The Other Guy's Bride (14 page)

Neely stiffened, lifting his rifle. “We do if I say we are. I’m the officer in charge here.”

Jim didn’t say a word. He just stood, meeting Neely’s eyes and letting the other man take his measure. He didn’t want to hurt Neely. The lieutenant had probably never thought he’d make it out of Egypt alive, and now that he could finally see an end to his time here, hope had come hand in hand with fear.

Jim pitied Neely. But they weren’t going back.

For a long few seconds, Neely ground his teeth in frustration, one eyelid twitching as he stared at Jim. Finally, with a sound halfway between snarl and sob, he turned on his heel and left.

“What was that all about?” Mildred had risen and was standing nearby.

“Nothing,” Jim said. “He wanted me to take late night watch, is all.”

“Oh,” she said. “Do you have to go right now?”

No. Yes. Right now. Before it’s too late…if it isn’t already.

“No.”

She flashed him her gamine smile. “Then I suppose you want me to tell you about the building of the step pyramids?”

“I want nothing more,” he answered.

She sank back down to the ground, laughing a little and picking up a feather some high-flying vulture had lost.

He tried to recall Charlotte’s face but it was gone. All he could see was the girl in front of him, leaning forward to draw him a picture in the sand with her vulture feather. Her hair was coming undone, a single strand curling around her neck like a lover’s palm—

The rifle butt caught him hard in the temple.

He felt his knees buckle, and his last thought was that LeBouef would have laughed himself sick that Jim Owens had finally been caught off guard because he was mooning over a woman drawing stick figures in the sand.

“You’re coming with us!” Neely shouted.

“I am not,” Ginesse said. She knelt where Jim Owens lay unconscious on the ground, her fingers gently probing the gash in his head, uncertain she would know what a crack would feel like even if she found one.

“Get packed and get those camels loaded!
Now!
” Neely shouted at his men, and they leapt into action, taking down the camp with a speed they’d never shown setting it up.

He turned back to her, glowering. “Goddammit, lass. Do you
want
to die?”

“I’m not going to die,” she said.

“Right. Because you’re coming with us and that’s that. Owens can rot out here, since that’s what he wants. But I been charged with taking you to the colonel, and that’s what I aim to do.”

“But you aren’t. You’re taking me back to Suhag.”

“Just until some more men can be sent. Now, get up.”

“No,” she said, her gaze on Jim. “I’m not leaving Mr. Owens.” Though his breathing seemed unlabored, he looked pale.

“Look, Miss Whimpelhall,” Neely said, obviously making some effort to speak in a reasonable tone. “You don’t come with us, and you might as well take Owens’s gun there and shoot yourself in the head. Because you’re gonna die out here sure as there’s a devil in hell.”

He’d struck Jim from behind; she hated him.

“Mr. Neely,” she said in a hard, uncompromising voice, “let me make myself clear. I am not going with you. If you attempt to make me go by force, I shall fight you every step of the way. If you sneak up behind me and knock me senseless,” here Neely had the grace to flush with embarrassment, “I shall take the first opportunity to run away. Because, Mr. Neely, I have more confidence in an unconscious Mr. Owens than I do in an unprincipled scoundrel and his equally dishonorable soldiers.” Her scornful gaze swept over Neely’s men. Not one of them could meet her eye.

They’d finished taking down the camp. The tents were packed, and the camels carrying provisions were already loaded and tethered to a lead line.

Neely pulled himself up. “Owens gave me no choice,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster.

“And
I’m
not giving you one. I am not leaving him here.”

His lips curled back in a snarl, and he dropped to a squat beside her so they were eye to eye. “Ever seen what them savages do to a man?” he asked, in a low, throbbing voice.

“They make ’im so as he’s not recognizable as man, is what. Sometimes they cut chunks off him, skinning him alive, or taking pieces out of his insides and draping ’em over him. Or sometimes they let the desert do their work. They stake him out in the sun so his skin peels off like the blistered hide of roast pig, slit his eyelids off so he goes blind staring into the sun, and let the ants eat him bit by bit…”

She felt the blood drain from her face though this was not the first time she’d heard such stories. She’d been awake during similar conversations at her father’s camp when no one thought ears that needed protecting would be listening. She’d heard equally horrific stories eavesdropping in on the
fellahin
’s gossip, too, only the barbarians in their tales wore uniforms.

