand as he walked fifty feet to a place at the wall to set up watch.

She’d heard no gunfire. But then, gunfire would carry for a long distance, and Major Fallon didn’t seem the kind of man who would advertise his presence. Brianna remembered the lethal-looking knife.

Later, when she lay down to sleep, she tried to find comfort from her position on the sand. The tent remained open to the breeze. She smelled Turkish tobacco. Turning into the crook of her arm, she found the robed figure of Major Fallon. He sat against the stone wall, the rifle casually drawn against his knees. He was half facing the tent. The tip of a cigarette glowed orange as he inhaled. As if sensing her eyes on him, he turned his face, and she felt the strange impact of his gaze.

It was a long time before Morpheus claimed her in his arms.

“I
know that the captain was a friend, Major Fallon.” Halid al-Nahar’s shadow lay over the perfectly square hole painstakingly dug in the hardened earth. He’d spoken the words in Arabic.

“What of the women and children who belonged to the merchant families on that caravan?” Michael observed Halid from over the tagilmust that covered his mouth and his nose. “Miss Donally said there were many.”

“We found only the men.” Glancing up the horseshoe-shaped berm behind them, Halid’s fingers tightened on the serviceable-looking talwar at his side. “The jackals uncovered the mass grave, or Donally Pasha’s men might have missed it entirely.”

“It would have taken hours to prepare such a pit.” The ground was hard. Inhospitable. The dry wadi bed fraught with long-thorned fragments of dead Loranthus. “Why spend the time to bury the men at all?”

And with every question, Michael wondered what had gone so wrong that an armed escort could be ambushed, where only two English women had survived against all odds. Climbing the steep grade past a dead olive tree, he let
his eyes go across the barren landscape and waited for instinct to whisper into the silence. Out here, living or dying depended on seeing with more than his eyes. The site had already become known as the Well of the Dead. There was no well or water, though, the most numerous living inhabitants being the black flies thick in the air.

Donally’s camp had been the caravan’s destination. Tents of the workers, laying the telegraph, pocked the distant landscape like termite mounds. Thanks to Donally’s efforts, modern technology would soon stretch from Cairo to this outer desert oasis.

Except a week ago, Donally’s base camp had been forty miles southeast of this place. The thought stopped him cold. The caravan had been miles off-course.

“Who hires the guides, Halid?”

“Most probably the arrangements come from the chief of the general staff. Donally Pasha might know,” he said mildly. “You could ask him, if he had not left here yesterday.”

Michael turned. “Donally left? Where?”

Halid’s shrug was as elegant as his clothes. The son of a wealthy sheikh, Halid savored the unlikely conviction that civilization sprouted from men who sported fashionable attire. Educated in England, he commanded the outpost near this oasis.

“I only know that when the caravan was overdue, he sent out patrols. After his men found this site, I am told that he went mad. He then gathered two rifles, a pistol, and supplies and headed to El-Musa.”

“Not Cairo?” Staring across the sands, Michael no longer saw the swirling hot currents. “What would compel a man like Donally to go racing across the desert wasteland to a town where the reigning sheikh is a notorious hashish smuggler?”

“No man who works as hard as Donally Pasha does for the fellaheen can be a thief or murderer. I believe he has a reason.”

“I want men sent to the outer oases to search for those
missing from this attack.” Michael maneuvered downhill, his burnoose sailing outward with his pace. “Follow the old slave route—”

“It has been too long”—Halid caught up with Michael’s long-legged stride—“even if the women did survive, everyone knows what befalls those the slavers bring to market.”

Michael despised the didactic drivel that hovered over female chastity as if virtue alone elevated women to the status of sainthood, or the lack of it defiled them. “Who can account for the intrepid compassion that weighs moral convenience above life? Give me justice, Halid. Not sanctimonious fervor.”

“You are angry. This is not your fault.”

“Captain Pritchards was carrying payroll currency that Donally was supposed to use to pay those workers out there. Currency that you are supposed to use to pay your own troops. Information about that shipment was classified, Halid. How many people knew? Think about what that means.”

The implication was as far-reaching as the moon, too dangerous to ignore. How many other caravans had vanished carrying governmental stores and precious antiquities? Just enough that until now the attacks had looked random.

“Major…” Halid placed a restraining hand on Michael’s arm, stopping him before they reached the other men. “Without proof, they will court-martial you if you so much as make an insinuating remark against any high public official.”

“Spare me your Byronic version of decorum, Halid. You speak the Bedouin dialect. Your family lives in the desert. Find someone who might know someone’s cousin or uncle. These raiders have to hide somewhere. The prodigal son needs to return and ask some questions.”

A faint flush spread across Halid’s face. “I think that you are a—” He waved an indignant hand about the air in front of Michael’s nose. “What is a more descriptive word for the penis of a donkey?”

“The word is ass, Halid. A-S-S.”

Unamused, Halid spat in the dirt. “
W
hasratan
, God has afflicted you, O Acerbic One. It is fortunate for you that I am your friend, Englishman. Or you would have nothing left but your barren soul to rule.”

Watching him swing onto his mount, Michael reached into his robe and pulled out the makings for a cigarette. “Wear blue,” he called. “I wouldn’t want your relatives to mistake you for an Englishman and shoot you.”

Halid’s arm shot up in a universal gesture that needed no interpretation. Staring moodily at the cigarette he’d rolled, Michael struck a match to the tip. His gaze went to the sky. The day had already turned to leaden gray, and he’d learned one thing since his arrival in Egypt. Out here in the desert, sanity was relative to the heat.

Discounting any excuse for his black mood, Michael knew he wasn’t decent company for anyone. Besides, Halid no doubt noticed that the imposing effendi, lord of a million souls in his jurisdiction, had nearly lost his stomach back there at the pit.

