Mr Impossible (19 page)

“
Fascinating,”
Mr. Carsington said.

Daphne slowly
straightened, her heart racing. Caught up in the excitement of
discovery, she hadn’t realized she’d been thinking aloud.
She’d said far too much, given herself away. But no, not to
him. He was no scholar. To him, it must have been meaningless babble.

He stood watching
her, arms folded over his big chest, his dark eyes uncomfortably
penetrating. “It isn’t so much what you say as how you
say it,” he said. “That first day, when you knew
immediately that someone had disturbed the materials on the table.
You
had been working on the papyrus, you said.”

“
I told you.
I assist Miles.”

“
You knew
exactly where each item had been,” he said.

“
He has a
system,” she said.

He smiled and shook
his head. “You give yourself away. When you are on sure
ground—on
your
ground—your voice changes, and a
wonderfully arrogant look comes into your eyes, and you hold your
head in a certain way.”

Did she? Was she so
obvious? “I fail to see the relevance of the way I hold my
head,” she said.

“
It says
you
know
. And when you speak of a sign and a sound,” he
went on, “and when you know the Coptic word for
sun
, and
when you coolly dispute the famous Dr. Young’s interpretations,
I can only conclude—”

“
Miles—”

“
I doubt it,”
he said. “You told me what your brother’s trunks
contained. You never mentioned his books. How odd that a language
scholar should travel without books.”

“
Actually—”

“
You, on the
other hand, travel with a remarkable assortment,” he said.
“Greek. Latin. Hebrew. Persian. Arabic. Turkish. Coptic.
Sanskrit. And the usual: German, French, Spanish, Italian. Did I miss
anything?”

“
Apparently
not,” she said tightly. “I missed a great deal. You are
supposed to be a great, dumb ox.”

“
I am,”
he said. “I only seem so brilliantly insightful because I’ve
a hieroglyph fanatic in the family. Cousin Tryphena is not like you,
though, and it isn’t simply that she’s older. She’s
usually impossible to understand. You even I can follow, more or
less. She’s hardly ever interesting. You always are. You have
so much
passion
.”

Daphne winced at
the word, at its myriad meanings, so many of them dangerous. “You
don’t know me in my normal state,” she said. “I’m
a great bore.”

“
I find you
intriguing,” he said. “It must be the air of mystery that
comes of leading a double life.”

“
I have no
choice!” Daphne burst out. “I am not mysterious. I am not
a person drawn to intrigue. I am dull and bookish and content to
spend hours alone memorizing a new vocabulary and grammar or staring
at a single cartouche. But one can’t work in isolation. Those
who do end up repeating others’ mistakes or wasting time on
disproved theories.” Like Virgil, who’d wasted decades.
“My sex and circumstances isolated me,” she went on. “I
had a choice: either give up my work or practice deception. I could
not give it up.”

“
Passions are
beastly difficult to give up,” he said.

“
You would
think I was trying to seduce men rather than coax prepositions from a
piece of crumbling parchment,” she said bitterly. “A
common harlot could not meet with more disapproval, scorn, disgust.”
She laughed, but it was an angry sound. She was still fighting. It
still hurt. She was so tired of fighting, pretending.

“
Maybe you
were associating with the wrong sort of people,” he said.

“
What other
sort is there?” she demanded. ‘The sort who laugh at
intellectual women instead?“

“
There’s
the sort like me,” he said.

He didn’t
move, but physical distance didn’t matter. She’d let him
get too close because she’d let emotion loosen her tongue, and
her secrets had tumbled out into the open.

She took a step
back, into Ramesses’s stony forearm.

Mr. Carsington’s
mouth curved a very little, like that of the stone pharaoh, and he
closed the distance she’d tried to make between them.

“
You could
probably coax a proposition from me,” he said, “if you
set your mind to it.”

“
Preposition,”
she said. “I said
prep
—”

He slid his hand to
the back of her head, into her hair, and she froze, on the outside,
that is. Inside, a ferocious hammering started, and the place where
her brain used to be was now a wild whirl of dark fragments as
elusive as the lost language she’d struggled to decipher.

He tilted his head
a little to one side, studying her “Ah, well, so much for slow
sieges,” he said. He leant in, and she was too slow to duck or
draw back, and so his mouth fell upon hers, and the bottom dropped
out of the world.

She lifted her
hand—to push him away as she must. As she ought. But his mouth
moved boldly over hers, firm and sure, and she clung instead, her
fingers curling round his upper arm. It was as hard as the stone
figure blocking her retreat, yet warm and alive, its heat electric.
Her fingers tingled, and the current shot under the skin. Every
particle of her being reacted, as though galvanized.

The dark fragments
in her mind swirled into a haze, and the mad hammering wasn’t
simply in her heart, but beating through vein and muscle.

She tightened her
grasp, holding on with both hands now, as though the very ground were
giving way beneath her, just as everything within was giving way. One
powerful arm slid round her waist and pulled her closer. She
stiffened at the collision with that rock-hard body, but in the next
heartbeat she was melting in its heat and molding herself to him. It
wasn’t enough. She dragged her hands up over the broad
shoulders and up his hard jaw. The pulse in his neck beat against the
edge of her hand. Cupping his face, she parted her lips, offering
herself. He teased her first, his tongue playing over her lips, then
he stole inside, and the world spun as the taste of him swirled
inside her, strangely cool and sweet and infinitely immoral.

