Romancing the Crown: Max & Elena: The Disenchanted Duke

“I lived with a mechanic for a while.”

He looked at her. “Lover?”

She thought of Roy Anderson, potbelly, booming laugh and perpetual grease on his hands. His wife had been a short-order cook in the diner next to his repair shop. One of the many homes she’d passed through in her life in the system.

Roy was roughly forty years her senior and basically a decent guy, but she laughed at the thought of his being anyone’s lover, even his wife’s.

“Hardly.”

Max was tempted to ask her to elaborate, but she didn’t look inclined and it was none of his business. He only figured on getting as personal as was necessary with her in order to capture Weber.

“Well, since you’re so sure, there’s nothing much to be done here.” He opened the door to the passenger side. “Hop in. We can call for towing from that town just up ahead.”

She’d already seen the faint lights being turned on in the town down the road. Tiny pinpricks against the horizon. They’d been the only thing sustaining her, even though there didn’t seem to be enough lights on to properly accommodate the top of a moderate-size birthday cake.

She frowned. She knew towns like that. Small, terminal things where people’s souls shriveled up, yearning for something better. Mechanics were not always on hand. Took talent to fix things, make them right. People with talent moved on to where the pay was better, the life more exciting.

“Don’t count on it.”

“Now aren’t you glad I came along?”

She ignored the annoyingly cheery note in his voice. Turning her back to Ryker, she popped her trunk. There was no way she was leaving her equipment behind.

“Otherwise,” he was saying, watching her, “it might just be you and the coyotes before long.”

The thought was far from thrilling, especially given the way she felt about the dark, a feeling that dated back to the time she was eight and had lived with a minister and his wife who never raised a hand to her, but believed that leaving her in a locked closet for hours would make her submissive to their authority and save her immortal soul.

Cara looked at Ryker and wondered just how much better off she was with this man, who professed to want a partnership with her, than the coyotes. At least with the coyotes, you were aware of the immediate danger.

Leaning into the trunk, she took out the portable fax machine and her notebook computer. She stopped to take her oversize purse out of the front seat along with her shapeless overnight bag and then, arms loaded, trudged over to his car.

“Pop your hood.”

Max moved to take something from her, but she pulled back. She was being territorial. Why didn’t that surprise him?

“Is that anything like ring my chimes?”

“The car’s hood,” Cara said from between clenched teeth. The grin on his face was beginning to annoy her immensely. More annoying still was the way his grin made her feel. As if she were a ball of yarn about to tumble down a hill, in imminent danger of unraveling.

He popped the hood as she asked, and Cara placed her things inside the trunk, taking care to secure them as best she could. Rounding the back, she came up to the passenger side and slid in. She hit her feet against something on the floor. Curious, she bent over and picked up the device he had only moments earlier pushed to the floor when he’d seen her.

Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the rectangular object. “What’s this?”

He always felt that using the truth as far as it could go was easier than inventing lies from start to finish. He kept his face forward as he started the car. “A tracking device.”

Cara examined the lit screen. The cursor was dormant. “Doesn’t seem to be tracking anything.”

“It’s not.” Reaching over, he pressed the button and shut it off. The screen went blank. “Got everything you need?”

She traveled light. Her requirements were few. “Except for Weber.”

He nodded, taking the car back on the road. “We’ll get him, too.”

We.

It sounded odd, hearing the pronoun applied to her. She’d never really been part of “we” before. Oh, occasionally the word was bandied about in reference to her within the family she was currently staying with. But no one really meant it. She was Cara and they were “we.” If the two mixed, it was only for the moment.

Reality was always waiting for her around the bend. A new family, a fresh separation. She learned to rely only on herself. Cut down on the people to blame as well.

Cara raised her chin, slanting a glance at him. “I don’t know about ‘we’ catching him, but I know I will.”

“Certainly not a shy, shrinking violet, are you?”

But she had been, more than once. And learned the hard way that selling her soul just for a pat on the head, a hug, a kind word, was selling herself far too short.

