The Duke’s Covert Mission

by Julie Miller

  But as much as Rademacher enjoyed playing games—and people—Cade thought a more likely scenario was that Rademacher was working for his protégé, Prince Markus. Under Winston’s advice and tutelage, Markus had been raised to be the perfect prince. With Rademacher’s thoroughness for details, he’d want to see Markus become the perfect king. Royal advisor had a much more powerful ring when it was attached to a man who ran his own country.

  So was Cade working for an idealistic political group? Or serving the needs of a greedy man? And was either option one he could survive?

  “Cade?”

  He had almost switched himself back to soldier mode when Ellie called his name.

  For a man who desperately wanted to focus on the job and not the woman, he had assigned himself the worst possible task on the planet.

  He had to watch her bathe.

  And watch, he did. Awestruck.

  Ellie rose like Venus from the waves. With one arm folded across her chest hiding next to nothing, and the other crossed lower, hiding little more, she stepped from the tub. The water ran in rivulets from her hair across her shoulders and gathered in the cup formed by her arm and breasts. As Cade boldly stared, tracing the path of long, golden-brown hair and water, he saw the goose bumps rise on her skin. His body temperature rose in pore-popping counterpoint.

  “Could I have a towel?”

  Was it a trick of his aroused body, or was there more seduction than shyness in her voice?

  “A towel.” He repeated the words, doubting the innocence of her request.

  She had the good grace to duck her head and blush. Cade leaned forward, his body helplessly drawn to the discovery of exposed pink skin from the ruddy dots on her cheeks all the way down to…

  Cade swallowed hard. He tried to be a gentleman and look away. But then, he’d never been much of a gentleman. “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?”

  Her body-wide blush darkened and she laughed off the compliment. “The towel, please?”

  Although reluctant to hide such a work of art, he pulled one of the white towels off the line and held it out to her. He grinned in indulgent delight, watching her debate which hand to move in order to take the towel.

  “Allow me.”

  He spread his arms wide, holding the towel like a thin cotton wall between them. Ellie raised her bright blue eyes to him and squinted. “I wish you were the nearsighted one.”

  Cade grinned, glad she couldn’t see the evidence of the power she had over him bulging in the front of his pants. “Twenty-twenty vision does have its advantages. Come here.”

  It was a gentle request, one that Ellie responded to by taking a hesitant step toward him. Cade met her halfway, wrapping her up in the towel, looking down and catching a glimpse of her delectably round backside.

  She took over tucking the ends of the towel around her breasts in a makeshift sarong. Cade let his hands slide to her waist, not quite having the strength to move away from temptation.

  “Do you really think I’m pretty?” she asked.

  It bothered him that she still saw herself the way he used to—the wrong way. True, she wasn’t a conventional beauty. But she was a mind-boggling delight to the senses. Her luscious figure, soft skin and softer hair made her irresistible to the touch. He never tired of looking into those eyes, which reminded him of the clear mountain lakes of Korosol.

  And warmth. Ellie produced an enchanted, incandescent heat. But she warmed more than his body. She fired up his mind. Her shy vulnerability, blended with a backbone of steel, opened fissures around his jaded heart. She was melting his icy detachment from the world and making him care about things that normally sent him running toward safety and freedom—and loneliness—in the past.

  “Definitely pretty.” He couldn’t see these self-doubts as false modesty or a feminine ploy for attention. She already had his attention. All of it.

  He cared that she was embarrassed. He hurt because she was scared. He stewed in guilt because he couldn’t help her escape.

  But there was one thing he could feel good about doing for her. He could straighten out a few misconceptions.

  Cade stood a little taller, suddenly feeling a bit more like that good man Ellie insisted he could be.

  He tightened his grip on her waist and pulled her forward. He brought her closer and closer until the light of focus clicked on in her eyes. “What I’m thinking right now goes way beyond pretty.”

