Caught

Caught

Kristin Hardy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Kathryn, for efforts above and beyond

the call of duty

and to Stephen

for being pure of heart

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Epilogue

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Pamela Hatchfield, conservator, and

Rita Freed, curator of Egyptian art,

Boston Museum of Fine Arts;

and to Robert Burnham,

editor of the Napoleon Series.

The Legend Continues

The drums and cymbals sounded. The heavy, musky scent of incense filled the air. Despite the heat outside, the Hall of A Thousand Pillars remained cool with its heavy stone roof and carved columns. It was the Naming Day.

Batu walked along behind her older sister Anan, slowly, matching the pace of her footsteps to the beat of the drums. The cloth of Anan’s garments shone white in the flickering torchlight; the gold-and-colored-stone bracelets on her arms gleamed.

Anan had to be exhausted, Batu knew, thinking of the week of ceremonial cleansing, the fasting, the prayers. That morning they’d risen before dawn to go through the rituals, the bathing, the adornments, the dressing of Anan’s hair with precious pearls, brought from afar.

It was not every day the ruler of the kingdom was promised her consort.

A throng packed the Hall of A Thousand Pillars, waiting to see the shape of their future. For Anan was not to take merely a husband, but the man who would rule by her side, and from his strength would fl ow the prosperity and security of the realm.

Batu felt sympathy for her sister, for she knew that Anan’s duty was a difficult one. Hers was a life consecrated to the kingdom. How fearful it would be to be in her spot, left without choice, forced to marry the one the priests chose for her.

For Batu was in love.

As she walked, she stared at the dais ahead, at the rich, golden throne, so that she would not look to her side at the line of soldiers guarding their path, so that she would not meet the eyes of the one man she desired above all others.

Egmath. Even the whisper of his name in her thoughts felt like a stolen pleasure. Soon they would tell of their love, soon. But for now, it was theirs to savor, still new in its full flower. When they informed the priests and Anan, it would be a public thing; they would be held separate until they’d married.

And Batu did not think she could bear it.

From the corner of her eye she saw the gleam of the gold cuff around his upper arm. She saw the strong muscles of his chest, the proud carriage of his head. And her heart swelled at the knowledge that this warrior, this man of honor, was hers.

Batu couldn’t help it—her eyes fl icked toward him to meet his gaze. The rush of it stole her breath. It seemed hardly possible that the love she’d always felt for him had transformed into this tremendous emotion that took her over. This was not the simple affection of children for children.

This was the love of a woman and a man.

Batu followed Anan up the stairs to the dais and moved to stand behind the golden throne as her sister sat. From there, Batu could stare out into the hall, looking at the torchlight flickering off the richly colored pillars. Looking out at the throng that packed the hall.

Looking at Egmath.

On the steps stood Hortath, the eldest priest. At the foot of the dais stood Lagash, the leader of the army, with his soldiers arrayed beyond him. And Egmath by his side.

The music ended, and the silence of the hall was broken only by the rustling of the throng.

Hortath cleared his throat. “May all the gods of this land give strength and health to our ruler, Queen Anan. Let great joy and celebration mark this day, the day the Queen will stand before you with her consort, a great warrior to keep the realm safe and bring forth heirs.”

But it wasn’t Anan’s choice. The priests made the decision, as they did in so many things. Anan would find out at the same time as the rest of the kingdom. She would take Lagash, they’d speculated, though she bore him no love and he was two score harvests older than she. She would take him into her life, take him into her bed.

Batu ached for her sister.

Hortath raised his hands. “Let stand forth the consort whom the gods have chosen.” He waited a moment for silence. “Let stand forth Egmath.”

And the hall erupted with cheers.

Let stand forth Egmath. The impossible words reverberated in Batu’s head. She felt stunned, as though the knowledge held the force of a blow. It was impossible, unbearable. Egmath was hers, her destiny. But the priests wished to control his power and they’d sworn him to Anan.

At the foot of the dais Egmath looked frozen, unable to move. And she who knew him better than all, she who could read every nuance in his expression, saw pure agony in the liquid dark eyes. He looked at her and for a moment they locked eyes, not caring, finally, about the multitudes around them. For a moment, words, feelings flowed through his gaze.

My beloved…

My only…

My lost one…

My duty…

And Egmath stepped forward and strode up to the dais.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Prologue

Upstate New York Saturday, April 29

“I AM SO DONE WITH THIS,” Julia Covington said to herself.

And stepped out the door into thin air.

Not surprisingly, she dropped like a rock. That was why smart people knew enough to stay inside the airplane.

