be her lover’s home entered his mind in a white hot flash of anger and jealousy.
No! She is ours!
There was such passion in the thought that he didn’t know for sure where it originated from. Himself? Menes? It was all Blending together more and more and he was beginning to have trouble distinguishing between the two at certain times. The only thing he could do was ask himself whether or not he would have thought something like that before Menes had taken possession. He wanted to say no. Never. And with any other woman he would have known loud and clear what to think. But he had to confess to himself that he had imagined things where she was concerned that he never would have thought himself capable of before meeting her two years earlier. He may have kidded himself before, but ever since Menes had taken up residence inside of him he’d faced the fact that she was the rising star of his fantasies. More and more so every damn day. Especially since she’d given him hell for being an arrogant jerk.
Christ, it was as though getting set down and put in his place had been a complete turn-on.
Maybe it had been. Maybe he liked his women a little bit tough. A little bit dominant. Able to stand up for herself. Perfectly capable of telling him where to go when he deserved it. It sure seemed that way to him at that moment. Maybe that was how he’d been getting it wrong all this time. He’d always chased after the curvy vacuous kind, thinking they would be simple to manage and fun to play around with.
But truth be told there had been no curvy and no vacuous women in his life for a very long time. Truth be told he hadn’t been much interested in anyone else since a certain redheaded doctor had walked into the station like a breath of soft, perfume-scented air. He could smell her even now, even after they’d both spent hours in the cold night doing their jobs, he could smell the sweet warmth of her. And maybe that was because he rolled up on his side a little and touched his face to her hair, but just the same … only she could manage to smell good when everyone else smelled something else entirely.n when like sweat and too many long hours drinking stale, crappy coffee.
But she wasn’t exactly perfectly kempt at the moment, her glorious red hair spilling left and right and all haphazard directions over her face and his arm. She was wrinkled at the skirt and even a little at her sweater, and peeking over to see her face, he saw the dark smudges of makeup that she had neglected to clean off. He would lay bets she’d rather be caught dead before letting someone see her like this, which made him suddenly realize why she wasn’t in a relationship.
No, the man who owned this place might be a lover, but he was nothing important to her. She simply was too tightly wound and it was too important to her to be seen in a flawless manner. Relationships were messy and unkempt, they were about letting others see you at your dirtiest, your silliest … the real you that you were.
Wow, Jackson thought, he was getting pretty damn insightful in his old age. And there was the fact that he had a very old soul inside of him now. Menes had walked quite a few lifetimes, seen more things and more women than Jackson might have ever conceived of. But what it always seemed to boil down to for Menes was the one, the only one whom he would ever love.
Jackson was given relatively hefty doses of the feelings that Menes had for Hatshepsut. He could feel Menes chafing for her, could feel a level of patience warring with a level of frustration inside him. Menes missed her. This remarkable creature that had his implicit loyalty … he missed her with so much power it left a vacant hole in his heart. And Jackson was forced to remember that it meant one day very soon all of his focus would be directed toward another woman. The thought sat very ill with him, despite Menes’s reassurances that all would turn out well in the end. All he knew was that it would mean more of the process of saying goodbye to his former life and all the things in it. And