Romancing the Crown: Max & Elena: The Disenchanted Duke

“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.