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  The Other Guy’s Bride

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2011 Connie Brockway

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Photos from the Library of Congress

  Cover design by Dana Ashton France

  Published by Montlake Romance

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-144-8

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  In writing As You Desire (www.amzn.com/B004CFAWRU), the story of Desdemona Carlisle and Harry Braxton, I prefaced the initial chapter with the year 1890, when in fact, I’d meant to write 1880. Anyone who follows my posts on Facebook (www.facebook.com/ConnieBrockwayFans) or Twitter (www.twitter.com/ConnieBrockway) or who has had the misfortune of exchanging e-mail with me will hardly be surprised. Like Harry Braxton, I experience a mild degree of visual dyslexia. It has made me very fond of copy editors.

  Somehow, I doubt the reverse is true.

  If you would like to read excerpts from more of my stories, please visit my website at: www.conniebrockway.com.

  Thank you!

  Connie Brockway

  This is for all those kind readers who asked, “What happened to Harry and Dizzy?”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have been wildly blessed in writing this book, and there are a slew of people to thank. First off, thank you Jeffrey Belle at Amazon for calling me up and saying, “I have something I’d like to discuss with you that I think you’ll find interesting.” It was pretty interesting. (That’s Minnesotan for BOOYAH!)

  Thank you also to the rest of the great team at Amazon. My thanks to my long-distance editor, Charlotte Herscher, for the kindness with which she identified the flabby parts.

  I am one of those fortunate people whose friends are as talented as they are generous. Thank you to Eloisa James, who took the time she did not have to look over these pages; to Lisa Kleypas and Teresa Medeiros for singing “The Little Choo-Choo Train That Could” whenever I began to feel I couldn’t; to Christina Dodd, for cackling gleefully from the sidelines; and most of all to my dear friend Susan Kay Law who has my back in so many, many ways. Love you, Suz!

  Contents

  AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  1897, THE SAHARA DESERT, SUDAN

  “Join the Foreign Legion,” the dirt- and blood-stained young man muttered, jamming a cartridge into his rifle’s magazine. “If you die, that’ll make her sorry, by God.” He dug another cartridge out from the bottom of his kit, ramming it alongside its fellow. “Only one problem: you’ll be dead a lot longer than she’ll be sorry, jackass.”

  He took a deep breath, counted to five, and stuck his head out from behind the boulder where he’d taken refuge, snapping off a couple of shots as he tried to locate the Mahdist tribesmen hidden amongst the rocks. A dozen reports answered in reply, peppering his face with shards of rock. He jerked back, breathing hard.

  He’d counted five guns, but there could easily be ten. They’d been at it for two days now. As of last night he was the only one of his troop left. The rest were dead.

  Sweat pouring down his back and soaking his shirt, he squinted up at the sun burning half a hand’s span above the western horizon. His face was sunburned and blistered, and he had a hole in his left bicep that screamed bloody hell every time he shouldered his rifle and a broken collarbone that made the hole in his arm feel like an itch in comparison. He hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours. He was running low on ammunition and even lower on water. To his south, north, and east were at least five Mahdist gunmen intent on his death while to his west stretched a hundred miles of desert wasteland just as likely to kill him.

  The situation did not look promising.

  Inside a half hour it’d be dusk, and then, well, a bad situation would turn downright grim. The days were infernos, but at least there was some shade behind the boulder. The nights were worse, a frigid, bone-soaking cold that set your teeth chattering and your body shaking like a rag doll in the jaws of a pit dog. He didn’t think he’d survive another night. If he was going to make a move, it had to be soon.

  He didn’t have much of a plan, more of a half-cocked idea, and since the last half-cocked idea he’d had was to join the French Foreign Legion—despite not being French—he didn’t put much stock in it. Unfortunately, it was the only one he had.

  He upended his kit, producing his remaining clips. Flicking open his pocketknife, he set to work prying off the tops of the cartridges, emptying the gunpowder into the well-worn folds of a letter he’d carried next to his heart over the past year. He watched the delicate signature disappear under the gunpowder, thinking he’d finally found a good use for the damn thing.

  He tore the letter’s second page into little squares, funneling a small bit of powder in the center of each and then twisting it into a plug.

  “Join the Legion, see the world, die in glory!” he muttered as he worked. The only part of the world he’d seen had been the parched earth of one desert after another. As for glory…He looked around. There was no glory here, only sad, nameless corpses. That he wasn’t one of them was a matter of pure chance.

