But your embraces alone give life to my heart;
May Amun give me what I have found for all eternity.
—Papryus Harris 500, song 12
“Surely, you’re mistaken,” Rhys said.
But he was wrong.
“You think I don’t recognize my own mother?” Gillian whispered.
She wiped her eyes and ran an unsteady finger over the dear face in the photo. Her mother looked so...young. In her memories, Gillian was ever a small child, and Isobelle Haliday was tall and smiling and beautiful. Gillian had always looked up to her and run to her when she’d needed a safe pair of loving, adult arms.
Until they’d disappeared forever...
“Let me see,” Rhys demanded with a frown.
Gillian handed him the photo and pointed to the auburn-haired woman sitting on an iron bench next to an attractive Egyptian man. She didn’t look happy. Or unhappy. Her expression was strangely blank. Which was exactly how Rhys’s looked as he peered closer at the picture.
“Do you know that man?” Gillian asked. “The one sitting next to her?”
Rhys cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, yes. He was not a good person.”
Alarm sang through Gillian. Could this be the one who’d caused her mother to vanish all those years ago? A killer, or human trafficker? “Who is he? I must tell the police. Maybe they can—”
“The man is dead, Gillian,” Rhys interrupted. “He died shortly after this photo was taken.”
“Oh!” Her whole body sagged with bitter disappointment. She let out a long, slow breath. “Damn. I had hoped...”
The very hardest thing about her mother’s death was that they’d never found her body. For years, Gillian and her sisters had hoped and prayed she would come back, alive and well. With amnesia. Or some heroic story of escape from evil slave traders. Or even a bad excuse. Any excuse. They’d just wanted her to finally come back to them. Her father had hunted everywhere, tracked down every possible lead. Presumably the police had, too. But no trace of her had ever been found. After ten years, she’d been officially pronounced dead.
“What happened to the man?” Gillian persisted.
Rhys handed the photo back to her. “He was killed in a fight.”
She straightened. A fight? “Could the fight have had something to do with my mother? Maybe the people who killed him also—” She swallowed, unable to say the words.
“I very much doubt it,” Rhys said soothingly.
“Still, the police should follow up,” she insisted. “When did it happen?”
“A few weeks after the party. Flip it over. There should be a date.”
She turned over the photo and read the date. Frustrated, she shook her head. “No. It says 1992.”
“That sounds about right.”
“But...” Her heart suddenly seized in her chest. “It can’t be.”
He frowned. “Why not?”
“Rhys, she disappeared in 1990.”
His black eyes shot to hers, then back to the photo. His mouth thinned. As though...
My God. He knew something!
He did! She felt it as she saw the tension that swept over his body. The way he glared at the photo, hatred flaring in those expressive, all-seeing eyes.
“What is it?” she asked, jumping to her feet. She dug her fingers desperately into the fabric of his tunic. “Tell me, please!”
“Darling, calm yourself. I don’t know anything.”
For a fleeting instant, her mind snagged on the endearment. It was the second time he’d called her darling since their explosive and unexpected kiss—which he’d ended like a man who’d caught himself tonguing a serpent. A situation hardly meriting endearments between them.
She shook off the contradiction and focused on her mother. “But you suspect something.”
He gently pried her fingers from his shirt, holding them between his strong hands. “It was a long time ago, Gillian. I may be way off track.”
“Please, Rhys.” Her voice cracked with the plea. “If there’s any chance, at all...any light you can shed on what happened to her, you’ve got to tell me, and go to the police.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “If you want real answers, going to the authorities is the last thing you should do,” he informed her. “Anyway,” he said with a kiss to her forehead, “it’s probably just the wrong date written on the photo.”
He slipped his arms around her and she allowed herself to be pulled into the uneasy comfort of his embrace. Her eyes welled up again as she looked through the French doors onto the patio where her mother had once sat and enjoyed this very man’s hospitality.
Except...the date...
