Return Once More

Caesarion squeezed my arms, concern pushing aside the pleasure in his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I forced a smile and banished my anxiety. What was done was done. “Can we take a walk, perhaps?”

“Of course.”

He turned to his guards and spoke softly in a local dialect, raising his voice a few times but wi

It didn’t seem like the time to mention that an hour still left me plenty of time to kill him and abscond.

That settled, Caesarion took my hand and led me away from the men and the fire. They had reached Berenice, a beautiful ancient city that rested on the southwestern coast of the Red Sea. The salty breeze twisted refreshing, cool air through my hair, a welcome change from the day we had spent in the baking hot desert, and the sky turned the water a deep blue under its winking stars.

We navigated the beach in silence until we left their earshot. Once nothing except the moon and stars interrupted the darkness, Caesarion dropped my hand and drew me into his arms. They were strong around my waist, and he lifted me to his chest, holding me tight. The musky scent of sweat and man went straight to my head and I closed my eyes, attempting to memorize everything about this moment. He breathed in deep against my neck, as though trying to accomplish the same thing, and the sensation of his breath moving my hair washed my skin with hot tingles.

“I thought you wouldn’t come back. That I’d dreamed you,” he whispered against my throbbing pulse.

I shifted, unwilling to remove my arms from his neck but wanting to see his face. “You didn’t dream me. But I’m not exactly real, either.”

“You feel real to me, Kaia.”

The husky tone of his voice betrayed his own response to our nearness and flushed me with heat all over again. His lips sought mine, hesitant at first, but with more abandon every passing second. An unintentional sigh slipped out of me when his tongue slid against mine. The two of us pressed together from head to toe, and if becoming one physical being were actually possible, maybe we could have stayed that way forever.

He pulled away too soon and set me back on my toes in the deep sand. My knees weren’t working properly, dumping the rest of me into the golden grains too, and I pulled Caesarion down beside me. “I confess I might have returned just to kiss you again.”

His chuckle warmed my heart, and the slight flush of his cheeks in the moonlight made me smile. “Then I am even happier you are here.”

Things couldn’t get out of control. A baby from a three-thousand-year-old daddy might not even be possible, but if it was, it had to rank high among hard things to explain away to the Elders. I wanted to kiss him all night, though, so I lay on my back, dragging him down until he braced himself above me, hands sinking into the sand on either side of my shoulders.

Moonlight lit the desperate sorrow in his eyes, and a crease deepened between his eyebrows. “For the first time in my life, I wish it didn’t have to end.”

“What?” I asked, reaching up to rub my hand against the tunic covering his heart.

“Everything.”

Pain spilled out of him, coating me with a raw ache. I wanted to say I could save him, that we would steal more hours, more days, but it might be a lie. Oz had changed James Puckle’s destiny. Jonah had found a way to alter Rosie’s. But I still didn’t know how. Or if I could.

“Everything ends, Caesarion. Like you said. But we’re together now.”

I pulled him toward me until his elbows bent and propped him against my chest, until our lips met in the quiet, seaside night. The sound of waves licking the shore blended with the roaring between my ears as he kissed me, slowly at first, then with increasing ardor as his hands left the sand and found my hair, and the weight of his body fell onto mine.

My own fingers roamed, finding the corded muscles in his back. My body responded to his, my heart thrilling with every response I elicited from him. I didn’t know how long we lay there, exploring one another fully for the first time without haste, but it was not long enough.

He eased away, panting a little while he rested his forehead on mine, our sweat mingling. “I have been with many women, Kaia, but never felt as I do in your arms. I have never loved another.”

The phrase many women lodged in my brain, dampening even his first confession of love, and the brain stem tat tried to spill unwanted facts about the Egyptian royals and their free and loose sexuality into the forefront of my mind. I shoved them away and smiled up at him, loving the way he looked framed by the night, secure in the knowledge that no matter how many women he had been with, this was special to him, too.

“I’ve never been in love before, either.”

I left out the part where I’d never had sex. In the ancient world, a woman’s purity was of the utmost importance so that proper and valid heirs could be ensured, even more so when it came to ruling families.

“And have there been other men in your life, my Kaia?” A wrinkle appeared between his eyes, as though he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to know or why he had asked the question.

“No. My world is vastly different from yours, Caesarion. We do not grow up so quickly.”

“Explain.”

He lowered his lips to my neck and worked his way to my collarbone, driving all rational thought from my head for the next several moments. I reveled in the feel of his mouth and his tongue, the weight of him, and tried not to pout when he stopped.

“You are used to being given what you demand, I imagine. Including girls—or boys, if the mood strikes you. Why are you not demanding more of me?”

Part of me wished he would go further, ask more—I didn’t know if now, in this moment, I could deny him. It might be my only chance to know what it felt like to be with my perfect match, and to give that up in the interest of propriety didn’t exactly feel right. The other part of me quaked in terror at the thought of that kind of intimacy at all, and a teeny, tiny voice worried about the man I would one day love enough to marry—that I would remember this one perfect night, and nothing could ever compare. That I’d know I’d settled for less.

“I do not want to hurt you, Kaia. It surprised me, your confession of love back at our camp, but it stu

Intact was not how I felt. I felt exploded into a million pieces, scattered over the sand and naked in front of the winking heavens. It was vast and impossible to describe, the feeling of being with him, of hearing him attempt to express the same emotions that rolled through me like waves.

But no matter what decision would be made regarding the two of us and how far we would take these stolen days, tonight I was not ready, and his sweet understanding pricked my eyes with tears. “It doesn’t make sense, to love a man I’ve spent only hours with, and yet I do. Love you.”

He didn’t reply, trailing a single finger down my throat until his palm settled over my heart. The Egyptians had been the one to latch onto the idea of the heart as the center of feelings in the body, and even when later sciences confirmed they originated in the brain, the colloquial importance of the heart remained even now, in Genesis.

Caesarion picked up my necklace, toying with it the way I often did when thinking of him. “What is this?”

“A family heirloom.”

His eyebrows pinched together as he squinted at the engravings in the moonlight. “The laurel wreath and the palm branch. Not symbols often paired. What does it mean?”