by Lara Temple
He untucked the edge of her scarf from under her ear and unwound it, his dark brows drawn together with concentration. When he brushed his knuckles from her temple to her cheek that side of her face lit like an oil lamp and she held herself stone still, hope springing to life. But he merely moved away, tossing her scarf on to the pile on the table.
‘You’ve brought half the desert in here with you, Queenie. You aren’t going anywhere but into a bath. Everything else will wait until the morrow.’
‘I must see if Dash is there—’
‘Do you know what they call animals that rush into traps?’ he interrupted and she frowned, well aware this was a trap in itself.
‘No...’
‘Supper.’
‘Oh, very amusing.’
‘Sarcasm doesn’t work if you’re laughing, Cleo-Pat.’
She didn’t bother to deny the accusation. It was very hard to remain serious when he was in this mood. No doubt this lightness was relief at finally reaching the safety and relative comfort of Cairo and knowing he would soon be shot of her and her problems. Tomorrow he would be on his way to find his brother and she—
All her amusement and the glimmerings of pleasure were doused as swiftly as if she’d been tossed headfirst into the Nile.
He frowned. ‘I don’t care what mouldering mummy of a thought your tortuous mind has conjured, Queenie; you aren’t going anywhere today. Come, I’ll show you to your room.’
He went towards the door, but she wavered and he glanced back.
‘It’s not a trap, Cleo.’
‘I know that. It’s only... I’ve forgotten what it is like to be indoors.’
‘After a week, miss?’ Birdie asked as he entered the room with a wooden tray bearing a steaming long-spouted teapot and plate of honeyed cakes. She smiled at him with relief.
‘It feels much, much longer than a week, Birdie.’
‘Is that a jibe about how heavily our company weighed on you, Queenie?’ Rafe asked.
‘Stop that bickering, you two, and come drink.’ Birdie filled the finjans and the scent of coffee and cardamom filled the room. ‘Naguib brought this fresh from the coffee house. His son’s heating water for Miss to wash and I’ve sent him to fetch us a good piece of lamb for supper. You’ll go to the baths by the square, sir?’
Rafe drained the small cup and rubbed his hand over his jaw, but his gaze was on Cleo. ‘You go, Birdie. I’ll make do here with hot water and a blade.’
‘No, you won’t, sir. I’ll keep a weather eye here, never fear.’
Cleo saw the yearning mix with hesitation in Rafe’s eyes and sighed.
‘I am not foolhardy, Mr Grey. I won’t disappear while you are at the hammam.’
‘Your word.’
‘My word.’
He nodded but there was still a peculiar hesitancy about him. Finally, Birdie gave him an unceremonious shove towards the door.
‘Off with you. Faster you go, faster you’re back and it’s my turn.’
When the door closed behind him Birdie smiled at her.
‘Come along, miss. I’ll show you to your room.’
‘That sounds very grand, Birdie.’
‘Well, it’s not that, but right now I’d venture we’d be happy in a hayloft, miss.’
* * *
It wasn’t the laughter or the scraping of some string instrument from the coffee house down the street that was keeping Rafe awake. It was a blank wall.
Behind the straw-coloured wall was Cleo’s room and her equally narrow wooden bed. In essence, he lay closer to her now than he had in the desert where nothing but a couple of yards of cooling air separated them.
Except now he couldn’t see her and it was wreaking havoc on his ability to surrender to sleep. She’d become a talisman, like those prayer beads the men in the coffee house clicked between their fingers. He’d grown accustomed to seeing her just before he fell asleep—marking it in his mind: One Cleopatra Osbourne, present and asleep.
Other than that hellish night in Kharga, for a week now this had been his nightly rote. He hadn’t noticed it had become a habit. He certainly hadn’t realised it had become a necessity.
Strange to think he’d watched her sleep more than he’d watched any other woman. He’d spent a fair share of time in bed with women over the years, but he could not for the life of him remember ever watching them sleep. If he’d thought about it at all, he would have considered it an imposition—he didn’t like the thought of anyone watching him while he was unconscious, so he had done unto others as he wished to be done unto him.
He had no idea why she was different. Perhaps it was the desert—that thick but crystalline darkness, or the absence of walls to protect them from whatever dangers lurked in the darkness so he had to check she was safe.
There was also that niggling confusion—he could not quite get to the bottom of the puzzle that was Cleopatra Osbourne. She was at once so direct and so very convoluted. He found himself searching her face for some clue that would settle the question one way or another. Perhaps in sleep she would reveal that essence. But her face, free of wariness and tension, her lashes twitching like feathers as she dreamt, only confused him further.
Not that it should matter. He’d never before thought it necessary to understand his charges in order to protect them. Why he should feel that impulse now, he didn’t know. It was there, though. A discomfort, like sitting on a poorly stitched saddle.
The confusion was rubbing him raw.
Having a real bed, a room and a solid wall between them should have been a relief. The last thing he would have expected was to be lying awake staring at that wall, as alert as if a pack of rabid jackals was scratching at the door.
