Mr Impossible by Loretta Chase Read Free Book Online

enhance
them. She couldn’t disguise her walk, though. She walked like a
queen or a goddess, chin high, back straight. But the arrogant sway
of her hips bespoke a Cleopatra kind of queen, an Aphrodite kind of
goddess. The walk was an invitation. The attire was a Keep Off sign.
The combination was fascinating.

    “ To a man,
you see,” he continued, “these facts are immensely
important.”

    “ Oh, yes, of
course,” she said. “A woman’s looks are
all-important. Her mental capabilities don’t signify in the
least.”

    “ That would
depend,” he said, “on what she was thinking.”

     

     

    DAPHNE WAS THINKING
it was very hard to think with Mr. Carsington in the vicinity.

    She was good at
solving puzzles, usually. But the only idea she had about recent
events was a ridiculous one, and no more ideas were forthcoming.

    She was not easily
distracted. One must possess tremendous powers of concentration, not
to mention an obstinate and tenacious character, to contend with
ancient Egyptian writing.

    She might have
easily ignored an earthquake or a barrage of artillery fire.

    She could not
ignore him.

    She was aware of
his abstracted expression while he calculated her height and decided
what color her hair was.

    Now, as she sent
Udail out to order the donkeys, she was aware of Mr. Carsington’s
attention drifting away from her person to the table containing her
materials.

    She recalled her
agitated reaction when she first spied the disorder. What had she
said? Had she given herself away? But no, she couldn’t have.
The ruse was a habit by now, practically instinctive. It was Miles
who had the more difficult task, pretending to be the brilliant
scholar. Luckily, very few people in the world understood enough
about decipherment to suspect him—and he took care not to meet
those people face-to-face.

    Mr. Carsington was
frowning down at the copy of the Rosetta Stone. “That papyrus,”
he said. “I collect it was something out of the ordinary.”

    She, too, stared at
the lithograph, wondering what he saw there. A fragment of
hieroglyphic text. Below that another nearly complete section written
in the script some scholars called demotic. Then the battered Greek
text with its all-important final lines, announcing that all three
texts were identical in content.

    “ Like the
Rosetta Stone?” she said. “I wish it had contained some
hints in Greek. But it was all in hieroglyphs.;..” She looked
up at him. “Are you asking whether it was valuable?”

    He nodded.

    “ I daresay it
was,” she said slowly, the truth dawning as she spoke it.

    She hadn’t
thought of the papyrus in that way. She knew it had cost more than
most, but then, it was a superior specimen. But that’s all it
was to her. Perhaps Miles was right, to an extent: She was rather
unworldly. It hadn’t occurred to her to lock it up, any more
than it would occur to her to lock up a book.

    “ I suppose
one could call it valuable,” she said. “It was
expensive.” She related the merchant’s tale of the
mysterious pharaoh and his presumably untouched tomb.

    “ I told Miles
he encouraged such tall tales and probably set a bad precedent by
paying so much,” she went on. “Yet it was remarkable.
Written entirely in beautifully drawn hieroglyphs. Exquisite
illustrations. The others I’ve seen are not works of art, and
most were written in the script form. None was in such good
condition. It isn’t hard to understand why Miles couldn’t
resist it.”

    Mr. Carsington’s
dark gaze shifted from her study materials to her face. He wore a
perplexed expression. “And it didn’t occur to you why
robbers might want it?” he said. “A guide to buried
treasure?”

    “ No, it
didn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine anyone
could be so foolish as to believe that story.”

    “ Yet it might
seem to others that your brother—a scholar—believed it.”

    Miles certainly had
seemed to believe it—perhaps because he was a little boy