Must Have Been The Moonlight (7 page)

Major Fallon stopped in front of her, his arm braced across his thigh. “I suggest that you find shelter, Miss Donally.”

Her gaze shot to Christopher and Alex.

“Don’t worry about them,
amîri
. They’ll be all right.”

“Did your plan work?” Her voice was quiet. “You’re still alive.”

“It worked.”

Holding one hand over her turban, she turned as he rode past and into camp. Brianna scrabbled back up the hill and ran to help Abdul take down the tent. All around the caravan, people were doing the same. Somewhere, she could hear Major Fallon’s voice carry above the wind. Camels stretched out their long swanlike necks to the ground and closed their eyes. The heat continued to rise like the mouth of a hot oven. Brianna saw her mare pacing the corral and ran across the
camp. In the chaos, she could hear Christopher calling her name. The horse reared when Brianna grabbed onto the mane, desperate to get the mare to kneel as the others had done. The sky continued to darken with violent, swirling particles of sand. She’d never seen anything so powerful as the darkness that was bearing down on them, and fought with the panicked horse until strong arms suddenly came around her.

“Get back!” Major Fallon took the reins. His hand went over the mare’s nose and mane. He spoke gently, making a clicking noise with his tongue. Brianna watched the horse kneel. He secured a cloth over the mare’s eyes and nose, then reached for her, and caught a jolt of electricity. It arced from his hands, and her eyes shot to his. “We have to get down,” he yelled against her ear.

Brianna’s gaze swung to the sky. A heavy blanket went over her as Major Fallon took her down into the sand beside the mare.

Her ragged breathing was the only sound in the narrow tomb in which she’d found herself enclosed. “I can’t breathe,” she whispered in panic.

“You can.” Major Fallon’s breath ruffled the loose tendrils of hair on her cheek. One of his legs lay over hers to still her panicked movement. “Unless you try to get out of here.”

She put a hand between them. “I need a knife. Give me a knife.”

He pulled back to look at her. “And have you bleed all over me?”

“I don’t want to kill myself. I need to cut my bindings.” She shoved against the hard ridge of his belly. “You’re too damn close!”

The low sound of his answering laughter filled the narrow space between them. “Unfortunately, we’re both going to have to live with that,” he said, his voice growing louder above the wind. “I would urge you to be still.”

The moaning, howling wind struck them. Brianna covered
her ears and pressed her face against his chest. Michael was conscious of his arms surrounding her in an attempt to keep some of the terror at bay, fitting the softer curves of her body against the harder angles of his. A length of her hair had shaken loose from the turban.

“I swear, I don’t cry,” she said. “I don’t jump at bogeymen in the dark. I don’t faint—”

“I’m not accusing you of being weak.”

“Yes, you are.” She wiped a sleeve on her nose and pulled back to look up at him in accusation.

Michael found himself staring into the most extraordinary liquid-blue eyes he’d ever seen. Her musk filled the enclosed space, no doubt along with his. He shouldn’t have been tantalized, he told himself.

“I can feel it.” She laughed. “You’re being nice.”

His eyes dropped to her mouth. Annoyed with the extent of his growing arousal, he removed the knife from his hip. “Do you really want your bindings cut?”

“With that horrible thing? Are you insane?”

He stabbed the knife into the sand to anchor the blanket at his head. “You’re going to have to stop squirming.”

“I hope Abdul covered my photography equipment.”

“You’ll probably have to remember where it was and dig it out.”

Alarmed, her gaze lifted. “How long do one of these…these
simoons
last?”

“Days.”

“Days!” she gasped. “We’ll die of starvation.” Then she saw that he was laughing. Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Truly, Major, you are
such
a bore.” Her body relaxed a little as she seemed to compose herself. “You can let go of me.”

He complied, and she lay on her back and looked up at him. With her head wrapped in the turban, her Mona Lisa expression in place, she looked astonishingly serene in the dim light. Distracted by the length of dark hair that had fallen from her turban, he propped his head on his hand.

