As You Desire Read Online Free Page A

as she hated to, she was going to have to lie to her grandfather. Either that or spend the next year in her room.
Damn
. Now she owed Harry another debt.
    “I realize things are done differently among you young people nowadays,” her grandfather was saying. “I have tried to adjust. But still, it is important to keep up appearances. And since we have broached the subject of appearances, why are you togged out in that getup?” His gaze traveled over her bedraggled native garb and even more bedraggled self.
    She groped around for an acceptable lie. If her grandfather ever discovered her unchaperoned and absolutely forbidden trips to the Cairo
suqs
, she’d be locked in her room for a year.
    “Dress party,” Harry said.
    “Oh?” her grandfather asked.
    She narrowed her eyes on Harry. He smiled graciously. She could almost see him checking off another mark in his mental “Debts Desdemona owes Harry” list.
    “Dress party, Desdemona?”
    Desdemona nodded glumly.
    “Well, I also suggest that the next time you feel you must dress like a native, you find some cleangarb in which to do so. Gad, Desdemona, what can you have been thinking of? You smell like a camel.”
    “Goat’s milk. Fermented,” Harry supplied helpfully.
    The warmth in her cheeks turned into an inferno.
    “I’m going to bed,” she announced.
    “Jolly good plan. Let yourself out, Braxton.” Her grandfather wandered off toward the back of the house, once more engrossed in his book.
    Without waiting for Harry to leave, Desdemona climbed the stairs. A bath, a light meal, a bed, and then—she patted the thick packet at her waist—and then she would reread the shocking, titillating, downright indecent poems of “Nefertiti.”

C HAPTER T HREE

    If ever, my dear, I am gone,
   where will you offer your heated stalk?
If I cannot hold you close deep within my body,
   with whom will you know love’s satisfaction?
Would your fingers follow the line of another’s thighs,
   learn the curve of her breasts, and the rest?
It is all here, now love, for you
   quickly uncovered.
    Desdemona flipped over in her bed. The words kept her from sleep, teasing a deep warmth from her body. All evening she’d pored over the papyrus. Not an authentic papyrus, of course. Akhenaton and Nefertiti’s tombs had never been found.
    She could have offered the scroll’s creator a few pointers on counterfeiting age on papyrus, she thought. This was too clean, the vegetable dye too fresh looking, the whole too well preserved. The author’simaginative abilities, on the other hand, were another matter altogether.
    Not only were the verses erotic, sensual, and graphic, but they touched the heart as well as aroused the, er, spirit.
    At ten o’clock Desdemona had been interested, by midnight she was riveted, and by one A.M. she’d developed such heart palpitations only a brisk sponge bath in cold water had relieved her. She’d been lying in bed for the last hour, unable to get the verses out of her mind. They were nothing like the romantic books she kept hidden in her grandfather’s library and far more graphic than anything her own imagination had thus far come up with.
    When she’d been twelve, she and her parents had stayed with a professor of antiquity in Hamburg. He had a daughter Desdemona’s age, Maria. In her, Desdemona had found her first real girlfriend. Each day the two girls would excuse themselves to go study. In reality, they would lie on Maria’s great featherbed, staring out the window and trading daydreams. They made up stories that had nothing to do with philosophies or academics or politics, but instead recounted deeds noble and worthy by men, honest and brave, who loved their beautiful ladies far better than they loved wealth or fame or power.
    It was a harmless pleasure she nurtured during the seemingly endless rounds of symposiums and conferences her parents—and she—attended. She would take the dry, sterile little episodes of her life