Daphne wondered where her mount had got to, and whether the poor thing was alive. She looked for it without much hope. Visibility was uncertain at best. The sun was either a hellish red behind a veil of sand or disappeared altogether. Not that one could look in any direction for long. Eyes, ears, nose, and mouth filled with grit. One could scarcely breathe for the sand. Simply trying to protect herself from it exhausted her. Yet what she experienced at present, she now knew, was hardly the worst of the punishment the hot wind could bestow.
She made herself stop looking back at the deadly yellow thing racing toward them, and focused on her companion.
She recalled her moment of panic when her donkey had fallen, and she’d seen the monstrous sand tide rolling toward her. For an instant, blinded by the blowing sand, she’d felt alone, abandoned. But it was only for an instant, because in the next he was there.
As long as he was by, she could face anything. She’d followed him through the absolute darkness of the pyramid, squeezing past corpses on the way. She’d been arrested, and locked up in jail, like a common felon. She’d burst into a room filled with cutthroats, and attacked them. She’d knelt by the dying rug merchant and tried to comfort him as the last drops of blood trickled from his slit throat. She’d shot a pistol and a rifle, though firearms had always terrified her.
Even now she wasn’t sure how she’d done any of these things. Perhaps she didn’t really know herself after all. Perhaps, somehow, Mr. Carsington knew her better.
She’d survive this, she told herself. All she had to do was stick close, not let him get killed, and this difficulty, too, would soon be behind them.
He hauled her into the first tomb they reached. The donkey balked. It pulled back abruptly, tearing the bridle from his hand. Then it stood stock still in the doorway, braying.
“Hermione, get in here,” he snapped.
The donkey brayed and pawed at the ground.
“Hermione, don’t make me come after you,” he said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Daphne said. “This is an Egyptian donkey. Ta’ala heneh,” she called sharply to the agitated animal. “Ta’ala.”
The donkey snorted, and tossed its head.
“Ta’ala,” Mr. Carsington said.
The donkey trotted inside and went directly to him and nuzzled his arm.
Naturally.
“She’s afraid,” Mr. Carsington said, stroking the creature’s muzzle. “The smell, I daresay.”
It was a smell Daphne was growing accustomed to: death. Not ordinary death but mummy death, the thousands-of-years-shriveled-and-petrified smell distinctive to Egypt.
“It’s better than the sandstorm,” Daphne said. “Can we move further inside?” Now that she was out of immediate danger, she was trembling. “I should like to sit down. But out of reach of the wind and sand.” Without waiting for him, she started down the entrance passage.
It was much wider than the typical pyramid entrance. She could make out figures on the walls and what appeared to be a block of hieroglyphs further on. It quickly grew too dark to see, though, and she moved more slowly and cautiously, keeping close to one wall, testing the way ahead with her foot, to avoid tripping over or into something.
“This is far enough, Mrs. Pembroke,” his deep voice came from behind her. “We’re well out of reach of the sand, and Hermione is shaking like a leaf. Let’s wait out the storm in a quiet, restful manner, shall we?”
REST, YES.
Rupert needed to catch his breath, collect his wits. He might have lost her in the sandstorm. He needed a moment to calm down, that was all.
He never meant to fall asleep.
He’d seen them all settled inside: the donkey’s saddlebags and — most important — the leather water bottle, stowed safely, a space cleared in the rubble, and Mrs. Pembroke seated on a mat. Then Rupert simply leant against the wall to rest and collect himself.
The next he knew he was waking up to utter darkness.
And to heat, of course, the heat that continued to surprise him, though by now he ought to be used to it.
In England, deep inside a cave like this would be cold and damp. But not here. It was like the pyramids. One expected, going down so deep under so many thousands of tons of rock, it would be cool.
But in Egypt, the rocks and mountains stored thousands of years of hot desert sun.
Along with thousands of bodies.
Whether it had been the long-dead Egyptians troubling Hermione, or some donkey superstition, she’d settled down. He could hear her steady breathing. If anyone else in the vicinity was breathing, Hermione drowned it out.
