As You Desire (31 page)

“I don’t know what to do.”

Her confession caught him off guard. He stared at her, his chest heaving like a bellows, his gaze flashing with his own confusion.

“I don’t know,” she insisted in a hushed voice. “Tell me. Just … Only teach me. I want this to be … 
wondrous.”

His self-restraint vanished. He captured her face between his trembling hands and rolled her onto her back, bracing himself above her on his forearms, bracketing her body. The heat and hardness of his silky arousal lay between them.

“Want me.”

“I do. But what can I—”

“For the love of Allah, just want me, Dizzy. As I want you.”

“Yes.”

Then he was kissing her again … sweet, wild, wet kisses. A flavor of urgency replaced the sense of discovery, of moving toward a culmination, an end to this torturous stimulation. She could not even tell whose crisis she anticipated, his or her own. All she knew was that an ache had begun in her breasts and thighs and down between her legs and each press of his hips made her ache more acutely until finally she sought that press of his body there, low, against her. It was the only thing that offered more pleasure than frustration. She instinctively moved in an ill-timed counter to his hips’ rocking cadence.

He rose above her, his head thrown back, neck arched, magnificent lips parting in a grimace of endurance. His hair clung damply to his temples. His chest gleamed in the half-light, sheathed in glistening moisture. Powerful emotion coiled in the banked gaze he lowered to her, and then his hand was between them, deliberately stroking the curl-covered mound between her thighs, petting her, building the fire, slipping between slick folds, rubbing against—

She gasped and arched, her eyes flying wide, clenching his shoulders, looking for an anchor. He smiled—sweet violence, pure triumph—and he replaced his hand with another, harder presence. Then he was pushing
into
her, his gaze tangled in hers, his
jaw tight, his nostrils flaring with each breath he dragged through them.

She lifted her hips and there—oh, there—a pressure, not quite pain, not sharp, but a stretching, a deep final ache and—and the promise of ecstasy. She seized upon the rhythm, pitched her hips to meet his thrust, winning a growl of rapture from him. He moved with her, pushing her, filling her.

He tried to slow down, to give her time to accuse torn herself to the feel of him inside of her.
Inside of her
. The thought banished good intentions. Her body communicated with terrible clarity her urgent striving. He could feel her closing tightly around him, hear her gasping for air, see the feverish focus of her body in the glazed blindness of her half-closed eyes.

She clung to him with her knees, riding his passion, and he was lost. His head fell into the lee of her throat where he felt the dampness of her breasts, tasted the salty musk of her arousal. He urged her along the spiraling dance of repletion, where sensation and need now drove him. And yet … and yet even now, a deep indefatigable part of his soul recognized the unique form, the grace and strength of the woman he held. Dizzy.

All of his desires pinnacled on this moment, everything he’d been or achieved or strove for culminated here, now. It was too much. Not enough. He incited her with tongue and touch, bequeathing a small part of his own passion. His control was slipping. He’d never lost control before. He ground his teeth together, struggling to give her what she
sought before his own passion catapulted him to completion.

Somehow it was enough.

She cried out once, every lithe and gorgeous line shivering with rapture. With the sound of her climax, he gave himself over to his own.

“D
izzy,” Harry whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Hmm.”

“Go back to sleep.” There was a smile in his voice and she nodded drowsily, nuzzling her cheek into the pillow. As if from a great distance, she heard him moving away.

Slowly her eyes drifted open and then widened. Harry, his back to her, naked as a Greek god, retrieved his trousers from the floor. He didn’t know she was awake and she took the opportunity to watch him, unobserved. He pulled on his trousers. Such a simple act and yet one she could watch for hours, years. He was so very handsome, so very casual about his masculinity.

If questions had arisen in the last few days, some answers had come to light, too. In his past Harry hadn’t been valued much. It had only enhanced his magnetism. For never having been taught his own beauty, he’d reached adulthood without self-consciousness
or vanity, and so there was nothing measured or sentient in his grace. Only a lithe athleticism that riveted the eye.

Pale in the predawn light, his skin was clean and fine-grained. Her hands and limbs and lips still felt his smooth, warm texture. Exquisite. Shattering. Impossible to define what they’d shared. She closed her eyes, adrift in sensual memory and exquisite lethargy.

“I’m going to make us breakfast,” Harry’s voice drifted softly into her ear and then her lips were brushed by velvety warmth. It was a quick kiss but one that effectively demolished her languor. She rolled over, opened her eyes, and stretched her arms out just as he disappeared into the hall. The door closed with a quiet click.

Wide awake now, she blew a noisy sound of disappointment and swung her feet to the ground, twining the linen sheet around her body. For a second she debated whether to join him in the kitchen, but decided against it. She needed a few minutes without the distraction of his touch, his voice, his lips in which to think. There hadn’t been any thinking going on for the last six hours.

Overnight their relationship, already ill-defined and unrecognizable, had metamorphosed yet again into something unutterably sweet and tender and violent and passionate, and nothing like the lofty spiritual merging her books had outlined.

Desdemona rose and wandered to the window. Faint saffron and rose lights seeped from the dark horizon, staining the morning sky. She turned from
the vista, smiling as she saw Harry’s few possessions littering the library desk. Inexplicably uneasy, needing something of his to touch, she straightened his ivory-backed bristle brush and tortoise-shell comb, deposited his gold collar stays in their enameled box. Her hand drifted tenderly over these few, so personal effects passing over each to an unfolded packet of papers on the corner of the desk. Harry’s name caught her eye.

Curious, she opened the sheets and began reading the top paper. Her face grew still. It was a will naming Harry the heir to Darkmoor Manor.