His hand slid
further down; curving over her buttock and pressing her closer yet,
until her belly was crushed against his pelvis. It was wrong,
completely wrong, but she was wrong, too—born that way—lacking
the will to break away. She yielded to the shattering physical
awareness of
him
—the long, sinewy body and the pressure
of his hardened rod against her belly. She surrendered to the
simmering heat between them and the tempest of feeling within.

Deep-buried
longings clawed their way out of hiding. They tangled about her heart
and coiled and twisted in her belly. She couldn’t name them.
This wanted a new language, or no language at all. Meaning narrowed
to the taste of-his mouth and his skin and to the scent of him, dark
and dangerous and so familiar that she ached, as though it were a
cherished memory or a reawakened grief.

She should have
battled her baser self and pulled free of the woman-trap he was.
Instead she struggled to get closer, her hands tangling inhis thick
hair while her tongue tangled with his. So wrong. So lewd.

And so strange and
exciting, like crawling through a pyramid in utter darkness.

He and what he
awoke within her were far more dangerous. At this moment, though, she
loved danger, and she would have gone on, straight to ruination. But
his hand slid from her bottom and his mouth left hers, and with the
broken contact, she became aware of the sun and the tall palms and
birds singing and the stone giant against whose arm she had so
stupidly lost control—along with her self-respect and any and
all claims to virtue.

She pulled away.
“Oh!” she said. And then, because she didn’t know
what else to say—hadn’t a good reason to blame him or any
plausible excuse for herself—she did what she’d used to
do when she felt this way, when she and

Miles were
children. She balled her hand into a fist, swung her arm, and hit
him, backhanded, hard in the chest.

PANIC.

One black, ghastly
moment. Rupert must say something—conceal, divert, distract—but
it meant thinking, and his mind wasn’t up to the job.

The blow settled
everything handsomely—and about bloody time, too.

“
Sorry,”
he said. “I got carried away.”

That was too
uncomfortably true.

“
Carried
away?” she repeated indignantly.

He could have said
she was a fine one to wax indignant when she’d cooperated
fully, thank you very much, rather too fully, in fact. Rather more
than he was prepared for— or any man could be prepared for.

He still saw
stars—and moons and planets, too. The whole universe was
spinning. Dizzy, he started to look about for the large object—a
stone falcon for instance— with which she must have thumped him
in the head.

He caught himself
in the nick of time.

There wasn’t
a weapon.
She
was the weapon. She’d struck with her softly wicked pouting
peach of a mouth and her body, the curving miracle of a body the
Devil himself had designed to drive men distracted.

And then there was
the passion, ocean-deep and as wild as any sea storm.

Rupert had a strong
suspicion what it was her husband had died of.

He gestured about
him. “The… um… romantic scene. The woman of
mystery.” With the magnificent rump. And a raw, rare talent for
kissing a man deaf, dumb, blind, and deranged. “The mood of the
moment. And no one about.”

That was to say, he
hoped there had been no witnesses. He looked past her, over the
gigantic Ramesses he’d assumed would shield them from prying
eyes. Their guide and the handful of servants and crew members who’d
come along had gathered a respectful distance away. They sat in the
shade of a clump of palm trees, smoking their pipes and listening to
Tom talking nine to the dozen. In the other direction, the donkey
drivers remained with their beasts and talked in the same animated
Egyptian manner.

“
I am no
mystery,” she said crossly. “I told you—”

“
Your mind is
so intriguing,” he said. “So filled with learning. And
all those secrets, too. Complicated. Fascinating.”

Her expression grew
wary. “My mind?” she said. “You kissed me for
my
mind? ”

“
Don’t
be ridiculous,” he said. “Do you want to see the
pyramids?” He pointed. “They’re that way.”

Chapter 9

DAPHNE WANTED TO
RUN BACK TO THE BOAT and hide in her cabin, which was childish and
silly, she knew. When she did get back to the boat, she would give
herself a good talking-to. She could not revert to the heedless
schoolgirl she’d once been, ruled by her passions. Then she’d
paid with a prison sentence of a marriage. Now she would pay with her
reputation, shaming Miles, who’d made it possible for her to
continue her work and to whom she owed her sanity.

If your honor means
nothing to you, she told herself,
at
least consider his
.

Aloud she said,
with all the composure she could summon, that she would very much
like to visit the pyramids— as soon as she made copies of the
cartouches.

Mr. Carsington
unloaded her drawing supplies from her saddlebags, then kept out of
her way while she worked. It did not take very long, and she was
surprised, when she was done, to look round and find him standing
under a palm tree, sketching.

“
I didn’t
know you could draw,” she said.

“
It’s
one of my deep, dark secrets,” he said. “Actually, it’s
the only one. Not much of a secret, either. My father believes a
gentleman must know how to draw as well as fence and shoot. If I go
home with no pictures, I’ll never hear the end of it. There.”
He showed it to her.

The sketch was of
the colossal Ramesses—and of her, seated on her stool, copying
the signs on the stone pharaoh’s wrist.

“
It’s
very good,” she said, surprised. She felt a surge of pleasure,
too, because she was in the picture, and a chill of anxiety, because
she was in the picture, and the portrayal struck her as…
intimate. But that was ridiculous, emotion playing tricks on her
reason. Who’d ever know it was Daphne Pembroke, that tiny
figure next to the immense pharaoh who’d fallen on his face?