“Mrs. Pembroke,” Rupert said. He reached toward where she’d been last time, on the mat he’d dug out from his saddlebag and laid on the ground for her. The mat was there. Her cloak was there. She wasn’t there.
“Mrs. Pembroke,” he said, a little louder.
Nothing.
“Mrs. Pembroke.”
Hermione snorted, but no human voice responded.
“Confound it.” Still groggy, Rupert stood. It took him a moment to recall which way was out and which way was in. He went toward the entrance first, recalling how she’d slowed there, captivated, as you’d expect, by the pictures on the walls.
The hot wind still blew, whirling sand and bits of rock within the passageway. A dull light penetrated, but not far. It was hard to guess what time of day it was. He could see, though, that she was nowhere in the outer passage of the tomb. He turned and made his way back.
“Mrs. Pembroke,” he called. Not a trace of sleep clung to him now. He was acutely, painfully awake, his heart beating fast, heavy strokes. “Mrs. Pembroke.”
Hermione said something in donkey talk as he went by, but that was the only sound he heard apart from his boots scraping along the tomb floor.
Rupert knew he couldn’t run blindly into the interior. He might easily collide with a wall or trip over something, get concussed, and then be no good to anybody. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face or the ground beneath him. The tomb floor abounded in obstacles and pitfalls: gaps and cracks, chunks of stone, animal skeletons, and other debris he preferred not to think about.
He thought only of staying upright and finding her.
Alone, in the dark, she might kill herself in a hundred different ways. She might stumble into a burial shaft, and fall a hundred feet to end up unconscious — or dead — at the bottom.
“Mrs. Pembroke!” he roared.
A sound. A voice, at last. Distant, muffled.
“Mrs. Pembroke, where the devil are you?”
“Oh, the most wonderful place,” she called. “Do come see.”
He stumbled on, groping along the tomb walls, endlessly it seemed. He walked into dead ends and had to grope his way back out. He felt his way along the sides of a room until he found the doorway. He edged through a long passageway.
Then at last he saw the light flickering, and the outlines of a chamber.
THE BACK WALL of the chamber had three recesses. She was in the central one. On the rear wall, an ancient Egyptian fellow followed three women carrying flowers. The man appeared again elsewhere, presiding over a lot of people and performing what looked like rituals.
Rupert took all of this in without really seeing it. His attention was on her, alive and unhurt, occupied with her ancient men and women and never thinking of him, while he’d been half-mad with fear for her.
“Candles,” he said tautly. “You didn’t tell me you had candles.”
“In my hezam — my girdle,” she said, leaning in to study one of the figures. “That time when we were abandoned in Chephren’s pyramid taught me to carry a tinderbox and some wax candles. Is it not beautiful?”
“You didn’t tell me you were leaving,” he said.
She must have heard the tension in his voice because she dragged her gaze from the figure and looked at him.
“You fell asleep,” she said. “I was talking to you, and you answered with a snore.”
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“I never snore.”
She shrugged. “It must have been Hermione, then.”
Rupert wished he could deny he’d fallen asleep or blame that on the donkey, too, but there was no getting out of it gracefully: he’d collapsed with fatigue.
Well, when was the last time he’d had a proper night’s sleep? And what of today, when he’d towed her and the donkey up a mountain, struggling against wind and sand and fighting to drag a morsel of air into his lungs? All the while he’d been terrified he’d lose his hold, and the monstrous wind would tear her away and the sand would bury her so deeply that he’d never find her in time.
Even Hercules had his limits, and Rupert was not a demigod. He was a mortal man who could endure only so much. He’d needed a moment, at least, of respite.
Still, he couldn’t believe he’d collapsed at her side, like a weakling.
Embarrassment did not improve his mood.
“You should have woken me,” he said. “You should not have set out on your own. You might have fallen into a burial shaft.”