“Maybe a few hours,” he rectified.

“Do you think Christopher and Alex are all right?”

“What do you think?”

She propped herself on her elbow and peered up at him in the meager light. “I think a few hours is certainly more than the ten minutes we had the last time we were alone, Major.”

The shadow accentuated the provocative curve of her waist. He saw her mouth slide into a smile. “Don’t sound so smug. Miss Donally.”

“And here I was thinking we could have lusty sex—just me and the desert
simoon
against your hot naked skin.”

His eyes narrowed. Little-Miss-Spoiled-For-Life-With-One-Kiss thought she was safe.

She lay back, content to think herself immune from him. “You mean, you don’t want to strip naked?” she asked.

His mouth moved into a slow grin. He put his palm on her stomach. “I think it’s the best damn idea you’ve had yet.”

She slapped his hand away.

Michael liked that he’d shocked her, and put his hand back, lower this time. He had no idea why anger shot through him, except Miss Donally in all of her restless naiveté was like a shot of brandy in his veins. He bloody should have let her brother deal with her welfare. But when he’d seen her fighting to save the mare’s life, he’d only thought of saving hers. Maybe he’d wanted to be tucked in for the day with Miss Donally and her nice body.

“You know what else I think?” he said. “You like the thought of getting your hands dirty. It excites you.”

She didn’t remove his hand, and he was tempted to move it lower. To move his lips against her slim throat. He tried to stay detached. Except there wasn’t anything detached about his erection.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” he said, reading the look in her eyes. “If that’s what you’re wanting.”

“Don’t disgust me.” This time she did remove his hand. “You happen to smell like a camel.”

“And you don’t?” He laughed. His mouth lowered unwillingly, grazing hers. He could make quick work of her bindings, and had an urge to fill his hands with her breasts.

“And your face is rough,” she rasped, her eyes betraying her awareness of him.

“You don’t like that, do you?” His thumb slid across her bottom lip. “Have you ever come, Miss Donally?”

“Let go of me!”

He grabbed her hand and pressed it into his other hand, grappling easily with her slim form. He could see her pulse racing at the base of her neck. “What if I don’t?” He’d also pinned her with his leg, and if he fought with her anymore, they were liable to lose their shelter.

He thought about opening her mouth and sucking on her tongue like a sweet orange, and might have if she hadn’t looked so eager for him to do something. Then his hand was on her again, moving lower over her abdomen.

“You get coy with me, and you’ll lose more than you bargained for, Miss Donally.”

“You don’t make me nervous.” Her voice was breathy. Challenging.

Did she think he wouldn’t take her dare? With her gaze on his, he could read her defiance and something far more potent conveyed in her expressive eyes, acting like an aphrodisiac. “Not even now?”

Her lips parted slightly. She let him trail his palm over the concave curve of her belly.

Christ, he shouldn’t be doing this, he told himself.

He should have stopped there.

He should have stopped before his palm came in contact with the hot juncture between her thighs. He should have removed his hand, but he was suddenly touching her in the most intimate way.

“Have you ever had a lover?” he asked, the intensity in his tone deceptively casual. He pulled back to look into her face.

Her lips were compressed. That
something
he’d seen in
her thick-lashed eyes earlier had wobbled into something else. He wondered if a man had ever touched her at all.

He withdrew his hand. “I’ve never had patience for a practiced flirt, Miss Donally.” His voice was a quiet rasp, more anger-filled at himself for not acting smarter, for putting them both in a place neither had any business delving. “And I never play for anything halfway.”

The weighted silence was soon replaced by the moaning wind outside their enclosed sanctuary.

Finally, she turned away from him. “Why did you come back?” she asked. “We’ll be in Cairo soon.”

Michael didn’t answer her.

