by Julie Miller
She finally managed to get some words past her feverish confusion. “I don’t mind talking to myself. I’m the best company I’ve had all weekend.”
“Ouch.” He picked up the blanket and folded it loosely in his arms.
When he headed for the stairs without another word, Ellie lunged after him, touching his arm only long enough to ask him to stop before stepping away from him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean that. I don’t want to be alone.” She eyed the gray wool bundle. “What are you doing?”
“I’m setting up a blind so that you can take a bath. I can keep Jerome in the house, but I don’t want him looking out the window and getting an eyeful.”
“A bath?” Thoughts of escape, thoughts of Cade and company crashed to a sudden halt. Had she heard him correctly?
“It’s nothing fancy. I scrounged an extra toothbrush for you, but I couldn’t find a washcloth. I’m ready to pour in the hot water as soon as I get the blanket set up.”
She tried not to salivate with anticipation. “Is there soap?”
Cade grinned, his dark eyes dancing with devilry. “You interested?”
Ellie felt the grit under her nails, the bruises and scrapes on her arms and legs. She thought of the chain coming off her ankle and the chance to breathe fresh air. “Yes.”
But when she assumed he’d unlock her chain and she’d precede him up the stairs, he didn’t move. Instead, he tucked the blanket underneath one arm and nodded at the place where she’d scuffed the floor. “What were you making over there?”
A dozen different lies ran through her head, but she knew he’d see through each and every one. “I drew a picture that was in Lenny’s notebook. Are you a member of the Korosolan Democratic Front?”
His smile vanished. “No.”
“I think he might be.”
“Really?”
She ignored the skepticism in his voice. “What else would KDF stand for? It’s in there several times. I can show you.”
He looked down at her outstretched hand, then back to her eyes. “I don’t think so.”
But Ellie wasn’t ready to give up on her idea yet. That notebook had to be the key to something. If she understood the key, then maybe she could buy her own freedom by helping Cade decipher the information. “I think some of the other symbols are map coordinates. Latitude, longitude. The rest is written in shorthand.”
“When did you read all this?”
“I wasn’t taking the book when you woke up last night.” She paused to let the full impact of what she was saying sink in. “I really was just covering you up.”
A flash of disbelief, then anger blazed in his eyes. “I can’t trust you for a minute, can I?”
“No more than I can trust you.”
He drilled her with one of those enigmatic indigo glares that spoke such volumes—if she could only understand the message.
But when he turned to go, she understood she was being abandoned.
Ellie dashed after him. Her chain made a pitiful racket on the floor. When she reached the end, she shouted after him, “You really did look cold.”
He stopped halfway up the stairs. She watched the muscles in his back expand and contract with a weary sigh. Then he turned around and marched down the stairs with such purpose that Ellie backed away. But she had nowhere to go. He was so much bigger and quicker that she finally just stopped and let him advance and have his say.
Only, she saw no anger in his frown, and the long fingers that stroked her cheek, then tunneled into her hair, were warm and gentle. “Ellie.”
When he said her name like that, as though he just didn’t know what to make of her, didn’t know what to do with her—as though he was the one who didn’t understand much about the opposite sex—she went all soft and tender inside. His confusion humanized him, took this larger-than-life man and made him real to her.
Ellie’s heart went out to that vulnerable man beneath the too-tough-to-care outer shell. She leaned her cheek into the callused warmth of his hand. “You were suffering in your sleep. Maybe it was a nightmare, instead of the cold, but I wanted to help.”
“You don’t have to take care of me.” His fingers massaged the base of her scalp, but she thought he might be taking comfort, not offering it. “I’ve been looking after myself since I was nineteen. Nightmares and all.”
Ellie tried to picture Cade as a young man, but couldn’t quite make an image of this hardened, cynical man of the world as an innocent youth who still had ideals he believed in.