  “Too bad, Althea,” he muttered, his thoughts turning from the letter’s author, Charlotte, to the woman behind the letter—his nemesis, his warden, his guardian, his grandmother. Althea. The malevolent old woman had told Charlotte that Jim was a bastard and that as such he wouldn’t inherit anything, not a name, not a place in society, not wealth. Charlotte had believed her because Althea did have a name, a position in society, and wealth.

  When he’d confronted Althea, she’d coldly informed him that she would destroy, overturn, and prevent anything that ran counter to her will and it was her will to ennoble the family name, which meant Jim would marry only when and who she chose. The only way he would ever truly escape her influence, she’d said, would be to die.

  He’d told her he would never bow to her will and that he would rather die than be her puppet. And then she’d looked him in the eye and told him yes, she would prefer if he died, too, since his younger half brother Jock was s
o better qualified to make the family proud.

  So, he’d made a deal with the devil; he’d shed his name, go away, disappear forever, for all intents and purposes, die. The courts could declare him dead and give everything that should have been his to his half brother, Jock. In exchange, Althea would return the land that had been a bride’s gift to her husband’s family—and which Althea had inherited from her dead husband—to Jim’s mother’s family in the New Mexican Territory.

  Althea had jumped at the offer.

  And so, a little less than a year ago, the boy he’d been had died and James Owens had been born. The only thing he’d kept from his former life had been Charlotte’s goodbye letter. Now even that would soon be gone.

  “Bloody idiot,” he muttered, looking sadly at the flyblown corpse of the horse that had been shot out from under him. “If you were so eager to die, you could have just jumped off Tower Bridge. At least you could have spared a good horse.”

  As soon as he’d finished twisting the last plug, he ripped a band of material off the bottom of his tattered shirt. He tore it into several thinner strips and tied the ends together, tucking a paper plug in at each knot. Then he rubbed cartridge grease up and down the length of the makeshift fuse.

  When he was done, he took off his shirt, belt, and boots, shedding anything that might reflect the sunlight. His plan was simple. Come sunset, when the setting sun briefly blazed right in his enemies’ eyes, he’d light the fuse and belly-crawl out to a shallow dip in the ground he’d spotted a hundred yards out. By the time he reached the depression, the linen would burn down to the gunpowder-filled plug, explode, then burn down to the next plug and so on. The Mahdists’ eyes would stay on the boulder, thinking he was desperately wasting his last shots while in fact he’d be sneaking into their camp to take off on one of their horses.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  Because aside from not knowing if the setting sun would be bright enough to cover his scramble for that depression, he had no idea if the linen would burn or how fast it would if it did. And he didn’t know if the gunpowder would sound anything like a rifle shot. And even if that all worked out, the rest of his plan depended on his being able to get up on a horse sans saddle but hopefully not sans bit, with a broken collarbone and a bum arm, take off, and stay ahead of his pursuers until he, well, got away.

  No, sir, the situation did not look at all promising.

  He was good with a horse. Damned good. As a kid, he’d been taken under the wings of his uncle’s Comanche ranch hands, the best riders in the world. The question was, was he good enough?

  He looked up. The sun had come to rest on the horizon now, spreading colors across the sky as bright yet as delicate as a houri’s veil. Another minute and it would flare before disappearing. That was his chance, or as much of a chance as he was going to get. He tilted his head back, closing his eyes.

  He was twenty years old and he did not want to die. “I swear, God, if I make it out of this in one piece, I’ll never, ever do something stupid because of a woman again.”

  He opened his eyes, rolled over, and began crawling.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1905, THE BRITISH PASSENGER SHIP, THE LYDONIA, BOUND FOR ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT

  “People don’t die of seasickness, Miss Whimpelhall,” Ginesse Braxton said. She wasn’t absolutely certain of this, but she had long held the belief that a thing only counted as a lie if you knew it to be false. Unfortunately, rather than bolstering her patient’s spirits, her words seemed to have the opposite effect.

  “They should.” An older woman dragged herself over the side of her bed and clutched the rails, her long, lank ropes of red hair swinging in time to the ship’s pitch and toss. “It…would be…a mercy.”

  Ginesse patted her patient’s hand. She’d spent the last four days listening to variations on this same theme, and while she felt a good deal of sympathy for poor Miss Whimpelhall, she could not really empathize—she had a disgustingly robust constitution.

