“I missed you,” she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. “Talking to you last night made me remember how it used to be between us. I missed our friendship.”
He turned to face her fully, his hand reaching out to touch her cheek gently. “I missed you, too, Eden. More than you know.” His eyes, normally guarded and distant, held a warmth that pulled her closer. The air between them hummed with an unspoken yearning, the connection they had once shared flaring to life again.
He leaned in slowly, giving her every chance to pull away. But she didn’t. She met him halfway, her lips parting as his descended, and a rush of longing swept through her. His mouth was warm, and his tongue tasted of brandy. It was everything she remembered and everything she had dreamed of all these years.
But as he pulled her closer, a jolt of cold reality brought her back. She was no longer just Eden. She was the widowed Lady Eden Pemberly, the benefactor of this expedition, and he was the man she had hired to lead it. Their roles were professional, their mission was to be taken seriously, and a romance betweenthem would jeopardize everything. It would make them a laughingstock in the eyes of people like Albright.
He’d already insinuated as much earlier, and she simply could not prove him right.
With a soft gasp, she broke the kiss, pushing gently against his chest. “Max,” she whispered, her voice filled with a mixture of desire and regret. “We can’t.”
He looked at her, his brows furrowed in confusion. “Eden, what—”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice trembling. “I’m so glad that you’re here with me. And there’s no one I’d trust more to lead me out into the desert. But I can’t help but think that this...” She gestured between them. “This attraction... It can’t end well. It will only distract us and give people like Albright more reason to think I’m nothing but a foolish woman.”
His eyes flared with some emotion she couldn’t name before they shuttered once again, the protective wall slamming back into place. “Of course,” he said woodenly. “We must care about what Sir Thaddeus thinks, mustn’t we?”
He turned and strode away, his shoulders rigid and his footsteps swallowed by the engine’s hum.
She wanted to call him back and knew she’d handled that all so badly, but the shock of that kiss had been overwhelming. The intimacy that had flared between them last night had been wonderful, but it had also terrified her. She couldn’t afford to fall in love with him again; she couldn’t afford to let herself believe he might still love her. Albright’s sneer had been a grim reminder of how easily the world could make a mockery out of her ambitions.
Lifting her chin, she glanced around, hoping no one had witnessed her moment of weakness. As much as Max’s kiss had rocked her soul, she couldn’t let it happen again.
Chapter Ten
Three days out of Malta, Max was awake long before dawn, restless in the unfamiliar silence of the Mediterranean at slack water. He climbed onto the open deck while most of the passengers slept, stood alone beneath the stretched canvas awning, and watched as the first bands of light rolled across the eastern horizon. Even at this hour, Alexandria announced itself by smell: a windblown blend of hot stone, spice, and the mineral tang of ancient harbors.
The city itself rose from the sea as a blurry silhouette—mosques and minarets, domes ringed with scaffolding, the distant plume of a foundry’s chimney. As theConstellationedged alongside the quay, Max could make out the bobbing lanterns of the dock men, their voices carrying in uneven bursts across the water. Already, lines of camel carts moved up and down the embankment, the animals stoic as boulders while their drivers spat and cursed in a dozen dialects.
This segment of the journey was over, and he was glad of it. The atmosphere between him and Eden had been deceptively calm since the evening when he’d kissed her, but the undercurrent of sexual tension was a constant, tiring distraction. She’d been right to pull away, of course, and he cursed himself for having been so foolish. He’d obviously misread the situation, which was unlike him, but then again, he’d never really knownwhat she was truly thinking. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought she cared more for him than she actually did.
From now on, he was determined to remain professional. But that hadn’t stopped him from dreaming about her every night, waking so hard it hurt. What would she do if she knew he stroked himself to even more fantasies of her? He’d been too long without a woman. Perhaps he should remedy that once he reached Cairo.
An hour later, he found Eden and her companion waiting in the vestibule near the forward stairs, luggage stacked with military precision at their feet. Mrs. Carlisle still looked pale and ill, but she’d made a fine effort to rally—her pale hair perfectly pinned, her face set against the indignities of foreign travel. Eden, on the other hand, was so excited that the air around her fairly vibrated, her green eyes scanning the portside scene with the greedy attention of someone who had been waiting an eternity to take their first steps on a foreign shore.
“Ready?” Max asked, motioning for the porter.
Eden’s reply was a nod, the corners of her mouth tilting in a smile of anticipation. He liked seeing her happy. He liked it too much. Frowning, he looked away.
The disembarkation was chaos. Passengers bottlenecked at the gangway, everyone jockeying to be first ashore. Max cut a path through the confusion, using both his elbows and the kind of authority that made lesser men step aside. He led Eden and Mrs. Carlisle down the narrow planks to the stone wharf, their progress watched by a mob of local porters and children, the latter already angling for coins or sweets.
Customs awaited them at the far end—a roped-off section of the quay beneath a striped awning, guarded by clerks in faded uniforms and a single British overseer, sunburned and already sweating through his shirt. Max handed over their documents,double-checking that Eden’s name and title were spelled correctly, then slipped a folded note to the officer in charge.
The man read it, grunted, and stamped their papers with a perfunctory thud. “Welcome to Egypt, my lady,” he said, not bothering to look up from his ledger.