He’d felt the same at Chesham when Jacob was ill. He and Edge had taken turns keeping vigil and he’d been terrified he’d fall asleep on his watch and wake to find his nephew dead. In the end Jacob had died snug in Edge’s arms in the middle of a sunny day. It made no odds if they were awake or not, but something deep and atavistic told him it mattered. The same overpowering urge to assure himself she was well was pressing on his chest like an incubus. He needed to see that she was sleeping.
Absurd. Besides being improper and unnecessary and offensive.
He groaned and rubbed his stiff shoulder.
He would compromise by ensuring all the doors and windows were secured. In a few days she would be on her way to England on his friend Chris’s ship and there would be no checking on her, sleeping or waking.
His stomach clenched and he stood. A thousand things could happen to a woman travelling to England. Cleopatra might be more resourceful than most people of his acquaintance, but he knew the world—it stacked the deck against women and even the most agile fox could find itself cornered if the hounds were set upon it.
Even if the Hesperus was still docked in Alexandria... Even if he trusted Chris with his life... Even then the thought of watching her set sail to an unknown future felt like a betrayal. Worse, it felt...frightening. Wrong.
He felt a little ill with it. Like the days before one fully succumbed to an ague. His insides felt rough, raw, miserable.
It was damn lucky he no longer depended on his skill as a mercenary to pay the bills because he’d clearly gone soft.
He padded into the corridor and his stomach clenched again.
The door to her room was ajar and the narrow bed empty. Fear was chased by anger—she could not possibly have been so foolish to have gone off alone? He strode into the room and the anger dimmed at the sight of her boots, now clean and shiny, set by the small table-cum-dresser. But that merely made way for fear to return. He did not believe they had been followed, yet...
He hurried down the corridor to the salon and stopped in the doorway.
She half turned, her eyes dark and gleaming like an animal’s. She was wrapped in a cott
on blanket and it trailed on the ground like a cape. She looked more than ever like a faerie being with her short hair and large eyes. A breeze was slipping through the shutters, but his body was heating up far too fast for the cool air to soothe him.
With a mixture of anger and resignation he felt it take hold. He might as well have been that blasted princess chained to the rock in the sea—there was no escaping this wave. It swept out from his centre like kindling tossed into a keg of gunpowder.
He’d wanted to feel young again, but not like this. Not overwhelmed by a need he didn’t even understand. He liked lust—liked it fierce and hot and immediate. But not when it was laced with fear and this strange loss of balance.
It had happened before, in moments of weakness. This welling of need for some place to set down roots and grow. Someone...
But it dragged up every doubt and demon inside him, his mind mapping the future down a hundred paths to perdition. It ended in his father’s madness, his nephew’s death, with the murky image of the woman who might marry him realising her mistake. It ended with pain and emptiness and a loneliness worse for being shared.
He liked his life. There was no reason to change it only to make it worse. He had no faith in his ability to be anything but a temporary haven. That was the essence of his being. Temporary.
Cleo deserved everything her father and that bastard of a lover had denied her. She deserved her pack of jackals, a safe, good man who would help her set down the roots she’d been denied by the men who should have stood by her.
He knew as much about roots as he did about camels. Less.
He should stay away.
However much his body was waxing lyrical about her at the moment, she was only a page in a very brief chapter of his life. She had no place in his tale any more than he had in hers.
‘Why aren’t you in your room?’ He tried to keep his voice low and authoritative.
‘I can’t sleep,’ she whispered. ‘The room feels...stifling after the desert. It’s foolish, but I needed to breathe. Did I wake you?
‘I wasn’t asleep.’
‘Oh.’ She turned and touched the shutters briefly. Through the perforations of the mashrabiya he could see the inky shimmer of the Nile. ‘I came to look at the river. It always calms me.’
‘You sound as if you will miss it.’
‘I think I will. Or perhaps that is only because my future is so uncertain. Better the devil one knows...’
‘What will you do when you reach England?’ He hadn’t meant to make it sound like a demand, but she reacted as to the flick of a whip, her back straightening and her lips flattening.
‘First I must be certain Dash has left Egypt. I am very grateful for your help, Mr Grey, and I will find a way to repay you, but you are under no further obligation to me.’
‘If I were your friend al-Mizan, do you know what I would do once I realised you’d slipped through my net?’ he said, ignoring her stilted formality. ‘I would wait for you to do precisely what you appear determined to do—return to your home ground. You might as well declare your arrival in Cairo from the nearest minaret.’
‘I’m not quite the fool you think me, Mr Grey. I do not plan to parade around Cairo for all to see. Besides, I doubt my father took anything so valuable from Bey al-Wassawi he’d send al-Mizan all the way to Cairo.’
‘You know as well as I al-Mizan is not in the employ of Bey al-Wassawi. He came from Cairo and carried a letter of recommendation from the French consul general.’
‘Why are you only telling me this now?’ Her voice rose in anger.
‘I might just as easily ask why you didn’t tell me you knew al-Mizan was in Boucheron’s employ?’
She turned her head back towards the shutters.
‘I’ve never met any of Boucheron’s mercenaries.’
‘Yet you knew he employed a man by the name of al-Mizan.’
‘It might have been a common name for all I knew.’