“Shrinking violets get their roots pulled up, they get stuck in a vase, then tossed out when they’re no longer pretty.”

The road ahead was flat, with no headlights coming at Max from the opposite side. He spared her a long look. She made it sound personal. Had she been dumped by a lover? he wondered.

If she had, it would have been because of that razor-sharp tongue of hers, not because her looks had anything to do with it. As far as that went, the woman was a keeper. He bet she’d just love to hear that.

“Sounds as if you’ve got firsthand knowledge about that.”

Cara absolutely hated being analyzed. “Maybe you should hang out a shingle and go into the head shrinking business instead of tailing people other people are after.”

He smiled, more to himself than at Cara. “I’ve had enough career changes for the time being.”

She pretended to raise a brow in surprise. “You were something else before you made a habit of getting in other people’s way?”

Max thought of life in the palace. If he’d followed in the footsteps of his father, he would have learned how to look down on people and use them to his own advantage. That life had never been for him, even though he’d been trained for it from the day he was born.

“I ran a charm school,” Max said sarcastically. He glanced at her again before looking back at the lonely road. “You might have benefited from it.”

Cara crossed her arms before her, sitting back in the seat. She promised herself that at the first opportunity, she was going to ditch him again. All she needed was to catch him off guard. She wouldn’t even need his car keys, she knew how to hot-wire just about any vehicle. By the time he thought to call the police, she’d be gone and renting another car.

“I really doubt there’s anything you could teach me.”

Some very personal things, completely unrelated to the situation, came to mind. Max hadn’t realized that his mouth had curved into a smile. “You’d be surprised.”

“Yes,” she said pointedly, “I would be.”

The conversation was veering into territory he felt it was best not to enter. He was having enough stray thoughts about the woman at his side as it was. Max nodded at the lights of the town up ahead. “Let’s see if we can find someone to tow your car.”

“It’s not mine,” she reminded him. “I just rented it.”

Something told him that the woman didn’t allow herself to get too attached to anything. Seeing as how Rivers was on the trail of a bounty, she was traveling incredibly light. Other than her equipment, all she had with her was an oversize purse and what looked like a duffel bag that had seen better days. There was only so much it could hold.

“Then I guess it’s the rental agency’s problem.”

“Guess so,” she murmured.

“By the way, you have something of mine.”

She braced herself for a trite line. “Oh?”

“My gun. I had one when you left me in that poor excuse for a bar last night. I didn’t have it when I woke up. I’d like it back.”

Pressing her lips together, she opened her purse and took out the weapon she had lifted. It made a good backup gun. Not saying a word, she placed it on the dashboard between them.

“Thanks.” Taking it, Max leaned forward and slipped it into his waistband at the small of his back. He could put it back in its holster once they got into town.

The town they pulled into looked hardly bigger than a truck stop. There were a handful of streets with stores scattered about and a flock of houses just beyond that. Old, weather-beaten houses that had been baking in the sun for a long time, sea lions turning up their faces to the sky.

It didn’t look too promising. “I doubt if the rental agency where I got the car has even heard of—Buford,” Cara read the town’s name on the sign as they drove past it.

He doubted if anyone except for the people who made maps had heard of Buford. “Maybe not, but it’s still their problem.”

Frustration chewed away at her. Not having a car seriously cut into her independence. “No, it’s mine. How am I supposed to get around?”

“Seems to me that you are getting around.” Max nodded at the car they were in. “It makes combining our efforts a lot simpler.”

He didn’t intend to combine their efforts, she thought, he intended to use her efforts to secure what he felt was his man. Not going to happen. Somehow, someway, she was going to make sure that she had first claim. She couldn’t afford not to. Literally.

Shifting, she peered out through the windshield. “Speaking of simple, do you think this lovely little town has a hotel?”

Hotels invited a higher clientele than he guessed usually passed through Buford, New Mexico.

“More likely a motel or a motor inn, if anything.” He glanced at her, making a judgment call. “Probably not what you’re used to.”

