The Lord's Inconvenient Vow

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.

‘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.