But his gaze fell on the pale curve of her profile, the bow of her full mouth, the gentle wing of an eyebrow. Not for the first time did he find himself staring at her, caught by her beauty, wanting to see into her eyes. In disgust, he turned his head and stared at the blanket. He was an idiot.

A
s was her habit since her return to Cairo, Brianna rode out of the stables before the sun crested the lake. She wore her usual tanned boots and split skirt, her shirt opened at the throat. The air cooled her skin.

Her brother’s home overlooked the most beautiful garden this side of the Nile. Beyond the stone walls of his residency, morning mist rose above the lake, one of many throughout the city. All around her, in the tall mimosa trees and sycamores, the world had come to life, and as Brianna left the grounds, birdsong greeted her. Here there was no sense of being shut in, and Brianna loved her freedom.

Western women seldom rode where she went. Though her eyes didn’t miss the squalor beneath the ancient magnificence, she loved the city with its eastern flavor and strange language. Cairo appealed to her in a way her own culture with its mode of sterility did not. Maybe that’s why she enjoyed photography as much as she did. She had the ability to capture life in its rawest form.

Brianna’s Arab mare clip-clopped along the narrow stone streets as she rode this morning to the hot baths. By the time she and her groom returned to the house, the sun had already
climbed past the horizon. She doffed the last of her dingy clothes and, slipping her arms into her wrapper, walked outside her bedroom to stand against the granite balustrade that overlooked the lake.

The entire house smelled overwhelmingly of roses and heliotrope since her return, as she’d been deluged with flowers, her room awash in floral tributes from civil servants and military personnel she’d met at the consulate before leaving Cairo with Alex. Cairo’s colorful social world was a young woman’s dream. But she’d found herself restless and bored by what she’d once found fascinating among the men she met at the consulate.

She had thought of little else but Major Fallon since she’d awakened after the
simoon
and found him gone. She had discovered through some digging that he worked at the ministry.

Behind her, she heard her bedroom door open and listened to the soft pad of footsteps approach. She turned to see her maid. “Mum, will ye be wantin’ breakfast up here or in the dining room?” Except for her warm brown eyes, everything about Gracie was as old as the earth. She wore a net over ash curls, a pale apron over a gray dress. She’d looked old when Brianna was three, and hadn’t seemed to age a year since.

“I’ll dine downstairs, Gracie.”

“Ye should not be getting out of bed at such early hours, mum. It’s been barely two weeks since your return. You’ve not gained back the weight you lost.”

Brianna leaned her head against the mass of a flowering creeper that clothed one of the marble pillars in scented lilac. “And you worry overmuch.” She walked back into her room. “I have work to do today.”

“Will ye be going to the consulate with your brother?” Gracie set out her gown.

“Christopher told me to stay home.” Brianna slipped out of her wrapper and stood in her chemise and corset. “He said Major Fallon was facing a disciplinary hearing today.”

According to the charges launched against him, he’d put a gun to the head of a royal family member and tried to kill
him. Brianna wasn’t surprised that Major Fallon was capable of inciting an international incident, but she’d also gathered from Christopher’s comments that Sheikh Omar was a brutal man.

“Lift your arms, mum.” Gracie slid a petticoat over Brianna’s head, followed by her gown. “The major has taken over Captain Pritchards’s duties at the ministry, which means he’ll be staying in Cairo.”

Brianna dropped quietly onto the pillowed bench in front of her looking glass. “Do you know that he will be staying for a fact?”

Her maid picked up a brush. “It helps that I share tea every morning with Miss Amelia. She is Lady Bess’s parlor maid, and her bein’ married to the consul general himself. Lady Bess is hoping to pair one of her daughters with Major Fallon for the upcoming picnic.”

Rolling her eyes, Brianna adjusted the décolletage on her bodice. Servants had an intelligen network that rivaled the British government. “Lady Bess’s daughter isn’t even twenty. He won’t do it.”

Gracie brushed out Brianna’s thick hair. “Most of us think he won’t do it for other reasons. It’s all very hush-hush in the servants’ ranks at the consulate. But he spends much of his time in the old quarter.”

