Forty-Five
B eyond the low ridge that bordered the tents, the scrubby Bedouin grazing lands softened into gently rolling dunes. The sand sifted around Ellie’s boots as she walked into the dark silence of the desert. She stopped once she was safely out of view of the camp.
The sky sprawled around her, the great bowl of it arching from horizon to horizon, pierced by the countless silver pinpricks of a wild array of stars. The sheer immensity dizzied her. She gazed up at the firmament, feeling lost and overwhelmed—like a feather caught in a soaring, timeless symphony of cause and effect, past and present… and perhaps something more. Something that moved in and around those stars like the beating of great, silent wings.
There was no sound. The sand under her boots swallowed any scrape of sole or rattling pebble that might otherwise give someone away, and yet Ellie knew with a shiver that she was no longer alone. That Adam Bates was there.
She turned to face him. Between the stars and the narrow horn of the moon, she could make out every detail of his bruised, beautiful face and his lanky warrior’s form.
“Not sure how we pulled it off,” Adam said with a careful lightness. “But it looks like we saved the world again.”
“And we didn’t have to destroy an entire site to do it,” Ellie replied with a pang of old guilt. “Only bury one for the foreseeable future.”
“Sounds like we’re getting better at this,” Adam quipped.
His tone was easy, but the seriousness of his gaze spoke of something deeper and more complicated.
He suspected why she had called him out here. Now that the immediate danger of the fate of the staff had been resolved, all the old questions about their future together were bound to come roaring back to the surface. The lines of Adam’s bruised, beard-shadowed face were uncharacteristically solemn.
Ellie’s throat tightened. She opened her mouth to speak, but he raised a hand—a pleading look in his eyes.
“Let me start—please,” he added meaningfully. “I just… want to get this out before it slips out of my brain.”
Ellie bit back her own words, recognizing the tight desperation in his tone.
“I’ve been thinking…” Adam began. “About what happened on that ledge. About how I didn’t even have to think to know that I was gonna put myself in the line of fire if it meant that you had a chance of getting out of there alive. I’d make the same choice again in a heartbeat, even though I know you’d be rightfully furious with me for doing it. And I’ve got to ask myself what that means, exactly.”
His lip was still scabbed from where it had been split. His eyes were tired—but his shoulders were straight, and there was nothing uncertain in the look he gave her.
“My dad never would’ve made a choice like that,” Adam went on. “He’d rattle off a hundred reasons why it wouldn’t make any sense—which’d all more or less amount to why saving his own ass was better for the greater good. George Bates has never cared about anything enough to give up his life for it. And I’m pretty damned sure he never will.”
He stepped closer to her, his voice softening as he gazed down at her through the twilight. “I told you I didn’t want you to be anybody other than who you are. But… it occurs to me I’ve been pushing exactly the opposite of that on myself.”
He lifted a tentative hand to her face, gently brushing a lock of hair back from her cheek. The gesture ached with a quiet tenderness.
“Maybe I don’t know where all of this is going to go,” he said, the words tight with feeling. “But I know that I’m in love with you. And even though I’m still not sure entirely why, I think you might actually love me too—just as the big, smelly, reckless lout that I am.”
A storm rose inside Ellie’s chest, a tumult like an untamed sea. It was too big for words—too wild, too immense, like trying to stuff a symphony into a music box.
She raised her hand and pressed it gently to the broad plane of Adam’s chest instead, just over his heart. Her palm lay there softly, where she could feel the deep beat of his pulse through his shirt.
“Not reckless,” she finally said when she could speak again, the words rough with feeling. “Quick-thinking. Selfless. Brave. ”
“I haven’t been feeling very brave lately,” Adam admitted.
Still ravaged by the emotions swelling through her, Ellie raised her other hand to his beard-roughened face.
“We have been tying ourselves into knots over what our future ought to look like,” she said, meeting his gaze. “But how could we possibly know? I want time . Time for us to better understand what each of us wants. What we fear. What we need. But I do know that I want us to have a future together—desperately, with every bone in my body.” Her eyes narrowed, her voice sparking with a new ferocity. “And that I am never going to walk away from this, or you, no matter how hard it gets. Not without a monster of a fight. Because there is no one else in this world that I want like I want you—just you. Exactly as you are.”
His eyes were damp, his face drawn into lines of aching vulnerability.
“Ellie…” he began.
She raised her hand to his lips, stopping his next words with her fingertips.
“Just you,” she repeated forcefully as her own tears slipped down her cheeks. “Exactly as you are. Will you give me that, Adam Bates?”
He caught her hand, the gesture slow and careful. He took it from his lips, wrapping his warm, calloused fingers around it instead.
“Yeah,” he said, the word raw and uneven as it slipped from his throat. “Yes, Ellie.”
She brushed the moisture from her face and raised her chin. “Good,” she declared firmly.
