As You Desire (24 page)

“I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Harry,” she was saying. “Akhenaton’s tomb itself isn’t worth a beating such as you’ve undergone.”

“You can say that again.”

“You might have died.” Her face wore a thunderous expression.

“I know.”

“What did you do? Play one of your desert rat friends false? Skim a little too much profit off the top?”

Her bitterness hurt him. What irony. She thought his wounds were the result of a deal gone sour. And
well she might. It was what he’d taught her to expect.

He had no answer for her disillusionment her disappointment. “You put me in a packing crate,” he said instead.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “I put you in a sarcophagus. The original owner wasn’t using it.”

He stared at her, nonplussed. “Couldn’t you have at least found a cot?”

And now, finally, her lush, tender lips found their natural habit in a smile. Albeit a dry one. “Foresight and planning,” she said. “Isn’t that what you always advocate? I simply took your advice.”

“How so?”

“This way, if you’d succumbed, we’d have been able to ship your remains back to England with the least amount of trouble.”

He broke out in a surprised laugh. “So expedient, Diz. I’m proud of you.” His chuckle became a cough. Immediately she hovered nearer.

“Desdemona,” she corrected him distractedly, her fingers moving with breath-stealing gentleness over his lips and cheeks and swollen eye. “You should have ice on this.”

“How’d I get here?”

“Your cousin carried you.”

Damn Blake
. Not content with exerting all that brooding charm, now he had to play at knight-errant, as well. “Nice to see all that brawn is good for something.”

“I cannot believe you’re so ungrateful. Blake—”

“Blake?” He jumped on her use of his cousin’s Christian name.

She blushed and with that telling color ferocity stirred in his heart. He wanted to haul her into his arms and, with hand and mouth, erase that telling pink stain from her cheeks, replace it with a memory worth blushing over.

“Lord Ravenscroft, then.” She did not meet his eyes. “He carried you all the way from Jabbar’s mansion. Well, not all the way. We took a carriage most of the way. But he did carry you to and from the carriage. A good twenty yards.”

“Remind me to tip him next time we meet,” he said, trying to rise up on his elbows. Pain knifed through his side. “Chrissake,” he muttered. “Did they have the damn mule work me over, too?”

“Oh!” Her hushed distress caught him off guard. She straightened abruptly, her color high, her eyes flashing not with answering humor but with real ire. He stared back, confused and despairing.

“I’m sorry, Dizzy,” he said. “I am grateful to Blake. I’ll make certain to express that gratitude at the first opportunity.”

She turned her face from him, as if the sight of him were unbearable. He found, to his grim amusement, he could not bear that. “Please, Diz,” he said softly.

He reached out and braceleted her wrist with his fingers, pulling her hand to his mouth and pressing a light kiss across her knuckles. Her fingers trembled in his clasp. “Please, Diz,” he repeated. “Don’t look like that. I’ll write Blake a sonnet if it’ll keep
you from looking so. You’ve never looked at me with loathing before. Disappointment frustration, suspicion … but not this.” He smiled lopsidedly. “I find I hate it.”

She snatched her hand away. “You idiot!” She dashed the back of her hand across her cheeks.

God, she was crying. He pushed himself upright, ignoring the lance of pain piercing his side, stretching out his arm for her. “Dizzy—”

“Idiot!” she repeated forcefully, backing away. “I don’t give a bloody damn if you write Blake a hundred thank-you letters. Don’t you
ever
risk your life for some useless piece of junk again! You might have become septic and died, you bloody, bloody fool!”

His mouth fell open.

“I’ve patched up your hands and plastered your cuts and, from time to time, I’ve even taken a few stitches in your miserable hide. But never anything like this. And I won’t ever do it again. Do you understand?” Her voice was loud, strident. “Do—you—under—stand?”

“God help me, I think so. I hope so.”

“You scared me!” she wailed. She backed into a chair and toppled down onto the seat. She promptly buried her face in her hands.

“Dizzy, I wasn’t trafficking. I wasn’t.” He hitched a leg over the side of the crate, ready to go to her. It was a bare leg. Surprised, he hauled it back. He stared down at himself. Except for a sheet winding around his loins, he was naked. “Who took my pants off?”

She ignored the question. “Semantics. Trafficking, illegal dealing, theft … all the same thing.”

“I hadn’t stolen anything. I didn’t betray anyone.”

