Read Online Mr Impossible by Loretta Chase - Free Book Online Page B

top until she was giddy and
giggling… then pick her up…

    But he couldn’t.
Not yet. If he moved too quickly and put his mouth or hands where she
thought they didn’t belong, she’d send him back to Salt.
Rupert would end up toiling in the desert, supervising natives
shifting sand and rocks. Lord Noxious would have the fun of a search
with her and fights with unsavory, very likely French, persons, while
Rupert died of boredom.

    Picturing Noxious
with his hands on her waist promptly squelched Rupert’s
lascivious urges.

    He turned a
skeptical eye upon the cringing servants. He made his expression
stern, and adopting the same disdainful tones his father used on such
occasions, said, “I should like to know, madam, what good you
expect this lot to do, except give you a prime view of their backs
the instant trouble threatens.”

    “ We cannot
travel unaccompanied,” she said. “Not only is it not
respectable, it is not at all safe. And we haven’t time to
apply to the local sheik for replacements.”

    If they had to
apply to a sheik for servants, it would take forever. While Rupert
understood almost nothing of Arabic, he knew that phrases such as
“make haste” or “we must not lose a minute”
or “I mean now ” were not in the local lexicon.

    In short, he must
make do with the material at hand.

    “ Leena,”
he said, “please be so good as to tell these fellows that there
will be no running away today. Tell them that no matter what terrible
thing threatens, it will not be half so terrible as what I will do to
them if they desert their mistress.” He provided a brief, vivid
description of what he would do to them, emphasizing with gestures.

    Leena rapidly
translated.

    “ For all the
good it will do,” Rupert said, half to himself. “I should
have to catch them first, shouldn’t I?”

    “ They won’t
run away,” Mrs. Pembroke said.

    He turned back to
her, and his stern demeanor crumbled before the turban and the
strange, heart-shaped face that didn’t belong under it.

    “ Won’t
they?” he said, smiling helplessly.

    “ Rumors have
spread that you are a genie,” she said. “Wadid by now has
told them what you did to him yesterday, and the feat has been
exaggerated beyond all recognition.”

    “ Good,”
Rupert said. “That saves me deciding which of them to use for
the demonstration.”

     

     

    A WHILE LATER,
fists on his hips, the long, muscled legs straddling a gap between
masses of broken stone blocks, the man who’d brought Daphne to
Giza without a murmur of objection stood looking up at Chephren’s
pyramid.

    By swift degrees,
Mr. Carsington had discarded his gloves, hat, neckcloth, and coat.
Now barely dressed and glowing in the sun’s glare, he seemed a
bronze colossus.

    Daphne was only
dimly aware of the pyramid, one of the world’s wonders. All she
could see was the man, and far too much of him: the shirt taut across
the broad shoulders, the thin fabric almost transparent in the harsh
light, revealing the contours of muscular arms and back.

    It was some comfort
to know she wasn’t the only one whose gaze he drew. Her
servants cast him frequent, wary glances. The men who loitered about
the pyramids to help visitors ascend to the top or penetrate its
interior also watched him from a respectful distance.

    And she might as
well have been his shadow. The guides hardly noticed her or seemed to
care who or what she was.

    They all felt it:
the magnetism of that tall figure, the danger crackling in the air
about him. All understood that an unpredictable, uncontrollable force
had come among them.

    Daphne had felt it
even before she could see him, when he’d been only a shadowy
figure in the dungeon’s gloom.

    “ It’s
big,” he said at last.

    “ Yes, it is,”
she said. “I suppose you want to climb it.” Men could not
resist.

    “ Not at the
moment,” he said. “If I climb to the top, it’ll
only be a prodigious long stairway. No, for the present I like