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“With your strength and quick reflexes, I would imagine.”
“Just so,” he said with an impatient frown. “Anyway, I negotiated my way past the guards and was able to free the lady.”
“From within their camp? How did you accomplish that in the face of such poor odds?”
Miss Corbyn, it would seem, was a very active participant in the storytelling process. He considered her question for a beat then said, “You see, I’d hidden a dagger in my boot—”
“That is the first place any respectable guard would look.”
“Where would you have me hide it?”
“I don’t know. In a book, perhaps? No one ever looks in a book.”
“Fine. I’d hidden my dagger in abook. Once I was inside their camp, I distracted the guards with a poem”—Miss Corbyn frowned at that—“then I cut the lady’s bonds. We barely escaped with our lives.”
“That’s the end? That seems a bit abrupt.”
“That is not the end,” he said. “As it turns out, the lady was in possession of a valuable… statue.”
“Oh?” She tilted her head at this twist in his plot. “How intriguing.”
Rhys swallowed. “Intriguing is not the least of it, Miss Corbyn. The warriors had been hired to kidnap the lady by a villain who coveted the artifact. A vile man known only as the Collector.”
Miss Corbyn straightened and pulled her head back to look at him. “The Collector?”
“I take it you do not approve of the moniker?”
“I suppose it serves in a pinch, although it seems a bit… uninspiring, don’t you think?”
Rhys couldn’t agree more.
“Perhaps he should have a name more befitting the dangerous allure of Egypt,” Miss Corbyn suggested.
With another sigh, Rhys searched his mind. They’d already established that his Arabic skills were limited, so he seized the first word that came to him. “How about… Al-Zahria?”
Miss Corbyn’s lips twitched. “Not Al-Zahria!” she exclaimed.
He was pleased by her breathlessness, which was convincing enough that he almost thought it genuine. Miss Corbyn had a talent fit for the theater. “The one and only,” he said. “I outwitted Al-Zahria with my cleverness to save both the lady and the artifact. The warriors were so impressed with my resourcefulness that they made me an honorary member of their tribe.”
“Hmm…” she said. “I can see why. It must have been quite remarkable indeed, to take down a man as vile as the Flowerpot. Did you drop him from the balcony?”
The Flowerpot? Rhys chuckled and surrendered. “I did as you said, Miss Corbyn, and focused on the spirit of the message rather than the perfection of the words. You have only yourself to blame.”
She nodded once in acknowledgement. “Well done, Mr. Evelyn. You and your camel may yet find a bride. While it’s true you’ve not mastered the language of the region, at least you have its heart.”
He smiled at her words as the camel swayed beneath them. His fear for his sister was still there—Fiona was never far from his thoughts—but Rhys realized he’d smiled more in the past minutes with Miss Corbyn than he had in the past weeks. While he was frustrated with the lady’s effect on his plans, he couldn’t deny the pleasure he’d found in their conversation.
The evening had cooled with the sun’s descent, and Alexandria’s bustle yielded to the wide plains of the delta, where lone farms and tiny settlements speckled the map along the canal route. The moon was up, and the stars were out. And Miss Corbyn, he was pleased to note, had relaxed against him.
——
Helen smiled toherself at Mr. Evelyn’s ridiculous tale. She liked that although he was possessed of intelligence, he didn’t take himself too seriously. That much was evident in the man’s willingness to shrug off his abysmal language skills. His smile, though, when it dared to appear, was tempered by a strain about his eyes that she couldn’t name. Sorrow or regret, fear or anxiety, she couldn’t say.
But all that aside, he was a man and she an unmarried lady, and their circumstances were far from proper. So, when she caught herself relaxing against him again, she quickly straightened her spine and leaned forward. Just enough to distance herself from Mr. Evelyn’s warmth but not so much to pitch herself over the camel’s neck.
Thatwould be something for her letters home, although, in truth, it would be best if her pen never mentioned this particular excursion. Maybe when she was forty to her father’s seventy… perhaps then she might tell him of the time she’d ridden a camel across the Nile delta with a man who was not her husband.No, she quickly decided. There probably weren’t enough years in their lives to make such a disclosure advisable.
She shifted on the saddle, crossing and re-crossing her ankles as she considered their surroundings. An endless line of palms, papyrus and flowering rushes fringed the canal, and a network of old water channels laced the marshy delta beyond that. They passed the occasional mud-hut settlement or the remains of an ancient village, but she had to admit Wilkinson had the right of it: the prospect along the canal was wholly unremarkable. Given the excitement of the past hours, though, the monotony of their passage was not unwelcome.
