The Other Guy's Bride (13 page)

“No,” Haji said. The last thing he wanted was to add another burden to an already onerous one. This fainting, waxy-faced woman was the worst sort of traveler.

“
Yes
,” said Sir Carlisle. “If Ginesse has inconvenienced this lady, we owe it to her to do what we can to see that she is reunited with her fiancée as soon as possible. And I shall go, too.”

“What?” both Magi and Haji exclaimed.

“She’s my great-granddaughter, and if she needs rescuing, I daresay I should be the one doing it. Besides, if the girl finds Zerzura, I want to see it.” He smiled suddenly as an idea occurred to him. “Why, we’ll make a party of it!”

Once Sir Robert had set his mind on a thing, he did not change it. The years had only amplified this trait. It would do no good arguing.

“I will go, too,” Magi announced, and when Sir Robert opened his mouth to protest, the look she gave him had it snapping shut again. Silently, Haji ran through a litany of Jim Owens’s more colorful expletives.

“And I,” the professor declared, then quickly amended, “That is, if I might impose upon you?”

Sir Robert peered at the professor suspiciously.

“No, sir,” the professor said with commendable dignity. “I would never attempt to commandeer Miss Braxton’s discovery. I wish to go for personal reasons.”

“Those being?” Magi asked, haughtily.

The professor looked uncomfortable. “I feel responsible. Had I listened to her, this entire situation might have been circumvented. Now, if I may make a suggestion?”

“Go on,” Sir Robert prompted.

“We should leave as soon as humanly possible.”

“And why is that?” Magi asked, frowning. “From what you say she is well tended.”

“Do you know Miss Braxton well?”

Everyone except Miss Whimpelhall nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

“Then can you imagine the sort of trouble she will get into without someone who is aware of her, um, proclivities to protect her?”

T
HE
E
GYPTIAN DESERT, TEN DAYS LATER

The pistol shot rang out across the desert floor, and Pomfrey’s soldiers dove for cover, including Neely, their grizzled lieutenant.

On the far side of the camp, Miss Whimpelhall started and looked down at the newly minted hole in the sand beside her and at what remained of the large, yellowish scorpion that had been sitting in it a second earlier. Then she looked at the rock in her hand, the one she’d just lifted from that same place.

“I fear I am once more in your debt, Mr. Owens,” she said, her voice shaking just a bit.

“Think nothing of it,” Jim said, calmly replacing his pistol in its shoulder holster and leaning back on his bedroll. He no longer got rattled at having to shoot things, climb things, chase things, or dive into things to snatch her back from the precipices she seemed always to be leaning over. It was all in the day’s work. “Please. Continue with what you were saying.”

“Are you really interested?” She sounded both doubtful and hopeful, and the combination was incredibly winsome. Added to which, he really was interested. She was an encyclopedia of the obscure and unusual. The theoretical finishing school she’d attended might not have tamed her vivacity, but it had definitely honed her intellect.

“I am.”

She replaced the rock over what was left of the scorpion and edged away. “Where was I?”

“You were explaining how Akhenaten’s name was expunged from the historic record. That rock you were holding was going to illustrate the expunging, I believe.”

“Oh, yes,” she said and began again. He listened, but his mind drifted. He found Egyptian history interesting enough, but not half so interesting as her. Ten days under the desert sun had bleached most of the plum color from her hair, turning it a soft cinnamon, and toasted her skin a light golden brown so that her blue-green eyes shimmered like a turquoise oasis in a bed of warm sand.

She still wore those damnable trousers, but at least they were hidden under an enveloping white
tob
, a robe that he’d bartered off a trader in Suhag. For the most part, it had been an uneventful seven days. Oh, there’d been a bit of food poisoning, a tent had caught fire, here and there a runaway camel, and now the scorpion, but nothing wholly unexpected.

It wasn’t her fault that trouble dogged her steps. Take, for instance, the scorpion. A hundred people could have picked up that rock and nothing would have been under it; yellow scorpions were as rare as they were lethal. But if Mildred Whimpelhall picked up a rock, there would surely be a scorpion lurking beneath it.

But while she was seldom to blame, she wasn’t entirely inculpable. She was impetuous and impulsive and headstrong. Somehow she always managed to tempt Fate, and Fate never managed to resist.

Most times, it wasn’t too onerous a task keeping her safe, and most times she courted nothing more than a few bumps and bruises—not always her own. But there had been times his blood ran cold. Like when she’d been hanging out over the Nile straight in the path of that oncoming
dahabiya
.

She could have died.