“I’d hate to think what they might do to a woman,” Neely finished intently.

She swallowed but did not look away. “I am not leaving Mr. Owens.”

They stared at one another a full minute before he surged to his feet, spewing epithets and dashing his hat to the ground. She watched him, unmoved.

“If I show up in Suhag without Owens, no one cares,” he shouted at her. “But how am I supposed to explain how I’m there and you’re not?”

“That’s your problem.”

“Dammit, woman, I don’t care if I have to tie you to the camel, you’re—”

He stopped because she was on her feet with a gun pointing at his chest. Jim Owens’s gun. “I am telling you for the last time, Mr. Neely,” she said. “I am not going to leave Mr. Owens, and since you have already declared you are not taking him with you—”

“It’d be worth my hide if I tried,” Neely said.

“Be that as it may, I am not going without him. And if you take one step closer to me, I will shoot you. I do not know if it will kill you, but at this distance, do you want to take that chance?”

The men shifted uneasily, muttering. The situation had taken an unexpected and unpleasant turn.

“Goddamn you, woman!” Neely exploded, but this time there was more helplessness than anger in his voice.

She kept the gun trained on him. “You’ll leave us a camel and provisions,” she said.

He swore again and made a sharp gesture to one of his soldiers. “Untie that last camel,” he shouted. He turned back to Ginesse as the man hurried to the end of the line to comply.

“Listen. I don’t want to leave you here. I’m a Christian man,” Neely said. “Mostly. Truth is, I don’t know how hard I hit Owens. Pretty hard, I guess. Fact is, he might not wake up, and then where’ll you be?”

A bottomless pit seemed to open up at Ginesse’s feet. She swallowed, refusing to let it suck her down into it. She wouldn’t believe it. Her father had been coshed in the head a number of times and he’d always woken up. Jim would, too.

“I’ll take that chance.”

He regarded her soberly for one last long minute, miserable but resigned.

“All right, miss. You win. I did what I could to make you come. And if it’s any consolation to you for what I done to Owens, you might know that me and my lads will have to take the French leave because if we don’t, we’re sure to be court-martialed.” He regarded her reproachfully, as if she had willfully done him a great wrong.

“You don’t
have
to leave us,” she said.

Neely snorted. “First off, that man has a reputation for bein’ a hard customer,” he said, nodding toward Jim, “and I don’t want to learn if it’s warranted. Second, my man saw a fire in the distance no matter what Owens says. So I guess I’d rather flee Egypt with my head on my shoulders than stay and have it lopped off.”

But Jim had said there was no cause for alarm, and if Jim said there was no one nearby, there was no one nearby. “Then there’s nothing more to say,” she said, wishing Neely would go so she could put down the gun and go back to doing what, if anything, she could for Jim.

“I guess not.” The solider who’d untied the camel led it over and handed the rope to Neely. There’d been a reason that particular camel had been at the end of the line. She was old and evil-tempered with a patchy hide and only one eye. She spat, hitting Neely’s trousers. Ginesse decided she liked her.

Neely shouted again and another soldier untied his water skin from his saddle and tossed it to him. He caught it and flung it at Ginesse’s feet. She didn’t look down to where it landed, expecting Neely would try to divert her attention so he could grab for her gun. Once more he swore.

“If I were you, I’d make sure I was gone before Mr. Owens wakes up.”

Neely spun around and started stalking toward his waiting men. He’d gone about five steps before he turned around. In amazement, she saw that his lips were trembling and his eyes brimmed with tears.

“What now?” she asked, growing exasperated. The man was worse than a Dickens serial story. Just when you thought it might end, something else popped up.

“You’re a brave lass, Miss Whimpelhall,” he said, his voice thickening. “As thick as bricks, but courageous as I am not. I wish I could promise you I’d tell them where to find your sweet, valiant bones, but the truth is, I won’t. I’ll tell them Owens took off with you and bandits got the pair of you. And when the next ship sails out of Alexandria, I’ll be on it no matter what the outcome. So goodbye, Miss Whimpelhall. Don’t think too badly of me when you’re dying.”

As farewell speeches went, it wasn’t very heartening.

He swung up onto the camel’s saddle and with a final salute, kneed the great beast into a trot, his men following suit.