Tears welled in her eyes, but she blinked them back. She doubted if he’d appreciate her sympathy. “That must have been hard, losing your father like that and then seeing reports of his death splashed in all the papers. Do you miss him?”
Cade’s hand went still in her hair. His expressive eyes shuttered and he withdrew completely. “Don’t you want to ask about the scandal? Find out how a wealthy duke could blow an entire fortune and end his life in disgrace? How a man could devote his life to trying to find that one big deal, that one perfect game that would turn his world around and make him a winner so his wife would come back to him? Isn’t that what you really want to know?”
“No.” Ellie frowned, fighting back against the bitterness he slung her way. “I was worried—”
“That’s what everyone else wants to know.”
A sharp bite of sarcasm colored his voice. But Ellie recognized the defensive mechanism for what it was. She’d heard that same tone in her father’s voice whenever he’d talked about her brother, Nicky. She heard the same heartbreak and anger and guilt. She saw the pain denied in the angry swipe of his hand across his eyes, taking any trace of telltale moisture with it.
But Ellie felt no such need to hide the pain she felt for him. She pulled her glasses from her face, transformed Cade into a blur and let the tears come—huge, slow tears that burned her eyes and scorched her cheeks as they trickled down her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize talking about your father was so painful for you. I didn’t mean to bring up a bad memory. But when you said you were on your own…I thought I could help…. I thought… I know how much I miss my family—” She caught her breath on a sob.
“Ellie.” Suddenly Cade was right there. In full focus. Close enough to see without her glasses. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?” She sniffed loudly and tilted her face up to drown in a pool of perplexed indigo blue.
“Giving a damn about things you shouldn’t.” He closed the short distance between them and kissed her. It was hard, healing and over before she could either protest or respond. “Thank you for caring, but don’t waste your time. Don’t try to fix me or help me or do any other damn thing for me. I said I take care of myself.” He pulled a blue bandanna from one of those endless pockets and dabbed at her eyes and cheeks. “Here.”
Ellie sniffled and dutifully dried her tears. His gentle touch and indulgent grin made her feel all of nine years old.
But it was a woman’s heart that ached for him, that understood his lonely battle, that despaired over ever hearing him admit to any emotion besides lust or greed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry. I’m sure it’s just the stress of everything.”
There he was again, swimming into focus. He smoothed her bangs off her face and studied the movement with his eyes. “Don’t apologize. My family is a topic I just don’t discuss.”
Ellie nodded. She had one more stuttered sniff to take before she could curb the tears. But when she inhaled, she absorbed the clean, soapy scent of his shaving cream. It was a normal, healthy scent that seemed at odds with the dangerous man of mystery who wore it.
Cade St. John was more than just a mercenary. He had to be. A man couldn’t be gentle and funny and fiercely protective without caring about something. He couldn’t show her tenderness without having known it himself first. He couldn’t sympathize with her pain without having suffered himself.
And yet he denied all that. He denied that
he hurt. He denied that he wanted to help her. He denied that he was a good man.
Why?
Ellie had no answers. She had no experience to fall back on, no instincts she trusted. She only knew that she couldn’t give up. There had to be a way to reach Cade’s conscience. And the way she knew best was to give something of herself. Her time, her intelligence, her perseverance. “Maybe if you did talk about it,” she suggested, putting her glasses back on and getting down to business, “you wouldn’t have the nightmares.”
“Nice try.” He pushed the bandanna back into her hands when she tried to give it to him. “Keep it. C’mon. Let’s get you into that bath.”
He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and knelt down to unlock the ankle cuff. Since he didn’t want her to care, she went back to offering her expertise in exchange for her freedom. “Don’t you want to know about Lenny’s notebook? I can translate the shorthand for you.”
“Why would you want to do that for me?” He handed her the oversize running shoes.
“Because if I help you, then maybe you’ll—”
“I can’t let you go, Ellie.”
She wasn’t above begging. “Do you need the money that badly? Maybe there’s another way. I know you don’t want to hurt me.”
