He rose up on his knees, stripping off his shirt and jerking his belt free of the loops as she followed his example, working frantically to rid herself of her clothing. Abruptly, finally, they were naked, or mostly so, their bodies coming together, skin sliding against skin, heat stoked by desire, her hands learning his powerful form, the sensation of hard muscle flexing and releasing.
He cupped her buttocks, lifting her, and then he was in her, penetrating slowly and purposefully, an exquisite torment, a fullness that edged toward pain. She spread her knees wider, clasping him between her thighs, lifting up to seat him more deeply. With a groan, he thrust deep inside her. She cried out with the pleasure of it, the torment of it, for each of his thrusts built a sense of carnal anticipation.
Pleasure spiraled inward, molten and powerful, burning ever brighter, ever more focused. He moved more swiftly, his body pushing hers into the deep, silky sand, his breath hoarse in her ear. “Take it,” he urged, his voice deep and rough. “Your climax. Move on me.”
She did. She shifted, tipping her pelvis. She felt his arm tighten around her waist as he clasped her hips and thrust deeply, his body rock-hard, his face strained with effort…
Passion crescendoed around her, swelling to an unbearable promise. She cried out, impaled at the pinnacle of sensation, her throat arching, her shoulders drawn back. Wave after wave of intense pleasure erupted in her. She sobbed with the beauty of it, the unexpectedness, crying out when it peaked, and she heard him make a harsh, strangled sound deep in his throat, as he thrust and held, pulsing deep inside her.
Seconds or an eternity later, he looked up and brushed the damp hair from her face, feathering kisses on her forehead and along her nose. She stroked his lean cheek, kissed his collarbone, and marveled at how perfectly formed he was until it occurred to her that she’d been sadly negligent in one respect.
“I love you,” she whispered, gazing up into his pale gray eyes.
He smiled crookedly, for a moment looking at her with a dazzled air. He had, she realized sadly, no experience hearing those words. He didn’t know how to react. “I figured as much.”
This time, she didn’t hit him.
Sometime later, Jim pulled Ginesse into the curve of his body and gently shifted her onto his chest. The sand still roared like the surf outside the cavern, and the sun was still blotted from the heavens. He didn’t care. For a long time after she fell asleep, he cradled her tenderly and watched her.
His. And she loved him. His wonder was only outstripped by his sense of homecoming, of finally arriving on that distant, longed-for shore. His. There was nothing else he needed. Nothing else he wanted. But there was a good deal more she needed and wanted, and he intended to see that she had it. She’d placed her heart in his care, and he would go to the ends of the earth to see that she never regretted it…
“Ginesse! Ginesse! Where are you?” The sound of a man’s voice woke him.
He was not too far away.
Jim frowned. The voice was unfamiliar. It wasn’t Haji, and it wasn’t Jock. He stood up, pulling on his trousers and waking Ginesse in the process. She blinked blearily up at him from her nest of discarded clothing.
“Someone’s coming,” he said, moving to the front of the cavern so she had time to quickly don some clothing.
His frown turned into a fiercely protective scowl. He glanced at Ginesse. She’d pulled the habarah over her head providing more than adequate covering, but her hair hung about her shoulders like a toffee-colored shawl. She looked ripe and flushed and deliciously tumbled.
“Another suitor you failed to mention?” he asked, only half in jest.
Her eyes widened innocently, she started to shake her head—
“Ginesse!”
—and froze.
“Oh, dear,” she said, grabbing a handful of her hair and twisting it into a knot. She scrambled to her feet just as a tall, well-built man in a dusty shirt and trousers, a white khafiya on his head, appeared in front of the cave, backlit against a now bright sky.
Jim couldn’t make out his features, but the direction of his gaze was clear enough. It flew to Ginesse and then came pointedly back to Jim and Jim’s bare chest.
“Look, mister,” Jim said tiredly. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. You’re too damn old for her—”
“Hi, Daddy.”
Jim watched Harry Braxton move back into the light. Yup. Same eyes. Same nose. He nodded curtly toward his daughter, but his eyes, as cold and hard as steel, remained on Jim. “Looks like I made it in time for the wedding,” he said. “Doesn’t it, son?”
