Pomfrey offered him a thin smile. “As soon as you’ve eaten and cleaned up, you can report to my office and tell me where the rest of my men are,” he said. He nodded to his young lieutenant, who, though standing at attention, was slack-jawed with wonder. “Jones here will see you to the men’s barracks.”
“Of course,” Jones said. “If you’d follow me, Mr. Owens?”
Owens nodded tiredly and began following the eager young subordinate, but Pomfrey felt he owed the man something more. The trip had obviously tested Owens in unforeseen and unpleasant ways, and yet he’d arrived with Mildred. His faith in Owens had not been misplaced after all.
“Owens,” he called out.
Owens stopped, his shoulders sagging with exhaustion, and looked around.
Pomfrey smiled. “Well, you always said you’d repay your debt to me. I guess you’ve done so at that,” he said amicably. “I should say that makes us even.”
An odd, wry smile curled Owens’s cracked and bleeding lips. “Would you?”
“Why, yes,” Pomfrey said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Not even a little bit, Colonel. In fact, not at all,” he replied, and with that enigmatic statement, he turned and limped away.
An hour later Pomfrey was still pondering what Owens had meant when Owens appeared in the doorway to his office. He’d washed, shaved, and changed into the regiment’s khaki drill clothing, his own being beyond salvaging. Nonetheless, he still looked awful. Dark circles underscored his eyes, and his cheeks looked hollowed out, his cheekbones jutting under peeling and raw skin.
“Ah, Owens. That’s all right, Hobbins,” he said to his assistant who had leapt up to dutifully guard the sanctity of his commander’s office. “Come in, Owens. Have a seat.”
He motioned for Owens to take the chair across the desk from him and waited while Owens was seated. “Would you like some tea?” he offered, picking up the pot Hobbins had recently brought in and pouring himself a cup.
Owens ignored the offer. “How is she?”
“She?” Pomfrey echoed.
“Mi—Miss Whimpelhall.”
“Oh,” Pomfrey nodded. “Fine, I should imagine, or I should have heard otherwise. Thank you for asking.”
“You mean you haven’t seen her yet?”
“Of course not,” Pomfrey said in sincere surprise. “I can guarantee you, she would not thank me to visit her in her current state. She would be mortified. I shall see her in due course, when she is feeling more the thing. Perhaps tomorrow.”
Owens’s light-colored eyes glittered oddly.
“Now tell me about Neely and the rest of my men.”
“They deserted us,” Owens said flatly.
“What?”
“Neely got it into his head that we were being followed by some sort Mahdist raiders. He wanted to turn back halfway into the journey. I refused.”
“Neely left Miss Whimpelhall with you and absconded?” Pomfrey asked incredulously.
“I don’t know the particulars. He coshed me. When I came to, he and his men were gone and Miss Whimpelhall was still with me.”
“Well, for God’s sake man, what did she say?”
“She wouldn’t say much.” Something softened in his eyes for a second, and a half smile flickered briefly over his austere face.
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “She wouldn’t say that either.”
“But that’s preposterous.” Pomfrey drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk.
“That’s Mi—Miss Whimpelhall.”
Pomfrey stiffened, taking exception to Owens’s familiarity. How dare Owens presume to instruct him on what his fiancée was like?
Owens was gazing steadily at a place in the center of the desk through half-closed eyes, either indolent or absorbed.
“Were you?” Pomfrey asked.
Owens pressed his lower lip in and bit it, as though keeping back a snarl. He looked up. “Were we what?”
“Being followed by raiders?”
“No. We were being shadowed by Tuaregs.”
“Tuaregs?”
“Yup. They closed in on us about a week back. Caught us unawares.”
“Good Lord,” Pomfrey breathed, furious. “Then Neely was right and you needlessly endangered my fiancée!”
Dull red swept up Owens’s neck into his lean face. “No,” he said softly. “They were traveling parallel to us. They would never have dared approach us had Neely stayed. They had nothing but a couple of antique rifles, and there were only four of them.”
As much as Pomfrey wanted to believe Neely wouldn’t act in so craven a fashion, he didn’t doubt Owens, not when he could so easily confirm his story with Mildred.
He sat back. “What happened?”
“I sold Miss Whimpelhall to them for that horse you saw, snuck into their camp four days later, and got her back. We’ve been making our way here ever since.”
Pomfrey felt his blood grow cold. “You what?”
“There wasn’t another way to ensure her safety. If I hadn’t sold her, they would have killed me, and that would have been the end to it.” Owens met his shocked gaze with a flinty one.
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 defe
rential, 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.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
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?”
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