The Disenchanted Duke

by Marie Ferrarella

  A slight shiver danced over Cara's neck, shimmying down her spine. She kept her eyes forward as she crossed to the bar. She'd passed through here three or four times, always on the trail of a bail jumper. The bartender liked to pass on information, for a fee.

  But she wasn't about to give Ryker any details. "Often enough."

  He couldn't help wondering what a woman like her would be doing in a place like this. She looked like someone's little sister, in need of protection from the kinds of people he saw lounging at small tables, sitting on bar stools, all building relationships with the nondescript glasses sitting directly before them.

  But then, he reminded himself, she did have that peashooter strapped to her thigh.

  Max found himself thinking about that thigh in great detail. He curtailed the mental journey.

  He would have rather taken a table, but she selected a spot at the bar. "So, what'll you have?"

  "Whatever you're having," she replied cheerfully, making herself comfortable on the stool.

  "Scotch, neat," he told the bartender. Sitting down next to her, Max glanced at the woman he was trying to temporarily put out of commission. She looked as if she weighed somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred and ten pounds, maybe less. He figured he could easily catch her before she hit the floor. He'd rent a room for her at the nearest motel and deposit her there. Maybe she'd learn her lesson and stay out of his way.

  "Make it two," she told the bartender.

  Max didn't bother hiding the smile on his lips. This, he promised himself, was going to be interesting.

  The smoky blue mirror over the bar reflected his expression, bouncing it back to her. Cara spared him a look. "Something funny, Ryker?"

  If he went strictly by looks, not manner, she looked like someone who could sit under a shady tree, sipping a tall, cool glass of lemonade. "You just don't strike me as the scotch type."

  She exchanged glances with the bartender, although she was fairly certain that because of the angle of her body, Ryker hadn't seen anything. "I'll let you in on a secret, Ryker." She wrapped her hand around the glass the bartender placed before her. "I don't have a 'type.' I am a unique experience."

  Max couldn't help the short laugh. He'd run into confidence before, but not on this scale. "Think a lot of yourself, don't you?"

  She'd gone the shy, retiring route and it had gotten her abuse and heartache. Cara tossed her honey-blond hair over her shoulder. "Contrary to the popular hope, the meek don't inherit the earth, Ryker. All they get is the dirt."

  She caught him off guard. That was surprisingly harsh. "Meek is one word I wouldn't have thought of when looking at you."

  The bartender handed Max his glass. Once the bartender withdrew, Max picked up his drink and touched the rim of his glass to hers. "Here's looking at you, kid."

  She smiled, then threw the drink down in a long gulp that had Max staring at her incredulously. "Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca." She placed her glass down on the counter. "Don't you have any better lines?"

  "Actually that was from Key Largo," he informed her. "Common mistake."

  Maybe, she thought, but you just made another one.

  Waving to snag the bartender's attention, she held up two fingers, then turned her attention back to Max. "So, who are you working for?"

  Because he knew a silent challenge when it was given, Max downed his drink and offered his empty glass for a refill as well when the bartender approached. As an afterthought, he took out his wallet and peeled off the appropriate amount of money to cover the four drinks, plus a healthy tip. He placed the bills on the counter.

  "You know I'm not at liberty to say."

  The question was her way of feeling him out to see what kind of effect the drink had on him.

  Taking a breath, she downed the second drink. Glass bottom met countertop with a resounding smack. "That's all right, I already know."

  Max followed her lead and downed his drink, although he had to admit that he preferred taking in his alcohol at a slower pace. But then, going this route only meant the lovely creature sitting beside him would cease to be a problem that much quicker.

  He was amused at her certainty that she knew who he worked for. There was no way she could be privy to his work for his uncle. But for the sake of distracting her from his true goal, he played along.

  "You do?"

  "Sure. It's Phil."

  "Phil," he echoed. The name seemed to resound briefly in his head as he said it.

  "Phil," she repeated, holding her glass aloft so that the bartender could see her from the other end. "Phil Stanford."

