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

1897,
THE
S
AHARA DESERT
, S
UDAN

“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 so 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.