She laughed softly, thinking of some of the places she’d been in. In foster care all of her life, she’d run away several times when the family she was with had made life unbearable for her. She’d also stayed with some very nice people—people she hadn’t allowed herself to grow attached to because there was always a separation waiting for her in the wings.

But the other families were the ones that had left the deepest impression on her, though she pretended, even with herself, that they hadn’t.

It was while living with one of the latter, a family named Henderson whose older son had thought that having her stay with them entitled him to gaining access to her body whenever he felt the need, that she had learned how to make do on next to nothing and live by her wits on the street. She’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday living in a discarded refrigerator box beneath a bridge in Denver, Colorado.

Her smile was enigmatic. “You have no idea what I’m used to.”

There were scars there, Max suddenly realized. His grandfather had only given him a quick summary of Cara Rivers, Bounty Hunter. But Cara Rivers, the woman, and the person who went into forming that woman, was something that had been left out.

At the time, he hadn’t thought it was necessary for him to know.

Now he wasn’t so sure.

“Maybe you’ll tell me what you’re used to over dinner,” he suggested.

She looked at him and slowly, her lips peeled back into a smile. It was a line. She knew all about lines—and what was at the end of them.

“Yeah, I can see you running a charm school all right,” she quipped. “But you can save your breath, Ryker. It’s wasted on me.”

His smile matched hers and made her all the more wary because she couldn’t read what was behind it. “I’ll be the judge of that.”

“You can be anything you want, but I’ve had my shots against pretty boys.” The Henderson’s son, Ted, had been almost too beautiful for words. He’d used his looks to his advantage like a skilled swordsman wielded a weapon. She’d been flattered that anyone as good-looking as Ted would pay attention to her. Until she’d realized what he actually wanted.

Max had been called a lot of things in his time, but pretty boy wasn’t one of them. And when she said it, the connotation was far from flattering.

“Maybe you’re putting me in a category where I don’t belong,” he told her.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said, throwing his words back at him.

There was no point in sparring this way. He nodded at the obligatory diner that stood like a tarnished, elongated silver can on the edge of the road. “Think the food here is decent?”

She sincerely doubted it. But since it appeared to be the only place in town to serve food and they needed to eat, the point was moot.

“Does the fact that it’s such a small town give you a clue?” she asked him.

He wondered if she always saw the glass as half empty, or if this was a part she was playing for his benefit, the reason behind it being something he wasn’t allowed access to yet.

“We could drive to the next town,” he offered.

She had no idea how far that might be and it was already nightfall. Now that she thought back, she hadn’t eaten since around one. That had been a burger and fries as she had driven to her latest Weber sighting. A large container of coffee had been breakfast.

“We’re here, we might as well give it a try. It might surprise us.”

“Always up for a pleasant surprise,” he told her, pulling up next to a dusty blue pickup truck.

The food turned out to be tolerable, though nothing Cara would have wanted to repeat on a regular basis. And the waitress was talkative enough. She looked at the photograph Cara gave her in between ongoing tirades about the condition of her tired feet.

Studying the man’s face, the orange-haired woman nodded as she refilled their coffee cups.

“Yeah, I seen him. Not much of a tipper,” she said regretfully. She looked around at her clientele. The diner was only one-third full. Cara was the only other woman in the place. “You get used to that kind of thing around here.”

Cara tucked away the photograph. “How long ago did he leave?”

“From here?” The waitress considered. “About two hours ago. Looked like he was in a hurry.”

Listening, Max took a sip of the coffee. It only got worse with time, but it was hot and black and for now that was enough. “Got a mechanic?”

“We’ve got Luther, but he’s away on vacation.” She grinned their way. “Likes to go fishing this time of year.”

Well, that was one strike, Cara thought. “How about a hotel?”

