Must Have Been The Moonlight Read Online Free PDF

the photograph. Maybe Donally was no milquetoast Eurocrat. If he possessed half the courage of his sister, then he was a man who could survive hell.
    Michael certainly appreciated his taste in photography.
    “I will bring lamb stew.” The servant bowed.
    “That will be fine,” he told the servant.
    “I am Abdul,” he said. “I will revisit this evening with dinner.”
    Returning his gaze to the loving pair in the photograph taken in Giza, Michael started to roll a cigarette before he caught himself. It wasn’t smoking the Turkish tobacco that had stopped him. It was the craving that he refused to let control him—and something else that he hadn’t felt in a long time as he looked at the photograph.
    Lady Alexandra had been raised in the same elitist society that had surrounded him his whole life. That she had somehow escaped the narrow confines of her world intrigued him. That she’d married an Irish commoner impressed him.
    Hell, Pritchards’s death had unhinged him. The man the last ten years had shaped was not prone to either whimsy or regret. Michael lay on the cot, both feet rooted to the floor, a position he favored. With one hand behind his head, he closed his eyes. He never wanted to get too comfortable, as if staying in one place for too long would somehow grow on him. He was bone weary in every part of his body. He should be thinking about his plans to get back to Cairo. To hunting Donally down, if only to return the man’s sister and his wife to him. A position that had fallen to him by virtue of default.
    But for just a moment he would remain here.
     
    He didn’t awaken when Brianna approached that evening, as the sun had set and the air grew cold, with a blanket. She looked down at his unshaven features refined by the shadows, the dark smudge of his lashes resting on his cheek. Even in repose he exuded a vibrant, male vitality that contradicted the vulnerability she saw.
    Lying on the cot, Major Fallon looked uncommonly long and lean, with broad shoulders that she remembered all too well when he’d fairly frisked her bones. His burnoose had fallen open, revealing the knife tucked in the crimson sash at his hip. His thighs were well formed beneath the once silky white sirwal trousers. They had ridden for three days in thedirt and the grit. They had ridden when she thought she could go no more, and he’d carried Alex when there had been no more strength for her to sit atop a camel.
    Brianna covered him with the blanket. Then, turning, she started to extinguish the lamp beside the cot, and felt his fingers wrap around her wrist.
    With a start, her gaze slammed directly into his.
    His eyes, half lidded and astonishingly silver in the light, eased over her. He was still asleep, settled in the shadows of some dream.
    Brianna held her hand still and returned his look, but for all of her talk about equality for women, and her emboldened demeanor, she still possessed more Victorian mores than she cared to admit. Michael Fallon made her nervous. And she was never nervous around men.
    For the most part, members of the opposite gender annoyed her with their condescending nature and patronizing platitudes, and she’d never had a problem dismissing them. Except for Stephan. Her once betrothed.
    There had been security in the predictability that she’d found with Stephan. Security that she’d never appreciated, and on more than one occasion taken for granted. At twenty-five, he was three years older than she, and studying to become a barrister, a crown jewel in England’s justice system. She’d never loved anyone but him. They might have been married upon his graduation, except for one fatal flaw in her plans.
    Stephan had wanted children and a wife who would make him a home in his perfectly respectable, sedate life. Yet, for all her dreams of being in love, not once had she looked upon Stephan Williams with anything more than a girlish adoration—which faded immeasurably compared to the curious intensity