“Now, Miss. Whimpelhall. You’re upset,” Jim said, uncertain how to continue.
“With or without you,” she repeated. She pivoted and pointed an imperious finger at the captain, who’d taken time off from barking orders at his lackluster crew to watch the proceedings with growing interest. “You, Captain. Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Do you know someone who would be willing to act as my guide to Fort Gordon?”
“No.” He shook his head in disgust. “It is far away across a very bad land. No.”
Jim relaxed. He hadn’t been aware that every muscle in his body had tensed.
“Could you find me someone willing to do so for, say, fifty English pounds?”
The captain abruptly ceased shaking his head. He squinted up at her. “My cousin’s daughter is married to a Bedouin. He might—”
“No,” Jim clipped out. “No. You can’t just hire someone you don’t know to take you on a trip like this.”
“I don’t know anything about you other than what Colonel Lord Pomfrey wrote,” she said. “Apparently he didn’t know much either. Certainly he didn’t know you were a welsher.” Her gaze racked him from head to toe. “I suspect he should have.”
He’d been called worse, and he wasn’t the sort of man to be goaded into doing something because of a few words. Still, it stung. “I guess he should have at that.”
“Oh!” She stomped again. “Fine. Captain, as soon as these men disembark, you can start across the river.”
“I’ll need to be paid first.”
“Of course. I have the money right—What are you doing, Mr. Owens? Unhand that man at once!”
He’d reached across the transom, grabbed a fistful of the captain’s galabeeyah, and dragged him forward until the man hung face to face before him. Dammit. Now the captain knew she was carrying money on her. She’d just put herself in peril and she didn’t even realize it. How the hell had she made it all the way to Egypt unscathed?
Had he thought he’d be putting her at risk by staying with her? She was already in danger, and it would only grow worse by the day, because that was the sort of woman she was, set on having her own way regardless of the consequences to anyone. Including herself.
“You’re not taking her across the river alone,” he explained to the captain. “Not for fifty pounds or a hundred pounds. Understood?”
The captain lifted his hands, squirming. “Of course not, effendi. I was not thinking clear.”
“No!” Mildred Whimpelhall howled from atop her crate. “That’s not fair. You can’t just tell people to ignore me!”
Jim glanced over at her. “It’s for your own good.”
“Oh, how I loathe that phrase,” she spat out. Her hat had fallen off during her scramble, and the terrible red hair was starting to come unbound, falling in Medusa-like ropes around her face.
“You may stop this man from taking me across the river, Mr. Owens,” she declared, “but you can’t accost every captain along this shore, and that’s what you’ll have to do to keep me from crossing this river. I’ll go up and down the banks and ask every man with a dahabiya or felucca or a raft to ferry me across. Sooner or later, one of them is bound to agree, and there is nothing you can do to stop me, unless, that is, you plan spend your days shadowing me. And since you seem to be in a great hurry to be rid of me, I can’t imagine you will do so. So you may as well go now, Mr. Owens, and leave me to my search.”
He stared at her. She stared at him.
Shit.
“Allah be praised!” the boy beside her suddenly cried, leaping up and pumping the air with both fists as the mainsail caught the breeze and billowed out.
His triumph was short-lived. He hadn’t tied down the mainsheet on the boom, and as soon as the wind filled the sail, the big wooden spar swept across the deck, knocking aside everything in its path.
Including Miss Whimpelhall. One minute she was standing there, glaring at him; the next, she was gone.
He leapt to the side of the boat just in time to see her sink beneath the water, her enormous dark skirts ballooning around her like a giant jellyfish, a jellyfish that was going to drown her.
“Leave Egypt now, James,” Haji said calmly. “I will see that she is safe.”
But it was too late. Jim had already dived in.
Ginesse plummeted toward the bottom of the Nile, weighed down by the heavy gabardine skirt. She opened her eyes in a thick stew of brown murk and felt a thread of panic take hold: she couldn’t tell top from bottom. Disoriented and frightened, she forced herself not to struggle. She knew how to swim, but in these skirts it would be impossible. She had to shed them.
She began to work feverishly at the ties and buttons. Her chest ached, and her lungs felt close to bursting, but she knew to exhale meant she had only seconds to replace the air. Carefully, she let a thin stream of bubbles escape her lips as she yanked at the skirt. She was growing light-headed, her fingers fumbling…
And then suddenly two strong hands seized her and she was being propelled up through the muddy waters, the water breaking over her head as she was pushed up through the surface and into the air, choking and gasping for breath. Strong arms raised her up the side of the felucca where other hands accepted her, hauling her aboard like a net full of fish and dropping her on the deck.
She coughed, spitting water all over the deck, and then she was being lifted against a hard, broad chest and her head fell in the lee between a warm neck and muscled shoulder.
“Are you all right?” His voice was harsh, unsympathetic. He gave her a little shake. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
She opened her eyes, blinking through the muddy water still streaming down her face, and found Jim Owens looking down at her. Of course. She’d known it was him the moment he’d touched her. His face was a mask, inscrutable and stony, his gray eyes roving over her face, touching on her hair, her mouth, and finally meeting her eyes.