She glanced down at the photo again, which he’d set on the coffee table. Sure enough, Rhys was smiling into the camera, his arm around a beautiful flaxen-haired woman who was laughing up at him. Gillian ignored a spurt of jealousy at their intimacy, and forced herself to look closer at the Rhys in the photo. He didn’t appear a minute younger than he did now. Which was a physical impossibility. The man embracing her today would have been a teenager the year the photo was supposedly taken. Was it Rhys’s father? In which case—
Hope flared anew.
“It must have been your parents’s party,” she said. “Maybe they remember—”
“My parents are dead,” he cut in.
Sympathy tempered her disappointment. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
He released her and stepped away. “Don’t be. It was a long time ago.” He lifted a shoulder. “We never really got along, anyway.”
There was that chill in his voice again. She suspected there was a lot more to the story, but no way was she going to pry. Or ask why he had no interest in meeting his long-lost aristocratic family in England to make up for whatever bad blood ran through his relationship with his parents. There might be aunts and uncles, or cousins.
“Mine did,” she said wistfully. “Got along, that is. My whole family. It about killed my father when my mother disappeared. He was never the same. He pretended to throw himself into his scientific research, but he really spent the rest of his life searching for her here in Egypt. My sisters and I got closer because he was so...absent. In the end he took his own life.” She sighed.
“I’m so sorry,” Rhys said. His voice was now warm and soothing. He took another pace away from her. “There may be another way to find out something.” He sounded oddly reluctant to continue.
“Yes? What?” she prodded. Hope sparked in her heart.
“More like who. And you’re not going to like it.” He turned to regard her.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “If this person helps me find my mother, I’ll worship the ground they walk on. My sisters will, too.”
He gave her an odd smile. “That’s more accurate than you think. The thing is, the person I’m thinking of is a seer. A priestess in the service of the per netjer of Set-Sutekh.”
She blinked. Set-Sutekh? The ancient god? Something tickled her memory, just out of reach. “A seer? You mean—” She suddenly recalled the tomb inscriptions of Seth-Aziz and the god he served. Set-Sutekh. Good lord, were the rumors that the cult still existed true?
“Yes, Nephtys has very special abilities. She can see things in the past as well as the future. She is rarely wrong. She may be able to discern what happened to your mother, why she was with this man.”
Logic and reason warred within Gillian against the irrational wish that what he was saying could be possible. But it wasn’t. To think so would really be grasping at straws. Her hope vanished in a fit of logic, as quickly as it had sprung up. “I appreciate the thought,” she told him with another sigh. “But I don’t think so.”
He nodded. “I understand. Most westerners find it difficult to believe in such things. If you change your mind, let me know. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can find out through normal channels. But don’t get your hopes up. It really would take a miracle. Still, this is Egypt, and stranger things have happened. I’ll do my best.”
For some reason she believed him. And also felt instinctively that if anyone had the power to solve the mystery of her mother’s death once and for all, it was this incredible man.
She couldn’t help the smile that spread within her. He’d rescued her from a dead faint in the tomb, and now he’d offered to try and fix the worst anguish of her entire life. Her mysterious stranger was a true hero.
A lock of raven-black hair fell over the thick lashes of his sensuous bedroom eyes as he captured her gaze.
He was also sexy as hell.
The memory of his kiss washed over her, vivid, toe-curlingly arousing, drenching her with the desire to taste his lips again.
She took a deep breath. Didn’t a hero deserve a hero’s reward?
She took a step toward him. And another. He stood his ground, not moving, letting her come to him.
But his glittering eyes beckoned, urging her closer with an almost physical pull. The sensation intensified, brushing over the bare skin of her arms and shoulders, and lower, tingling over her chest and the exposed slopes of her breasts, making her shiver as though he really were touching her.
Suddenly, it wasn’t danger she felt emanating from him. It was pure, feral temptation. The powerful, chaotic draw of this enigmatic stranger was all but impossible to resist.
