by Lara Temple
Damn him.
She untangled her hands, detached her mouth, bracing herself against his shoulders for when he put her aside. She wasn’t brave enough to meet his eyes so she stared at the pulsing beat at the side of his throat, at the shadowed line of his jaw, every inch of her telling her to kiss him again, touch...take.
But neither of them moved. Perhaps they’d turned to pillars of salt like Lot’s wife as she looked back in yearning.
Then his hands moved, one pulling her closer, the other cupping her cheek, his thumb rough against her lower lip, as if erasing the memory of her embrace. Then it softened, brushing with the same gentle touch he used to give his precious antiquities.
‘Shall I show you how I enjoy myself, Sam?’
It wasn’t at all like eight years ago. That had been her very first kiss and she’d been all confusion and it had taken her a while to realise it was even a kiss and only then to realise it was over.
But she’d never stopped wondering why those brief, girlish embraces had meant so much. They’d marked her so potently she’d consciously set out to erase them with every man she’d kissed that foolish year in Venice before she’d finally accepted Ricki’s courtship. She’d tried to replicate the way Edge’s kiss connected with every parcel of skin and ran through every bone and made everything tingle and ache. She kept searching for that same flash of truth, that sense of Yes. This! And found not a whisper of it.
Until now.
Though even as his lips moved against hers, he wasn’t even truly kissing her, just exploring her mouth with his, almost curious. His hand was doing the same to the lines of her cheek and throat, learning her as a blind man would something he feared was fragile. Or dangerous.
It was gentle, but it wasn’t at all. Each sweep of his lips on hers, every stroke of his fingers, was fire trailing over abraded skin. He applied no pressure, but it both hurt and made her strain towards him, trying to feed or relieve the strange inner cry. She planted her hand on his chest and discovered the lie—there was nothing gentle or soft about his pulse—it was harsh and faster even than hers. Whatever he showed on the surface he was on fire inside and in a second her whole body went up in answering flames and her lips parted with a whimper under his, her tongue touching the smooth warmth of his upper lip.
For a moment she thought they were falling again, the way his arms gathered her to him, crushing her against his body. He could have pushed her off the cliff and had less of an impact. He wasn’t gentle any longer, his mouth hard and demanding on hers as his hand sank into her hair, his other drawing one long line down her back to close on her behind, pressing her against him and making her shudder and rise towards him as if trying to reach something or escape it. She moaned as his tongue withdrew to trace her lips, burning and defining them. Her body was alight, on fire, every inch of her wanting its turn. Her hands were fisted in his shirt and she dragged it up and slid her arms up his back and moaned at the sheer pleasure of feeling him. She’d never touched him like this, but it felt like coming home.
This was so very, very wrong.
He must have thought the same because he suddenly froze with something between a curse and an expelled breath. Slowly she sank back on to her heels and he disentangled himself and stepped back. Lord Edward Edgerton was back.
‘We should return. It’s been a long day and we are both tired.’
Chapter Three
The Jackal sniggered, pawing at Gabriel’s torn shirt. ‘Only a fool would ask the River God the same question twice and expect the same answer. Leila would know better.’
‘Leila is gone,’ Gabriel snarled, and turned towards the water once again.
—Temple of the River God,
Desert Boy Book Two
‘They went where?’
Janet looked up from pitting dates alongside Aziza in the shade of the small courtyard.
‘To the temple of Senusret, my dear. Poppy has been itching to see it again after all these years. Since we cannot expect any news until later in the day it is best the men occupy themselves. They haven’t our patience, you know.’
‘The men,’ Sam huffed and Janet smiled.
‘Yes, my dear, I know you haven’t the patience either. But I noticed you did not sleep much last night and so I chose not to wake you. Come help us with the dates. I want to watch so I can show Ayisha when we return to Qetara in autumn.’
Aziza looked up from her significantly larger stack of pitted dates.
‘I have six older brothers, Najimat al-Layl, and I know what it is like to wish to follow where they lead. Even to lead where they might follow. Sometimes I think it is best not to have daughters, the world is never fair to them.’
Sam moved closer, picking up a cured date and splitting it with her fingers. The sticky, fibrous meat gave way and she resisted the urge to sink her teeth into its warm sweetness.
‘I want a daughter and I want her to do more than I dared to do.’
‘That is a good dream. One day you shall have just such a daughter.’ Aziza nodded, pitting five to her one.
Sam’s stomach closed like a fist around the stab of pain at the memory of Maria, her hair a tumble of dark curls about the plump face, her eyes wide as she listened to the story Sam was reading. Perhaps in time Ricki might have stopped trying to punish her for not loving him and perhaps in time she’d have learned to care for the sulky boy that hid under the boisterous exterior, at least enough to open herself to his advances again, perhaps even welcome them. But that possibility died when Maria drowned because of Ricki’s drunken callousness. And then again, definitively, three years later when Ricki drowned as well.
Sam knew she had no real right to mourn Maria’s loss so long after her death. She wasn’t her child, not like Jacob had been Edge’s son. Perhaps it was no longer Maria she was mourning, but the absence of a dream of her own daughter. A family.
A home.
