Must Have Been The Moonlight Read online

  Brianna’s mouth cinched in disbelief that he would know that.

  “Halid told me. He was there last night. I missed you at the house this morning. Where the hell have you been? My men lost you in the city.”

  “Don’t you dare turn this around to me.”

  “You?” He was incredulous. “How do you expect me to protect you if I don’t even know what is happening in your life? Do you have a death wish, because if you do, I need to know right now.”

  “You are a bastard, Michael Fallon,” she whispered. “I thought that we had something between us. I really did. But you are such a liar. Such a…man.” It was the worst insult she could think to pay him.

  “Dammit, Brianna. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a little busy to be carrying on this ludicrous conversation with you.”

  “Naturally.” Her hand went to the door latch. “Except you weren’t so busy last night to attempt a liaison with me in the middle of a consulate function. But then what you do well with your mouth has nothing to do with informative dialogue, does it?”

  His reaction was as volatile as hers. Brianna flung open the door before he could grab her, and collided with the secretary. The force of her momentum knocked his shoulder against the doorway, and the wicker tray he’d been carrying crashed to the floor, shattering the porcelain coffeepot and cups. She would have fallen if not for the strong hands that caught her. Her satchel flipped out of her grasp, and she watched in horror as her photographs spilled over the wet floor.

  All of her photographs.

  She could only stare at the catastrophe on the floor. Michael snapped in Arabic to his secretary, then gathered up the ruined photos, before pulling her into the room across the hallway. Releasing her, he kicked the door shut with the heel of his boot. His eyes, clearly expressing more than fury, did not move from her face.

  “I’m sorry.” He held the ruined photographs out to her.

  Brianna just stared at his hand. She couldn’t bring herself to touch the pictures. Finally, she sank into the nearest chair.

  This was her fault. She’d behaved irrationally and this was what came of it. An unequivocal brain rupture.

  God was punishing her for behaving like a complete idiot.

  Rain sheeted against the window. The room was small, filled with bookcases and shadows—and Michael.

  “Forget it,” she said. “It was my fault.”

  “I don’t want to forget it.”

  “I said this was my fault.”

  “Are we having an honest to God argument over my apology now?”

  Brianna finally snatched away her ruined photographs, if only to be done with it so he would leave. The photographs were clumped together and reeked of coffee. She peeled off the top photo and winced as the image remained embedded atop the second picture.

  “Can the photographs be repaired?” he asked, his voice softer.

  “No.” She finally just dropped them on the floor and lifted her gaze. “You can go back to your meeting. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “Come here.” He pulled her off the chair.

  “Go away and let me brood in peace.” She held one hand against his chest. “I don’t want you to be nice. I just want you to leave.”

  Michael wrapped his fingers around her wrist and pulled her into his arms. She winced at the touch. He held her wrist out to the light and noted the bruises Omar had left on her wrist. She could almost feel the fury fill him as he looked at them. “Why didn’t you tell me that Omar accosted you last night?”

  “Because he threatened you, not me. He said terrible things about you. I don’t want you to use me as an excuse to go after him again.”

  A knuckle alongside her chin turned her face, and his expression softened. “I don’t need to use you as an excuse.”

  “I’m all right. Nothing happened. I swear, Michael.”

  His fingers scraped into her hair. “Michael is it now?”

  She opened her mouth, prepared to say something sarcastic, but he silenced her with his finger on her lips.

  “I should have told you last night about the news I’d received yesterday, but I couldn’t.” Abruptly, there was a hint of a smile in his voice. “No one has ever stormed a meeting of mine before. You made quite a spectacle of yourself, and frightened my men away from European women forever. One would think that you cared for me.”

  “You mock me,” she whispered.

  “I couldn’t talk to you last night because, frankly, I wasn’t ready to discuss anything.” He leaned his forehead against hers. “In addition to the fact that Veresy recommended that I be called back to London—”

  “He shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I learned that my brother has been dead almost a year.”

  “I’m sorry, Michael.” She was appalled.