He pulled her closer, slowly and tenderly. His lips brushed her hair, and then his head came to rest against her own.
She felt the uneven hitch of his breath through the circle of her arms.
“It doesn’t matter if we don’t know yet what it will look like,” she added pointedly. “We will figure it out together—in our own way. Not your father’s way or the way the rest of the world tells us.”
Something subtle shifted in Adam’s posture as she held him. It sparked a tingling awareness in her nerves, the first whispering intimations of a new heat.
“Been thinking about that too, as it happens,” Adam said, the words deceptively casual.
“You have?” Ellie pulled back to look at him, though the warmth and pressure of his hands on her waist still sent little shivering butterflies through her skin.
“About touching you,” Adam clarified, the words rich with a dark warmth.
Ellie swallowed thickly. “Oh?”
“Seems to me there’s two ways I could go about looking at that.” His hand began to move, fingertips tracing delicately up the line of her back. “There’s my father’s way—which says it’s a load of selfish impulse with no thought to the consequences.”
“I’ve told you—” Ellie began.
Adam stopped her with a finger to her lips. He traced it slowly down, catching the sensitive tissue along the rough surface of his skin.
“And there’s the other way,” he continued, softly relentless, gazing down at her with a cobalt heat. “The way that says I’m not taking advantage of you or lining you up for hurt—but giving you the kind of worship you deserve without demanding you change yourself in order to get it.”
The word— worship —shivered over her like another kind of touch, and Ellie’s breath grew a little shorter.
“Because that’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it?” Adam went on, moving his hand to the line of her jaw, then gliding it back to slide into the thick waves of her hair. “It’s that, or I’m just waiting for you to come around on this whole marriage thing—or settling for that goddamned ‘colleagues’ nonsense you tossed at me back in Luxor.”
He pulled her in with a quick flex of his arm and pressed Ellie against the lean, dangerous line of his body from chest to toes. His eyes glittered with a dangerous new intensity.
“I want you in my life, Princess—any damned way I can have you,” he said, the words low as a growl. “But I’d be lying to us both if I pretended I didn’t want that to include feeling you come apart in my arms.”
Ellie’s mouth was dry. Desire sparked through her, electrifying her skin. The ache for him came roaring back, dizzying her with the sheer force of her need.
“Adam…” The word was a plea.
He tugged irresistibly at the back of her hair, then softened, a flash of the old hurt and vulnerability mixing with the heat in his look.
“I’m not done yet.” The words sounded like both a warning and a plea. He closed his eyes, drawing deep. When he opened them again, Ellie saw a new kind of naked honesty in his expression. “You’ve told me how marriage is one kind of tyranny. But my father’s voice in my head—George Bates sitting up there, telling me I’m not good enough and never will be… That’s another. Even if it’s personal and not a whole damned institution. He doesn’t deserve to have that kind of power over us.”
“Over you,” Ellie corrected him, touching his face.
The old hurt tightened his expression, and he pulled her to his chest. Ellie let her head fall against his shoulder, holding him in return.
“We came pretty close to dying out there,” Adam said roughly. “More than once. And that’s got a way of putting things into perspective.” He brushed a hand down the side of her face, turning her chin up to meet his eyes again. “I can’t say how easy it’s going to be for me to shake it off. I spent a lot of years hearing those words—reckless and irresponsible. But if I’m going to be the kind of man you deserve, then I need to stop being afraid of who I am.”
“Who you are…” Ellie said, framing his face with her hands, “is everything that I could possibly want.”
The heat in his gaze intensified. His fingers trailed along her spine once more—this time triggering a cascade of shivers across her skin. “Guess that means I have to get used to being a bit of a cad.”
The words carried an air of wicked promise.
“How much of a cad, exactly?” Ellie pushed back hopefully.
Adam raised an eyebrow.
Ellie hurried onward. “It is only that Constance says her father has this very interesting book hidden in the bottom of his wardrobe that might offer certain… er, creative workarounds to the sort of practical considerations faced by a couple who choose to engage in extramarital activities.”
“You talking about what I think you’re talking about?” Adam returned carefully.
“I believe so?” Ellie hedged in reply.
Adam’s hand rose to thread into her hair again, sparking an electric awareness that coursed through her from her fingertips to her toes. “I think maybe I could manage being that kind of cad.”
“You could?” Ellie brightened.
“Worth a few tries.” Adam dropped his lips to her throat. “But we’re not going to need that book.”
“We won’t?” Ellie echoed a little numbly, her brain mostly subsumed by the exquisite sensation of Adam’s beard-roughed cheek lightly scraping against her jaw.
“Nope,” he confirmed easily as his mouth trailed lower—and his hands traveled up. “Because it turns out…” His lips trailed over her collarbone. “That I am very good…” His hand slid up to her breast, gliding across the curve through the fabric of her corset. “At improvising.”
“Thank God for that!” Ellie said fervently—and let him carry her down to the sand.