‘Not at all, according to Gamal. You didn’t mention it for a reason.’
Her chin lowered like a bull considering whether or not to charge.
‘Oh? And what reason do you ascribe to me?’
‘Two reasons. At first you didn’t trust me. It was one thing for a foreign mercenary to shield you from a local bruiser, quite another to expect him to take your side against another foreigner and a wealthy and influential one at that. A sensible mercenary might have decided you and your beastly bauble were not worth the risk.’
‘And the other reason?’
‘The opposite consideration. You were worried you might not be so easily rid of us if we thought the source of your threat was here in Cairo.’
‘You appear to think you know the workings of my mind, Mr Grey.’
‘Some of them, certainly. You are too honest a person to lie convincingly, Cleo-Pat.’
‘I did not lie.’
‘Omitting to tell the truth is still being dishonest.’
‘The same applies to you. You don’t appear to be at all bothered by the fact you lied by omission.’
‘Not terribly. You did not need to know it. Now you do.’
‘Magnanimous of you.’
‘Merely practical. It makes it clear why I cannot allow you to charge into town tomorrow.’
‘He will be on the lookout for Dash, not for Miss Osbourne. Miss Osbourne left for London with the Mitchums weeks ago.’
‘Yet what happens if you are recognised? Boucheron will surely be interested why Miss Osbourne, who as you say left for London, has returned to Cairo in record time. No reason for him to consider that at all suspicious.’
She crossed her arms. With her short hair and the plain cotton nightshirt Birdie had procured her she did not look like any young woman of his acquaintance. Her hair feathered over her dark brows and his hand twitched with the need to sift through it, brush it back, shape his hands over her head, her nape... He wanted so very badly to walk over and...
And nothing. It was not going to happen.
‘I shall naturally not advertise my return, Mr Grey,’ she replied. ‘All I wish to do is go to our rooms and see if Dash is there. Perhaps I shall discover this is all a foolish misunderstanding and that all is well...’ She wavered, but clung doggedly to her shrinking island. ‘There is no reason to always suspect the worst.’
‘There is one reason to always suspect the worse and that is one’s wish to survive.’
‘“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.” That is from Julius Caesar in case you were interested, Mr Grey.’
‘Not Old Willie again. And if you must quote him, try not to choose a quote where the character is dead by the next act.’
Her reluctant laughter rippled out.
‘I concede, but my point is still valid as well. Living in fear is a dreadful way to pass through this world.’
‘I disagree; it is far preferable to be a coward than valiant. As a coward I’ve died many times and will likely do so again before I do so irretrievably. But, unlike Caesar, for now I’m still here to argue with you.’
‘Don’t be coy, Mr Grey. You are certainly no coward.’
‘You think not? By your definition I most certainly am. My cowardly little mind maps the world with a hundred ways my candle can be snuffed. It could be anything—from having my throat slit by one of your enemies to being poisoned by Birdie’s culinary efforts. Every night I go to sleep is another temporary victory over that catalogue. I am only alive today because I am a coward.’
His anger grew with his words. She wasn’t attacking him, but it felt like an accusing finger. Rafe Grey’s life was based on the actions of a coward, or running away from burdens—his father’s anger, his mother’s indifference, even his true name. He’d escaped them all, tail between his legs. He didn’t need some misguided miss
spouting romantic nonsense about being valiant to him. It was a little late for that.
‘Then I’m very glad you’re a coward.’ She spoke softly and there was still a remnant of a smile curving her lips. It was either the smile or something in her words, but he felt a little stunned, as if he’d walked into a tree he’d not realised stood right in front of him. Of all the risks he prepared for daily, he was not prepared for her shifting moods.
‘If being brave is forcing your way again and again through your fears, and I agree it is, then you are a very brave man, Rafe.’
Damnation.
‘Are you buttering me up for a purpose, Cleo-Pat? I still have no intention of allowing you to run about Cairo unchecked.’
‘I am not buttering you up, but cannot in good conscience continue to impose upon you. You have your own matters to see to.’
‘Do you wish me to help you or not?’
‘Of course I do, but...’
‘Good. Then stop arguing about everything. Tomorrow we will decide how to proceed. Right now, take advantage of having a decent bed.’
He sounded sensible and authoritative. But inside a voice was pleading—Please go to sleep before I do something my conscience will hit me over the head with.
* * *
‘Very well. Thank you, Rafe,’ Cleo murmured and he shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with gratitude or praise. He looked like an overgrown, embarrassed schoolboy. She almost enjoyed saying nice things about him just to watch the confident man turn into a squirming mass of discomfort.
She enjoyed far too much about him.
What would he say if she told him it wasn’t only her worries about tomorrow that had kept her awake, but the realisation that it was over? This brief, frightening, and yet beautiful adventure.
She smiled at him. She would miss him awfully when they parted ways, but she wouldn’t allow that to take away from the gift he’d unknowingly helped her uncover. Somehow during their passage through the desert she’d come to feel she belonged. She’d been right there at the centre of her own world, instead of alone or an observer. It wasn’t that Rafe Grey had moved into the centre of her world. She had. Whatever happened from that moment onwards, she would hold on to that.
