Far in the Wilds by Deanna Raybourn

Author:Deanna Raybourn
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2013-03-31T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The next morning Ryder had already risen and washed and hunted for bush meat for the porters before his clients emerged from their tents. The prince looked a little haggard, but Mademoiselle was fresh as the morning, dressed in crisp safari clothes and wearing her enormous hat, the veil thrown back as she breakfasted on fresh eggs and tomato juice and potatoes fried in duck confit.

“I think your African air agrees with me, Mr. White,” she announced. “I never eat so much at home. I shall be fat as a pig by the time we return to Europe.”

“I doubt that,” Ryder said mildly. He had learned long ago the best thing for a man’s sanity was never to be drawn into a conversation about a woman’s weight. The prince wasn’t so careful. He snorted as he looked Mademoiselle up and down with a proprietary gaze.

“Yes, you must be careful,” he said seriously. “I do not like my women to be fat.”

Jude looked up from her plate of eggs, fried bread, meat stew and fruit and glanced to the prince’s soft belly and rolled her eyes. “How are you feeling this morning, prince?” she asked sweetly.

The prince groaned a little and Jude mixed him up a hangover cure of tomato juice with a raw egg broken in, whipped to a bloody pink froth. He held his nose and drank it down in one go, heaving a little as he did. “Thank you, dear lady. How is it that you are unscathed by our evening and I feel as though I’d been run over by a herd of wildebeest?”

“Africans are hard drinkers,” she explained. “Not much else to do out here except drink and fornicate.”

“Jude.” Ryder’s voice was sharp, but Jude was in a malicious mood.

“Come now, Ryder. We’re all adults. Surely we can speak frankly. The prince has brought his friend to entertain him on the trip. It’s no different than what you get up to with half the wives in the colony.”

Mademoiselle stiffened but the prince looked slyly at Ryder. “Ha! We are men of the world, are we not?” But Ryder did not respond. He turned his attention to the fire instead.

If the moment had passed, the whole rest of that day, the whole rest of their lives might have been different. But the moment did not pass. Instead, Mademoiselle’s usual caution deserted her. At hearing the prince describe himself as a man of the world, her eyes went to his rounded belly, the pink gleam of his scalp, the fat fingers. And she laughed.

The laugh was short and brittle, bitten off as soon as she realized what she had done. She looked quickly down at her plate and Ryder hurried in with a remark about the weather being fine for the day’s hunting. But Jude was watching the prince. And she knew that Mademoiselle might be forgiven for pricking his vanity. It was probably not the first time it had happened, and it would not be the last.

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