  With one hand Ellie clutched the towel in a death grip at the deep, shadowy cleft between her breasts. She flattened the other hand against his chest. The tentative touch seared him with some of that magical heat she possessed.

  Cade sighed with a lightning-charged shimmer of awareness that was grounded in an unfamiliar contentment. The normal wary tension eased out of his muscles, and a different sort of tension took its place. There were definite benefits to having the hots for a nearsighted woman. She had to get incredibly close to be able to see into his eyes. He liked her close like this. Inside and out, he liked it a lot.

  He braced his legs apart and pulled her an impossible inch closer. The dampness of the towel worked like friction, sticking to her skin as he slid his palms across the thin terry cloth and found the spot where his cupped hands fit perfectly around the curve of her bottom.

  He dipped his face to her temple and buried his nose in the rich, clean scent of her damp hair. “I don’t know how you manage to come across as a classy lady and an irresistible seductress at the same time.”

  “So you think I’m pretty enough to…” Her awkward blush warmed her cheek against his. “Do you think a man would…?” Her breathy sigh tickled the hair beside his ear and made him shiver from his scalp to his toes. “Sorry. This is so awkward for me.”

  “What is?” Cade lifted his head and lost himself in the embarrassed confusion of those lake-blue eyes. But he thought he already knew.

  “I don’t want to die without…I’ve never known a man…Would you…?”

  “Ellie.” He caught her lips in the gentlest of kisses, thanking her for her sweet, sweet request. The virgin pretend princess was talking about sex. “I want to do that, too.”

  “With me?”

  Her startled response kicked him right in the heart. He’d told a lot of lies these past few days. But this time—even though it scared the hell out of him—he told the truth.

  “Yeah.” He zeroed in on her mouth. “Definitely with you.”

  He claimed her mouth in a possessive kiss, pretending for the moment that making love to Ellie wouldn’t be the biggest mistake of his life. She slipped her hand around his waist and he found a way to lift her onto her toes and bring her closer still.

  As her mouth opened beneath his, he swelled with the humbling awe of how quickly she could break through his once-impregnable emotional barriers and breathe heat and life into the chilly recesses of his mind. There was no practiced finesse in the stroke of her fingers or the press of her lips or the dance of her tongue. Just a pure, unrestrained passion that drove him wild.

  He was hot and he was hard, and he wanted to strip that flimsy towel off her, lay her down on the ground and show her just exactly what kind of wonderful things that a man—that he—would want to do with her.

  But Ellie was a shy woman who demanded patience, whose unexpected smiles and pithy responses were worth the wait. She was the kind of woman he’d heard about as a teenager—before he’d understood the complexity of his father’s addiction or had to deal with the destruction it caused in the lives around him. Ellie was a good girl. The kind of woman a man was supposed to marry and have kids with. He was supposed to learn his lessons from women who knew the score. But ultimately, he was supposed to come home to someone like Ellie.

  His attraction to her was a completely new experience for him, because he knew he could never really go home. He knew there was no woman like Ellie in his future. No marriage, no children to taint with the St. John name. Maybe that was all this craziness was about—wanting what he kne
w he couldn’t have. Dabbling with what he knew would never be his. So it was safe to be attracted to Ellie. Safe to teach her a few of those life lessons she had yet to learn.

  “I wish I could tell you what you want to hear.” He nibbled a path down her throat. Down to the shadowy softness between her breasts. “But I can’t promise—”

  “You don’t have to promise anything.”

  Cade froze. His warm, wonderful fantasy world crashed to a bleak, blinding halt.

  He didn’t know what stunned him more—the rigid determination in Ellie’s shaky voice.

  Or his own 9-mm Browning sidearm jabbed in the middle of his gut.

  Chapter Nine

  Ellie held the gun tightly, surprised by its weight. Tucking her elbow to her side to support her hand and keep the gun leveled at Cade, she backed beyond arm’s reach, squinting to keep him in her sights.