Jim, caught off guard and a little irritated, opened his mouth to reply, “Barely in time, sir,” when he caught sight of Ginesse out of the corner of his eye.
She was standing in the shadow near the blanket partition, the hastily donned robe twisted around her slight form, her bare feet peeping from beneath the dragging hem, her hair falling in a tawny river around her shoulder. She caught his eye and smiled. It was a confident smile, full of love. But there was just the smallest hint of wistfulness there. Just a soupcon. She had wanted to hear him say he loved her and then worried that he would find it pathetically romantic. He wasn’t going to satisfy anyone’s expectations but hers. Even if it hurt, which, he glanced at the lean muscular man in front of him, he imagined it would.
“No, sir,” he said.
“What?” thundered Harry Braxton.
Ginesse’s eyes widened in surprise. But there was no fear there, no hurt, just curiosity. She trusted him. And that meant more to him than he would ever be able to express.
“No, sir. There is nothing romantic about a shotgun wedding, so that’s not the marriage Ginesse is going to have, and when I ask her to marry me, her daddy isn’t going to be standing there watching while I try to button my fly in between choking out the words.”
“Oh, Jim!” A soul might have thought he’d just given her a piece of heaven instead of telling her father he wasn’t going to propose to her.
Harry Braxton wasn’t as enthusiastic about it. “You sonofabitch,” Harry said, stepping forward.
Jim didn’t answer. He didn’t even try. He just stepped back as the virago he loved launched herself between Harry and him, sticking her hand square on her father’s chest and shoving him back a step.
“No,” she said. She shoved him again. “No.” She shoved again. “No!”
“No what?” shouted Harry.
“No, you are not going to make him marry me. Or me him!”
“Look, honey, I don’t know what this man—”
“Jim. Jim Owens.”
“Jim Owens,” Harry repeated. His startled gaze shot to Jim. His jaw clenched. So did his fists, and Jim tiredly anticipated that this wasn’t going to end well. “Jim Owens is a disreputable, morally questionable, possibly criminal artifacts dealer and gun-for-hire.”
“I don’t care!” Ginesse shouted gleefully. “I’m still not marrying him!”
Harry, finally seeming to divine that things were not quite as he’d imagined, but just as clearly pretty used to that state of affairs when it came to his daughter, unclenched his fists. “Anyone care to take a stab at explaining things?”
“No,” Ginesse said angrily. “It’s none of your business. It’s no one’s business but mine and Jim’s, but everyone keeps insisting on interfering. So let me make this perfectly clear. I am not going to marry Jim because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. I am not going to marry Jim because Colonel Pomfrey told him proposing was the right thing to do. I am not going to marry Jim because he’s a duke—”
“You’re a duke?”
“Be quiet,” Ginesse snapped. She took a deep breath and continued. “I am not going to marry him because you showed up and told him he had to marry me, and I am not going to marry Jim because of the state of my hymen.”
“Merciful Mother of God, Ginesse!” Jim and Harry burst out in unison.
“Ach!” she sputtered in disgust. “What a pair of
old ladies.” She shot them both a venomous, contemptuous glare. “It’s true. Everyone is so concerned with whether I’m a virgin or not, but no one seems too interested in a far more fragile organ: my heart.” Her gaze softened. “Except Jim,” she said, bestowing on him such a rapturous smile it made the beating he anticipated worth it. “And because he does, we won’t be marrying right away.”
“Why?” Harry asked, looking bewildered.
“Because,” Jim said, “I have five weeks to get to London and make sure that the man who proposes to your daughter is still a duke with a place to take your daughter once we’re married. And I’m not going to rush her through some civil union in a borrowed dress. She deserves more than. She deserves my best. And I won’t offer her anything less.”
She hadn’t figured on that. “You’re leaving?” she asked, her brow furrowing.
“For a while.”
Horrified, Jim watched tears spring to her eyes, turning the blue-green irises into gemstones. He reached out to take her in his arms, but her father stepped between them. Not a wise move. Had it been anyone other than her father it would have been more than unwise; it would have hurt. He forced himself to stay put.