“No, I don’t want to hurt you. But there’s more than money at stake here. A hell of a lot more.” The cut-and-dried timbre of his voice brimmed with hidden meaning. But he didn’t elaborate. “I need you to be Princess Lucia for a little while longer.”
And that meant she needed to find another way to escape.
Not only was her life on the line, but over the next few hours, if she wasn’t very careful, she could lose her heart to this hard, hurting man who didn’t want to be her hero.
And of all that she’d endured thus far, that would be the worst humiliation of all.
AT SOME POINT during this mission, Cade thought, he must have made the conscious decision to be an idiot. He was certainly behaving like one!
Jumping down poor Ellie’s throat over his dad. He had been reliving a nightmare when she woke him last night. He’d seen men die in battle, had lost comrades he called friends on a dozen different missions around the world.
But no image had ever stuck in his head like the one of his father slumped over in his office chair, with half his brain and a ton of blood pooling on the desktop beside him. He’d been the first to read the tearstained suicide note. The one to call the police. The one who opened the door when the press and their cameras showed up the next day. The one who answered the phone when the creditors started calling.
He was just a kid in college. Just a kid!
He’d known his father was sick, that his gambling was an addiction that couldn’t be cured by love or reason. Once his mother had left them, Cade knew he was the only one there for his father. But he couldn’t help him. There hadn’t been a damn thing he could do to help.
These past few days with Ellie had dredged up all those buried feelings. He couldn’t really help her, either. His hands were tied. And as much as he wanted to give her the safety and freedom that she wanted—that she deserved—he knew his first priority was the job. He had promised to do this thing. Given his word. And like any good soldier, when he signed on to a mission, he saw it through to the end.
Even if an innocent victim got in the way.
And now she wanted to help him? Oh, God. He needed to see a shrink to understand that one.
With a towel wrapped around each handle, he carried two buckets of boiling hot water from the fire and poured them into the old iron tub to heat the water from the pump he’d filled it with earlier. It was a lot of trouble to go to, considering he’d have to take Ellie right back down to that filthy basement once she had washed. But Rademacher had insisted on turning over a clean hostage.
More importantly, Ellie had gotten all excited over the prospect of taking a bath. And after dealing with those big, sorrowful tears that had turned him inside out with guilt—that made him feel as if he himself was crying—he wanted to do something that would make her smile again.
Not that she couldn’t take care of herself. He had to admire the moxie of a woman who could pick his pocket and beat Jerome off with a stick, all in the name of survival. She was smart, too, piecing together the puzzle of Lenny’s notebook and offering it up in trade. He hadn’t ruled out the KDF as his secretive employer, but he wasn’t quite ready to take his hostage’s word on that fact.
Cade tossed the buckets aside and hung the towels over the line he’d strung up to give Ellie some privacy. “All right, Your Highness. It’s good to go.”
Though he hated keeping up the pretense of calling her by another woman’s name, Cade used it to distance himself from that inexplicable pull he felt toward Ellie. Jerome might be within earshot, anyway.
Ellie rose from the stump where he’d instructed her to sit and tiptoed over the tufts of grass to the tub. She’d already removed all her clothes except for the oversize shirt, which covered her down to her thighs, but clung to all the best spots—her flared hips, her round bottom, those incredible breasts.
She held the shirt together with one hand and dipped the other into the water. “Mmm.” She smiled a small Mona Lisa smile while she traced circles in the water with her finger. “Delicious.”
Cade tried not to notice the fluctuations in his body’s temperature as he watched her, despite the overcast dampness of the day. “Get in before it gets cold, Princess.”
The low-pitched command sounded harsh even to his own ears. He’d moved beyond detached and unemotional on this job a long time ago. Maybe about the time he saw Ellie’s bare breast for the first time. Or was it after the dreamy-eyed waltz in the basement? Or maybe that unexpected clip to the jaw that had unmasked him the first night was what forced him to walk a fine line between doing his job and doing what he thought was right.
