Must Have Been The Moonlight by Melody Thomas Page B

press her against the wall and bury himself in all that life force that seemed to glow around her like sunlight.
    “Aye.” He attempted to rub the fatigue of the past few days from his eyes. He was insane if he let her wrap him in her romantic fantasy. What she wanted from him had nothing to do with love.
    So why did he balk?
    Turning back into his office, Michael walked to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed, his uniform jacket hanging open as he leaned forward to find a match from the drawer in the nightstand.
    He’d never noticed how neatly partitioned and tidy his private space was. Unlike the boxed clutter of his office, which contained floor to ceiling files of his work, his bedroom was nondescript, bare of memorabilia, bare of extravagances, and empty of his presence. He kept little of his lifeor his work in his living space. The walls were limestone pale, the furniture inexpensive, and today the noise from outside on the streets was intrusive.
    Little of who he’d once been had survived the bloody wars in China. Indeed, the man the khedive had labeled El Tazor was not the man who had left England in disgrace twelve years ago.
    He remembered a time when he did belong somewhere, when he’d hunted London’s clubs and the Season’s circuit of marriageable young ladies. As the third son of an old aristocratic family, he’d never been expected to take over the reins of the family fortune. He’d fallen in love and dreamed of all the things an idealistic fool dreamed when he was twenty and naive. Before his father taught him that societal comportment and appearance were thicker than blood. Thicker than a son’s heart, and more important than the world he’d tried to build for himself.
    In the end, Michael had learned that the only person he could truly count on in this life was himself, and with his emancipation came the satisfaction of a job well done. Some would say that he’d excelled in the art of violence. In the twelve years that he’d walked away from hearth and heritage, he would argue that it was survival.
    And now, for the first time in all of those years, he was suddenly looking across a lake at a family that didn’t belong to him, and wanting something more than he had.
    With an oath, Michael slammed the drawer shut.
    He dropped the unlit cigarette on the nightstand and plowed his fingers through his hair. Fifteen minutes with Brianna Donally and he was driven to smoke, and it was his damn luck there wasn’t a match to be had.
    Half dressed, he walked through the living room toward the kitchen, when he stopped dead and, every sense alert, turned.
    Halid sat on one of the pair of chairs that made up the furniture in the living area. With his legs crossed at the ankles, he watched Michael frown.
    “By the grace of Allah, it has only taken thee thirty minutes to see me.” He clicked shut the silver watch fob. “Fortunately, I am under no one’s payroll but yours.” His teeth flashed white.
    An indulgent spark of humor lifted a corner of Michael’s mouth. The last time he had seen Halid was at Donally’s desert camp. Halid still wore the blue robes and turban of his tribe. “Remind me to put a chair beneath the door latch in the office.”
    As if that would truly hold anyone at bay, but at least he’d have noticed the broken glass. The French-designed door had been his one concession to frivolity in his quarters.
    Halid walked to the table and tossed down a leather packet. “Your secretary gave me this. He said that you had requested a routing survey of the telegraph Donally Pasha is constructing. And this.” Halid held out the letter that Lady Bess had forwarded to his office.
    Michael hesitated. He would recognize his sister-in-law’s flowery script anywhere. He tore it in half. Caroline had no business writing him, as if she were the sole arbitrator of his family’s sins.
    Or his.
    Halid eyed him curiously. If he thought Michael’s behavior odd, he wisely didn’t comment. “It