Nor was he indifferent to Halid’s words. Halid had erred if he didn’t think he understood military bureaucracy. The military was no different in its moral perception of justice from any other establishment in Britain.

But this had become personal in a way he’d not expected.

The British captain buried in that mass grave had not only been his friend since Eton, but his colleague. Michael had served with Captain Pritchards in China before they’d both come to Egypt almost three years ago. He’d made a toast at Pritchards’s wedding last year.

Michael drew deeply on his cigarette before tossing it in the sand. Mounting his camel, he went in search of the site foreman. Later, he interviewed the five men who had found the gravesite. The foreman then took him to Donally’s tent, an hour away. No one questioned Michael’s motives for asking to go there. Hospitality was as automatic to a man of his rank as it would have been to the sultan himself.

A striped awning stretched the length of the entrance where a table and chairs remained on a carpet overlooking a small pond. It was the first touch of greenery Michael had seen in months. Cautiously, he stepped through the entryway. The skirt of the tent was raised to let in the desert breezes. His gaze scanned the strewn cushions, the shelves filled with photos, books, and maps. A red carpet covered the desert floor. It was unbelievable that so bare a place could be made to look like a home.

“I will have your personal things brought in here, effendi,” a servant said.

“No.” He turned. “Where are Lady Alexandra and Miss Donally?”

The servant waved his hand over the sheet of heavy silk that divided the room. “They are asleep. They have not moved in hours.”

Michael’s gaze went to the screen. He stopped the foreman as he turned to leave. “Is someone attending to my mount?”

“Yes, effendi.” He bowed slightly before he left.

The lamplighter, who also served as Donally’s personal steward, sidled apologetically around the close quarters to light the paraffin lamps. Waiting for the servant to leave, Michael leaned over the maps on the desk. Dust had already settled over everything. Behind him, photographs lined the makeshift shelves. One picture caught his attention.

Drawn by some elemental response he couldn’t name, Michael picked up the image of a man and woman atop a camel, his arm around her waist in a racy pose. Her face was turned adoringly toward his profile. In the background, seen through a gossamer halo of light, the shadows of an approaching eclipse stretched across the pyramids of Giza.

Compelled by a combination of interest and admiration for the photographer, he held the photograph nearer to the paraffin lamp. The photograph was arresting. Poetic in its contrasts of past and present, darkness and light. Michael switched his attention to the bottom of the frame, where
another photo was wedged inside. Edging it out, he found that it was Alexandra Donally, wearing a veiled costume of a belly dancer. The daughter of an earl, Donally’s wife was an interesting study in cultural diversity. Amused, Michael shoved the photograph back into the frame. He again considered her husband and the questions his absence raised.

“The Donally Pasha’s sister, she is a good image taker, yes?”

Michael returned the frame to the shelf, the visual memory of the girl standing unflinchingly with a gun trained on him predominant in his thoughts. “Miss Donally took all of these?”

The servant tipped his head toward the photograph that had been taken in Giza. “Lady Alexandra has been traveling Egypt writing a book for the British Museum. You know her, yes?”

By choice, Michael didn’t walk the same social circles of Egypt’s anointed elite. Having had enough pomposity in his life to last until his eternal leap into purgatory, he’d left Captain Pritchards to stoke the home fires of social fortitude. Now, he regretted the neglect.

“Why did Donally go to El-Musa?” he asked.

“Donally Pasha was not himself, effendi. When he returned from the gravesite, he was a man possessed. He packed only a few of his belongings, took his rifle and pistols, and left.”

“Alone? Over a hundred miles across the desert with no guard?”

“You travel alone. What does it matter when numbers do not protect a man? He speaks the language and has traveled much.”

Finding no logical argument, Michael dropped his gaze to the photograph. Maybe Donally was no milquetoast Eurocrat. If he possessed half the courage of his sister, then he was a man who could survive hell.

Michael certainly appreciated his taste in photography.

“I will bring lamb stew.” The servant bowed.

“That will be fine,” he told the servant.

“I am Abdul,” he said. “I will revisit this evening with dinner.”

Returning his gaze to the loving pair in the photograph taken in Giza, Michael started to roll a cigarette before he caught himself. It wasn’t smoking the Turkish tobacco that had stopped him. It was the craving that he refused to let control him—and something else that he hadn’t felt in a long time as he looked at the photograph.

Lady Alexandra had been raised in the same elitist society that had surrounded him his whole life. That she had somehow escaped the narrow confines of her world intrigued him. That she’d married an Irish commoner impressed him.

Hell, Pritchards’s death had unhinged him. The man the last ten years had shaped was not prone to either whimsy or regret. Michael lay on the cot, both feet rooted to the floor, a position he favored. With one hand behind his head, he closed his eyes. He never wanted to get too comfortable, as if staying in one place for too long would somehow grow on him. He was bone weary in every part of his body. He should be thinking about his plans to get back to Cairo. To hunting Donally down, if only to return the man’s sister and his wife to him. A position that had fallen to him by virtue of default.

But for just a moment he would remain here.

He didn’t awaken when Brianna approached that evening, as the sun had set and the air grew cold, with a blanket. She looked down at his unshaven features refined by the shadows, the dark smudge of his lashes resting on his cheek. Even in repose he exuded a vibrant, male vitality that contradicted the vulnerability she saw.

Lying on the cot, Major Fallon looked uncommonly long and lean, with broad shoulders that she remembered all too well when he’d fairly frisked her bones. His burnoose had fallen open, revealing the knife tucked in the crimson sash at his hip. His thighs were well formed beneath the once silky white
sirwal
trousers. They had ridden for three days in the
dirt and the grit. They had ridden when she thought she could go no more, and he’d carried Alex when there had been no more strength for her to sit atop a camel.