Page 22

“Then what am I, exactly?” Ellie pressed, her voice uneven.

This was all going wrong. The words weren’t doing what Adam needed them to do. They twisted back on him like snakes, striking where he meant them to help.

He was screwing it up—again. Just like he’d done so many times before.

“You’re…” he started, his voice strangled as he fought for a way to salvage this—to make her understand. “I…”

Her shoulders drew in on themselves as her eyes swam with hurt. “I see,” she said softly.

Adam felt a crack as though a piece of something vital inside of him threatened to break loose and fall away. Fear roared up in response, along with a sudden rush of determination.

“No, you don’t, dammit,” he shot back—and grabbed her.

He tugged her to his body until he could feel every firm, shapely line of her pressed against his skin. Then he kissed her.

The embrace was fierce—claiming, devouring. She stilled for only a heartbeat with surprise before her hands rose to his hair, tangling in the wet locks of it as she pushed up on her toes to meet him.

She tasted like black tea and honey. Smelled of rustling old paper in the silence of a library, woven through with something wilder—ancient forests and the promise of lightening before a storm.

Adam dropped his hands to her thighs, gripping them through the layers of practical twill. He lifted, then pivoted to press her up against the wall.

Ellie let out a gasp at the impact, her head tilting back. He took it as an invitation to set his mouth to her throat, gliding up to catch her sensitive earlobe between his teeth.

She groaned, clutching him more tightly between her thighs. Somehow his shirt had come loose from his belt, and Ellie’s hands were inside of it, gliding up the muscular ridges of his flanks.

Adam cursed into her mouth as his desire rose, sweeping in like a tide—fierce, implacable, insatiable. He wanted her closer. He wanted her bare. His hands slid beneath the fabric of her skirt, and the notions of what he was going to do with her burst through his mind like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

“You’ll make it up to me, will you?” Lady Sabita chirped brightly from below.

Adam froze. He lifted his head from the opened front of Ellie’s blouse to see Constance’s mother dart playfully out of one of the doorways to the courtyard, turning back to smile at her husband.

Reality crashed in like a falling boulder. Ellie’s hair was undone, pins scattered on the paving stones. Her shirt was open to expose the pale curves at the top of her practical corset. Adam’s hands gripped the round curve of her rear beneath her skirt, holding her flush to the unmistakable evidence of his arousal.

Lady Sabita’s giggle drifted up to their shadowy perch.

“Maybe I should be late more often,” Sir Robert quipped playfully, giving a darting chase to his wife around the fountain.

Adam looked down into Ellie’s eyes. Her pupils were dilated to black, her cheeks flushed. Lips red and bitten.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed out desperately.

She blinked back at him, bewildered and pleasure-fogged. “You’re sorry?”

He drew his hands away, letting her legs slip back down to the ground—where they belonged, he reminded himself furiously. He stepped back—one idiot stumble, just far enough to put a breath of space between them.

The distance only let him see that much more clearly how her chest heaved with her wild breath, her clothes in obvious disarray as her hair tumbled down over her shoulders.

He could knot his fingers in it, tug it back as she gasped…

“I have to go,” he blurted out in a harsh whisper.

As Ellie gaped at him, he whirled on his heel and ran away.

??

Six

Ellie watched theoutskirts of Cairo blur past the windows of the train as she perched on the comfortable bench of the first-class compartment Constance had booked for their journey.