“When will you be back?” Ginesse asked.
“As soon as I get my affairs in order. As soon as I possibly can.” He wouldn’t leave if it would hurt her. God knew, he didn’t want to. “Please, Ginny. Let me do this for you. Please.”
Her gaze searched his face a long time before finally, with an air of sad resignation, she nodded.
“Let me see if I understand,” Harry said slowly, his gaze moving back to Jim. “You’re not going to marry this man?”
“Why, Dad,” Ginesse said, the shadow of an impudent smile curving her lips. “The gentleman hasn’t even asked me. Recently, anyway.”
“Fine,” said Harry, nodding with satisfaction. “Then there’s no reason I shouldn’t do this.”
And with a right hook, he laid Jim Owens out cold.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
FIVE MONTHS LATER
CAIRO, EGYPT, 1906
“Oh, there is no doubt about it, the Duke of Avandale is all the lux!” enthused the fresh-faced young English miss to her equally dewy-skinned companion at the table they shared on Shepheard’s famous balcony.
Though still very early in the morning, the balcony was already filling up with tourists and expats taking in the first fine spring days. As it was Saturday, there was little traffic on the broad avenue below. The strains of “Sweet Adeline” playing on a gramophone inside the hotel drifted through the open windows.
“Mum and I saw him yesterday at the consulate’s. He looked at me! I do not mind admitting, dear, that I thought I would faint dead away, he was so fierce.” She flapped her gloved hand in front of her face, presumably cooling her overheated cheeks. “And manly. Oh, my!”
“I saw him last night. He was having drinks with some young man at the Marmeduke. The young man was good looking, but compared to Avandale he seemed but a pup!”
Yesterday, Ginesse Braxton thought grimly. Jim had arrived in Cairo yesterday, and everyone seemed to have seen him except her.
“I wonder what he’s doing here?”
“Well, Father says that he is turning his estate in England into a stud farm for Arabian horses. I shouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t looking for a good brood mare—”
This last proved too much. Ginesse, sitting at a table next to the balcony’s rail with old friends, a pair of middle-aged archaeologists and their wives, choked.
“Ginny, my dear, are you all right?” Mrs. Throckmorton asked in concern.
“I’m fine, thank you,” she said, hastily taking a swig of tea. If she heard that simpering female extolling the virtues of Jim Owens any longer—no, she thought, Lord Avandale—she would tip said simpering female over the railing onto the street. Though the short three-foot drop from the balcony to the ground would probably not knock very much sense into her head.
Lux. Fierce. Manly. What claptrap.
“I have heard Tynesborough intends to return to the Fort Gordon site this season and try to find Zerzura, Ginny,” Mr. Arnout said. “Will you join him?”
“No,” she said. “The sandstorm that swept through the area was enormous. Heaven knows how vast an amount of sand was moved.”
“Then you think all is lost?” Mrs. Arnout traded a tragic look with her husband. Ah, thought Ginesse, true enthusiasts.
“Not at all,” she reassured the stricken couple. “With two such brilliant researchers as Mr. Elkamal and Lord Tynesborough looking for it, it is only matter of time before it is found. It just won’t be found by me. I have come to the conclusion that I am not much of an Egyptologist.”
This was met by a series of quiet gasps and telling glances, quickly masked and immediately covered with too-effusive denials.
“Not at all!” Mr. Arnout said.
“You are a gifted scholar,” Mr. Throckmorton exclaimed.
“A most accomplished researcher!” Mrs. Arnout enthused.
“Another star attached to the illustrious Braxton name,” declared Mrs. Throckmorton. “Your parents are most proud.”
“Oh, I know,” said Ginesse calmly. “Have you seen the review Mr. Coleman of the London Gazette gave The Belle of Montana: True Love’s Rough Trail? It is enough to turn one’s head. They said it was the most astonishing portrayal of the American West—”
“Ginny!” a masculine voice bellowed from somewhere out in the street.