They’d lied when they’d said it was like flying. It wasn’t a bit like flying. Or floating. What it was like was falling, strapped to a jump instructor, her stomach up her throat, the wind flapping around her, nothing to hold her as she watched the distant—and really large, really hard—earth come inexorably closer.

And her mind, analytical to the last, couldn’t stop processing. Acceleration due to gravity was thirty-two feet per second squared, which meant every second she fell thirty-two feet per second faster. Until terminal velocity, of course, a mere hundred and twenty miles an hour, which she should be reaching shortly. On the ground she’d get thrown in jail for going a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Up here she just got charged a lot of money for the privilege. A hundred and twenty miles an hour—more than sufficient to make a nice little splat when she hit the ground.

She really hoped she’d packed the parachute right.

She glowered at her old college roommate Sasha, who’d come up with the whole extreme-sports idea. It’ll be good for you. Live life on the edge. Grinning giddily, Sasha waved.

“How did I let you talk me into this?” Julia shouted, words that were ripped away by the wind.

Sasha cupped one hand to her pressure helmet. “Whaaat?”

Julia shook her head. It didn’t matter. She knew why she’d done it—the same reason behind nearly every absurd thing she’d done over the past eight months. Since her divorce. Since her emancipation from Edward Cleary, her controlling, disillusioned Svengali of an ex-husband. Edward, who’d loved her as the naive student he could mold and instruct. Edward, who wasn’t at all prepared for a Julia with a mind of her own.

And she’d been demonstrating that mind of her own since the papers had been signed by trying every foolish thing she could think of that would make Edward turn purple with disapproval. So okay, maybe the incident on the balcony at Mardi Gras hadn’t been well thought through, but she’d crash the Miramax party at Cannes again any day.

It had been a pretty fun eight months.

And it was time to end it.

Too bad she hadn’t come to that decision before she’d leaped from the airplane. Timing, as they said, was everything.

She felt the tap of the jump instructor on her shoulder and she swallowed. The minute of free fall had whipped by astonishingly quickly. Now came the moment of truth, the moment she pulled the rip cord. A feather light landing or…splat?

Julia grasped the toggle. She stared at the ground, at the squares and circles of green rushing toward her. What was the saying—God protects fools and drunks? Well, she certainly wasn’t drunk, more was the pity, but she was the champion of all fools.

Holding her breath, she tugged—

And with a whispering rush, the chute unfolded smoothly, dragging her vertical. Suddenly, she was floating, with the world spread out below her. Okay, now this part wasn’t so bad. This, she could do. Now she had time to think, time out from the world to figure out what came next. Because she was going to be hitting ground eventually, and when she did, it was time for a change. Most women had transitional men after divorces.

She’d had a transitional life.

Time to move on. Of course, she’d had a transitional man, too—or at least a transitional purely sexual, as-often-and-outrageous-as-possible affair. She sighed wistfully.

Time to move on there, too.

Because when you came right down to it, she wasn’t wild Julia, skydiving, sex-in-public party girl. She was serious, practical, collected Julia. Anything else was temporary, a pose.

The past five minutes had graphically demonstrated that to her.

It was time to get her life back in order. When she hit the ground, she’d get started. When she hit the ground, it was time to make some changes.

1

Manhattan Friday, May 5, 1:00 a.m.

“GOOD LORD.” Alex Spencer rolled onto his back, gasping for breath, heart hammering against his chest. “No more Asian sex manuals for you, woman. You’ve ruined me.”

“I’ve ruined you?” Julia Covington managed through her own heavy breathing.

With her dark hair tumbled loose and wild around her shoulders and her skin gleaming pale in the light from her entryway, she looked like some odalisque in a seventeenth- century painting—beautiful, tempting and thoroughly addictive. Even now, looking at her made him dry-mouthed with desire.

If he’d been thinking straight, he’d have been worried.

Then again, he’d hardly thought straight once since that evening she’d appeared at the museum fund-raiser in a flame-hot red dress that had left nothing to the imagination. The dry, serious Ms. Covington, who never appeared in anything but utterly simple garments in shades of taupe, charcoal and cocoa, was suddenly a siren. He couldn’t have said what had shocked him more—the dress or the fact that she’d left with him.

And every moment since had pretty much been a toss-up.

“Yes,” he murmured against her mouth, “you’ve ruined me, milked me dry, left me a worn-out husk, old before my time.”

He could feel her smile. “I had some help with that, I think. Some very enthusiastic help.”

