Sixteen
E llie followed a cat across a softly undulating desert. The empty landscape around her was painted in the orange, peach, and shadowy violet of dusk.
The cat’s gray coat was peppered with black spots like the pelt of a leopard, its body long and sleek with pointed ears. Ellie trudged in its wake as it padded lightly up the shifting sands of a low, sprawling dune.
She crested the rise, and the cat was gone. Instead, a woman stood in the deserted hollow. She was slight in stature but radiated a quiet strength in her simple white gown. Her umber skin glowed warmly in the golden light, framed by braids of thick black hair.
Ellie knew her. She knew the gold-flecked eyes that watched as she approached and the lightning bolt of a scar that marred the surface of her cheek.
She knew the sound of her voice. The blood that had stained her hands. The memory of the face of her lover.
Her name.
“Ixb’ahjun,” Ellie breathed out in surprise. “But I… I haven’t seen you since…”
She trailed off, her throat tightening with guilt at the memory of white pyramids falling with ancient roads and towering forests into a vast black pit.
One that she had opened.
“How are you here?” Ellie caught herself with a lurch of dismay. “ Are you here? Is this just a dream, or…”
The priestess from the other side of the world did not answer. She gazed at Ellie with a quiet knowing, then turned and led her across the desert.
They climbed another dune. On the far side, the flowing sand gave way to a flat, rocky plain.
A long, slender box sat isolated in the center of the open ground, covered in lines of hieroglyphs between accents of shimmering gold.
Ellie recognized it as a coffin.
Ixb’ahjun stopped at the head of it. She looked at Ellie as though waiting.
Ellie slowly approached. The coffin was a typical example of Egyptian New Kingdom royal funerary arts, with a stylized face framed by a striped nemes headdress. Carved arms were crossed over its breast, holding the crook and flail of Egypt.
A gust of wind tugged at Ellie’s skirts, tossing the loose tendrils of her hair. A storm was rising to the north, visible as a dark, obscure haze marring the line of the horizon. The first grains of blowing sand pecked at her skin with a subtle sting.
“She is waiting for you,” Ixb’ahjun declared from her place at the head of the beautiful coffin.
“Who?” Ellie demanded.
“The Stranger,” Ixb’ahjun replied. “The Lady of a Hundred Names.”
The breeze strengthened. The air around Ellie dulled with dust tossed in wild little swirls and eddies.
“But what can I possibly do for her?” Ellie pitched her voice to be heard over the wind as she raised up her arm to protect her eyes.
“Learn.” Ixb’ahjun’s fiery gaze was steady through the growing hiss of the storm. “ Remember. ”
Ellie opened her mouth to reply—and the desert swept in, blinding her in a maelstrom of burning sand.
?
She woke with a gasp to a thick black night, the weight of Leviticus resting heavily on her chest.
Constance snored softly in the other bed. Through the open windows of the hotel, Luxor was quiet. Ellie could hear only the trill of night birds and the distant, gentle creak of the wharves.
Her mind was troubled and restless, spinning with the remnants of unsettled dreams.
The light fabric of the curtains hung still, without so much as a ripple of a breeze. Constance let out a dreamy mumble.
“Never win… dastardly…” Constance rolled over, twisting in her sheets. “…Devilish kisses…”
Ellie was filled with the need to escape the room and feel open air on her skin. Throwing back the blankets, she swung her legs off the bed.
The concierge had left her and Constance a pair of the loose dark cloaks that Egyptian women typically wore to cover their regular clothes when they left home. Ellie slipped hers on over her galabeya and tiptoed out, pulling the door quietly shut behind her.
She found her way down to the veranda that ran along the front of the hotel, where she gave the twin statues of Sekhmet a commiserating glare. Leaving the stolen monuments behind, she moved to the end of the covered walkway, near to where the garden wall blocked her view of the black, still waters of the Nile.
She wished the wall was not there. She itched to go further, stealing up to the banks of the great river to sink her bare toes into its mud.
“Bad dreams?”
The voice rumbled softly from behind her. Ellie turned to see Adam leaning against the wall of the hotel, his lanky form swathed in shadows. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His feet were bare. The clothes he wore looked reasonably clean, which meant they had most likely been borrowed from someone else.
“What are you doing out here?” Her voice sounded hoarse—like a man in a desert who’d just spotted a drink of water.
Adam flashed her a slightly rueful smile and lifted his hand to reveal the orange ember of a cigar.
“Of course you are,” Ellie noted dryly. “And who is responsible for supplying you with those?”
“Hotel guy pointed me to the street with the shops,” Adam replied. “Probably because he could guess what the state of my socks would be in the morning without a swap. Might’ve happened to stumble across a tobacconist on my way to the socks.”
“Tripped right over it, I imagine.” Ellie’s gaze dropped to his exposed toes. “And where are the socks now?”