She swallowed, feeling deliciously dizzy and light-headed, as if she were tipsy. Oh, how she wanted to drown in the feeling, to float in the sensation of being kissed and caressed by the otherworldly energy flowing hotly over her skin!
His energy.
Her nipples spiraled hard, thrusting themselves against the thin, confining fabric of her camisole. She wanted it gone, to be naked to enjoy the rush of erotic sensations without interference.
“Take it off,” he ordered softly, as though she’d spoken her wicked thoughts aloud.
What was happening to her?
It was like the man had some kind of magical power over her. Over her will and her body.
But she didn’t care.
She pulled the camisole over her head and tossed it aside. Lowering her arms she watched his eyes darken to brown velvet, taking in the sight of her naked breasts.
She wanted him to kiss and caress her. Slide his hands over the curve of her hips. Brush his lips along the swell of her breasts. Probe the moist, secret place between her thighs.
“Come to me,” he said.
She felt the impact of his roughly spoken command cascade through her body, from the roots of her hair clear to her toes. Illicit excitement danced through her veins.
She closed the distance, coming next to him. She wanted him to pull her into his arms. She ached for his touch with a longing that took her breath away.
He reached out and undid the waist button of her cargo pants with a firm flick of his thumb. Then started to pull down the zipper. His eyes held hers, daring her to deny him.
She didn’t.
He slid the trousers over her hips, and then her panties. Dipped his chin so she’d step out of them. And then she was completely naked. She shivered with anticipation.
Never before had she wanted a man like this. This badly. This thoroughly. Willing to do anything he wanted, if only he’d take her. Fill her. Use his hard, powerful body to make her shatter in a million pieces.
“You are perfection,” he murmured, taking her in. “A goddess.”
But still he did not touch her.
“I want you,” she whispered shakily, stepping against him. Shivering at the male roughness of his tunic and the musky, masculine smell that filled her senses.
“I mustn’t,” he said, and her heart sank. “Not yet.”
“But...why?” She put her hand to his chest, felt the firm, defined muscles under his clothes. “Why bare my body if you don’t intend to use it?”
“There are things you don’t know. About me. About...”
“About what?”
His steady gaze held hers for a long moment. “Me.”
“I don’t care,” she admitted, weak with desire. She nestled against him. Brazen. Shameless. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.”
And in that moment, she truly believed it didn’t.
His hands finally found her, glided slowly down her nude torso, grasped her hips and pulled her flush against him. His arousal, thick and long, strained at her belly through the folds of his Bedouin pants.
He did want her.
He wound his hand in her hair and tugged back her head, exposing the column of her throat to the brush of his lips. He kept tugging as he put his mouth to her skin and licked wetly down, down, bending her over his free arm in an arc so her breasts were offered up to him in a sacrifice of hot, tingling flesh.
His lips closed over a nipple and he suckled hard, sending a stunning shockwave of pleasure and pain straight to her core. She cried out. Craving more.
More.
He switched to the other and she nearly came.
Her knees buckled and he caught her up. She surrendered herself to him with a moan.
“I can’t,” he said, his voice raw with some intense inner conflict, even as he swept her onto an armless settee and laid her down on it.
“Please,” she begged. Beside herself.
She groped at his clothes, trying to peel them away. To expose him to her as she was exposed to him. He evaded her efforts, instead grasping her knees and wrenching them apart.
She gasped. Utterly open. Vulnerable. Shivering with the desire to be taken by a man she’d met only an hour before. She didn’t care. She wanted this.
He dropped down between her legs. Her heart thundered. He slid his hands along the backs of her thighs, raising them, spreading her. She shook with sudden terror, and with lush expectation, quivering under his hands, waiting breathlessly.
Until finally, finally, he put his tongue to her, his lips, his mouth. To her sizzling need.
At his first fleeting touch, pleasure roared through her. She screamed at the tumultuous onslaught. And came apart under him.
It was the last thing she remembered.