“I had a candle,” she said in an I’m - talking - to - an - idiot tone that only fueled his temper. “Furthermore, the burial shafts are easy enough to distinguish. If you’d paid proper attention to the diagrams and cross sections in the Description de l’Egypte, you would be aware that the shafts are located in the inmost depths of the tomb and do not appear willy-nilly underfoot. Burial is an elaborate matter, and burial places are laid out according to a careful system. A shaft would be marked with an entrance, actual or symbolic, like this recess. But of course you did not give the French illustrations your full attention. They were merely a means of attracting women to your side.”
He was in no mood for lectures about diagrams or his morals or anything else.
“The point is, you should have stayed with me, instead of making me fumble about this infernal place looking for you,” he said.
“I was bored,” she said, less patiently. “Did you think I should be content merely to sit by your side in the dark, listening to you sleep?”
“I’d think you’d consider the possibility of snakes,” he growled. “And scorpions. And pitfalls and booby traps. But you’ve no notion of caution. When there’s a hieroglyph in the vicinity, or a god with a beast’s head, you take leave of your senses. You plunge headlong into danger —”
“I?” she said indignantly. “Talk of the pot calling the kettle —”
“What should I do if you were hurt?” he exploded. “What should I do if you were killed? Do you never think of me? No, why should you? I’m merely a great, dumb ox. I have no feelings, so why should you consider them?”
“Feelings?” she cried. “What do you know of feelings?”
“This,” he said.
In the same breath he’d closed the space between them. In the next he’d pulled her into his arms. She didn’t come easily. She tried to wriggle away, but he held on. And once he’d caught her firmly, she beat at his chest.
He pulled her hard against him and kissed her.
She stopped beating his chest.
Her mouth, taut with anger at first, yielded in the next instant. And then her hands were climbing up to his chest, pushing his shirt out of the way and sliding up, her bare palms against his skin, to his shoulders. She held on tightly, as he wanted her to, as though she needed him.
She kissed him back, and he tasted hunger like his own, laced with desperation and anger.
He didn’t want to feel this way. He didn’t know why he did, or when it had come upon him. A moment ago, he was aware mainly of a tumult of feelings, and they were dark to him, like snakes and scorpions lurking unseen in the shadows.
She turned the world dark and bewildering, but now he didn’t care. She was in his arms, and the taste of her was a strange champagne, and her curving body was made to wrap with his. The alluring incense scent of her filled his nostrils, his consciousness. He forgot about his inner turmoil and about the deadly storm outside and about the ancient dust and death inside, underfoot as well as in the air they breathed.
Her hands moved over his skin, over his shoulders and down, pushing his shirt out of the way as she went. He longed to tear it off, but he didn’t want to let go of her, either. He dragged his hands down her back to her waist and down, but the girdle was in the way, a long, wide scarf, folded and twisted and filled with who knew what. It was the work of an instant to untie it. Then down it slid, its contents making a muffled clatter when it hit the stony floor.
He clasped her waist. So little it seemed in his big hands, with all that baggage gone and no padded buckram corset to thicken it. In wonderful truth, there was nothing in the way but the long, snug-fitting vest and the thin crepe shirt underneath…and the waist of her trousers.
He was aware of all this, of the construction of clothing, in that problem-solving place in his mind, the place where a man stored the logistics of undressing women.
He was far more aware at present, though, of the supple curves under his hand and the way she moved when his hands moved over her. She moved like a cat, lithe and sinuous and unself-consciously demanding to be petted: yes, here. Ah, yes, there. More of this. That again. Yes.
Her mouth left his to make heat trails over his face and down his neck. Meanwhile her hands stroked down over his chest under his shirt. There was no hesitation, no unsureness: he was hers for the taking, and she knew it. He fell back against the wall, to brace himself, because she made him weak-kneed and because he wanted everything at once: he had to have her then and there that instant, yet he didn’t want to move, to do anything to interrupt the sensations coursing through him. He had no names for what he felt. He might be dying, for all he knew. The pleasure was beyond anything. Let it kill him.