“My feet were hot.” Adam grinned at her.
The sight of that crooked, boyish smile sent a warm, heady feeling rushing through her. Ellie found herself exquisitely aware that they were alone together at an hour when they might remain uninterrupted and unobserved for quite some time. It invited notions that had her skin feeling hot despite the comfortable temperature of the night air—thoughts of how Adam’s lips would taste like cigar. Of what it would feel like for him to press her up against the wall of the hotel or make some wicked use of the sturdy wrought-iron table beside her.
The force of the desire rocked through her like lightning. She wanted to feel it. She wanted to feel him —every precious, infuriating inch of him.
“So I had a little… er, chat with your brother back in Saqqara,” Adam offered awkwardly.
His words hit like a splash of cold water, breaking the dangerous spell that had been weaving around her.
“Fiddlesticks,” Ellie blurted.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Adam countered.
“It wasn’t?” Ellie returned skeptically.
Adam shifted uncomfortably. “I mean… maybe it was a little bit that bad. But not… as bad as it could’ve been.” His expression firmed. “I did make it damned clear that none of this is your fault.”
A sense of exhaustion crept up around her like tendrils vining out from the paving stones.
“Adam, why are you using that word?” Ellie asked quietly.
“What word?” he pressed back, confused.
“Fault.”
He went still, the gold ember of the cigar continuing to burn in his hand. After a moment, he reached over to set it down on the ashtray that stood by the table. “I’m just trying to do the right thing, Ellie.”
“You said that before,” Ellie pointed out, even as the first silent wisps of fear tightened her throat. “But I don’t know what it means.”
Adam met her eyes from across the shadows of the veranda, the blue of his irises shaded to cobalt. “It means that only an irresponsible cad would keep kissing you when he hasn’t figured out where all of this is going.”
“You’re not an irresponsible cad,” Ellie pushed back, bewildered.
“I’ve sure as hell been acting like one.”
“Why?” she pressed firmly. “Because you kissed me? You’re not the only one who initiated those encounters, if I might remind you. Does that make me a cad as well?”
“Of course not!” Adam protested.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re…”
“A woman?” she prompted thinly.
“No!” he burst out, and then caught himself. “I mean—you are. But that’s not what I meant!”
“Then what did you mean?” Ellie’s voice was tinged with a hint of exasperation.
Adam’s expression hardened. “You aren’t just… cruising through your life without taking responsibility for things,” he bit out sharply.
Ellie stilled as she took in the stiffness of his form—the tension that infused every line of him.
“Is that what you think you’re doing?” she asked carefully.
“I didn’t think it before!” Adam shot back, throwing out his hand. “But now I’m kissing you in caves, or on boats, or balconies, and completely mortifying your brother—all without having the first goddamned idea how all of this is supposed to turn out. And I’m not sure what the hell else you’re supposed to call that!”
His voice had risen almost to a shout. Ellie held herself carefully still. Something about their conversation felt dangerous, like a vase poised on the very edge of a table.
“Would all of this be easier if I was open to the idea of marriage?”
“No,” Adam retorted shortly, and then hedged, his expression falling into one of helplessness. “Yes? I don’t know, Ellie!” He treaded across the stones of the veranda like a caged lion. “Maybe it would be—but that doesn’t mean it’s what I want! I told you—I like you the way you are. Maybe if you were more open to the idea of marriage, I wouldn’t have already fallen half in love with you!”
Ellie froze for a different reason. A sudden and dizzying warmth swept through her. “Do you really mean that?”
Adam looked over at her in confusion. “Which part?”
“The part about being half in love with me,” she returned with careful patience.
His look burned through the darkness that separated them. “Yeah.”
Ellie closed her eyes as the word washed over her. It felt as though her feet had rooted themselves to the ground—as though nothing in the world could have moved her if she didn’t want it to.
The night air stretched around her, warm and delicate with the sound of softly chirping insects and the fluttering of black-winged birds.
“But I’m not doing a very good job of it, Princess,” Adam continued softly, his tone aching with regret.
Ellie pinned him with a glare as a bolt of sudden fury shot through her. “Says who?”
“Huh?” Adam returned, frowning.
Ellie took a step toward him, closing the distance between them. She pushed a finger against the solid wall of his chest. “Who says you aren’t doing a good job of it? Whose voice are you hearing in your head, telling you that?”
Adam was quiet—but he didn’t flinch back as he gazed down at her through the shadows. “My father,” he admitted.
Ellie’s heart twisted painfully in her chest. She brushed a hand softly over the stubble on his cheek. “Adam, your father disowned you.”
“I’m aware,” he returned with a wry twist of his lips.