The waitress shook her head. A man at the end of the counter waved to get her attention. She waved back. “Nope, don’t have one of those. But there’s a motel a few miles up the road. They should have a vacancy.” She chuckled. “Hell, they always got a vacancy.” Coffeepot in hand, she began to retreat to the counter and the customer. “Make sure they give you clean sheets.”

“This place just keeps getting better and better,” Cara murmured to Max after the woman left.

He thought of the time he’d bummed around Europe before coming to his senses and heading out to where his grandfather lived.

“I’ve been in worse.”

She looked at him and sincerely doubted it.

Chapter 5

She’d had a bad feeling the moment she saw the so-called motel.

Single story, the motel had rooms that were all connected to one another, fashioning a semicircle around a courtyard that had a dry, decaying fountain in the middle surrounded by dead, brown grass and dirt.

Calling the motel run-down would have been kind, but in addition, the rear section of the structure resembled a burnt-out shell whose insides had all been painstakingly scraped away.

With a shake of her head, Cara had marched into the manager’s office. It was too late to go hunting for another motel somewhere down the road. For now, this was going to have to do.

Things only became more complicated.

When she requested separate rooms for the night, the clerk shook his head.

Keeping one eye on a television show about aliens turning up in a small, desolate, southwestern town, he told them, “Sorry folks. We had ourselves a little fire here last month. Gutted almost half our rooms. This is all we got left.” He gestured at the rack on the wall behind him. There was only one key dangling there. “This is our busy season,” he added with pride.

Cara looked at the clerk’s balding spot as he glanced back at the television set on his desk and tried to imagine how slow the rest of the year must be if a seven-room occupancy represented the “busy season.” A seven-room occupancy in what was now, unfortunately for her, an eight-room motel.

Standing at her elbow, Max made no secret that the situation amused him. That, and her ill-concealed discomfort over it.

“You could sleep in the car,” he suggested.

It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She glared at him. “Or you could.”

But Max shook his head. He pressed a hand to the small of his spine. “Bad back. My roughing-it days are over.”

It was a lie, but a small one and he figured he could be forgiven. Besides, spending the night in the car was guaranteed to give him a bad back.

Yeah, Cara would just bet they were. The man was as physically fit as any she’d ever seen. Maybe even more so. There was no doubt in her mind that when he had a willing partner, consideration for his back was the last thing on the man’s mind. He looked capable of making love twisted up like a pretzel.

“You try anything and you’ll find out just how ‘rough’ rough can be,” she warned under her breath, then turning toward the clerk, she exhaled in frustration. “All right, we’ll take it.”

His attention momentarily diverted from the flickering screen, the clerk turned the registration book around for her benefit.

“Wonderful. Sign here.” He shifted slightly at the surprised look on her face. “I’ve been meaning to save up for a computer, but this kind of gives it the homey touch, don’t you think?”

“Homey,” Cara murmured. If home was some backwater, shanty town struggling its way into the second half of the twentieth century. Cara skimmed down the column of names that appeared on the discolored pages. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of people named Smith and Jones coming through here.”

“Yup.” He seemed utterly clueless about her inference. “Popular names,” the clerk agreed guilelessly.

Hell, she decided, would be being stuck in a place like this for all eternity. Cara quickly signed her name, then handed the pen to Max.

He added his on the line below.

The clerk turned the register around after Max signed in and read their names.

“Welcome, Ms. Rivers, Mr. Ryker. I’m sure you’ll find your stay in La Casa Del Sol a pleasant one.” The way he pronounced the motel’s name testified to the fact that English was by far his first and only language. He leaned over the counter to glance down at the floor.

“No luggage?” His thin lips curved in a knowing smile as he straightened up again.

“We plan to make mad, passionate love and wear each other,” Cara told him matter-of-factly. “Can we have the key, please?”

His eyes big as saucers, he mumbled, “Sure thing.”

Taking the key from the battered rack behind him, the clerk held it out to Cara. But as she reached for it, Max intervened, taking the key from the clerk.

She turned on her heel and walked out of the tiny, airless office.

“What made you say something like that to him?” Max wanted to know.

