The Other Guy's Bride (22 page)

Pomfrey’s hand flew to his mouth in horror. Mildred! She had spent four days as the captive of desert scoundrels. If they’d defiled her…If? His stomach twisted with anger and anguish that Mildred, an intensely virtuous woman, should have suffered so horribly.

And what of his command? He doubted he could keep quiet what had happened to her, and when it came out, they would forever after carry the stigma of her victimization. Horrible. Horrible…

“God help us,” he whispered, not realizing he spoke aloud. “Her shame…How can I…?”

“How can you
what
?” Owens asked in a hard, cold voice.

Pomfrey’s round-eyed gaze met Owens imploringly. “Tell me they didn’t…? Is she…?”

“No,” he clipped out. “They didn’t touch her.”

Relief so profound swept through him that he sagged back in the chair, his eyes shutting as he offered up a prayer of thanks. When he opened them, he found Owens watching him with barely contained contempt. He pulled himself together and straightened, angered anew. It would be easy for Owens to accept damaged goods; he was damaged himself. He couldn’t understand the mortal wound such a…such a misadventure would cause a woman as sensitive as Mildred.

“No thanks to you, I take it,” he said sharply.

A muscle jumped in Owens’s jaw. “Nope.”

“Well, then. We’re finished here,” he said, suddenly wanting nothing more than to be done with this conversation, uncomfortable with the notion that somehow Owens was interviewing him and that he was not faring well. He picked up a report he’d already read twice and pretended to study it.

“First, I have a request,” Owens said.

Pomfrey looked up from the paper and raised a brow inquiringly.

“The stallion.”

“What of him?”

“If you haven’t shot him yet, I’d like to give him a chance to recover before I leave.”

Pomfrey felt himself flush anew. “Take however many days you need,” he replied coldly and went back to looking at the paper. He heard Owens climb painfully to his feet and start for the door. He kept his eyes focused on the report, relieved. But then Owens stopped walking.

Irritated, Pomfrey looked up. Owens was standing a few feet from the door, half turned away, on the cusp of exiting. Why didn’t he just go? “What now?”

“Treat her well.”

Impatiently, Pomfrey set the paper down.
Now
what was the man talking about? “Treat who well?”

“Your fiancée.”

Pomfrey stared. The man was beyond presumptuous, and he’d just about had enough of it. “I’m sure that’s none of your concern, Mr. Owens.”

“She’s a brave girl, Pomfrey, with a spirit like a flame. Bright and ardent.”

Mildred? Now he was dumfounded as well as affronted. Mildred was not ardent. She was calm and deferential, a refuge from the tempestuous, wicked world, not a part of it.

“Don’t extinguish that flame.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It’s meant as a suggestion.”

“Thank you, Owens,” Pomfrey said coldly, struggling to keep his composure. “I shall take it under advisement.”

Owens started to turn again and once more checked. Pomfrey’s lips compressed so tightly they began to go numb.

“And when she gets silent, and she’s rarely silent,” Owens said, “if you wait long enough she’ll be back chattering like a magpie because she has too much joy in her to hold on to disappointment.”

Chattering like a magpie?
A tingle of alarm started in Pomfrey and grew. He’d never known Mildred to chatter. Her conversation was sedate and high-minded, and while she always maintained a pleasant demeanor, one would hardly call her joyful. In fact, she was sounding more and more of a stranger, and as he realized this he realized, too, that he’d never spent any extended periods of time with Mildred. Some long weekends at house parties, a few holidays at her father’s country estate, but mostly his courtship had taken place in letters.

Now he wondered if letters had been a poor substitute for personal experience. A person could mask certain less salubrious traits and edit out character flaws in the written word.

“And remember when something…unexpected happens, she will think she’s to blame and you’ll need to assure her she’s not.”

“Unexpected?” Pomfrey echoed.

“Yeah. You know. It’s when you think everything is going along fine that you should start looking for meteor showers or stampeding wildebeests.”

Meteor show—“What in God’s name do you mean?”

“She’s impulsive.”

No.
No
. Mildred could not be impulsive. He
loathed
impulsiveness in all its shapes and forms. Lord deliver him, what sort of terrible mistake had he made?

“Impulsive people court trouble, and she,” Owens looked past him to some inner vision and smiled, his voice dropping to a whisper, “she is a very ardent suitor.”

And just that easily, Pomfrey understood.

He surged to his feet, the chair toppling back and crashing to the floor. “You’ve
had
her, haven’t you?” he choked out in a hoarse voice. “You
bastard
. You sonofabitch! You took her, didn’t you?
Didn’t you?
”

Owens didn’t answer; he didn’t have to.