  “Stay away from me.”

  He obeyed her order by splaying his arms out wide to either side in reluctant surrender, showing himself to be an unarmed man. His eyes narrowed, transforming his gaze from a lover’s visual caress into a killer’s cold glare.

  She was giddy with the success of her trick, unhooking his holster while his mind and lips and hands were occupied elsewhere. Her body was still quaking from the raw force of his touch on her skin, the demanding need of his mouth on hers. In another time and place, she’d have surrendered to his strength, believed his praises. If he was a prince and she his princess, she’d have made love with him. She would have willingly given herself to this man and discovered the wonder of loving and being loved for the first time in her life.

  But Cade St. John was no prince.

  And she was no princess.

  At the last moment, before losing herself in the illusion of a dream come true, Ellie dredged up thoughts of home and freedom and living to see the next day. She resisted her body’s blind desire to open up and give herself to him. It was easier to focus on Cade’s threats to keep her prisoner than to believe the sincerity of his kind words about being pretty.

  That was what she had to focus on now—not the cold-hearted betrayal that dulled the luster in his indigo eyes. Distrust loomed like shadows in the blue darkness there, tugging at some corresponding emotion deep inside her. It wasn’t guilt. She was rational enough to know she was the victim here. It was more a sense of loss that made her insides quiver and feel empty—a feeling as if she, too, had been cheated of something important almost within her grasp.

  But whether it was guilt or emptiness that made her pause, she forced herself to harden her compassionate heart and move on. This wasn’t the time to stop and help the man. She wanted her freedom.

  Because the alternative was death.

  “Don’t move or I’ll shoot. I don’t want to, but I swear I will. Since you won’t help me, I’ll have to save myself. I’m sorry.” She clutched the towel around her chest and pointed her head toward the beat-up black sedan. “You’re going to stay right there and I’m going to get into that car and drive away from here.”

  “How? The keys are in my pocket.” There was no velvet in his voice to soften the sarcasm in his words. “Do you know how to hot-wire it?”

  Drat! She clenched her jaw to stifle the unladylike urge to say something worse. Would it really hurt the forces of nature to allow one thing to go her way? “Give me the keys.”

  “No.”

  Ellie wrapped both hands around the butt of the gun, squeezing her elbows beside her breasts to hold the towel in place. She squinted to bring the big target of his chest into focus and pointed the gun right at the middle of it. She articulated each word with exact, commanding precision. “Give me the keys.”

  “You’ll have to take them from me.” Cade shrugged his massive shoulders with an annoying lack of concern. He splayed his fingers at his hips, settling into a stance that was a bit too relaxed to be trusted. “And if you get close enough to reach them, one of two things is going to happen. I’m either going to snap your wrist—or I’m going to kiss you senseless in retaliation for that damn seduction you just pulled on me.”

  “Kiss me…?” Ellie sputtered with indignation. But all of a sudden she couldn’t seem to catch a deep breath. She had no doubt Cade could carry out either threat without breaking a sweat. Even though she held the gun in her hands, she had a feeling the power between them had just shifted.

  “Do you think I’m pretty? Would a man really want me?” He threw her bone-deep doubts back in her face, mocking her. “I thought you were an innocent. That you really were shy. But I see you can play games like any other woman.”

  “I am innocent. I haven’t done anything to deserve this. I just want to stay alive. I want to go home.”

  Cade stayed as cool as the clouds gathering in the sky above them. “Then you’re going to have to shoot me.”

  Ellie looked hard into those dark-blue eyes, searching for any sign that he was bluffing. She stared until the pain of a headache stabbed behind her right eye. She looked away before he ever even blinked. “I’m running, then. I’m going up to the main road and I’ll find someone to help me.”

  “You’re running into the woods dressed in a towel? People will think you’re crazy.”

  She saw her mistake, but it was too late to reclaim the upper hand. His words had struck home. She had no plan. She had no clue. She wasn’t even sure if the gun had some kind of safety thing she needed to release before she could fire it.

