Mr Impossible by Loretta Chase Page B

left a great deal to be desired. But she was intelligent,
multilingual, and highly efficient. While she lectured her mistress
about missed opportunities—and life’s brevity and
unpredictability— the maid’s hands worked as busily as
her tongue.

    In a very short
time, Daphne returned to the qa’a ,Cairo’s answer
to an English drawing room or salon.

    Mr. Carsington
studied her for a good while, his dark gaze traveling slowly from the
head veil Leena had pinned onto a cloth cap, down over the cloak that
covered the thin shirt and most of the trousers.

    His hands might as
well have made the journey.

    She could imagine
the touch, practically feel it. Her skin came alive, and she could
scarcely stand still.

    He tipped his head
one way, then the other. Then, “I give up,” he said. “Who
are you this time?”

    A mad, bad, wild
girl.

    No, a woman who
knew how to subdue her worst impulses.

    “ It doesn’t
matter,” she said. “Everyone will stare at you. I’ll
simply blend into the background.”

    “ I think
not,” he said.

    She looked down at
herself, at the body she’d never understood and had been taught
not to trust. “I was trying not to look foreign.”

    “ It’s
more useful to look fetching,” he said. ‘To dazzle Anaz
into revealing all his secrets.“

    “ It doesn’t
matter how useful it would be,” she said. “I can’t
do it.”

    “ Can you
not?”

    “ No,”
she said firmly. “I am not that sort of—that—”
He regarded her steadily, his dark eyes unreadable. Her heart pumped
overfast. Her fogged mind thickened. “I’m not like the
women you’ve met in Society… and the other places,”
she said. “I’m bookish.”

    “ Readingimproves
the mind,” he said, and there was no mockery in his eyes.

    “ But not the
personality,” she said. “I’m not fascinating. I’m
tactless and cross and stubborn.” And worse. What she must
admit embarrassed her. The battle within, which she could never speak
of aloud, shamed her more. She was beastly hot in consequence, and
her face, she knew, was scarlet.

    But Daphne was
nothing if not persevering. “It isn’t at all the sort of
thing men like,” she said. “We must find another way of
wringing Mr. Anaz’s secrets from him.”

    “ Certainly,”
he said. “I’ll wring him if you wish.” The oddly
penetrating expression vanished as though it had never been, and he
was once more the cheerful blockhead she’d first supposed him
to be.

    Her tension eased a
very little bit.

    She had grown so
used to being ignored or, when she wasn’t ignored, earning some
man’s disapproval or disappointment. She’d learnt how to
steel herself against these reactions. They didn’t hurt her
anymore.

    With him she was
all at sea, and at the mercy of the storm within.

    She drew the veil
over her face. “We’d better go,” she said. She
turned to Leena, who stood in the doorway looking both disapproving
and disappointed. “If anyone asks,” Daphne told her,
“we’ve gone to buy a rug.”

     

     

    VANNI ANAZ WAS a
former mercenary of unknown origins—Armenian, Albanian, Syrian,
Greek, no one could say for sure. But everyone knew he’d
settled long ago inEgypt, where he conducted a profitable trade in
rugs, drags, and antiquities. His shop, Daphne told Mr. Carsington on
the way, was more like those ofEuropethan the typical
cupboard-sized dukkan of the main shopping quarters. The typical shop, seven feet high at
most and three or four feet wide, could hold no more than three
customers at a time. They would sit and smoke and bargain half the
day over a length of cloth or a copper pot. The shop floors stood two
or three feet above street level, making them even with the stone
bench built against the front for the inconvenience of passersby
trying to squeeze throughCairo’s narrow streets. These stone or
brick obstructions were called mastabas , Daphne explained, and it was upon them that business was
transacted.

    Anaz’s