Page 211 of Tomb of the Sun King

“Do you think only suffragists have that problem?” Zeinab retorted. “That is part of every relationship, even those among friends. We work it out together as best we can. That is all we can ever do.”

“Can it really be that simple?” Ellie demanded cautiously.

Zeinab rolled her eyes. “There is nothing remotely simple about it. But I think you and Mr. Bates will manage.”

She stood, the black folds of her abaya shifting into place around her. She was not a large woman, but in that moment, kissed by the distant lamplight against the rich shadows of the dusk, she looked like something out of myth.

Her green eyes shone with a quiet fire as she looked down at Ellie, and her words rang with low, furious power. “The oppressors take enough from us already. Do notdarelet them take your heart as well.”

A thrill burst through Ellie’s nerves with the electric force of a firework.

The men sang their ancient song of war and honor as the women laughed in the shadows. The stars glittered overhead as the wind danced across the sand-scoured verge of the desert… and everything quietly changed.

Ellie rose as though drawn by an invisible cord that pulled her toward both the awakening night and the man who danced across from her.

Zeinab’s lip twisted with a warm hint of mischief. “Don’t stay out too late,” she warned and strolled away.

The dance was finished. At the finale, a zagharit swelled up from the line of women, their trilling celebration rising into the velvet sky.

Ellie’s gaze unerringly picked out the battered, golden-haired American mingling with the crowd of victorious men. As though he could sense her across the yards that separated them, Adam turned, his blue eyes finding her among the shadows.

Though exhaustion still tugged at her, a quicksilver steel came into her spine as she lifted her head and knowingly—pointedly—tipped her chin toward the vast silence of the desert that lay beyond the warm embrace of the lamplight.

Without waiting for his reaction, she set off across the rock-strewn sand, slipping into the cobalt shadows of the dusk.

??

Forty-Five

Beyond the lowridge that bordered the tents, the scrubby Bedouin grazing lands softened into gently rolling dunes. The sand sifted around Ellie’s boots as she walked into the dark silence of the desert. She stopped once she was safely out of view of the camp.

The sky sprawled around her, the great bowl of it arching from horizon to horizon, pierced by the countless silver pinpricks of a wild array of stars. The sheer immensity dizzied her. She gazed up at the firmament, feeling lost and overwhelmed—like a feather caught in a soaring, timeless symphony of cause and effect, past and present… and perhaps something more. Something that moved in and around those stars like the beating of great, silent wings.

There was no sound. The sand under her boots swallowed any scrape of sole or rattling pebble that might otherwise give someone away, and yet Ellie knew with a shiver that she was no longer alone. That Adam Bates was there.

She turned to face him. Between the stars and the narrow horn of the moon, she could make out every detail of his bruised, beautiful face and his lanky warrior’s form.

“Not sure how we pulled it off,” Adam said with a careful lightness. “But it looks like we saved the world again.”

“And we didn’t have to destroy an entire site to do it,” Ellie replied with a pang of old guilt. “Only bury one for the foreseeable future.”

“Sounds like we’re getting better at this,” Adam quipped.

His tone was easy, but the seriousness of his gaze spoke of something deeper and more complicated.

He suspected why she had called him out here. Now that the immediate danger of the fate of the staff had been resolved, all the old questions about their future together were bound to come roaring back to the surface. The lines of Adam’s bruised, beard-shadowed face were uncharacteristically solemn.

Ellie’s throat tightened. She opened her mouth to speak, but he raised a hand—a pleading look in his eyes.

“Let me start—please,” he added meaningfully. “I just… want to get this out before it slips out of my brain.”

Ellie bit back her own words, recognizing the tight desperation in his tone.

“I’ve been thinking…” Adam began. “About what happened on that ledge. About how I didn’t even have tothinkto know that I was gonna put myself in the line of fire if it meant that you had a chance of getting out of there alive. I’d make the same choice again in a heartbeat, even though I know you’d be rightfully furious with me for doing it. And I’ve got to ask myself what that means, exactly.”

His lip was still scabbed from where it had been split. His eyes were tired—but his shoulders were straight, and there was nothing uncertain in the look he gave her.

“My dad never would’ve made a choice like that,” Adam went on. “He’d rattle off a hundred reasons why it wouldn’t make any sense—which’d all more or less amount to why saving his own ass was better for the greater good. George Bates has never cared about anything enough to give up his life for it. And I’m pretty damned sure he never will.”

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