The heavy pistol slowly dropped against her thigh, and she sank down next to Jim’s unconscious body, watching them go until they were just small figures dissolving into the shimmering horizon. In a very short time it would be dark and then the cold would come, quick and dangerous.

She brushed her hand across Jim’s brow. It felt a little warm but not feverish. She didn’t even know if one became feverish due to head trauma. She studied him, worrying her lower lip. Should she try to wake him up? She couldn’t remember if her mother had ever roused her father after a similar injury. And if she had, how? Water? A slap? Jostling?

What if she hurt him even more than he already was? What if something she did loosened something already perilously close to breaking and she caused permanent damage? In the end, she decided Jim’s body would best know when it ought to regain consciousness. Gingerly, she cradled his head in her lap and forced herself to wait. She was not very good at waiting.

The thought that maybe they would die kept whispering through her imagination. If she did, no one would ever know. Even Neely’s lie wouldn’t help anyone find her; they’d be looking for Mildred Whimpelhall, who eventually would appear in Cairo and turn Pomfrey’s funeral preparations to matrimonial ones and his sorrow to joy.

Ginesse sighed. Maybe one day when the Pomfreys were toasting their anniversary, they would pause and cast a passing thought to the strange young woman who for some unknown reason had masqueraded as Mildred and wonder why she’d done so and who she was.

There would never ever be any reason to suppose that Ginesse Braxton, Miss Whimpelhall’s shipboard acquaintance, was the impersonator, especially since her great-grandfather would eventually read the telegram she’d sent and then everyone would assume she’d been lost somewhere in Eastern Europe, stolen to become some Asian prince’s consort or eloped with a Bulgarian count.

It was all very romantic, and she was feeling a mite better when her eye caught the sparkle of the emerald ring she wore. Her mother had given it to her on her sixteenth birthday. Her mother…

What have I done?

If she died, she would have condemned them to a life of fruitless searching because no matter how slight the chance, as long as there was even the faintest possibility of her being alive, her parents would never ever give up looking for her. Never. They would hunt until they found her bones, or they themselves died. Because they loved her. They loved her, and they would never find her bones because they would be looking in the wrong place.

The thought of them searching for her year after endless year filled her with horror and shame. She should have left a letter explaining her plans with some responsible person to be delivered if she never arrived. And if she ever got the opportunity to do anything as stupid as this again, she would remember to write down her plans. But…but she hadn’t thought she might die. She hadn’t planned on Neely, damn him!

She looked down at Jim’s bronzed, handsome face. His lashes cast a fan-shaped shadow over his high cheekbones, his hair tumbling in damp curls over his brow. He looked so much younger now, so vulnerable, the hard gaze extinguished, his expression relaxed, the implacable lines softened. She brushed the hair from his temple. She couldn’t have left him, and given the choice again, she wouldn’t.
God
, she hated Neely.

Why wouldn’t Jim wake up? It had been almost twenty minutes. A quarter moon was rising in an orchid-colored sky. Soon it would be night. Carefully, she slipped her hand beneath Jim’s head and eased it to the ground. There were preparations she needed to make before the frigid desert night arrived—

—he moaned.

She scrambled back to his side on her knees, bracketing his face in her hands. “Mr. Owens. Jim.” A tear fell on his cheek. “Are you all right?”

“No,” he moaned. He squinted up at her through one eye, grimacing. “What happened?”

“Don’t move. Neely hit you from behind with his rifle.”

He rolled to his side and pushed himself to a seated position, groaning. “Where…?”

“Don’t try to get up. They’re gone,” she said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders.

“Gone?” He looked around, his expression astonished. “They left you here
alone
?”

“No. You’re here. Now, stop. Your head is bleeding again.”

He put a hand to his forehead, breathing hard and wincing. “How long ago?”

“Quarter of an hour or—
No!
You’re in no condition to do anything about it.”

But he was already struggling to his feet. She wedged a shoulder under his arm, supporting his weight as best she could as he climbed painfully upright. He was heavy and unsteady, and she had to wrap her arms tightly around his waist just to keep him from falling.

“Please,” she said. “There is nothing you can do. You’re only going to make yourself worse. You need to—”

But her words fell on deaf ears, for as she was talking his legs gave out, and with her arms around him, he crumpled slowly to the ground, unconscious once more.