The Passion of Cleopatra (Ramses the Damned 2)

She used her strength now in a focused way to throw him across the bed. She straddled him, tore his shirt from him with enough force to pop the buttons. And when she felt his thickness under her, saw the fear in his eyes replaced by desire, felt his lust for her even as she unleashed the more beastly side of her resurrected being, the terror receded, the taste of his lips a balm as sweet as nectar.

And once they were naked and enmeshed, the thickness of him buried inside her, he spoke the words she craved and he spoke them without hesitation or fear.

"Always," he whispered. "Always my queen."

13

London

"And when I told her that I have the title of a lord and none of the money to go with it, she responded in the strangest way, Julie," Alex Savarell said. " 'I shall acquire the wealth, my lord, that's nothing. Not when one is invulnerable.' What on earth do you think she meant by that?"

"Alex, you mustn't torture yourself like this," Julie answered.

"It isn't torture. Truly. She was just so odd, so strangely confident. I can't help but wonder if she was invulnerable in some way. But if that were so, she would have survived that terrible wreck and all those flames."

"They were ravings of a madwoman, darling," Julie said. "That's all. Any attempt to decipher them is sure to drive you mad as well."

The only son of the Earl of Rutherford, the man Julie Stratford had once been expected to marry, brought his teacup to his lips with a quick darting movement that did little to conceal his shaky grip.

Afternoon tea at Claridge's hotel wasn't the place for raised voices, but if she fought too valiantly to rid Alex of his obsession with the mysterious woman who had swept him off his feet in Cairo, raised voices would most certainly be the result. But afternoon tea at Claridge's wasn't the place for deception either, and what other word could she apply to her current endeavor?

It was one thing to have never truly loved Alex; it was one thing to have never desired his hand in marriage--these facts had been readily apparent to all who knew her, even the relatives who had plotted to marry them off to each other for purely financial reasons. Even, it pained her to admit, to Alex himself.

But her despairing former suitor remained the only member of their traveling party still wholly ignorant of all that had taken place during their trip

to Egypt.

Seeing Alex tortured by this combination of ignorance and grief was almost more than Julie could bear. And his upset seemed terribly out of place amidst the white tablecloths that seemed to float like clouds above the red carpeting, beneath the gold-painted arches in the ceiling overhead. And all the other guests, speaking in a polite, low murmur while they occasionally glanced over at the pretty young shipping heiress who was dressed not in a traditional tea gown but a man's suit with a white silk vest and a loosely knotted scarf at her pale throat.

She had arranged to meet him the day after she and Ramses returned to London. And she had not expected the meeting to be entirely pleasant.

Brittle, at best. Cold, at worse.

But it was turning out to be neither of those things. Indeed, she was astonished by the degree to which Alex remained utterly obsessed with the woman who had romanced him in Cairo, and the extent to which that obsession had transformed him into a different man altogether. Vulnerable and anxiety ridden, but also more vibrant and alive than she had ever seen him.

Her only hope was to let him tire himself with talk of her. All the while, the truth was as close to her lips as it had ever been.

She was a monster, Alex, and you were but a pawn in her scheme to punish Ramses, her creator. A terrible pawn. That's all. The ticket to the opera she offered you was stolen from a corpse. And while you were waiting for her to return to her seat, she crept off to the powder room, where she intended to break my neck so she could lay my broken body at Ramses' feet. It was all revenge, you see. Revenge for the fact that Ramses had refused to give her lover the elixir thousands of years before.

But the risk in sharing these things was far too great.

"Your glasses are drawing some notice," Alex said, startling her back to the present.

"Are they?" she asked. "The doctor has recommended them," she said.

"The doctor or Mr. Ramsey? He's full of ancient remedies, that one. Or at the least talk of them. In the last letter from my father, he wrote of some old tonic Ramsey gave him that completely healed the trouble in his leg."

It has healed far more than his bad leg, my darling.

Perhaps a small revelation would ease her guilty conscience.

When she removed the glasses, when Alex stared into her eyes turned dazzlingly blue by the elixir's transformative power, wonder filled his expression. The grief-stricken man was replaced by a young man who seemed to be witnessing the sunrise from a mountaintop for the first time.

"My word," he whispered.

"It's quite startling, I know," she said.

"And the cause?"