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documents she’d struggled to find, started to fire past her denial. Pinning her against the workings of her still too agile mind, they made her see the things she’d overlooked. Things that she, of all people, should have noticed. But she had read what she wanted and needed desperately to believe.
    Sheikh Asim’s correspondence to his brother: This infidel is an unnatural being. Even the prince will shun him for what he is .
    . .
    Farida’s own words: As his lips closed on my throat, I knew his hunger . . . We are nighttime creatures now, for the comfort of my love, and avoidance of those who pursue us . . . I prepared my dinner . . . A loving, submissive woman, speaking of preparing her dinner, not his . . . He is always gone during the day . . .
    “No. No. No! ” It was not possible. Lord Mason had become a djinn, like the stories suggested, a ghost visiting her grave throughout the centuries, a wizard able to preserve her body. Maybe even a fallen angel, defying God’s will to be with her. Farida had loved him. It had bled from every pen stroke in that journal. This whole chamber said he’d loved her insensibly. A vampire did not love, and most certainly not human women. No woman could fall in love with a vampire to the depths that Farida had fallen in love with Lord Mason. It didn’t happen. Vampires were savage, brutal creatures, obsessed only with power and control.
    He is not as other men in his solitude. He ordered me not to bind my life to his, and yet I defied his will and insisted. At last he made me his, in a way deeper than any woman I know has experienced. He is inside me in all ways, in my mind and soul, the two of us linked together through all eternity.
    Romantic, sweeping words she’d taken as romance, when she should have been reading other things.
    No. No. No. What she was seeing before her was not the power of a vampire. They had no ability to preserve life this way, because this woman was dead.
    “That’s as tight a fit as a young girl’s bum, that is.”
    Jessica stiffened and raised her head. Mel wriggled free and dropped into the chamber, giving her his ugly grin. “Well, darling, we didn’t believe it was all about some dusty rock almost as big as my dick, and we were right, weren’t we?”
    Shoving aside her jumbled thoughts, she rose on trembling legs, bracing herself on the side of the sarcophagus. When Mel’s gaze went to it, his eyes widened. “Hell’s bells, look at that, Harry.”
    She wanted to shift in front of it, cover Farida from his sight. Then she realized he’d ignored the phenomenon in the center of the room for the treasures on the floor behind her. But as he started forward, Harry caught his arm, his self-preservation instinct greater. “What’s going on here?” he asked sharply.
    Her last act on this Earth was going to be bringing grave robbers to Farida’s resting place. As if the horrific possibility whirling through her mind wasn’t enough to handle.
    “Your death,” she rasped out. “This woman is guarded by the spirit of the man who loved her. You touch one thing, and you won’t leave this chamber alive.”
    “More of your fanciful rubbish. You’re mad, old girl. We’re about to be bloody rich beyond anything ever,” Mel said. “That’s all that’s happening. And even dead, that girl’s a lot prettier than your sick heap of bones. I say we wake her up and take her along.”
    One man might have sacrificed his heart and soul to ensure this place would remain pure in memory forever. She had to believe that, hope for it, no matter what other terrible alternative existed.
    Jessica drew the knife from beneath her clothes, the one she’d almost gotten Harry with in their early travels. Perhaps because her movements were feeble, they didn’t think to stop her, but they didn’t know a Hell-based rage was burning deep in her breast, bolstered by her fear of betrayal and the threat of utter hopelessness. Please, let me die before I learn the