A red haze flooded Pomfrey’s vision, and he charged from behind his desk, spinning Owens around and ramming his other fist into his belly. It was like hitting a bag of wet sand, hard and dense, but Owens, exhausted and weak, went down to his knees. Pomfrey didn’t care. Dimly, he heard Hobbins shouting in the background, a woman’s scream, and the sound of boot heels running. Owens had lost any claims he had to a fair fight.

Pomfrey raised his fist and slammed it down into Owens’s face. He fell forward under the force of the blow, bracing himself on the floor with one hand. Pomfrey kicked him hard in the side, his lips curled back over his teeth, a sob coming from deep in his throat, “Bastard. You’ve ruined her!
Ruined
her!”

He stepped back, curling his fist to deliver another blow, but then Owens’s head slowly rotated and the silvery eyes marked him, gleaming with some hot inner fire, and he felt a cold shiver run up his spine even though he had righteousness on his side.

“Don’t you
ever
say that about her again,” Owens ground out in a low voice.

“Don’t you tell me what to do with regards to Mildred! You
polluted
her.” He raised his fist again and swung it as hard as he could down at Owens’s face. It never touched him.

Owens surged to his feet like a coiled spring abruptly released, catching Pomfrey’s fist in his bare hand and jerking him forward straight into an upper cut that came out of nowhere. Light exploded across Pomfrey’s vision, and he staggered back.

Owens came after him, catching hold of his shirtfront and straight-arming him backwards. Pomfrey’s head hit the wall hard, dazing him. Frantically, Pomfrey delivered a series of blows to Owens’s midsection, but the bastard didn’t even appear to feel it. He kept Pomfrey pinned to the wall with one hand and drew the other back to deliver a finishing blow.

“Let him go!” a woman cried out. “Jim! No!”

A disheveled woman in an oversized dress appeared, grabbing hold of Owens’s arm. “Jim!”

Owens looked over at her, his lips twitching back in a snarl. “Back away, Mildred.”

Pomfrey’s bleary gaze slew to the woman, narrowed in confusion, then widened in recognition. “Mildred?” he rasped. “That’s not Mildred!”

Owens’s gaze snapped from the woman back to him. “
What?
”

He should have known the woman Owens described couldn’t have been Mildred. He should have known it would be someone like
her
.

“That’s Harry Braxton’s brat.”

A half dozen soldiers flooded into the office, knocking Ginesse aside and launching themselves at Jim. They wrestled him back against the wall with an audible thud. It was excessive. An eight-year-old boy could have done as much because all the fight had gone out of Jim. He didn’t resist, he simply looked at her over their heads, his gaze betrayed and wondering.

Colonel Lord Pomfrey, a trim, sandy-colored man with a receding hairline and a lush moustache, snapped a linen kerchief from his uniform jacket pocket and dabbed the blood from his mouth while looking with loathing first at her and then at Owens.

She and several others had witnessed that he’d been first to strike a blow. Perhaps with this in mind, he made a sharply dismissive gesture to his men. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Let him go and leave. Now.”

Reluctantly, the soldiers released Jim, and with backwards glances, they filed out of the room.

“Hobbins, shut the door behind you,” Pomfrey ground out.

“You’re her. The
afreet
,” Jim said tonelessly, still watching her.

This wasn’t how she imagined telling him. No. Coward that she was, she hadn’t imagined it at all. She’d been too afraid to, and now looking at his face, she realized her instinct had been right.

“All that time. All that time knowing how I…and you were never…” he whispered, his head shaking like a dazed man.

“I’m sorry.”

He’d looked away from her, his gaze fixed on a place near the floor, his brow furrowed in concentration.

“What the hell are you doing here pretending to be Mildred?” Pomfrey demanded.

Her gaze slew to Pomfrey, to Jim, back to Pomfrey. “It’s…it’s complicated.”

“
Where’s Mildred?
”

“She’s fine. Really,” she said hastily. “I met her aboard the
Lydonia
. She was horribly seasick and got off the ship in Rome.” Her gaze flickered back to Jim. He was still staring fixedly at nothing. “She was going to finish her journey by rail. I…I took her place.”

“For God’s sake, why?” Pomfrey asked.

“I needed to get here, to find the lost city of Zerzura—”

“Jesus,” Jim whispered.

She turned toward him pleadingly. He looked straight through her. “No one would guide me if they knew who my father was. No one would dare to risk my safety by bringing me here. I thought if I told you my real name, you’d take me back.”