  Why would someone wait a year to tell him? Despite his earlier indifference toward his family, she knew that he’d been hurt. And she was sorry that he’d elected to go through this alone. “What happens now?”

  The contempt in his eyes was almost self-condemnation. “The laws of primogeniture have found me an unwelcome recipient of an inheritance I was never expecting.”

  Brianna slowly untangled herself from his arms. Mr. Cross had been telling her the truth about everything. Michael would be required to marry some bluestocking bride. He’d become a peer, a peculiar insular sect of individuals that lived behind the grand walls of their estates—a man most people would never see again in his original form. At least, not the man he was now. The thought pierced her.

  “You have a lot of gifts, Michael. I think you will make a fine duke.”

  “Listen to me.” He rasped his thumbs across her cheeks. “I’m not leaving tomorrow.”

  He might as well be leaving in the next hour as far as she was concerned. She pushed his hands away. “You’re a wonderful man, Michael.” He was wonderful. Really, really wonderful, with beautiful eyes, a roguish tilt to his mouth, and she liked him a lot, maybe even fantasized about falling in love with him once too often. “But there’s nothing else between us.”

  “Really?” He laughed at her, which made her eyes narrow. “It would take me about thirty seconds to prove you wrong on that score.”

  “Aren’t you the confident one, your Grace?”

  She looked down at the ruined photographs on the floor and blindly knelt to pick them up. She stood and held them to her chest. “And I’m sure that any of a thousand women would be happy to help fulfill your obligations.”

  “A thousand.” It was a statement fraught with amusement.

  “There must be a pool of eager damsels for your choosing.”

  “Brianna—”

  “Maybe you’ll even remember me the next time I march on parliament. Put a good word in for me if I get thrown into the gaol.”

  He observed her with infuriating calm. “From the moment you realized I was leaving Cairo you’ve been completely sure only about one thing: that there is something worth exploring between us. There has been from the moment you slept with me. Maybe I’ve felt it, too, Brianna.”

  Maybe he just didn’t understand what he was doing to her.

  A knock sounded on the door. Michael backed a step and opened it. With relief, Brianna recognized the secretary’s voice.

  “The corridor is clean,” Michael said to her, and handed her the satchel. It stank of coffee and wet horse. “Halid will take you home.”

  “That’s not necessary. The Public Works building is on the next block. I’ll send my horse home with the groom and leave with Christopher.” She stepped past him.

  Michael’s hand went to the door frame and blocked her exit. The muscles in his arm pushed against the sleeve of his uniform. “Then Halid will take you to your brother.”

  Brianna was too fatigued and cold to argue,

  “If that’s what you want.”

  His thumb slid along the line of her jaw, the intensity in his eyes stunning her. “That’s partly what I want,” he said, and k
issed her.

  Warm and impossibly near, he slipped the tip of his tongue between her lips, opening his mouth over hers; then he sifted his fingers through her hair to pull her against him, and her senses were swallowed by the taste, touch, and scent of him. She didn’t even brace herself, only tangled her free hand in his thick hair, stood on her toes and let him tongue-kiss her.

  “Thirty seconds, amîri.” His uneven breath hot against her lips, he smiled down at her, turned and walked away.

  She narrowed her eyes at his back.

  The only consolation to her bruised stamina was that it seemed he had lasted no longer than she did. But what started out as a scathing castigation of her weakness against him had cooled by the time Brianna reached her brother’s office. All she had left to cling to, she thought as she sat in the anteroom, were her ruined photographs.

  She tried not to get physically ill as she unglued the top few. She might be able to salvage some. Filled with disgust, she stuffed them back in her satchel so Christopher couldn’t see.

  Thankfully, the gargoyle that had taken over her body earlier had reclaimed its perch on some nether ledge in her brain. She didn’t want to think about Michael. He would be out of her life forever, and she would still be here to pick up the pieces of their affair, which hadn’t gone at all as she’d expected. Michael had controlled everything from the beginning, even inadvertently down to the timing of his departure.