A tremulous sensation began in her stomach and raced along her nerves, anxiety slowly replacing contentment, emptiness threatening her former feeling of repletion. Like a poisonous black flower, suspicion unfolded in her imagination, a dozen images and thoughts spurring on its ugly blooming.

The intense sense of contention she’d noticed immediately between Blake and Harry. The open rivalry with decades-long roots. The sincere concern in Blake’s voice when he’d assured her Harry was not the man she thought. Harry’s expulsion from Oxford. Blake swearing he would get his birthright back. Blake’s telling Harry he couldn’t go back to England because he would have to face the “reminders” of what Harry couldn’t possibly have, and then Harry, his eyes brilliant with mockery, asking Blake if he meant Darkmoor.

She fell forward, her mouth opening to gulp the air that seemed to thicken in her throat. It couldn’t be the way it looked. Harry could not have somehow
orchestrated Blake’s disinheritance. But, God help her, what else could it be? From the onset it had been clear Blake had not come to Egypt to recover from a broken heart, that his presence here had something to do with Harry.

Her hand crumpled the will. Another secret. Another lie. Some answers. Horrible answers.

She heard Harry a second before he backed into the room, carrying a wooden server stacked with cups and teapot and a basket of sweetbreads. He turned and spied her, grinning boyishly as he set the platter down on the floor. Her heart felt painful in her chest. Leaden and twisted.

“You’re awake,” he said, his voice filled with delight. He came to her, combing his hair back in a gesture appealingly boyish and self-conscious.

She thought of closing her eyes against the sight of his handsome face, his winsome smile, but couldn’t. He looked so damn happy.

“Dizzy—”

“I have to go.” She swallowed and gathered the linen sheet around her body, clutching the cotton over her breasts.

His brow furrowed in perplexity but still he smiled. “First—”

He leaned forward and kissed her. She could not help herself, she moved to meet his mouth. Passion, so lately satisfied, leapt to life with that brief contact. Shaken, she pulled away. He cupped her face between his palms.

“Dizzy. I love you.”

He looked so sincere, with his wise, tender eyes
and crooked smile. She had never dreamed that pain could feast on pleasure. But it could. She’d waited five years to hear those words. She had never imagined they could hurt so much.

“Oh, Harry,” she whispered, tears springing to her eyes, “I wish I could believe you.”

“What do you mean?” He tried to keep his voice calm but he had told her the simple truth, words he’d never spoken to another woman, and all he heard in response was doubt. Doubt. The hallmark of his life.

“You can’t hope to compete, Harry.”

“You won’t be able to make it through Oxford, son.”

“Why waste your money on paying the curate to read you all these books?”

She was supposed to say “I love you, too, Harry.” Fear burgeoned within him at her expression of resigned desolation.

“Harry,” she said, “I have loved you for five years—”

He surged forward to take her in his arms. She put her hand up, stopping him with her palm flat against his chest.

“No. Listen. Please! I threw myself at you. You laughed—”

“That was three years ago.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter now.”

“I beg to differ,” he said tightly. Only a supreme act of self-restraint kept him from shaking her. “I was not in the habit of stealing babies from cradles.”

“I was seventeen.”

“I don’t give a bloody damn if you were thirty.
There’s a difference between chronology and experience.”

Once more she shook her head in that bewilderingly mature way. She would not be goaded, he realized, not be convinced. She would only come to her own conclusion. The thought appalled him, scared the hell out of him.

“You haven’t ever, not by word or deed, demonstrated that your feelings for me are that of a … a lover.”

That was what this was all about … 
romance?
He raked his hand through his hair. “What did you want?” he asked fiercely. “Five hundred fucking roses?”

She paled and he cursed himself, his fists balling at his side.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” she whispered.

“What’s it?” he demanded.

“The roses. Blake. Five years and you have never acted on your feelings for me before.”

“No,” he said hotly. “That’s
not
it. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t think there could be any future for us. My loving you didn’t matter, it didn’t change anything. I couldn’t give you what you wanted. I couldn’t take you back to England. I couldn’t go back there.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t read.”

She froze, her eyes searching his face, her expression confused, wary. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s why I left England. That’s why I won’t go back. I got kicked out of Oxford, Dizzy. I couldn’t
complete the written exam. Hell”—he didn’t recognize the bitter laugh as his own, it was so acid bright—“I couldn’t
start
the written exam.”

“What happened to you?”

He closed his eyes. She still didn’t comprehend. She thought some accident, some illness, had robbed him of a facility he’d once owned. “Nothing. Nothing happened,” he murmured tiredly. “I’ve never been able to read or write.”

“But I’ve seen you,” she protested.

“Simple, familiar phrases. Some words.”

A deep line scored the smooth place between her brows. “You went to Eton.”

“For two years. They stopped trying after that and sent me home.”

“I don’t understand,” she repeated.

How could she? No one did. Most of all himself. But he’d try. For her he’d try to find a way to explain the inexplicable.

“I see a word and it becomes in my mind
many
words and then
any
word. Sometimes I can recognize it and sometimes it seems as if it shifts through my memory, just beyond my ability to recall its meaning, taunting me with images I ought to recognize but can’t. And then sometimes I’ll be able to translate snippets from a page, a line, a word.” He turned his palm up in a gesture of frustration.

“But the hieroglyphics,” she said. “I know you translate them.”

He nodded. “I can read some of them, many of them, because I can touch them. I trace the words and my hand reminds me of what it felt and my eye
sees
and
in my memory, I
feel
the words. It all comes together,” he said. He made a dismissive gesture, abandoning the effort to explain. “That’s why I couldn’t tell you I love you, Dizzy. Here, in Egypt, it doesn’t matter that I can’t read, that I can’t write. I can still be involved in a field I love”—his voice grew low, fervent—“do things that have value. Discover things. Explore.