“Am I supposed to believe that? Am I supposed to believe
anything
you say? I don’t feel like I
know
you anymore!” she said. “There’s this odd animosity between you and Blake, and I find that your self-professed ‘standard English boyhood’ is shrouded in secrecy and hints of impropriety, and now this madness!” She sniffed noisily.

“Is that what he’s hinted at. Impropriety?” He trailed off helplessly, unable to answer the one charge, unwilling to answer the others.

“I wasn’t involved in any sort of deal gone bad, Diz.” This at least he could explain. “Do you remember a brute named Maurice, worked as Georges Paget’s foreman?”

“Big fellow, womanish features?” she asked in an odd, defeated tone.

“That’s him. Well, he and I had a bit of a confrontation during the last excavating season.”

“Yes,” she said consideringly, “I recall. You were supposed to have administered a drubbing to him.” She screwed up her mouth. “No one ever told me about what so I didn’t put much stock in the story.” She peered at him. “Should I have?”

“We fought,” he answered. “He lost.”

“So, he beat you up for revenge?” She raised her brows, openly skeptical. “Come now, Harry. I know revenge is a dish best served cold and all, but that incident happened last year. His revenge would be glacé by now.”

Harry grinned. She charmed him, absolutely. Even suspicious and cold as she was now. “He wasn’t motivated by revenge. It just helped his enthusiasm for his job. Someone paid him to work me over.”

Her dark
houri’s
eyes flashed. “Why?”

“I don’t know. But I have my suspicions.”

“What? And do not tell me you suspect Blake is responsible.” Something immediate and hard chilled her tone. “It’s clear you’re in competition with him, that you mean to discredit him. How better than to accuse him of orchestrating your beating?”

“I don’t think Blake is at fault,” he answered, hating her acid tone, hating the distance that seemed to be opening up between them, desperate for some way to bridge it. “Maurice never said who it was, he was having far too much fun beating me up to answer any questions.” He shrugged. “Luckily, I have a low pain tolerance and winked out pretty damn quick.”

“Oh, Harry. I wish I knew what to think.” For an instant pity was betrayed in the stark look she gave him. He smiled and it vanished abruptly. “Oh, no. I won’t fall for that little-boy-lost look. I’ve spent far too many hours fretting over you as it is. Not anymore. How did you get away?”

“Bribery.”

Her brows rose questioningly.

“Honest.”

“Aren’t you afraid of lightning bolts, tossing out words like that?”

He grinned. “Really, Maurice’s sort doesn’t attract a fanatically loyal following. All I did was promise his henchman twenty pounds and I was hightailing it through the back streets of Cairo.”

“Crawling” better described his progress, but she needn’t know that, just as she needn’t know how long Maurice had “merely followed orders to make him uncomfortable” before leaving for his dinner.

“Twenty pounds? And the man
believed
you?” she asked incredulously.

“Whatever you think of me, Dizzy, I have a reputation for being bound by my word.”

She wandered to her grandfather’s desk and picked up a broken piece of a funerary vessel, her expression absorbed.

He followed her movements, his lingering gaze tabulating each subtle, rich variation of the desert hues that comprised her beauty: the dark buff-colored gown, tawny streaked hair, burnt-toffee eyes, buttery glazed complexion. She might have been an exquisitely crafted amber goddess in some ancient’s tomb. Might have, except she was not nearly as durable.

She was small. He often forgot just how small. But seeing her dwarfed behind her grandfather’s desk, it distressed him to see how very fragile she’d been formed. Maurice could hurt her without even trying.

“I want you to take care, Dizzy.”

She stopped toying with the shard. “Excuse me?”

“I want you to be very careful, Dizzy. Don’t go anywhere alone. Stay with people.”
Stay with me
.
His palm opened toward her, an involuntary movement. He shut it.

“What are you talking about, Harry?”

“Maurice knows that …” He didn’t know how to explain. She wouldn’t recognize or believe the truth if he told her, that she was in danger because he loved her. She’d be angry and offended and think he mocked her. “Maurice might come here, looking for me.”

She returned to his side and patted his hand. “I’ll be fine, Harry.” She sounded as if she were reassuring her maiden aunt. “You yourself have always said no sane Egyptian would even consider harming an Englishwoman.”

“No one has ever accused Maurice of sanity. And he’s not Egyptian.”