He’d never been so terrified. Not even when he’d crawled into the Mahdist camp seven years ago, certain any second the side of his head would be exploded by a bullet. So afraid that when he got her back on deck, he’d lost every scrap of composure and shouted at her. He never lost his temper. And it was while he was shouting at her and she was shouting back that a strange, unwelcome notion had stolen into his imagination, and moments later, when she’d flung her arms around him, that notion had taken root, and no matter how much he wanted it to, it would not be dislodged: he was besotted.

He told himself it was just an infatuation. It had been years since he had spent time in the company of a young lady. He was susceptible. And what of it, really? Many men had fallen under the spell of a siren; the essence of their allure was the very fact of their unattainability. And if he had a hard time imagining this forthright, ingenuous, outspoken girl in the role of a siren, what other term better identified her? She was unattainable and he was besotted.

So, he watched her, and remarked all her many grace notes, hoarding up every impression, every detail without hesitation or guilt, storing them up for a long future without her.

Yes. It was harmless, a blameless way to mark time. Almost innocent. Almost…

“—and the really juicy part of this is,” she leaned forward as if she were divulging the name of her neighbor’s paramour rather than a scandalous bit about a king who’d been dead for three thousand years, “there is some evidence in the written record that indicates
he
may well have been a
she
.” She straightened, her expression delightedly scandalized.

“You don’t say.”

“I do!” she replied, nonchalantly swishing her horsetail swatter around her face to chase away the battalion of flies that accompanied them. They didn’t bother her as much as he would have expected. Though Pomfrey had made sure they were well provisioned, even sending a mattress and china, it still had to be a far cry from what she was used to.

Yet she devoured the fava beans and oil mash served up every night for dinner with an appreciative appetite. She never complained about the arid wind that wrung the moisture from eyes and mouth, or the heat, or the stench of the camels. She was unfailingly good-humored and adaptable and engaging. It was as if she had been born to this sort of life.

Pomfrey had chosen well. Damn him. Though it did strike Jim lately that Mildred seldom mentioned her fiancé…But then she might not feel comfortable discussing her lover with him. Thank God. Because Jim didn’t know if he could quite handle being privy to her romantic confidences.

For the hundredth time, he reminded himself that he’d been put in charge of delivering her to Pomfrey and that is what he would do. And because he’d been entrusted with her welfare as well as her safety, if that meant keeping her safe from him, then that is what he would do, too.

“Mr. Owens?” she asked, dragging him back from his thoughts. “Are you alright? You look a bit strange.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “And I’d rather you called me Jim. Jim is a sight easier to yell than ‘Mr. Owens.’”

His carefully bland suggestion garnered an unexpected reaction. Rather than looking affronted or uncomfortable, she smiled at him, as pleased as a colt in spring clover. “You would?”

“I would.”

“Thank you, Jim.” She hesitated and he waited, hoping she would offer him the same intimacy, but then, as if reading his mind, her gaze dropped away.

He hadn’t really expected her to give him use of her Christian name. There were proprieties to be observed, a distance to be maintained, and it seemed she was willing to see to that even if he wouldn’t.

She was squirming now, visibly uncomfortable, and that hadn’t been his aim. “Go on,” he said. “You were talking about a pharaoh who might have been a pharaohess…?”

“There is no such thing as a pharaohess. It’s like the word ‘ruler,’ not gender specific.” She seized on the distraction. “Well, as I was saying earlier, in order to correctly position his, or possibly her, pyramid, its engineer would have made use of two
merkhets
, aligning the first with the North Star and the second along a north-south meridian.”

She continued on, adopting the slightly dry, professorial manner he’d noticed whenever she spoke about ancient Egypt. He watched her, enjoying the sound of her voice, his gaze drifting around their campsite every now and again, looking for danger, but always coming back to her and always lingering a little too long.

He realized she’d stopped talking and was waiting for him to reply.

“You sure know your ancient Egyptian history,” he said. “I’ve been here seven years and I don’t know half of the things you do.”

She blushed. “Well, I’ve been affianced to Colonel Lord Pomfrey for…for six years, and I knew I would be living in Egypt, so it only makes sense that I’d try to learn everything I could about the country, doesn’t it?” She sounded a little too pleased with this explanation.

“It’s commendable, though I’m not sure many women would take the same attitude,” he said. “Six years, you say?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Bloody hell. She must have been betrothed while she was still in the schoolroom. There was no chance it had been a love match, then. Likely their marriage had been arranged between her family and Pomfrey.

His loathing of Pomfrey grew. What sort of man betrothed himself to a child? And what sort of family allowed it? Still, though she said very little about her family, what she had said revealed nothing but warm affection.