“You dove in after me,” she said, her voice faint and wondering.
He seemed to find this amusing, for his mouth curled at the corner again and she took that for a smile. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”
She answered before she had time to consider. “I didn’t expect you.”
“I didn’t expect you, either.” His voice seemed odd, somehow nonplussed.
“Will you me take to Fort Gordon?” she asked without much hope. Of course he wouldn’t. All her plans were for naught, all her dreams whisked away with the swing of a spar.
“Yes,” he said in a resigned voice. “I suppose I will.”
CHAPTER NINE
Jim kept his eyes on his oar and avoided looking at Mildred Whimpelhall perched on the gunwale ahead of him, dangling her bare feet over the edge. He wished she wouldn’t. She made him nervous sitting there, as if tempting the river gods to have another go at drowning her. She seemed oblivious to any risk and to have completely forgotten yesterday’s misadventure, as if falling into the Nile was an everyday occurrence.
Except for her bare feet, she was back in the hot-looking gabardine travel kit, having spent most of yesterday twined in a long piece of sailcloth while her clothing dried on the mast, the package Haji had delivered having been buried under piles of other provisions by the inept crew. That hadn’t seemed to bother her, either. She’d been in high spirits ever since he’d agreed to take her to Fort Gordon.
He didn’t have much choice. It was clear that she was going to attempt to find her way with or without him. Someone was going to have to take responsibility for getting her across the desert, and since he’d agreed to Pomfrey’s request, that someone was him. For good or bad, she was his…until he turned her over to her fiancé.
A light breeze riffled the water, and he looked up at the mainsail. It luffed briefly before going slack again. The wind that could almost always be counted on to propel small sailing vessels against the Nile’s current had failed, and now he and the Nubian sailors—if he dared insult
sailors everywhere by calling them that—had been forced to lend their backs to the work of moving the boat upstream. It was hard, sweaty labor.
“Did you ever rob a stagecoach?” The question came out of nowhere.
He looked at her, startled, though he shouldn’t have been. She’d been lobbing these sorts of questions at him all day. Do you own a six-shooter? Have you ever rustled cattle? What did whiskey taste like, and had he ever seen a buffalo herd?
“Or a train?” She was regarding him with unblinking concentration.
What sort of proper young lady asked the sort of questions she did? What sort of proper young lady was even interested in the kinds of things she was?
His own limited experience with well-bred misses had ill-prepared him for the likes of Miss Mildred Whimpelhall. They had been modest, genteel, and reserved creatures, all downcast eyes and faint curving smiles. Charlotte, for example, would have been just as likely to run naked in the streets as to ask a stranger such personal questions.
Mildred Whimpelhall, on the other hand, had more questions, more opinions, more…talk than any three people put together. Whatever English finishing school she’d been sent to, if he’d been her parent, he’d have demanded his money back.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” she amended.
“That’s awfully decent of you,” he said dryly.
“But I wish that you would.” She peeked at him from under the sweep of spiky lashes. Her eyes—
Lord save him, those eyes. She had lost her spectacles in the river, which had proved a double-edged sword. When he’d scooped her up off the felucca’s deck yesterday and her eyelids had fluttered open, he’d lost his breath. She had the most extraordinary eyes he’d ever seen, a true cerulean, the irises a soft, greenish blue shot with copper sparks and ringed by darker blue. They were the sort of eyes that made a man stupid and sent him to his knees.
Some men—not him.
Then Haji had come to see how she fared, and she’d swooned. She’d rallied soon after Haji left, disgruntled that Jim still intended to go through with his plan.
“Well?” She’d taken out a folded square of foolscap and the stub of a pencil. What was she writing, anyway? It seemed she was always scribbling away at something. “Have you ever robbed a train?”
“Just what sort of man do you take me for, Miss Whimpelhall?” he asked.
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out,” she answered. “But it’s deuced hard when you only answer in mono-syllables.”
“Maybe the reason I don’t reply is because I don’t think you’d like the answers.”
She considered this, stretching out a long leg to dip her toes in the water, affording him a glimpse of neat ankle, a high, elegantly arched instep, and pretty pink toes. His body grew hard at the sight, unnerving him. How could something as serviceable as a foot be so arousing?
“I might not,” she finally admitted. “But don’t you think I deserve to know the manner of man to whom Lord Colonel Pomfrey has entrusted my safety?”
“Shouldn’t it be enough for you that he did?” he countered.
“No,” she answered without hesitation. “It’s my safety at stake, not his.”
Another mark against the supposed finishing school. “Supposed” because he was beginning to think she’d never set foot in such a school. Young ladies did not go about insisting on autonomy. Older ladies might be forgiven for being strong-minded and independent, but she was far too young to have developed a taste for independence. And she was very independent.
She was also right. She did deserve to know the sort of man guiding her, whether he would prove faithful to the task or abandon her if trouble arose. He would want to know if he were in her position.
But he also wanted to answer because he wanted someone, her, to know him, to be something more than a ghost for a few short days, though he didn’t examine why too closely.
“No, I’ve never robbed a stagecoach. Or a train. Or, before you ask, a bank.”