  Yet, as she remembered her confrontation with Omar, Brianna was glad for the forces that would take Michael away from this place. Take him away before he met the same fate as Colonel Baker or Captain Pritchards. Hadn’t she already witnessed how quickly people could perish?

  Gradually, she became aware of the leather cushion at her back, the sound of rain on glass. The stares of others. She imagined that she looked like a drowned cat. Smiling inanely at their rudeness, she fluffed her wrinkled skirt. “I forgot my parasol,” she primly informed them.

  Where was Christopher anyway? She had no intention of waiting until he saw everyone present. Brianna stood, she walked to the wall and, clasping her hands behind her, casually studied the photographic images. She smiled when she saw some of her own. Then her eyes widened as she realized that the wall was covered with her work. Much of it she’d taken in England: Cremorne Gardens, pictures of parliament from the Victoria embankment, Soho, and even Spittlefields.

  She’d never been in Christopher’s office before. She had no idea that he had so many of her photographs.

  There were others as well. A picture of the khedive’s palace in Cairo. Her heart kicked unpleasantly against her ribs when she recognized Omar standing next to the khedive, his hand extended to Christopher in a gesture of friendship. Leaning nearer, her gaze focused on the youthful face of the young man standing beside Omar. Everything inside her froze.

  Brianna looked at the date emblazoned in brass beneath the mounted photograph. Two years ago.

  She returned to her satchel and, prying the photographs apart, sought the one of Selim. Her hands trembled. Black and gray streaks from a stone tower smeared his image. She no longer had the plate. The sandstorm on the way back to Cairo had destroyed everything that survived the attack on the caravan.

  “Brianna?”

  Christopher’s voice spun her around. His dark eyebrows raised, he looked at her over the spectacles on his nose, his gaze taking in her state of disrepair. “I was just told that you were here.”

  “Who is that young man?” She pointed to the photograph on the wall.

  Christopher regarded the photograph impassively before removing his glasses and sliding them into his pocket. “Omar’s youngest son.”

  “He was on the caravan, Christopher,” she whispered, aware that the room had grown silent. “I swear that is Selim.”

  “Brianna”—her brother took her arm and escorted her out of the anteroom—“you couldn’t have seen him.”

  “But I did.”

  “He’s been at school in England for the past two years. He’s attending Oxford.” She heard her brother’s statement as if from a distance, and looked up to see that he’d brought her into his office and had shut the door. “The caravan attacks began last year, Brea. Whoever you saw can’t have been him.”

  She rubbed her temple. Maybe she was mistaken, she silently conceded. The photograph on the wall wasn’t completely in focus.

  “You can’t just make an accusation like that without solid proof, Brea. Even with solid proof, you’d have to be damn sure of your facts.”

  “I know. I know.” She scraped her fingers through her tangled hair. She should just lie down in traffic. Get everything over with now. “I’ve had a really bad day, Christopher.” She pulled back her shoulders. “Do you think we can go home?”

  “What are you doing here anyway?”

  “I was escorted here by the minister of war’s henchman.”

  Christopher’s brow arched in amusement. “There is no minister of war, Brea.” He returned to his desk and, reapplying his spectacles, returned to the document on the desk. “I won’t be that much longer.”

  “Did you know Major Fallon is leaving Egypt?”

  Christopher raised his gaze. “I know. He told me this morning.”

  “Truly, Christopher.” Brianna crossed her arms and laughed. The stylish room had curved cast-iron window frames and a white-marble chimney piece in the Egyptian flavor, designed by the office’s previous occupant to celebrate Nelson’s victory in the Battle of the Nile. It was a silly room, Brianna thought as her mind desperately sought a distraction. “I suppose everyone in Cairo knows about his inheritance?”

  Even Charles Cross, who worked at the museum.

  Charles Cross, who’d quoted Dickens and, until today, had never made her feel uneasy.

  “You had a visitor today, Sitt.”