Gracie twisted Brianna’s thick hair into a French roll.

Brianna lifted her gaze to the mirror. The peacock blue bodice accentuated her eyes. She lacked no illusions about her beauty. Only that she had not been as worldly as she thought she was.

A hairpin tumbled to the floor. Brianna twisted around on the bench and, taking the brush from Gracie, turned her hands over in hers. Gracie’s once beautiful hands had gone arthritic years ago and looked swollen.

“Gracie, what are you doing? I don’t expect you to be up at dawn to tend to me every day. I can brush out my own hair.”

Gracie snatched away her hands and retrieved the brush. “You don’t be worryin’ none about me. I’ve been tendin’ to
ye since you were a wee brat in swaddlin’. I’ll be tendin’ to your own babes one day.”

“Very well, Gracie.” Brianna turned to face the looking glass. “But may we please change the subject?”

“I’m sorry, dear. But it’s truly hard not to partake in the talk, when Major Fallon is all that is the topic these days since he brought you and her ladyship out of the desert alive.”

Indeed, the gossip mill had run on all cogs until Brianna was sick to death of the subject.

After Gracie finished with her toilette, Brianna gathered her collection of photographs from her darkroom. She went downstairs to the dining room, where the light was best this time of the day. She laid each photograph on the dining room table. Yesterday, she’d started cataloging and labeling her work for the book she and Alex were working on—especially since her sister-in-law had been so ill since their return. To Brianna’s dismay, she’d discovered that half of her older photographs were ruined beyond repair.

She’d not anticipated what heat did to fragile items that were not properly stored. Added to the photographs she’d lost in the attack, she was acutely aware that she did not have enough for Alex’s documentation.

Brianna had not told Alex the news yet.

And had decided that she wouldn’t. She’d just fix the problem.

Alex deserved better than her failure. In a profession wrought with peer jealousy, no one labored harder for so little recognition than her sister-in-law did. She deserved to win a professional accolade every now and then, and this book had been a professional coup. For her as well.

Working on the book had given her legitimacy in a career that had caused her nothing but social castigation since the moment she’d discovered soup kitchens and suffrage. But life had a way of veering left when least expected, then crashing into a wall.

Since her return to Cairo, Brianna sought only to regain
her place in her life. She visited the suks and resumed teaching twice a week at the American mission. She’d begun to take photographs again. Nothing had changed, yet everything looked different. Not even Stephan had trespassed in the places that Major Fallon had gone in her thoughts.

It wasn’t enough that in a moment of vulnerability she’d kissed him in open-mouthed abandon. No, his presence had been indelibly printed into her head like some photographic masterpiece. She fantasized about him almost every night, imagining what it would be like to have his hands all over her the way he’d touched her that day beneath the blanket. The implied promise of his action rooted deep in her imagination until it began to spill over into her sleep, and she knew that neither hard work nor a busy schedule would cure her deep down restlessness.

The closest she’d ever come to wanting an affair with any man had been with her former betrothed. She’d been in love with him, after all. But Stephan was a true gentleman to the core of his principled being. He’d been scandalized at the idea of “ruining” her.

On the other hand, Major Fallon had no moral reticence against ruining her. He probably figured she deserved it for throwing herself at him. But then, she wasn’t attracted to him because he was a gentleman, and she didn’t care if he considered her less than a lady.

What she had in her mind certainly didn’t make her one.

“Coffee, Sitt Donally?”

Startling her out of her revelry, Abdul bowed beside her. “Your favorite, Sitt.”

Steam rose from the warm liquid, a contrast to the chill in the air. “Please.” Smiling up at him, she accepted her cup.

The special ground drink was her favorite beverage this time of year. Water never touched a grain of this special blend; instead, milk was served boiling over the beans. Brianna called it her white-coffee drink; a beverage she could only appreciate before the weather grew hot again.