She shrugged. “I thought he needed a little spice in his life.”

No two ways about it, the woman definitely was not easy to read. One moment she was flippant, teasing, the next minute she was reserved, private, like a nun in training.

“I don’t know what to make of you.”

“Don’t worry about it. We won’t be together long enough for you to have to ‘make’ anything of me. All you need to know is that I always get my man. Always. Oh, and by the way, you take the sofa,” Cara informed him.

“I told you,” Max reminded her innocently, “I have a bad back.”

She shot him a look that was clearly nothing short of lethal. “Mister, you don’t know what bad is.”

He laughed softly under his breath, leading the way to Room 6. “I’ve traveled with you for a few hours. Trust me, I know.”

“All right.” She blew out a breath. “I’ll take the sofa.”

But then they entered the small room that overlooked the highway and discovered that decorating hadn’t been the management’s top priority. It hadn’t even made the top five list.

A huge bed dominated the room, its frayed leopard comforter clearly intended for the next size down. At the wall beside the tiny bathroom was a dresser that had seen better decades. Two nightstands that someone had obviously put together out of a box somewhere in the early seventies buffered the bed. They did not match the scarred, dark bureau.

Two lamps, one tall, one short, were perched on top, providing the illumination, such as it was.

“No sofa,” she muttered. Why didn’t that surprise her? Cara looked down at the floor. “I guess I should consider myself lucky that they sprang for a rug.”

“That all depends on your definition of luck,” Max commented.

The rug was matted down from years of wear and from all appearances, had never been cleaned. It was hard determining just exactly what color it had originally been. Currently it was mud-brown.

“The bed’s big,” Max pointed out. “Plenty of room for two people who don’t want to have anything to do with one another to sleep on.”

His phrasing caught her attention and not in a favorable way. “You don’t want to have anything to do with me?”

“Just following your lead,” he told her innocently.

It was just as he’d suspected earlier. Beneath the bravado and tough talk, she was more sensitive than she would have liked.

“I’m dog tired and really don’t want to argue about anything anymore, including sleeping arrangements,” he told her, curtailing, he hoped, any further debate about who went where.

Protesting that he’d always been nothing less than a gentleman would have undoubtedly fallen on deaf ears anyway. He was sure that she had her own preconceived notions that had little or nothing to do with him.

“Do you want to use the bathroom first?” he offered gallantly.

She wanted a few minutes to unwind first. Away from him. “No, you can check out if they have hot and cold running insects coming out of their faucets.”

“Glad I can do something for you.”

Cara watched as Max walked into the minuscule bathroom and shut the door. It took a little jiggling before the lock finally caught. Two minutes later, she heard the shower water running.

She released the breath she suddenly realized she was holding. Sitting down on the bed, she found her thoughts fixing themselves on what was going on behind the door. It was hard not to imagine him naked, the water cascading down a wall of what appeared to be solid muscle and was otherwise seen as his chest.

What the hell was the matter with her?

She needed a man, she decided. The sooner the better. It had been a long time since she’d talked to someone of the male persuasion in any other capacity than something having to do with her work.

All work and no play, Cara… she upbraided herself.

A ringing noise broke into her thoughts. The sound was coming from the other end of the room, and not from the old-fashioned dial telephone that was resting precariously on the edge of the nightstand, vying for space with the smaller of the two lamps.

The sound was coming from the jacket Max had haphazardly thrown on the edge of the bureau.

Crossing to it, she dug into a pocket and located his cell phone on the first try.

She flipped it open and placed it against her ear, not certain just why she felt it necessary to play the part of Ryker’s secretary.

“Hello?”

There was silence for a beat, and then the sound of a deep, crisp masculine voice on the other end. “Hello, who is this?”

The voice had a commanding tone to it and Cara heard herself saying, “Cara Rivers.”

“Oh, I am sorry, I must have gotten the wrong number—”

Cara snapped to attention before the man hung up. “Wait, are you trying to reach Max Ryker?”