As You Desire Read Online Free Page B

and build elaborate, wonderful stories around them.
    As she grew older she kept up the practice, securein the knowledge that being a romantic did not mean being a fool. What harm did it do to weave a little magic around mundane events? She knew the hero of her imagination didn’t exist. But if a few flowery words could help assuage the nameless longings …
    She moved restlessly beneath the sheets. Romantic she might be, fanciful she was not.
Longings, indeed
. If she kept up this nonsense, she’d convince herself Harry was simply misunderstood rather than a self-confessed, unrepentant, charming rogue. She forced her thoughts back to the matter of the papyrus.
    This wasn’t the sort of things one picked up on the sidewalk outside Shepheard’s Hotel. This was geared to a highly specific type of collector. A male collector.
    Men, Desdemona had learned, were fascinating, often self-delusional creatures. The same man who would not consider looking at, let alone owning, such steamy salaciousness when printed between the covers of a modern book jacket would pay ten times over for that same verse when written by an ancient hand on a decaying piece of pounded vegetable pulp. And that man would not thank anyone to point out that new ink on old weeds does not an antiquity make.
    A buyer was out there. She only needed to find him. Discreetly. She couldn’t very well stand about on the street corners hawking Egyptian pornographic verse. Such activity was bound to ruin one’schances in society. Or, at least, the society she’d join once they returned to London.
    The thought brought a frisson of discontent that she quelled. Hopelessly longing after something one could never have was pointless. Having learned the benefits of ruthless practicality, she’d long since decided that if her future lay in England, then England she would love.
    She couldn’t stay in Egypt without her grandfather, and her grandfather wanted—and deserved—to return to London. He was nearly sixty. He ought to have the opportunity to enjoy some well-deserved acclaim.
    She sighed and rolled her cheek into a pillow clad in Egyptian cotton so finely woven that it felt like brushed satin. She’d miss Egyptian cotton.
    She felt Harry’s mouth, a thing fashioned for ecstasy and sin, roam with wicked delicacy along her throat, trace the wing bone jut of her clavicle, and follow the incipient swell of her breast to the very …
    Desdemona woke in slow, delicious increments as a light, warming breeze soughed over her through the netting that surrounded her bed in the Egyptian style. Wonderful sensation, though a curious one since she distinctly recalled Magi closing the shutters last night. A slight noise, exactly like the cushioned fall of a foot, caught her attention. Without turning her head, she opened her eyes.
    Through the gauzy tenting she saw a man moving about with economical—and devious—grace. HarryBraxton was expertly and stealthily rifling through her drawers.
    There would, Desdemona thought, have been a time when Harry would have found something in her drawers. Not now. Five years had taught her everything she needed to know about Harry, and no amount of fermented goat’s milk could erase that cautionary knowledge.
    Her very first lesson had been never, ever, leave anything of value in an easily accessible location. Like a drawer. Well, she amended as he scowled and straightened, his hands on his hips as he looked around her room in exasperation, maybe not the
first
lesson. The first lesson had been that looks were deceiving.
    When she’d arrived in Egypt five years ago, she had promptly fallen madly, passionately, desperately in love with Harry. She’d just come to live in a strange land with a grandfather she’d never met. She’d been as credulous as only academic parents could make an only child. In short, staggeringly credulous. Harry Braxton, young, charming, and athletic, had seemed like the quintessential storybook hero.
    Now, with