He worked his way down her throat, feeling the first faint stirrings of arousal yet again. “Come on, what do you expect a guy to do when you show up at the door in nothing but a robe?”

“What was I supposed to be wearing at eleven-thirty at night?” she said and caught her breath. “You were lucky I let you in at all.”

He smiled beatifically. “I got lucky, all right.” He moved his hands and felt her quiver in response. “And if you give me a minute or two, I just might be in a position to demonstrate my appreciation.”

“Well, you’d better do it quickly, Lothario,” she said— a little unevenly, he noted in satisfaction. “I have to get to sleep. I’ve got work tomorrow—today,” she corrected after a glance at the mantel clock. “Something you might want to think about, also.” She shifted away from him.

Alex calculated and tried for pitiful. “I spend four days in D.C. fighting the sharks for NEA funding, and you’re throwing me out?”

It didn’t work. “You told me last week it was going to be a schmoozefest where the most challenging thing you’d have to do was drink champagne and eat crab claws.”

“And you think that’s easy?” he demanded.

Julia just snorted and rolled to her feet, plucking her Chinese silk robe off the living room carpet as she rose. “Nobody made you come here, you know. You didn’t even call to warn me.”

And, as always, the minute they stopped touching, brisk, matter-of-fact Julia came back.

“I thought you women thought spontaneity was romantic.”

“We’re not having a romance,” she reminded him firmly as she tied the belt of the robe. Too firmly.

“Oh yeah, right. No relationship, no talking, just sex.” Alex reached for his trousers, pushed down the little surge of annoyance.

“Exactly. You sales types should know better than to try to renegotiate as you go along.”

“Marketing, not sales,” he corrected. “We don’t sell antiquities at the museum.” He stopped in the act of buttoning his shirt. “Unless you’ve got a sideline I don’t know about. In which case, we’ll have to find out whether they give conjugal visits to lovers.”

She frowned. “We’re not lovers.”

“Right. If we were lovers, I’d be going to your bed right now instead of getting kicked out into the hall.” Even he could hear the edge in his voice. “I came here because I missed you.” He’d come because he couldn’t make himself wait until the next day to see her. “You were off with your skydiving thing last weekend and then I was gone. It’s just been a while. I thought you might miss me.”

Julia got that countess look he’d learned she put on when she felt she was losing control of a situation. She handed him his shoes. “Alex, it was nice to see you, really. But it’s late.” Her voice was brisk. “We’re getting together tomorrow night anyway.”

“Good, because I think we should talk about this.”

Relief flashed into her eyes, a relief that made him wonder. “Good. I want to talk, too. But it’s late and I’m tired and husks like you need your sleep. You should go.”

And then he was standing out in the hall, garment bag and jacket in his hand, staring back at the door that was closed to him.

Like Julia.

JULIA SATIN HER OFFICE at the NewYork Museum of Antiquities, staring out the window past the enormous pillar that obscured half her view of Fifth Avenue beyond.

Alex Spencer. The good-looking charmer, the golden boy who succeeded at everything he touched, always a nice word for everyone. Always somehow sensing when she’d been down during the worst of times with Edward, making her laugh with a joke even though she’d said nothing to anyone about how she was feeling. It had been temporary insanity the day of the museum gala six months before when she’d bought that outrageous dress purely because it would have appalled Edward. It had been temporary insanity that had made her wear it to the gala and definitely temporary insanity that had had her leaving with Alex Spencer.

She’d quite clearly been out of her mind.

That was probably why the sex had seemed so amazing, just as the skydiving might have been amazing if she’d been in the right mood.

Or maybe not.

All right, bad example. Luck, that was it. It was just pure luck that Alex happened to have an instinct for how to touch her. It was just that charm monster thing he had going that always made her feel so good around him. After all, it wasn’t as though they had a relationship or anything. They had zero in common except sex.

Anyway, they’d rarely managed to get out even basic pleasantries before ripping one another’s clothes off most times, which suited her to a T. If she had to talk to Alex Spencer, she’d be forced to face how wrong, how ridiculous, how brainless she’d be to think of them as a match. The way she’d been with him, that wasn’t her. That was the artificial post-divorce giddiness. The real Julia was quiet, sedate and studious.

The real Julia was someone Alex Spencer wouldn’t give a second glance.

Which was fine with her, she thought quickly, because he wasn’t her thing, either, any more than public indecency at Mardi Gras was. She wanted a man who was serious, focused, someone who was an achiever, not a fun-loving, slick G-boy with no sense of propriety. Thinking of the chances the two of them had taken together made her squeeze her eyes closed.