She’d been pushing that wish away for a long time, but it kept growing. Perhaps it was the realisation they were returning to England. Or the unsettling encounter with Edge. Whatever the case she couldn’t ignore it any longer.
She wanted a home of her own. A family. Already the images were forming as if she was drawing them herself—a girl and a boy, dark haired, green eyed...
She blinked them away as quickly as she could, but they lingered like the halo of a bright light on the inside of her eyelids.
The idea, once broached, would not be tucked away. She would not have thought of it if Edge had not walked out of the desert and into her world, but he had. She was twenty-six, widowed and wealthy enough to buy herself a house and hire a proper companion to give her countenance, but she wanted more than that. She wanted a home, a partner, someone who loved Egypt and travel and freedom.
Someone whose touch made her wonder if she’d been wrong to believe Ricki when he’d said that there was something wrong with her womanhood. That she was incapable of feeling what others did. Because in the fire of that kiss Edge had ignited on the hilltop she’d sensed a whole landscape awaiting her, accessible if she only reached for it.
Someone she could trust. Someone she could be herself with and however much Edge pushed back at her, she realised she had been more herself in the past three days than in...years.
Herself... In all her twenty-six years she’d been herself with fewer people than she could count on two hands...
But even if she considered it, why would Edge? He had nothing at all to gain.
It was madness.
She tried to put the idea away, but as she watched the women work, splitting, pitting, stacking dates, her mind was putting up brick upon brick of an idea, far faster than she could dismantle it with logic and objections and reality. She needed to obliterate it—or have Edge do that for her. Once she saw him in the light of day again it would become all too evident just how mad the idea was.
&nbs
p; ‘Aziza, is there someone who could take me there? To the temple?’
‘My boy Abdul, if you must go.’ There was sympathy in Aziza’s eyes and pity, too.
* * *
Edge left al-Walid and Poppy crouched by the tumble of rocks at the far end of Senusret’s temple and walked along the vividly painted walls. Amazingly nothing much had changed in a decade. It was still a beautiful escape from the starkness of the desert—the colours were remarkably fresh, better preserved than many temples he’d seen along the Nile.
He inspected an oval-encircled cartouche—a club and a jackal positioned above several abstract shapes. Poppy had showed him a copy of Champollion’s revolutionary new philological theories regarding the hieroglyphs and Edge was inclined to agree he was on the right path. It would be interesting to see how this field developed—to reach the point where he could understand the meaning of the hieroglyphs with the same ease as reading English.
Perhaps once he tracked down Rafe and returned to London he would visit the Society of Antiquaries and refresh his mind on the latest state of scholarship. He’d been away so long his mind had atrophied but there was still so much to learn. To do.
He reached out to touch the cartouche and stopped himself, smiling wryly. He’d admonished Sam often enough and here he was doing the same. She always had to touch everything, experience it with all her senses before capturing it in the quick and intuitively brilliant sketches that made her illustrations for his books so captivating.
His conscience snapped at him again. His one firm stipulation from Mr Durham, his publisher, was that his authorship of the Desert Boy books remain a secret from everyone, even the illustrator. He’d wanted no direct communication with Sam and he had no intention of changing that aspect of their relationship now. But he still had enough of a conscience to feel guilty about encouraging Poppy and al-Walid to leave early without waiting for her and denying her the chance to see what he knew she would love to draw.
She should be here.
His excuse that she needed to rest had been just that—an excuse, and a petty and insincere and cowardly one. Qualities he despised.
Especially cowardly.
Sam wasn’t to blame for the fact that he was sorely regretting indulging his lingering curiosity by kissing her last night. There must be something very wrong with him that a half-innocent kiss snatched years ago could have etched itself into his body as definitely as the ancient Egyptians carved their world on to this temple wall. He’d thought it was half-guilt, half-surprise that had made him react so strongly and so uncharacteristically to her innocent kiss eight years ago. The discovery of Sam not as Lucas and Chase’s younger sister and the bane of his existence but as a young woman with a lush body and the most extraordinary eyes... He’d never even noticed that ocean grey-blue until she’d knocked him to the ground, literally forcing herself on him... Or her mouth... Or the long legs tangled with his and the surprisingly large breasts so evident under the cotton kamisa. He’d barely even noticed she had breasts until those last weeks. Perhaps he had hit his head when he fell that day—he couldn’t understand why else he had been so stunned he’d reacted like a boy of sixteen rather than a man of twenty-six.
But when she touched her mouth to his...again...
Hell.
It was absurd that he’d remembered the feel of her mouth after eight years when he could barely remember Dora’s or most of the women who shared his bed since. Succumbing to curiosity and kissing Sam again had been a mistake.
He clenched his jaw as the same fire surged through him as had possessed him on the hill last night. He hated this. Had hated it then. Hated it last night, hated it now.
Once he found Rafe he fully intended to return to the life he’d built after Jacob’s death—it was comfortable there on his emotional plateau, confining all his flights of fancy to his writing. It might be as drab and boring as Sam accused him of being, but he’d been content.
Damn Rafe.
Blast Sam.