“We have not seen much of you,” he said. “You have been
out of the house before dawn every morning. I think no one can keep up with you.”

Another white-clad servant entered, bearing a breakfast tray set for one. “Is my brother not attending his meal? I didn’t think he had to be at the consulate until later.”

“He left an hour ago. Her ladyship is still abed. Would you care to join her this morning?”

“How is she feeling?”

Abdul shook his head. “Very poorly, Sitt.”

“How is my brother faring through all of this?”

Abdul shook his head again. “I think that he does not entirely understand…the heightened sensitivity that accompanies one’s delicate state. It is a balance of patience and fortitude, Sitt.”

Brianna laughed at Abdul’s apt description, glad that she was living on the other side of the sprawling marble residence. She would rather chew glass than have a baby. She shivered at the thought. “Let her sleep, Abdul. I have work to do this afternoon. It’s already past ten.”

With the flick of his wrist, Abdul motioned the servant to lay out her breakfast. “I have ordered the cooks to prepare your favorite meal today. As you call it, Eggs Benedict.”

“Truly?” Brianna smiled up at him. “I think that you are trying to fatten me up, Abdul.”

“You are gaining your weight back most nicely,” he said, and returned to take his place at the end of the table.

Brianna sipped her coffee. The dining room was open to the garden, and she glanced over her cup as a burst of cool fragrant air billowed the sheer draperies. The breeze stirred her photographs.

“Abdul?” She looked at him over her cup. “Did my brother say what time the hearing at the consulate began?”

“Perhaps you will have better luck seeing the Fallon effendi at the picnic next week, Sitt.”

Brianna set down her cup with a
clink
. “Am I so transparent?”

“Yes, missy.”

Abdul continued to stand in the doorway with his hands clasped behind him like a sentinel carved from salt. Brianna fidgeted with her napkin. “You’ve lived here longer than I have,” she said after a moment. “Are hearings of this nature common?”

“This is not the first hearing for Major Fallon, if that is what you are asking. I believe this will be his fourth in three years.”

“Fourth? Is he that unpopular?”

“Among a certain sect, I would say that he is.”

A servant entered from the opposite doorway. “You have a visitor, Sitt.” He bowed over her with a silver tray. “A gentleman.”

Turning the card in her hand, she read the inscription. “Charles Cross,” she said.

He was the short golden Adonis who worked for Alex at the museum. Brianna saw him on a regular basis, but he’d rarely come to the house. Men just didn’t venture into the hallowed halls of her brother’s sanctum, especially since Christopher had a way of intimidating the most stalwart of her suitors. “He must be here to see Lady Alexandra.”

Mr. Cross stood in the entryway. “Miss Donally.” His face lit up when he saw her. “I ask that you forgive my impertinence at this hour—”

“I’m not going to send you away.” She approached him. “But I’m afraid her ladyship still isn’t receiving visitors. I’ll take the flowers to her. Is this call about something at the museum?”

“I came to see you, Miss Donally.” His awkward gaze touched two vases of roses and an arrangement of lilies sitting on a table beside the door. “These flowers are yours.”

“Oh.” She accepted the flowers, and smiled warmly. “Thank you. They’re beautiful.”

Charles Cross was one of those colorless English gentlemen that she liked wholeheartedly on principle. He was not part of the insular sect. He wore spectacles and behaved with the bookish intensity of one who’d made neatness and
subservience a virtue. She had no idea why, of all the women in Cairo to choose from, he liked
her
. She failed neatness and was the least subservient person alive.

Maybe she’d become his friend because he’d reminded her of Stephan. Plus she generally had a soft heart for outcasts. But she’d also seen him feed the stray cats out back of the museum. She liked him for that alone. “Have you eaten?” she inquired.

The invitation seemed to relax him. “I thought perhaps we could take a ride in the park and talk about the book you’re working on. I’ve found the research documents that you asked me for yesterday. Maybe we could have tea at the consulate and talk…perhaps.”