  She stuck her foot out, catching the china basin sliding past on the floor, picked it up, and held it out it invitingly. Miss Whimpelhall shook her head, closing her eyes tightly. After a few seconds, she sank back on the bed. “I am sorry to cause you so much trouble, Miss Braxton. Please, forgive me. I am a terrible nuisance.”

  “Not at all.” Ginesse had never met so meek or apologetic a creature as Mildred Whimpelhall, and as neither Ginesse nor any member of her immediate family was overly familiar with either trait, she was understandably fascinated. Even more fascinating was Miss Whimpelhall’s personal story; she was on her way to marry her fiancé, who commanded an English garrison in Egypt. Which made Miss Whimpelhall a bona fide heroine.

  Ginesse knew all about heroines. As an only daughter, she’d escaped the unpalatable reality of life with six grubby little brothers into a world of books where men were identified by their gallantry and courage rather than by their farts and belches. Later, after she’d been banished from Egypt to England, she’d assuaged her homesickness by writing her own adventurous tales. Indeed, the penny press had even published one.

  Not that she advertised her predilection. She kept it strictly to herself. People, especially men, found it so hard to reconcile a romantic disposition and intelligence. She didn’t need any other strikes against her while trying to establish an academic reputation.

  Miss Whimpelhall moaned again. “Maybe this is hell,” she whimpered. “Maybe this is hell and I’m going to feel like this for the rest of etern…etern…et—” She didn’t make it to the end of the sentence. Luckily, Ginesse still held the china basin.

  “Well,” Ginesse said, a few minutes later, “if this is hell, then I must be a demon, and I am not a demon.” She chuckled to prove how silly such an idea was. “Oh, my, no. No, indeed.”

  She waved the air lightly with her hand. “Oh, perhaps comparisons may have been made when I was just a child and like many children given to acting imprudently.” Her voice sounded less jovial than she’d have liked. “Nothing that would justify being stigmatized with an unsavory reputation.”

  She forced her voice to relax. “But as I said, that was when I was just a child. A long, long time ago.”

  A wan smile appeared on Miss Whimpelhall’s lips. “So long ago? You are still very young.”

  “I am twenty-one,” Ginesse replied. “And I hold a degree in ancient history and will soon hold another.” And, if all went well, she’d soon win the esteem of the archaeological world.

  And that of her family.

  “Oh.” Miss Whimpelhall sounded vaguely disapproving. “Regardless, you have been an angel of mercy to me ever since my faithless maid deserted me at the first port,” she said. “How do you manage without one?”

  “I’ve never had one.” Her family had never been able to find an applicant who was both suitable and willing, for which frankly she was glad. She couldn’t imagine always being shadowed by another person.

  “Oh.” Miss Whimpelhall nodded. “Well, thank God He put you in the cabin next to mine and gave you the divine inspiration to somehow intuit my distress.”

  There hadn’t been anything divine about it; their adjoining cabins had thin walls.

  A sudden wave crashed against the porthole, sending the ship pitching sideways. The door to the wardrobe swung open, flinging Miss Whimpelhall’s possessions across the floor.

  Miss Whimpelhall blanched and groped for a nearby towel, shoving it against her mouth. “I want to die. Please. Let me d—”

  “Why don’t you tell me more about your fiancé?” Ginesse suggested, lurching across the room to gather Miss Whimpelhall’s scattered belongings. “You said you’ve been engaged to him for six years, during which time he has been entirely in Egypt.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes. That must have been very difficult.”

  “It was. We did see each other occasionally.” Miss Whimpelhall held out her hand, and Ginesse put a glass of water in it. She took a sip. “He was granted a fou
r-month furlough two years ago when his father died.”

  “You must have missed him very much. And he, you. I cannot imagine being separated from a loved one for so long.” At least she’d been allowed to return to Egypt for the holidays.

  “Life is about making sacrifices, Miss Braxton,” Miss Whimpelhall said. “Colonel Lord Pomfrey could not have advanced so quickly to so prominent a position had he remained in England.”

  “It’s a wonder you didn’t marry sooner. I’m sure you would have been a great asset to his advancement,” Ginesse suggested carefully. She was being unconscionably forward. Her “unladylike interest in other people’s lives” was just one of her unfortunately many character flaws. She couldn’t help it. People were a never-ending source of fascination to her.