She was welcome to kill him with heat and pleasure or torture him. So long as she wanted him, she could take him any way she liked. He was strong; he could bear whatever she did to him, and happily, too. But he wanted her, too, and he couldn’t wait forever.
He caught the back of her head and tangled his fingers in her hair, and drew her head back and kissed her. Not gently. She didn’t answer gently, either. Her tongue twined about his, and her hands slid under his shirt, kneading the muscles of his back until he groaned against her mouth.
He pushed the vest from her shoulders, shoved the tight sleeves down her arms, tugged and wrestled with it until it was off at last. He flung it down. He unfastened the ties at the top of the shirt’s opening and thrust the fabric back, exposing her beautiful breasts. Then he paused, in spite of heat and need and impatience to possess.
Her bosom was golden in the candlelight, and he felt like an ancient tomb robber who’d come upon a pharaoh’s treasure. He bent and kissed the silken skin and heard her first startled gasp slide into a sigh. He brushed his thumb over one tautening nipple, then brought his mouth there. She gave a little cry. Then her fingers were dragging through his hair, holding him, pressing him to her, and the quiet pause ended.
Heat and need flooded back, demolishing thought, and he was tearing off his shirt, then hers, and pulling her against him, skin to skin. It wasn’t close enough, not nearly.
He grasped her buttocks, crushing her against his groin, against his swollen cock, but that would never be enough. In a moment, he’d found the knot of her trouser string, and in the next it was undone, and the trousers were sliding over her hips, down her beautiful legs. He dragged his hands over her bottom and hips, over the swell of her thighs.
Her skin was hot velvet. She trembled under his caress. He stroked upward, to the feathery triangle between her legs. So soft here, so very delicate. Again, the wild storm of need paused. He took his time, took care, caressing gently, so gently, drawing his fingers lightly over the place.
“My God,” she said. “My God.”
He nuzzled her neck. Her mouth was soft against his ear, her voice a husky whisper: “Oh, it’s…yes. Oh, yes.”
He stroked more deeply, while his thumb caressed
the sensitive nub. He knew what to do. He knew how to please women. But she was hot and wet, and “Yes,” she said.
A storm swirled into his mind, and he couldn’t remember anymore what ought to be done. Mindlessly he tore at his own trousers. The fabric fell away, and his rod sprang free. He caught her under the thigh, lifting her leg up. She wrapped her leg about his waist, and he thrust into her. She cried out, “Oh. Oh, my God.”
He would have echoed her, but he was long past words.
He was lost in her and in the need for her. Desire was a raging thing like the sandstorm. It was a juggernaut, un-stoppable. He thrust again and again, and heard her cry out and felt her body shudder to climax. But it wasn’t enough. More. More. More. Hard, desperate strokes, as though he could get to the beginning and end of her, have all of her.
She held nothing back, riding him with the same ferocity, vibrating with one climax after another. Finally, she grasped his face and kissed him hard, and then it rushed through him, the flood of pleasure. And with it came a strange exaltation, like the pillar of light soaring up from the Egyptian horizon at sunset. It was only in the very last instant that awareness sparked, and he pulled from her. His seed spilled against her thigh, and release came, and the quiet darkness.
DAPHNE SAGGED AGAINST him, her naked leg sliding down along his. She stayed there, waiting for her heart to stop pounding and her breathing to steady. She let her head rest upon his big chest and listened to his heart gradually slow. She held onto him, her arms circling his taut waist. She didn’t want it to end quite yet, and her uncertain heart gave a flutter when she felt his chin rest upon her head. She remembered how he’d kissed the top of her head during the sandstorm, and the swell of feeling within her at those light caresses, so terribly like affection.
She didn’t want to think about the surge of feeling. It was more frightening than the sandstorm. She’d left his side a little while ago because it was the only way to keep from tucking herself into his arms while he slept, and burrowing against him, and pretending he was hers and she was his.