What incentive had they had to marry her off? Money? Land? Or were they simply eager to align themselves with a titled family? Did she wish a different future for herself, or was she content to dutifully fulfill the bargain now that it had been struck?

Like Charlotte.

There’d been a time when the memory of Charlotte’s willing acceptance of Althea’s lies would have summoned up a deep and bitter anger. But that time had long since passed, faded alongside the memory of a desperate puppy love. Poor Charlotte, she’d done nothing wrong. And if Charlotte had been a pawn in her family’s ambitions, hadn’t he been just as readily Althea’s pawn?

He’d been willing to give up everything, his life, his name, his heritage, to defy her and in the end he’d only given Althea what she had wanted from the start: uncontested control. How much easier to throw something away than to stay and fight for it.

His gaze strayed back to Mildred. How long, how hard would he fight to keep her if she were his?
Forever
.

“Owens!”

At the sound of his name, Jim looked around. Lieutenant Neely, a skinny, middle-aged veteran with a mouthful of broken teeth and a Cockney accent, was approaching. Jim stood up. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

“Since you’ve drawn the attention of every desert rat within twenty miles by taking that shot, I’m giving you double guard duty tonight.”

He sounded more sullen than commanding, and his gaze kept fidgeting away from Jim’s. He was not a good leader, too anxious and too belligerent. He’d probably made his way up the ranks through pure attrition.

“Sure thing,” Jim said.

The man hesitated, gnawing at his lip.

“Anything else?” Jim asked.

“Yeah,” Neely said, taking Jim’s arm and pulling him a short distance away. “Here’s the thing, Owens. I think we ought to go back to Suhag. Now listen,” he said before Jim could speak. “Hear me out. When we were there I heard some of them trader chap-pies saying as how they’d heard that Mahdists were rising up again and planning to attack caravans. You and I both knows I ain’t got the men or gun power to engage a raidin’ party.”

“Those rumors have been circulating for years, Neely. We’ll be fine.” Jim clapped the man on the shoulder. “Even if someone were out there, the chances they’d stumble on us are about as good as finding a seed in a sandstorm. We’re in the middle of nowhere, at least seventy miles from the Forty Days’ Road.”

That was not by accident. Instead of traveling along the ancient trade route, he’d taken them purposefully on a course south of it. The old caravan trail was still widely traveled and as such the most likely place for bandits and outlaws to seek their victims. Their current route led to a lesser-known oasis some three or four days out.

Neely shook his head violently. “The bloke that just come off guard duty swears he saw a glint in the distance. And last night I seen a fire. The boys are scared shitless.”

Jim didn’t answer because Neely was right; they were being shadowed. Jim had seen the signs three days back and had ridden out at night to see if he could get closer to their elusive escorts. He hadn’t had any luck. But whoever they were, if they’d wanted to do them ill, they’d have done so by now.

Likely as not, they were just traveling in the same direction and wanted nothing to do with them. But trying to convince Neely of that wouldn’t be easy. Better not to say anything at all. The soldiers had already caught the contagion of Neely’s alarm. Their eyes darted nervously and they stood in little clusters, talking in low undertones, clutching their rifles. Recent conscripts, Jim guessed, green and suggestible. Damn Neely, anyway.

“Mirages,” Jim said. “If there were raiders, they would have come after us long before this. I had a look around yesterday night. If there was someone out there, I would have seen them.”

“You’re wrong, Owens. Thing is you may be
dead
wrong,” Neely said, mopping at his forehead. “They weren’t mirages.” He shot Jim a haunted glance. “You ever seen what those savages do to a man?” He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and released it. “You don’t wanta. I wish to God I hadn’t. I been in service twenty years. I have one more year left before I’m discharged with my pension. One year and I’m for England. I don’t want to die before then. We should go back.”

“Listen to yourself,” Jim said. “You’re not making sense. How is going back any better? Bandits can follow us back just as easily as forward.”

“No,” said Neely with dogged insistence. “They’ll be waiting to ambush us at that oasis. We start back now, they’ll never expect it. We get back to Suhag and then we wait there for Pomfrey to send more men. Six ain’t enough.”

For a moment, Jim considered it. But he didn’t believe they were in any danger, and they were halfway to Fort Gordon. To turn back now would be ridiculous. And if they did turn back, he would be honor-bound to stay in Suhag with Mildred until Pomfrey’s reinforcements arrived. Two weeks with her. Maybe more.

And that, he thought with brutal honesty, would be a mistake. Every day in her company put a greater and greater strain on his resolve to act honorably, to do his job and walk away. He was very afraid that if he spent too much time with her, he wouldn’t be walking away. “No, Neely. We aren’t going back.”