No, it was wrong to blame her for his misstep yesterday, just as it was wrong to resent her for sowing the first seeds of doubt about his marriage. He could not blame his and Dora’s failures on that encounter with Sam eight years ago. It had been a catalyst, not a cause. It wasn’t Sam’s fault he realised there was little he found of interest beyond Dora’s vivid beauty and charm and it certainly wasn’t Sam’s fault Dora discovered she had nothing in common with what lay behind the façade of the wealthy war hero Captain Lord Edward Edgerton.
He’d still hoped that once they had children they would find a common ground and grow together. What a young, naïve fool he’d been. Jacob’s birth and illness had only weakened Dora, encouraged by her overprotective mother with her love of ailments real and imagined, and he’d done very little to help. He’d found it hard to watch her apathy to their beautiful son and his joy in the babe only seemed to make her more fretful. So he hadn’t truly objected when her mother whisked Dora away to recover in Bath after her difficult birth. He’d wished her well and settled in to enjoy his son.
When Jacob fell ill he’d waited for her to return, but once again Dora had given way to her mother’s decree that she wasn’t strong enough to expose herself to the fever. When the fever passed, leaving Jacob damaged for life and the doctors shaking their heads over the chances of Jacob’s surviving into adulthood, Edge had hoped that Dora and her mother, both so very fascinated by their own ailments, would be empathetic to Jacob’s, but he’d been as wrong as wrong could be.
He’d finally insisted she return to Chesham, but that brief visit had been a disaster. Dora had been devastated by her one encounter with Jacob and Mrs Wadham had taken her away that very week. The final straw came swiftly in the form of a letter from his father saying Mrs Wadham and Lady Edward had called at Greybourne on their way to Bath and that it was felt it best to send Jacob to be cared for elsewhere if Lady Edward was to return to Chesham and try to produce a healthy heir.
Rafe had been staying at Chesham during these challenging months and Edge had handed him that letter, then tossed it in the fire and never spoke another word with Dora or his parents. It was Rafe who sent word to them when Jacob finally died and Rafe who first received word that Dora had died of influenza two years later in Bath.
Edge walked out of the temple into the blazing sun, tilting his head back, hoping it would eclipse the heat and confusion inside him.
His eyes flew open as something came between him and the sun and stared in shock as a figure moved up the dune on the side of the temple. For a moment he thought it was a desert sarab conjured by his libido and conscience. But the rivulets of sand slipping down from the roof as she came to stand on its rim were not typical of desert illusions. His memory chimed in happily with the memory of her standing on another temple long ago, him reaching up...and finding himself flat on his back with an armful of warm...
Hell.
‘Sam! What the devil are you doing here? Come down at once!’ he demanded.
‘You can see the whole desert from here,’ she replied with a happy sigh and that only made it worse. ‘My goodness! What are those? They look like giant mushrooms.’
‘They are rocks. Now get down before you break something.’
She touched the tip of her boot to the long stone lintel that covered the entranceway.
‘It feels solid to me. Clearly Senusret was worthy of his reputation as a master builder.’
‘I meant your bones, not the blasted temple.’
‘Edge!’ Her eyes widened, her mouth curving into a smile that was far more old Sam than new. Or more young Sam than old. Or just more annoying Sam than the proper one whose emergence he’d so foolishly worried about. She must have loved her husband deeply to empty herself so brutally of life and laughter and to be filled with the grief she’d shown at the Howling Cliffs. He’d heard about the dashing Lord Ricardo Carruthers—it wasn’t su
rprising Sam still hadn’t recovered from her loss. It was wrong, though. Sam should be as she was now—with that glimmer of mischief lighting her inner flame, laughing at him. He’d always felt both comforted and uncomfortable when her impish humour targeted him. Right now it felt like a benediction; proof there was hope yet for this world.
She moved back a step, sending another cascade of sand like a veil over the entrance.
‘Is this better?’
‘No, it is not. What are you doing now?’ he demanded as she rooted around in her cloth bag.
‘I want to sketch those mushrooms.’
‘Rocks.’
‘They cannot possibly be natural rocks. Only look at them. That one looks like a parasol run amuck.’
Despite himself he turned. ‘Which one?’
‘You cannot see it from down there.’
Edge surrendered before he even began the fight this time. Clearly she had no intention of coming down and he would likely have an apoplexy waiting for her to fall. At least if he was close he could grab her before she did something foolish...again...
Oh, Sam. What the devil am I going to do with you?
‘There. See how beautiful it is from up here?’ she whispered when he stopped beside her. They stood so close the wind was wrapping her skirts about his legs like a morning mist.
‘We are barely ten feet off the ground standing on a pile of stones. Hardly an Alpine peak.’
‘It is not a ‘‘pile of stones”. It is a magical temple that can be moved by the power of one’s thoughts. Where would you command it to take you, Edge?’
‘There is nowhere I would rather be.’
The words were out before he could think and he very much hoped she interpreted them as apathy. It wasn’t that he wished to be here beside her, precisely. It was merely true that there was nowhere he would rather be.
After a moment’s silence, she returned to the view.
‘That formation looks like a tipsy mushroom, doesn’t it? And that one like a rabbit with one floppy ear and a bad squint.’