“But you’ve robbed something,” she said, watching him intently. “From someone.”
“Yes. The dead.” At her shocked expression, he gave a humorless chuckle. “I meant from tombs. I wasn’t stripping the boots off cattle rustlers.”
“Some people call that archaeology,” she said stiffly.
“What’s the difference?” he asked. “What I do is no less thievery, just less immediate.”
She stiffened even more. He’d nicked a nerve. Interesting. “It’s archaeology if the public benefits from it; it’s thievery if it gratifies personal greed.”
“Is your father an archaeologist by chance? Because you seem more than a little partisan,” he said, amused. A lot of upper-class gents styled themselves amateur archaeologists. He’d sold quite a few things to them.
“No! I mean, yes.” She flushed. “He is a gifted enthusiast. But he’s not a thief.”
That helped explain the bits of historical trivia punctuating her conversation and the idle observations she would make when they passed some ancient site or ruins.
“I’m sure your father abides by every rule involving the acquisition of antiquities,” he said.
She only flushed brighter and cleared her throat. “Just so,” she said. “But we weren’t discussing my family, we were talking about yours.”
“Actually, we weren’t and we won’t,” he replied evenly, winning a peeved glance. She was worse than Haji and even more transparent.
“Well then, we were talking about your life on the wild frontiers of America.”
“No. You were talking about it. I was rowing.”
“But if you would talk about it,” she said, “it would keep your mind off how hot it is and how hard the rowing is and how far we have to go yet before you can quit.” Her words were doing little to hearten him, which, he suspected, was her intent. “Or how inefficient your crew is.”
She cast a pointed look at Nubians lolling at the oars on either side of the felucca. “I daresay not one of them has ever rowed in unison. Do you think I should call out a rowing song? You know, to get you all synchronized and pulling as one?” she suggested.
“No,” he said hastily. The captain had told him the men were uncomfortable having an unmarried woman in their midst. They thought her plunge into the river followed by the unusual absence of the wind was a bad omen. “I’m, ah, enjoying our conversation.”
She smiled broadly, and he realized he’d just been blackmailed. “Do you have a mustang pony?”
Here at last was something he could talk about without reservation.
“I did. A tough little buckskin.”
“Was he handsome?” she asked hopefully.
“Hardly. He looked like a gargoyle, had a trot that could break your back, but never stumbled on open ground and knew his way around a steer.”
“But you’re an adept rider, I’d imagine.”
“Yes.”
“Do you still own him?”
“No.” Like everything, it had been sold after his father had died and he’d suddenly found himself an heir. Althea had swooped down like some malevolent angel, wresting Jim from his uncle’s ranch and taking him away to her mausoleum-like house—he could not call that place a home. She had allowed him to bring nothing with him.
“Is it impossible for you to offer any bit of conversation without me having to pry it from you?” she burst out, surprising him. He couldn’t imagine why she’d be so interested. “I appreciate your whole enigmatic, solitary wanderer identity, but you have achieved new heights of reticence. The Sphinx is more forthcoming than you!”
Enigmatic solitary wanderer? Is that how she saw him? He started to smile.
“Don’t smile that way. You are purposely enigmatic, and it’s obviously nothing more than a ploy devised to enhance your mysterious aura.”
Great God. His half smile turned into a full-out grin. She was so unexpected. So amusing. “I have a mysterious aura?”
“You only wish,” she refuted her earlier words with a humph.
“I’m sorry,” he said, still grinning. She had crossed her arms over her chest. And lifted her nose in the air, turning from him. “There didn’t seem to be any more to say on the subject. What would you like to know?”
“Do you have any siblings?”
“Yes. A half brother four years younger than me. Jock.” It had been a long time since he’d said his name. It felt odd. Bittersweet. “He was a sweet-natured boy, studious and shy, always disappearing between the pages of a book. His mother died in childbirth.” He’d been the only bit of warmth Jim had experienced in Althea’s great cold house.
She beamed at him. “See? Was that so hard?”
“Yes.”
She gave an unladylike snort.
“And do you have any siblings, Miss Whimpelhall?” he asked. “I don’t know anything about you, either, other than that you’re Pomfrey’s intended bride.”
“Oh,” she said easily, “scads. Six younger brothers and one on the way. My turn. Where are your parents?”
This was not a memory he wished resurrected. “Both dead,” he answered in a short, clipped voice. And then he found, oddly enough, that he wanted to say more. “My mother died when I was four. We lived on my uncle’s ranch—it’d been in the family for generations, and after she died my uncle just took over raising me. Must have been hard for him. He wasn’t married, and I imagine I was a handful.”
“What of your father?”
“My parents stopped living together before I was even born. I never met my father. He remarried after my mother died. Then, when I was fourteen, he died and I inherited his…” This hadn’t hurt him in a long time. There was no reason he should allow it to do so now.
“His?” Miss Whimpelhall prompted gently.
“His everything. Which wasn’t all that much,” he said. “Not to me. His mother decided I shouldn’t be allowed to run wild like a savage, so she came to the ranch and took me away with her.” He released a long breath, surprised to find he’d been holding it.
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