Thinking of the chances the two of them had taken left her awash in lust.

She made an impatient noise. It was time to end their little arrangement, no matter how much fun it was. She was ready, finally, to go forward with her life, and that life didn’t—couldn’t—include Alex Spencer.

Putting Alex firmly out of her mind, Julia flipped through the latest issue of American Curator. A major auction of early Roman pieces was scheduled for fall, she saw, making a note to herself. Some recent reports of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian forgeries. And a story about the heist of the Zander collection from Stanhope’s Auction House. No leads there.

Reading the list of items taken was enough to make Julia’s eyes cross well before the end. A shame, but having met Zoey Zander at a few of her mother’s society dos, Julia would have laid even money that the “antique” items weren’t even authentic. The jewels, perhaps, but as for the rest of it, Zoey was more about flash than substance. Having it look right was more important than having it be right.

Julia had never understood that. To her, it was the history of a thing that mattered, the story she felt when she touched it. Absently, she rubbed a finger over the bit of scrimshaw that sat by her telephone, a personal treasure that she knew she shouldn’t touch with bare hands but was helpless not to. She could imagine the whaler who’d spent long, windblown days working at the ivory, setting it aside at the cry of “Whale ho.” If she closed her eyes, she could smell the salt tang of the sea, feel the motion of the ship, imagine the distant blue horizon and the pale vault of the sky overhead.

It had always been like that for her, since she’d been a child. She remembered going to the Metropolitan and staring at a pale blue glass cup in the antiquities wing, a glass that had been in the ground so long it had turned iridescent. It fascinated her so much she’d relentlessly pestered her mother, her nanny, her great-aunt Stella to take her to the Met over and over. An artifact from an ancient desert kingdom, she’d read on the identification card and imagined a little girl like herself who might have drunk from it. And at night, she’d dreamed that she was the little girl, a princess whispering in the desert dusk with her favorite friend, a young boy who dreamed of becoming a great warrior.

She hadn’t had that dream for a long while.

“Hey, gorgeous.”

No matter how wrong for her he might be, something about Alex’s voice always sent a warm shiver through her, whatever she was thinking, whatever she was doing. Julia opened her eyes and gave her visitor a bland look. “Well, if it isn’t the infamous Alex Spencer.”

He leaned against her doorway, looking like some GQ model in his expensive suit and hand-dyed silk tie. “Miss me?”

She rolled her eyes. “How can I miss you when you won’t go away?”

“I can’t go away. I have to stick around to keep you from falling asleep at your desk.” He clicked his tongue at her. “Maybe if you got to bed at a decent hour, you’d be more awake.”

“Sometimes I get pestered by late-night callers,” she said.

“You shouldn’t answer the door, then.”

“I’ll remember that next time.” She folded her hands in front of her. “So what can I do for you, Mr. Spencer?”

“A favor.” He stepped into the office and her lungs took a breath of their own accord. Honestly, there was nothing the man could do that wouldn’t look good. He had a gift for it, from his cropped dark hair spiked with just a bit of gel to his glossy Italian leather shoes. And she knew from personal experience that he looked just as effortlessly handsome in shorts and a polo shirt.

Or in nothing at all.

Maybe it was the thousand-watt smile, the square jaw, those green, green eyes. Eyes currently glimmering at her in humor, making her realize she’d been staring far too long. “Making notes for a portrait?” he asked.

“Wondering if I maybe saw you on the post office wall,” she replied. “So what’s the favor?”

“Someone I want you to see today. My sister’s got a friend who wants to bring in something for you to look at. She thinks it might be valuable—”

“Alex, no,” Julia was groaning before he’d even finished. “No, no, no. You know how it works. They’ve gone to a flea market or on holiday to Morocco and they’ve got some piece of trash they’re convinced is the real thing.”

“Maybe it is,” he suggested.

“And maybe it’s a tourist tchotchke. Do you have any idea how often I’ve looked at those kinds of things?” she pleaded. “They’re never real. Trust me, antiquities don’t just fall in a person’s lap.” But he had that gleam in his eye that he always got when he proposed something outrageous, she saw sinkingly, that look that always seemed to get her to do what he wanted.

“Look, it’s a favor for my sister. Why don’t you just give it a look and see what you think?”

“I have a better idea,” Julia said silkily. “Why don’t you look at it?”

“I’ve got to leave for lunch with a big donor—” he glanced at his sleek Bulova “—like, right now.”

“And I’ve got meetings all afternoon.”