  Abdul met Brianna with a handful of invitations and mail the next evening as she walked into the house, carrying a small package that she’d picked up at the apothecary that afternoon.

  Brianna had started up the staircase before she realized Abdul had spoken. “Who?”

  “Major Fallon, Sitt. He said that you had invited him to lunch.”

  Brianna looked past Abdul to the tall clock. “I completely forgot.”

  No she hadn’t. He’d specifically implied that he wasn’t interested in dining with her family.

  “He stayed most of the afternoon. He and Lady Alexandra had a pleasant chat. He left shortly before Mr. Cross arrived.”

  Brianna retraced her steps down the stairs. “Mr. Cross?”

  “Her ladyship was most gracious, Sitt,” Abdul called after her.

  Brianna found Alex in the parlor installed on a red velvet Roman chaise lounge, a blanket wrapped around her lap. She wore an emerald dressing gown. A pair of ornate brass lamps cast light over the photographs in her hand. “Brea…” She looked up as Brianna stepped in the doorway. Her sun-streaked hair had been tightly wound in a coronet around her head and her color had returned. She looked beautiful. “Won’t you sit down?”

  Brianna’s gaze fell on the photographs strewn about the thick Persian carpet, clearly laid out by category, including those that had been ruined yesterday. “I found these in your bedroom,” Alex said. “Why didn’t you tell me that you had all of these? They’re wonderful.”

  “They’re ruined.” Brianna walked to the edge of the chaise lounge.

  “Not all, Brea.” Alex flipped through the dozen in her hand. “These are perfect. Mr. Cross was right. He said that you had done a quality job. He’d wanted to see more of your pictures. Imagine my surprise when I had no idea what he was talking about.”

  Alarmed, Brianna looked past Alex into the corridor. “Did you take him into my laboratory?”

  Alex laid the photographs on her lap. “I went to your chambers after he left. May I please keep these?”

  “Do you really like them?”

  “What do you think I’m trying to tell you?” She laughed. “You’ve helped
me decide that if I don’t at least attempt to finish this project, I will have done us both a grave disservice. Besides, I have to do something with my time or I shall go mad alone here all day.”

  “My lady?”

  Alex folded her arms over the photographs and looked up.

  “Did everything go all right today?”

  Her expression softened. “Major Fallon wished for me to tell you that he will be leaving Cairo next Saturday for Alexandria.”

  Brianna looked away. “I suppose you also know who he is.”

  “I do now.” Alex sighed. “You’ve been through a lot these past months. It’s understandable that you would feel something for him, Brea.”

  “He doesn’t deserve to leave here in disgrace,” Brianna whispered.

  “I know.”

  All Brianna could do was nod as she set her packet beside the lamp. “I brought you tea,” she said. “It should help with your nausea.”

  Her skirts whispered as she climbed the curved stairway.

  Reaching her room, Brianna shut the door. Gracie had already lit the lamps. She walked across her room and opened the glass doors. The cacophony of birdsong had faded with the last of the daylight.

  Nothing had been the same since she’d returned from the desert. Having an affair had not been anything like she’d thought it would be. Moving onto the balcony, she searched for a light in Michael’s apartment.

  “Mum.” Gracie was suddenly beside her, testing her forehead. “You look flushed.”

  “I’m fine, Gracie.” Brianna’s voice was tired.

  “A fever is quick to come upon a body in this clime, mum.”

  With the instincts of one who had been a nurse her whole life, Gracie set to the task of putting Brianna to bed.

  Suddenly she didn’t care. Her maid fed her warm milk with her dinner and a miracle elixir that cured everything from toothaches to rheumatism. Then she found herself tucked in bed, buried in covers as she watched Gracie turned out the lamps. “Thank you, Gracie,” Brianna quietly said. “At least I’m assured that you’ve cured me of any ailment before I’m felled.”

  “The chlorodyne drops will help you sleep, dear.” The last lamp beside the door went out, descending the room into darkness. “I’ll see that no one disturbs you. Good night, mum.”