“No,” Ellie pushed back, shaking her head. “I mean—you don’t do that to someone you truly care about. To someone you love .” Her tone firmed as her resolve hardened. “I don’t know everything that passed between the two of you, but George Bates gave up the right to live in your head the day he signed those papers and cut you out of his life.”
“You don’t know what I did to push him to it,” Adam countered.
“Be yourself? Make your own choices in life? Refuse to become the person he thought you ought to be instead of who you really are? That’s not pushing, Adam! That’s… that’s what you have to do in order to survive! ” Ellie raised her other hand to frame his face gently with her palms, forcing him to meet her gaze. “Who would you be right now if you had buttoned up the real Adam Bates and done everything your father asked of you? Not the man who’s saved my life three times over! Who took a chance on me for a medallion and a fairy tale, and stuck by me even when I didn’t deserve it!”
Her voice was raw with feeling. The cool track of a tear slipped from the corner of her eye to glide down her cheek.
“I don’t need to see that other Adam Bates—that one your father would’ve made you into—to know that I would never have chosen him over the one that’s standing right in front of me,” she finished roughly.
Adam was very still. “The other me probably would’ve read more books,” he said quietly.
“So?” Ellie protested.
A warm, firm hand slipped around the small of her back, drawing her a half step closer.
“He wouldn’t have just run off from his job,” he continued. “Probably smell a little better.”
Ellie dashed a hand against the damp that stained her cheeks. “I like the way you smell.”
Adam raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That’s because you haven’t really got me at my worst yet. Lemme tell you, after two weeks in the bush with no—”
Ellie pushed up on her toes to kiss him. Her lips were tender, her hand steady as she slipped it up the nape of his neck to tangle in his hair. He met her with something softer than the fiery heat that had threatened to consume them every time they’d touched before.
She brushed her other hand over his cheek, where a drop of betraying moisture broke against his unshaven jaw.
He carefully pulled back to gaze down at her. For the first time, Ellie could see the fear and vulnerability written plain on his rugged features. “I don’t know if I’m good enough for you,” he confessed roughly.
Ellie gently pushed a lock of hair back from his forehead. “Don’t you dare try to decide that for me,” she declared softly.
He let his head fall forward until it came to rest against her own. His eyes closed. His arms were warm around her back as he held her. “Still don’t know quite where that leaves us.”
“Well, I had thought the obvious solution was for us to become colleagues,” Ellie began.
Adam lifted his head, frowning down at her. “Colleagues?”
“Extremely close, deeply committed colleagues!” Ellie protested. “After all, the Latin root of the word strongly suggests…” She trailed off, sensing that now was not the time for etymology. “At any rate, I have realized that solution fails to address all of the key aspects of our relationship… such as the fact that I can’t seem to stop wanting to touch you.”
Adam’s lip quirked into a slightly satisfied smirk. “Find me pretty touchable, huh?”
Ellie gave a wry smile of her own, but resisted entirely succumbing to Adam’s considerable charm until she had finished. “So I have been working on alternate options for addressing our situation. And it has not failed to occur to me that the most obvious of them is for me to… amend my stance on the question of marriage,” she finished awkwardly.
Adam’s expression grew serious once more. The lines of his face were shadowed by the gloom of the veranda. “Don’t, Ellie.”
“Don’t?” Ellie echoed uncertainly.
“I meant what I said,” Adam continued. “I don’t want you to change your mind. Fighting for what’s important to you is who you are. If I tried to shake that out of you for my convenience, I’d be no better than my dad.”
Ellie raised her hands to the beard-roughened sides of his face again as she infused her voice with as much certainty as she could muster. “You are nothing like your father.”
He gave her a sad smile. “How do you know? You’ve never met him.”
Ellie let her thumb caress the strong line of his cheek, her gaze softening. “I don’t have to.”
Adam moved in a little closer—near enough that she could feel the subtle heat of his body a breath from her own. “See, when you say things like that, it makes me want to lay you out on this patio table.”
The words sparked a vivid image of what it would feel like for Adam to do exactly that. Ellie’s cheeks heated. “Oh?”
“Which is why…” He lowered his head so that his breath tickled warmly against the line of her jaw. “…I’m going to have to insist that you get back to bed.”
Ellie fought back a frustrated sigh. The patio table sounded much more enticing than her room upstairs and the rest of Leviticus, but it would be deeply unfair of her to push Adam’s limits—not now that she understood what that might cost him far better than she had an hour before.
“Yes.” She mustered the willpower to take a deliberate step back from him. “I’ll do that.”
She lingered another moment, achingly conscious of the delicate breeze, the distant lap of the river—and the lean, powerful form of the man who stood before her, his midnight gaze like an electric current that cut through the darkness that divided them.
“Goodnight, Princess,” Adam said, his voice rich with heat, respect, and affection.
“Goodnight, my Adam Bates,” Ellie replied forcefully—and then slipped away.