Pomfrey’s face grew red. “Do you mean to tell me you think I am any less responsible or that I care less about my fiancée’s welfare than your father does about yours?” he stormed.

Ginesse looked at him with loathing. She had his measure now. Pomfrey was the sort of man who thought himself the center of the universe, who considered everything that happened, anything anyone said, somehow related to him.

“
Of course
nothing would have happened to you. I would never have sent for Miss Whimpelhall if there was any danger.”

“But something
did
happen to me,” she said, unable to stem her anger. “Miss Whimpelhall
was
in danger. Because the men you sent to protect your fiancée were inadequate to the task. Had I been Mildred, you would be responsible for exposing her to a trauma from which she would not easily recover.”

“Impertinent girl!” Pomfrey shouted. “I suppose I am to thank you now? What hubris! But then hubris is rather your bailiwick, isn’t it,
Miss
Braxton?”

She went cold under the venomous lash of his voice. She wanted to plug her ears and flee from what he would say next. She didn’t. She wasn’t ten years old anymore. There was nowhere to hide from her actions. No one to whom she could run. Desperately, she glanced at Jim, but he was not looking at her. His jawline was tight, his brow furrowed as he stared at some inner demon. Or
afreet
.

“Everyone in Egypt knows your reputation as an overindulged brat incapable of the least modesty or self-restraint, a miscreant and a nuisance,” Pomfrey said in a thick, harsh voice. “You’re an object of ridicule and derision amongst the expat community. A calamity.”

She closed her eyes. He could have not have found sharper words with which to stab her or a more tender place to cut. Everything she’d thought to do by coming here fell apart, shredded by his accusations. The brilliant discovery with which she’d hoped to bury her past, the feeling of never being good enough, her failure to live up to everyone’s expectations, to make good on the promise of her famous name, mocked her in Pomfrey’s relentless voice. She was a jinx, an irritation, a meddler.
A disappointment.

“How could you mistake this…this
person
for my fiancée, Owens?” he demanded. Jim started and looked over at her.

“Look at her. A brazen, walking compendium of misfortune, irritation, and mishap. Sent away in shame. And now she’s returned,” he finished, “a full-blown adventuress and a profligate.”

She wanted to cry a denial, but the words couldn’t get past the constriction in her throat.

“And still in shame,” Pomfrey said meaningfully.

“That’s enough, Pomfrey,” Jim finally spoke.

Pomfrey’s gaze swung to Jim. “You are willing, I assume, to do the right thing by her?”

The right thing
?
Please, say no. Don’t think of me that way. Please.

“Yes.” He sounded numb. “Of course.”

A small sob escaped her lips.

“For your sake, I hope you mean that,” Pomfrey said. “You do know who her father is?”

“I know.”

Pomfrey gave a small snort of laughter. “Of course. How could you not?” he shook his head.

Jim didn’t speak. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t defend her. Not a sound to refute Pomfrey’s denunciation or to protest Pomfrey’s defamation. Certainly he said nothing about loving her. He was all dutiful resolve, stiff and erect, like a man facing a firing squad, she thought bitterly.

Well, she wasn’t going to be his bullet.

“No,” she whispered so quietly no one heard.

“You poor bastard. There’ll be no escaping the consequences this time.”

“That’s enough, Pomfrey,” Jim repeated. “This is no longer any of your concern.”

“No,” she repeated.

“I beg to differ, Owens. As the person inadvertently responsible for throwing her in your way and you in hers,” Pomfrey said, “it is indeed my responsibility to see that—”

“
No
.”

Both men looked over at her. She stood trembling, wounded and uncertain except for one vital thing: she would not marry Jim Owens. She would not marry him to placate society’s expectations, not to please her parents, not to satisfy Pomfrey’s moral code, not to be Jim’s act of contrition or to give him a forum to demonstrate how much honor he had. She would not marry him even to please her own heart. Because it would be a temporary thing, a preface to its breaking—if it hadn’t broken already.

If he’d cared for her, if he’d loved her at all, he would have championed her. He hadn’t. He’d stood silently by and let Pomfrey tear her to bits.

“I am
not
marrying Mr. Owens,” she said, “and nothing you can say, nothing anyone can say, can make me do so.”

And before either could speak, before her tears began falling unchecked down her cheeks, before she heeded an inner voice shouting, “
Fool! You love him! Marry him!
” she ran from the room.

Pomfrey turned to Owens with a sniff. “You have more luck than a pistol at a swordfight, Owens,” he said. “The girl is lost to all decency, obviously a complete wanton, a wh—”

Jim’s fist shot out.

Pomfrey collapsed to the ground unconscious.