Mr. Impossible (The Dressmakers 2)

He was…very much alive.

She was acutely aware of the rise and fall of his chest, of his breath on her face, and of his dark gaze focused on her head. And of his hands, those capable hands…so reassuring during the long, dark journey through the pyramid. And so dangerous, making her want more, making her impatient…to be touched.

Her heart began to race.

She swatted his hands away. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll wear a shawl.”

She hurried out of the room and walked straight into Leena. Daphne glared at her and continued on. When they were out of earshot she said, “Have you been eavesdropping — listening at the door?”

“Yes,” Leena said, not in the least abashed. “But his voice is so low, all I hear is a growl. Is he making love to you?”

Daphne hurried on. “Certainly not.”

Leena followed. “But your hair is down.”

“I had a temper fit and threw off my turban,” Daphne said. “I need to change. I’m going to the suq.”

“Now?” Leena said, baffled.

They entered Daphne’s bedroom. She pulled a pair of women’s Turkish trousers out of the cupboard and found a shirt. She tore off the clothes she’d been wearing since yesterday and threw them on the floor. “Burn them,” she told the maid.

“I do not understand you,” Leena said. “Why do you not send me to shop while you stay and let him take off your clothes? What is the good of being a great lady if you do the work of servants and take no pleasure?”

Daphne went to the washbasin. While hastily washing, she reminded Leena that this was no time for pleasure. Not to mention that she was the daughter of an English clergyman! And the widow of another!

“Yes, but they are dead, and you are alive,” Leena said. She gave her mistress a towel. “And this man — y’ Allah! You saw how he lifted big Wadid straight off the floor.” She pressed her plump hands to her plumper bosom. “So strong. So handsome. I saw how you looked at him. You —”

“My brother is missing,” Daphne cut in tightly. “People have been murdered.”

“Yes, but you have not.” Leena helped her into the loose shirt. “I would like to be in a dark place with such a man. I would not hurry out.”

Leena’s moral principles left a great deal to be desired. But she was intelligent, multilingual, and highly efficient. While she lectured her mistress about missed opportunities — and life’s brevity and unpredictability — the maid’s hands worked as busily as her tongue.

In a very short time, Daphne returned to the qa’a, Cairo’s answer to an English drawing room or salon.

Mr. Carsington studied her for a good while, his dark gaze traveling slowly from the head veil Leena had pinned onto a cloth cap, down over the cloak that covered the thin shirt and most of the trousers.

His hands might as well have made the journey.

She could imagine the touch, practically feel it. Her skin came alive, and she could scarcely stand still.

He tipped his head one way, then the other. Then, “I give up,” he said. “Who are you this time?”

A mad, bad, wild girl.

No, a woman who knew how to subdue her worst impulses.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Everyone will stare at you. I’ll simply blend into the background.”

“I think not,” he said.

She looked down at herself, at the body she’d never understood and had been taught not to trust. “I was trying not to look foreign.”

“It’s more useful to look fetching,” he said. “To dazzle Anaz into revealing all his secrets.”

“It doesn’t matter how useful it would be,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

“Can you not?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I am not that sort of — that —” He regarded her steadily, his dark eyes unreadable. Her heart pumped overfast. Her fogged mind thickened. “I’m not like the women you’ve met in Society…and the other places,” she said. “I’m bookish.”

“Reading improves the mind,” he said, and there was no mockery in his eyes.

“But not the personality,” she said. “I’m not fascinating. I’m tactless and cross and stubborn.” And worse. What she must admit embarrassed her. The battle within, which she could never speak of aloud, shamed her more. She was beastly hot in consequence, and her face, she knew, was scarlet.

But Daphne was nothing if not persevering. “It isn’t at all the sort of thing men like,” she said. “We must find another way of wringing Mr. Anaz’s secrets from him.”

“Certainly,” he said. “I’ll wring him if you wish.” The oddly penetrating expression vanished as though it had never been, and he was once more the cheerful blockhead she’d first supposed him to be.

Her tension eased a very little bit.

She had grown so used to being ignored or, when she wasn’t ignored, earning some man’s disapproval or disappointment. She’d learnt how to steel herself against these reactions. They didn’t hurt her anymore.

With him she was all at sea, and at the mercy of the storm within.

She drew the veil over her face. “We’d better go,” she said. She turned to Leena, who stood in the doorway looking both disapproving and disappointed. “If anyone asks,” Daphne told her, “we’ve gone to buy a rug.”

VANNI ANAZ WAS a former mercenary of unknown origins — Armenian, Albanian, Syrian, Greek, no one could say for sure. But everyone knew he’d settled long ago in Egypt, where he conducted a profitable trade in rugs, drugs, and antiquities. His shop, Daphne told Mr. Carsington on the way, was more like those of Europe than the typical cupboard-sized dukkan of the main shopping quarters.

The typical shop, seven feet high at most and three or four feet wide, could hold no more than three customers at a time. They would sit and smoke and bargain half the day over a length of cloth or a copper pot. The shop floors stood two or three feet above street level, making them even with the stone bench built against the front for the inconvenience of passersby trying to squeeze through Cairo’s narrow streets. These stone or brick obstructions were called mastabas, Daphne explained, and it was upon them that business was transacted.

Anaz’s shop was more like a private house. One went inside to view the rugs, and negotiated with the merchant while seated upon the divan.

Not on view when they entered was Mr. Anaz’s collection of articles from tombs he and his agents had plundered.

“He is regarded as a reputable merchant,” Daphne whispered to Mr. Carsington while they waited for the rug dealer to appear. “But the word reputable is more elastic in Egypt than in England. I think it most disreputable to make up stories about hieroglyphic guides to a pharaoh’s treasure.”

“You said the papyrus contained royal symbols,” Mr. Carsington said. “A pharaoh is at least mentioned, I take it?”

She nodded. “A king’s name is enclosed in an oval called a cartouche. Miles’s papyrus had two. The simpler contained a circle, a scarab beetle, three short vertical lines, and a shallow bowl or basket.”

She frowned at the paneled door to the back rooms. “Is the man never coming? Dishonest persons might make off with half the shop while he dallies.”

“Maybe he has a woman back there,” Mr. Carsington said.

Daphne looked up at him. “Do you never think of anything else?”

“I try to put myself in the other fellow’s shoes,” he said. “I ask myself what I’d be doing. Or what I’d most like to be doing.”

He looked down straight and deep into her eyes, and down that midnight gaze took her, into deep waters. She couldn’t catch her breath or find her balance. Her mind went dark and her hand came up and she almost, almost caught hold of him.

A noise from the back of the shop broke the spell.

He looked away toward the sound. She did, too, sick with dismay. Lack of sleep was the trouble, she tried to tell herself. Fatigue sapped the will and the mental faculties. But a small, vicious, inner voice mocked her: Sleep wo

n’t cure what’s wrong with you.

“Mr. Anaz,” Mr. Carsington called out.

He did not shout, but his deep voice seemed to expand and intensify. Such a voice, Daphne thought, might have easily commanded armies or instantly silenced the drunken masses gathered in Rome’s Coliseum. It called her to the present and brought her sharply alert.

It did not bring the shopkeeper running, however.