  But she tilted her chin and refocused the weapon and tried to make good on her escape. She took a step back. Then another. And another. “Don’t follow me.”

  “I have your glasses.”

  Thunder rumbled in the distance like an ominous death knell punctuating a last chance slipping through her fingers.

  She looked to the right and then to the left. She couldn’t even see the trees.

  Her breath stuttered in a painful wheeze inside her chest. She’d failed. Her courage faltered and tears stung her eyes. A few salty drops gathered in front of her pupils and refracted her vision for a moment of crystal-clear perception. It lasted long enough for her to see Cade’s stone-cold expression. She blinked, squeezing out the tears and turning Cade into a big, black-clad blur.

  She could have pulled the trigger. But when the monstrous blur moved toward her, she backed away, dropping her hands and surrendering to her vulnerability. She couldn’t shoot Cade. She couldn’t run and she couldn’t strong-arm her way out of this.

  “A piece of advice.” She didn’t want to hear it. He stepped into focus and pried the gun from her unresisting hand. “Never point a gun at someone unless you’re prepared to use it.”

  He put the pistol in his holster and locked it down with one hand. The other cinched around her upper arm. His touch was warm and heavy and embarrassingly impersonal as he guided her back to the house. He stopped just long enough to pick up her discarded clothes and toss them her way.

  Ellie caught them and hugged them close, fighting tears of frustration and fatigue, and crazy feelings she didn’t understand.

  He opened the basement door and took her down the stairs. He told her to dress, then stood there—a silent, voyeuristic sentinel—while she complied. When he knelt at her feet to lock the chain around her ankle, Ellie finally spoke. “I hate you.”

  He stood up, towered over her, ate up the extra space in the room with his broad shoulders and dark-eyed glare. Ellie tipped up her chin and held her ground. There was something cold and lonely in his solitary stance. Something that touched her gentle woman’s heart and made her ache for him. When he handed her her glasses, the gesture of kindness eroded what was left of her rebellion.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean—”

  “Hate me, Ellie,” he commanded in a voice that resonated low in his chest like the thunder outside. “It’ll be easier for me to walk away from all this if I know you hate me.”

  CADE CROSSED his booted feet at the ankle and sipped his beer. The images in the notebook he
was studying swam together into an endless series of squiggly lines. He’d cracked a number of codes in his time, but the basics of old-fashioned shorthand eluded him.

  I can translate the shorthand for you.

  Ellie’s pleading voice echoed in his head, staying with him the same way his body still sparked with the imprint of her in his arms, the same way the fresh, clean taste of her lingered on his tongue.

  He took a swallow of beer and swished it around in his mouth, trying to lose the taste of her in its bitter flavor.

  She’d bargained for her freedom with compassion, with intelligence and, finally, with herself.

  And he’d been tempted. Oh, God, had he been tempted to take her up on her offer and give her whatever she wanted. But when Ellie pulled his gun on him, he realized how screwed up his focus had become. He’d lost sight of his original purpose for signing on for this job.

  But with the gun at his stomach and the deception in her eyes, he’d been able to remember just who Cade St. John was supposed to be. A washed-up war hero who’d sold out his king in order to make some money. A lot of money.

  Somewhere along the way, he’d lost sight of what he needed to do. He’d forgotten who he was.

  All he had was a title and some special training. And his word. He’d given his word to a friend—one of the few people in this world he’d ever cared about disappointing.

  He’d stayed true to his word thus far. He’d done what was necessary to ensure the success of this job.

  And what did he have to show for it?

  A warm beer, an achy body, a frustrated heart and Jerome—passed out and snoring on the plaid couch across from him.

  Cade lifted his bottle and toasted the worthless bastard.

  Jerome, at least, kept his goals straight. He wanted money and women. He wanted retribution for the pain and trouble Ellie had caused him.