Free Must Have Been The Moonlight by Melody Thomas Page B

delving. “And I never play for anything halfway.”
    The weighted silence was soon replaced by the moaning wind outside their enclosed sanctuary.
    Finally, she turned away from him. “Why did you come back?” she asked. “We’ll be in Cairo soon.”
    Michael didn’t answer her.
    But his gaze fell on the pale curve of her profile, the bow of her full mouth, the gentle wing of an eyebrow. Not for the first time did he find himself staring at her, caught by her beauty, wanting to see into her eyes. In disgust, he turned his head and stared at the blanket. He was an idiot.

Chapter 5
    A s was her habit since her return to Cairo, Brianna rode out of the stables before the sun crested the lake. She wore her usual tanned boots and split skirt, her shirt opened at the throat. The air cooled her skin.
    Her brother’s home overlooked the most beautiful garden this side of the Nile. Beyond the stone walls of his residency, morning mist rose above the lake, one of many throughout the city. All around her, in the tall mimosa trees and sycamores, the world had come to life, and as Brianna left the grounds, birdsong greeted her. Here there was no sense of being shut in, and Brianna loved her freedom.
    Western women seldom rode where she went. Though her eyes didn’t miss the squalor beneath the ancient magnificence, she loved the city with its eastern flavor and strange language. Cairo appealed to her in a way her own culture with its mode of sterility did not. Maybe that’s why she enjoyed photography as much as she did. She had the ability to capture life in its rawest form.
    Brianna’s Arab mare clip-clopped along the narrow stone streets as she rode this morning to the hot baths. By the time she and her groom returned to the house, the sun had alreadyclimbed past the horizon. She doffed the last of her dingy clothes and, slipping her arms into her wrapper, walked outside her bedroom to stand against the granite balustrade that overlooked the lake.
    The entire house smelled overwhelmingly of roses and heliotrope since her return, as she’d been deluged with flowers, her room awash in floral tributes from civil servants and military personnel she’d met at the consulate before leaving Cairo with Alex. Cairo’s colorful social world was a young woman’s dream. But she’d found herself restless and bored by what she’d once found fascinating among the men she met at the consulate.
    She had thought of little else but Major Fallon since she’d awakened after the simoon and found him gone. She had discovered through some digging that he worked at the ministry.
    Behind her, she heard her bedroom door open and listened to the soft pad of footsteps approach. She turned to see her maid. “Mum, will ye be wantin’ breakfast up here or in the dining room?” Except for her warm brown eyes, everything about Gracie was as old as the earth. She wore a net over ash curls, a pale apron over a gray dress. She’d looked old when Brianna was three, and hadn’t seemed to age a year since.
    “I’ll dine downstairs, Gracie.”
    “Ye should not be getting out of bed at such early hours, mum. It’s been barely two weeks since your return. You’ve not gained back the weight you lost.”
    Brianna leaned her head against the mass of a flowering creeper that clothed one of the marble pillars in scented lilac. “And you worry overmuch.” She walked back into her room. “I have work to do today.”
    “Will ye be going to the consulate with your brother?” Gracie set out her gown.
    “Christopher told me to stay home.” Brianna slipped out of her wrapper and stood in her chemise and corset. “He said Major Fallon was facing a disciplinary hearing today.”
    According to the charges launched against him, he’d put a gun to the head of a royal family member and tried to killhim. Brianna wasn’t surprised that Major Fallon was capable of inciting an international incident, but she’d also gathered from Christopher’s comments that