Ginesse looked up, half expecting to see one of her brothers now that the entire Braxton clan was once more united in Egypt, especially since the whole lot of them were given to just such undignified bellowing.
Instead, she saw a tall, lean young man dressed in the brilliant white robes of a Bedouin sheik seated upon a magnificent gray stallion. Beneath the open robe he wore an impeccable white shirt and khaki trousers. His hair, neatly trimmed and clean, gleamed like burnished gold, his chiseled jaw was smooth and freshly shaved, and his riding boots gleamed almost as brightly as his hair.
Her heart leapt at the sight of him and began racing wildly.
“Ginesse Braxton!” he called again. Though why he kept insisting on shouting her name was a mystery as clearly she was looking at him and just as clearly he was looking directly at her. Around her, conversation died, the rattle of china and silverware stilled.
“I think that young man is hailing you, Ginny,” Mrs. Throckmorton said helpfully.
“Hm.” They had corresponded freely over the last five months. His letters had been brief, initially to know if she was pregnant—she wasn’t—and then castigating the English legal system for “its ineptitude in regards to inheritance law.” Her letters had been more loquacious. And far more genteel.
“Good heavens,” she heard one of the young English misses whisper. “It’s him. It’s Avandale!”
“Are you listening, Ginesse?” Jim shouted.
Mrs. Throckmorton nodded encouragingly.
“Yes,” she called back, trying to hold on to her sense of decorum. But he looked magnificent, so imperious and…dukely.
“Excellent,” he replied. The stallion danced beneath him. “I love you. Madly, passionately, devotedly, eternally. Marry me.”
She should have been satisfied. She should just stay quiet, but that had never been her way, and alas, a part of her sadly recognized even as the words were forming, it never would be.
“If you love me so much, where have you been for the last thirty-six hours?” she demanded, standing up from the table.
Good Lord he was handsome. He was grinning like a very devil now, as if her temper not only amused but delighted him. The stallion moved toward the stairs. What was he doing?
“Why are you smiling like that?” she demanded.
“Because for a moment there I thought someone had switched my adored afreet for a pallid English gentlewoman.”
Ginesse glanced down at Mrs. Throckmorton. “Did he just insult me
? I think I have just been insulted,” she said.
“No, dear,” said Mrs. Throckmorton, “I think I have.”
The stallion began mounting the short flight of steps leading into Shepheard’s. Alarmed guests flew before the beautiful animal’s measured progress. Riyad came rushing out of the front, waving his hands. “You cannot bring that horse up here!”
“What are you doing?” Ginesse demanded. “You are disturbing these good people.”
“I am coming to claim my bride,” he said calmly. The horse turned at the top of the steps, moving onto the balcony.
Her eyes grew wide. He wouldn’t dare. “You didn’t answer my question. Where have you been if you are so eager to marry me?”
“Oh. All those things necessary when one marries,” he said amiably, edging his horse carefully amongst the linen-covered tables to a choir of muffled shrieks and astonished whispers and Riyad’s loud admonitions. “License, the interview with the father—and by the way, my jaw wasn’t broken after all, and he seemed genuinely glad of it—letting an apartment, getting the once-over from the future brothers-in-law, and let me tell you, young Thorne drinks like a fish, finding servants. That sort of thing.”
He was almost to her now, and she found herself backing up before his advance. “And you could not find any time in which to come and see me?” she asked.
“If I had, I wouldn’t have left you,” he returned with such obvious meaning that the ladies on the balcony commenced tittering like a flock of little birds and the men cleared their throats uncomfortably.
“I never will again,” he said, his easy air abruptly vanishing, replaced by a tone of such ardency, such constancy and devotion that her breath caught in her throat. She stopped backing up.
“I am no good without you, Ginesse,” he said. “I spent a lifetime alone, but I never understood loneliness until I was away from you. I never understood happiness until I saw you again.”
He looked up into her eyes, his own as warm and soft as fresh ashes. “I love you, Ginesse. God alone knows how much I love you. So put me out of my misery. Say you’ll marry me. Because I cannot stand to live another moment without you.”
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