As You Desire (16 page)

“How do you conclude?” he asked, amused. “I paid you what you asked.”

“You took advantage of me. I didn’t know to ask for more.”

He was quickly losing interest in the conversation, being distracted by the way she kept fiddling with his shirt collar. Her fingers, brushing idly against his skin, teased him as tantalizingly as butterfly wings.

“You’ll have to enlighten me. I’m feeling particularly dense.” And he was suddenly tired of playing the affable, immoral scoundrel she thought him. He wanted so much more.

Her mouth flattened with disbelief. She was as slender and supple as a temple cat and he wanted to stroke her. He couldn’t. He could only hold his breath each time her breast pushed against his chest, each time her words washed her breath over his lips.

She squirmed until she’d managed to push her
hand into her skirt pocket—a hand that came dangerously near a certain part of his anatomy that was fast becoming oversensitized. He breathed an inaudible sigh of relief when she found whatever it was she’d been looking for and withdrew her hand.

Jesus. She had no idea what she did to him. She never had.

“There!” she crowed in woozy triumph, shoving a crumpled piece of paper against his chest.

“There, what?”

She smoothed the paper out and held it under his nose. “Read that, you blackguard.”

Mutely he stared at the paper. He would have gladly offered a limb to be able to follow her directive. But he couldn’t.

He couldn’t read.

“S
o?” He balled the cursed sheet up and threw it aside. “How much do you figure I owe you?” Surely she felt the hammer beat of his heart beneath her ear.

“You said you’d pay me 10 percent of whatever you made. That Middle Dynasty papyrus sold for one hundred and six pounds.”

“I see.” He relaxed. At least now he knew how to go on. “Dizzy, Joseph may have gulled some fool into parting with one hundred and six pounds, but he only paid
me
forty and I distinctly recall handing you a five-pound note.”

His words deflated her righteous ire. She wrinkled her nose and glanced sheepishly up at him. “Oh.” A long pause. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have accused you.” She turned her head into his shoulder.

“You’re forgiven.” He rubbed his chin lightly over the top of her bowed head. Her hair felt as slippery
and clean as the finest silk. And his secret was a secret still.

Word blindness
.

He remembered the first time he’d heard the term. The doctor who’d said it. Not that the word or the doctor had made any difference. Whatever its name, his inability to read had permeated every part of his life, fashioned not only how others saw him but how he saw himself. It had created him.

Until he’d arrived in Egypt.

Here he’d found a place where his expertise and ambitions hadn’t relied on written words, words that one day made sense and the next were transformed into an incomprehensible mass. Here he’d fashioned how others saw him.

It hadn’t always been blamelessly done. He’d taken advantage of his native ingenuity, of the raw resources available to him, because a man who cannot read has nothing else. He’d manipulated his competitors into confrontation and then taken advantage of their distraction. He’d used guile and, when necessary, fists to get what he wanted. And it had worked.

He’d wrested a portion of respect from the scholarly community here, a feat he’d once thought impossible. He’d finally found an avenue for all the knowledge and ideas that burgeoned in his mind, mocking him with his inability to express them on the written page. The impossible had ever been his carrot and he, fate’s mule.

He’d learned early and in the harshest manner possible that some things were exempt for him. That
no matter how strong his desire, how much he was willing to sacrifice to achieve his goal, there were some things he could not do, some things he could not have. He’d tried overcoming his deficit through sheer willpower. He’d promised himself that no matter what it took, he would somehow learn to read.

Well, he’d sweated, railed, petitioned heaven, and bargained with hell, and he still couldn’t read English. He never would be able to. But he learned an immutable lesson from that: Pain is the only reward for clinging to impossible dreams.

So he’d taken that lesson and transferred it to every area of his life. Including Dizzy. He’d given her up without ever telling her his secret.

What good would it have done? Dizzy was destined for England. And he
would not
go back to England. He
could not
become the Ravenscrofts’ halfwit relative again, the object of his parents’ well-meaning concern and his own self-scorn. And that’s all that awaited him as the son of scholars, the student with some of the highest oral exam marks in Oxford’s history … the man who could not read.

No, he couldn’t go back to England. But Dizzy would. It was her dream, and it wasn’t an impossible one. Doubtless some strapping young lad in country tweeds would sweep her off her feet. Or someone like Blake. His lips curled back and his hold on her tightened, and he cursed himself for a liar and a fool.

No matter how he’d warned himself and threatened
himself and tried to convince himself, he hadn’t given Dizzy up.

His heart hoped in spite of being brutally cognizant of the dangers of self-delusion. His love refused to die no matter what reason and experience argued, in spite of her determination to go “home.”

Damn her, home wasn’t an island or a cottage. It wasn’t a place. Home was
her
. And she was leaving. God, how could he let her go? How could he ask her to stay? What, he wondered in anguish, would she do if he told her, if she learned of his … inadequacy? As always, his imagination offered myriad scenes, all of them untenable.

If she wrestled his dysfunction into some melancholy, romantic bit of—If she felt pity—If she nobly offered herself as compensation for his—

God
. He closed his eyes. How would he survive
that?

“I had lunch with your cousin today,” she was saying. She had reached up and was smoothing the roll of his shirt collar between her fingertips.

“What?” he asked, seizing on the distraction presented by her words.

“Lord Ravenscroft and I had lunch together. With Grandfather. We had a very interesting conversation.”

She was still lost in her fascination with his collar.

“Blake can be a font of information.” He took a deep breath. He had to know what Blake had told her. “Dizzy, did he—”

“I really do think you’ve been awful.”

He wondered if she could feel his arms trembling. “Oh?”

“He came here thinking you were barely making ends meet. Why did you let your family believe you’re just managing to scrape together the bare essentials of existence? Why don’t you share your wealth with your family?”