“Semantics again. Don’t you worry on my account,” Dizzy said in that balmlike voice.
Don’t fret the invalid
. She had no intention of heeding his warning.

“Good.” He nodded, not in the least relieved, and lay back in his sarcophagus, his mind racing as he formed a plan to keep Dizzy safe. He’d have to act fast, before Maurice disappeared into the backwash of the criminal underworld.

“Harry—” Whatever Dizzy had been about to say was interrupted by a discreet tap on the door. “Come in,” she said.

Magi entered followed hard on her heels by Blake. His expression lightened upon spying Dizzy. Dizzy, Harry noted with a twisting in his chest, returned his welcoming smile.

“Lord Ravenscroft, how kind of you to call.”

“Desdemona.” Blake strode into the room and took her hands. “You look as lovely and fresh as if you’d just woken from a delightful dream rather than spent hours laboring over my reprobate cousin. I trust your patient hasn’t—” He glanced at Harry. “Who took his pants off?”

“Ah, Blake.” Harry lifted himself into a sitting position, allowing the cotton sheet to slip from his bare chest and settle over his hips. Yawning, he stretched one arm and then the other high over his head, keeping the smile plastered on his face even though his side screamed in protest. “Diz here tells me I owe you a debt of thanks. Thanks.”

“Go get him a shirt,” Blake snapped at Magi. She glared at his preemptory tone, but went. “You don’t have much regard for Miss Desdemona’s sensibilities, do you, Harry?”

Dizzy’s gaze found his. Reproach clouded their wild honey clarity. Damn Blake, he’d won that point.

“It’s all right,” she said, lifting her chin. “It’s just Harry, after all.”

His face ached with his effort to keep his supercilious grin in place.

Blake shot him a savagely triumphant look. “Ah! ‘Just Harry.’ Oh, well, then …” His amused gaze passed insolently over Harry’s sarcophagus and suddenly Harry saw himself as absurd, his nakedness as vulnerability.

“Amazingly, Harry old man, you don’t look half
bad. I imagine you’ll be able to scoot back to your little ghetto today.”

“I suspect I—”

“No.” Magi reentered, carrying one of Sir Robert’s clean white shirts. “Infection,” she said sententiously, “is still a distinct possibility.”

“Magi is right,” Dizzy agreed. “Harry should stay here. He has no one else to care for him.”

“Surely he has a valet or a houseboy or someone?”

Dizzy shook her head. “No. No one. He relies strictly on himself. His secretaries live in their own homes; even the housekeeper is only employed thrice a week.”

“Yes,” Magi declared. “Master Harry should most definitely stay here. Look and see how red this cut is.” She leaned over the sarcophagus and, her action concealed by its wooden sides, jabbed the cut on his cheek.

“Ow!”

Dizzy hastened forward. Harry moaned loudly as he slipped his arm through the shirt sleeve Magi held for him.

“It does look angry.” Dizzy’s fingers brushed his forehead. “And he feels warm to the touch, too. Magi, get him some water.”

“I’m sure it’s just his body’s natural defenses,” Blake said as Magi left. “And besides, remember your grandfather is gone. In Sir Robert’s absence you cannot have him here for any extended period of time.”

“Sir Robert is gone?” Harry asked. Given that
happenstance, there was no possibility that he would leave Dizzy alone in this house with only Magi and Duraid for protection.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence in my manly vigor, Blake, but I can promise you,” he said weakly, struggling to look pitiful as he buttoned his shirt. It wasn’t nearly as much play-acting as he’d have liked, “that playing fast and loose with Dizzy is the last thing on my mind.”

His statement didn’t appear to reassure Blake. He sneered, an exaggerated pull of his upper lip exposing one gleaming canine.

“That makes two of us,” Dizzy said. “But much as I might like it otherwise, I have a duty to him. A Christian duty. I can’t take chances with his health.”

She turned to Blake but her fingers still glided lightly along Harry’s cheek, over his swollen eye. If she kept this up, he might purr.

“That’s right.” Harry nodded. “You have your Christian duty. My back hurts, too.”

“No wonder.” She abandoned his face and ran her hands lightly over his now blamelessly covered shoulders. They may as well have been bare, he felt her touch so keenly. “You have welts. We have some liniment that I, er, Magi could rub in.”

Blake, having lost his bid to have Harry removed from the house, dragged a chair over toward the head of the sarcophagus and sat down. “What did you do?” he asked.