Ellie pushed her glasses up her nose, a habit he noticed that cropped up whenever she got nervous. But she wasn’t reacting to his order. This was something more personal. She clutched at the neckline of the shirt and made no move to climb in. “Turn around.”
Cade’s heart flip-flopped in a crazy rhythm that felt foreign in his chest. Part of him wanted to wrap her in his arms and shield her from any prying eyes, reassure her that her body was a treasure worth admiring—as long as he was the only one doing the looking. But a smarter part of him remembered the cut on his face, the long run through the woods, the stolen notebook. It was the part of him that had survived on these crazy jobs for so many years.
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head, refusing to be fooled into honoring her demure shyness. “I don’t trust you out of my sight. Get in, or I’ll put you in there myself.”
Yep, he was an idiot.
Now she was blushing. A delightful shade of pink that went from cheekbones to thighs. Cade’s pulse quickened in response. Oh, yeah. Like he ever should have conjured the image of putting his hands on Ellie’s naked body.
Definitely an idiot.
“Would you hold these for me, please?”
Cade snapped out of his fevered trance and took hold of Ellie’s glasses as she handed them to him. He wondered if it was any easier for her to be less self-conscious if she couldn’t see what others saw.
He stuck her glasses in a pocket and waited in dry-mouthed expectation as she turned around and started pulling the shirt off over her head. Damn. Her blush seemed to follow every bit of skin that was revealed. Her buttocks. The graceful arch of her spine. The long column of her neck.
Like a gawking teenager, Cade waited for her to turn around. Hoped she would turn around. Prayed. The anticipation alone had him adjusting his stance to ease the responding tightness in his pants.
Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.
Cade wasn’t aware of breathing again until Ellie sank into the water and removed all that untouched bounty from his sight. He tried to ignore the gentle sound of the water lapping her bare skin and the little coos of contentment she emitt
ed.
He walked the perimeter of the makeshift blind he had built, scanning the tree line for any signs of unwanted guests, while keeping Ellie in his peripheral vision. When she tipped her head back to rinse her hair and exposed about ninety miles of milky white throat that he hadn’t yet kissed, Cade finally turned his back on her.
This was ridiculous. Ellie Standish was a prim, nearsighted secretary who had no fashion sense and no self-confidence.
She was a means to an end. A necessary ally because the others still believed she was Princess Lucia.
And he was fooling himself by trying to maintain those misconceptions about her.
He’d long since given up on the idea of remaining unattached to Ellie and her innocently alluring charms. But he had to conquer those urges that made him want to strip down and join her in the tub. He needed to put his mind to work on the job at hand and ignore the painful awareness of his body and the guilt that plagued his conscience.
What would really kill those urges would be to have a heart-to-heart with Winston Rademacher—see if he could find out what made that cold bastard tick.
He’d said he connected people. Thus far he’d connected one fake princess, a wealthy king, three mercenaries for hire and… And who else? Who was behind the kidnapping?
And how did the hit man next door figure into it all?
The frustrating lack of answers ate away at Cade’s focus. He raked all ten fingers through his hair, then curled his hands into useless fists. If he knew what was going on, he could formulate a plan, go on the offensive, instead of reacting to unfolding events.
He had allowed his reputation as a loyal Korosolan to get trashed so he could do this job. He’d traded in war-hero status to become the traitor Ellie accused him of being. And for what? The chance to get turned in or blown away by an unknown boss?
Just who was Rademacher working for?
The KDF might have been having second thoughts about their alliance with King Easton and had decided that taking his granddaughter was the best way to renegotiate their settlement. They could have hired Rademacher to do their dirty work so that the kidnapping wouldn’t get blamed on them if things didn’t go according to plan. Winston wouldn’t gain much from either the success or failure of the job, but he’d have a hell of a time playing the game.