“My family? Papa and Mama Braxton and all the little Braxtons are doing very nicely, I can assure you.”

“I meant the Ravenscrofts. How could you, Harry?” She sounded acutely disappointed in him. “How could you let the Ravenscrofts struggle along while you enjoy yourself?”

“Struggle? My, my, Blake has been busy,” he murmured. He bounced her higher in his arms. “Listen, Dizzy. Though I realize your present condition makes it doubtful you’ll remember this, do try to attend.”

She blinked up at him.

“Blake’s family owns a great moldering pile of bricks—”

“Darkmoor Manor,” she chimed in like a student with the right answer to a question.

“Yes, Darkmoor Manor. It is a great rotting hulk of a house that squats among the most godforsaken rocks in England. For whatever reasons—and I strongly suspect mental instability—each successive line of Ravenscrofts cleaves to it as if they’d been bequeathed the Holy Grail itself.”

She nodded with drunken sageness.

“Blake and his father and his—our grandfather
poured every bit of money they had into harebrained schemes. Schemes designed to generate enough money for Darkmoor’s restoration. They weren’t very successful. In fact, the Ravenscrofts barely find enough money to keep pace with Darkmoor’s deterioration.”

“Okay. Darkmoor Manor is a white elephant. What’s your point?” she asked.

He grinned. How could anyone with such syrupy fantasies about England be so astute and pragmatic in all other instances? “My point,” he answered, “is why should I pay a succession of repair bills that would never end?”

“That’s awfully cheap of you, Harry.”

“No, it’s not. Admit you’d do the same thing in my position. Why should I lay out money so Darkmoor can have a new yew maze?”

She scowled fiercely at that though her unfocused gaze still wandered unhappily over his shirt. She plucked at a button. “Well, perhaps.”

There was that honesty again, that unassailable clear-headedness and practicality that she tried so hard to deny and that was so much more appealing and so much rarer than mawkish sentimentality.

“Still, you shouldn’t allow Lord Ravenscroft to think so poorly of you. It’s obvious to everyone that there are hard feelings between you. And I suspect it has to do with more than money.”

“I really don’t give a damn what Blake thinks of me.”

She was going to try to convince him otherwise. Desdemona-Make-It-Right. It was there in the set of
her jaw, the earnest compression of her lips. And all the time, she continued her unthinking exploration of him.

Slowly he had become aware of her hands on his body. It was so unexpected, so startling that he hadn’t even registered it until now, but fondling him she was. Little touches and pets, feathering like sunlight over his skin. Most astonishingly, he would have wagered his entire fortune she didn’t even realize she was doing it.

She frowned at his throat, moving her thumb gently to and fro over the nick he’d given himself shaving, as if by doing so she could erase it.

“Lord Ravenscroft thinks you’re a scoundrel,” she said in a distracted voice, her gaze still on his throat as the button slipped from its hole, exposing more of his skin to her regard—and breath-stealing caresses.

“Hm.” It was all he could manage.

She winnowed the hair from his temples, brushing it away from his face. “Of course, you
are
. But not in the way he thinks.”

“Hm.”

“You might try for a reconciliation.”

She had, he realized, lost all concept of the personal boundaries between them. It was as if she no longer recognized where her body left off and his began. She was touching him as familiarly as she would her own person, casually—shatteringly casually.

His breath quickened and he opened his mouth, stealing a breath between his lips before giving himself fully over to the sensation of her voluntary
touch. Her fingers flowed up the back of his head, fingering the short nape hairs intimately. He went absolutely still, unwilling to do anything to remind her they were separate beings, that his body was not hers to touch and use and handle in any way she desired. Even though he knew the effects of the hashish were responsible for her hazy abstraction, he would not break that contact.

Her emotions were labile, her thoughts disjointed. He knew better than to seek honesty in her clouded gaze, but at least in this state her body revealed a certain clarity, certain undeniable reactions to him.

“You need a haircut,” she mused lazily.

“Yes.”

“Lord Ravenscroft’s hair is terribly long, isn’t it?” She sighed, her full lower lip just a shade exaggerated, the beginning of a pout. “He has lovely hair.”

“Gorgeous.”

“Very dark. Like a—” She searched for a word.

“Let me guess. A raven’s wing?” he supplied helpfully. She didn’t look very grateful but apparently couldn’t think of a better comparison.

“Yes. Yours is—I’ve never been able to say exactly what shade.” She was serious, her inability to define the color of his hair actually troubled her. “Cured tobacco, maybe, or burnt almonds? Or the color of a desert shadow. More bronze than gold, but nothing so hard or metallic. Like warm sand at twilight. But soft.” Her expression reflected her dissatisfaction. “You know that color?”

“I know.”

She nodded and gave another gusty little sigh. “He’s broader than you are.”

Damn that troglodyte Blake, he thought. Her fingers slipped across his chest as if measuring its span inch by lingering inch. He felt marked with liquid fire. All thoughts of Blake fled.

“Is he?” He could barely hear himself.

“Much broader. But not as tall.” She paused, frowned. Her palm covered his breast, pressing, testing his firmness. “I wonder if he’s as hard as you are.”

He felt his loins tighten instantly and hoped desperately that she wouldn’t notice exactly how hard he had become.

“There’s no give to you. None at all.” She sounded plaintive.

“I’m sorry.”

“I am, too,” she whispered. “Why must you be hard? Too hard.”

He wouldn’t even begin to guess at her meaning. She was an enigma to him, had always been.

Three years ago she’d come to his house, bent on seduction. He’d been first stunned, then stimulated, and finally angered when he’d realized that she had come to offer herself to some hero she’d dreamed up, a hero that would sweep her up on his silver charger and race her straight back to England. With Sir Robert riding pillion.