  Damn it, how was she holding all that alcohol so well and where was she putting it? She should have been slipping off her stool by now. These drinks were potent. His eyelids were beginning to feel as if they could easily peel off.

  "I don't know who that is."

  Maybe he wasn't lying at that. Cara pushed the conversation another notch to see if she'd stumbled across the truth.

  "Sure you do. The nasty son of a bitch who doesn't know the meaning of the word 'ethics.' He hired you because he was afraid I couldn't deliver Weber." Which was a prime insult in her book, seeing as how she had always, always gotten her man—or woman—before. "But I still have almost another week before Phil has to forfeit his bail money and I'll have Weber safely locked up long before then. So don't get any ideas."

  The ideas he was getting, fueled with two shots of scotch and working on a third, had very little to do with the swarthy man he'd been sent to round up and everything to do with a woman who made him think of warm, moonlit nights and dancing along the banks of a tranquil river. Barefoot.

  Max took a deep breath before addressing the glass in his hand again. He wouldn't mind seeing her barefoot. Up to the neck.

  "What makes a woman become a bounty hunter?" He was aware that it took effort for him not to slur the last word.

  It wasn't a new question. She'd heard it before. A dozen times.

  "Opportunity," she replied mechanically.

  It had been that, pure and simple. She'd spent six months on the Denver police force, feeling hemmed in by all the rules she seemed to always be tripping over, when she spotted the ad in the newspaper, of all places, for a bounty hunter. The notion struck her fancy. She already knew she was a good cop, she was just a bad bureaucrat and not much of what the sergeant liked to call a team player. Becoming a bounty hunter seemed to emphasize all the right things for her.

  A new song came on the jukebox. Cara perked up just as Max was going to say something to her. She raised her hand. "Shhh, I like this song."

  Max found himself reaching for the hand she'd raised, folding his fingers around it.

  Surprised, Cara looked at him questioningly.

  "Like it enough to dance to it?" he asked.

  A faint smile played along her lips. "Are you asking me to dance, or taking a survey?"

  He got off his stool still holding her hand. "The former."

  "Then yes." Cara slid off her stool.

  Holding her hand, he led her to the tiny, dirty space before the jukebox. His legs felt oddly wobbly, but Max ignored the feeling. The desire to hold this woman came out of nowhere and was suddenly far too great to ignore.

  Dancing seemed like the best solution.

  Chapter 3

  Maybe it was just his imagination gone into overdrive, but it felt as if the beautiful bounty hunter he had in his arms was teasing him with her body. She was teasing him without doing anything more than swaying quietly to the throbbing tempo of the song on the jukebox. It was a love song from the days when couples shared a melody they referred to as "their" song and would exchange secret smiles every time it came on the airwaves.

  Max didn't know if it was him or the room, but one of them seemed to be spinning. He wasn't sure if he was rooting for him or the room.

  Holding Cara's hand within his, he kept it lightly pressed against his chest and looked down at her. Thoughts he couldn't quite grasp hold of were crowding in
to his head. She was petite, though far from fragile. Even so, Max had a suspicion that she wasn't quite as indestructible as she presented herself. Almost, but not quite.

  Maybe if he focused on talking, the spinning would go away.

  "So, what else do you like besides love songs from the forties?"

  She raised her eyes to his, an enigmatic smile playing on her lips. "Men who don't ask too many questions comes to mind."

  He laughed softly. The exotic scent she was wearing seeped into his consciousness, arousing him. "Sorry, occupational habit."

  She cocked her head, amused. "I thought detectives were just supposed to detect."

  He stopped dancing altogether and just stayed in place, holding her and pretending to move to the music. "They have to ask questions to do that."

  Cara nodded. "All right, you're allowed one question," and then she qualified it. "And I'm allowed not to answer it if I don't want to."

  Even standing still was beginning to take effort. And it was having no effect on decreasing the velocity of the room.

  "Hardly seems fair."

  She raised one shoulder and let it drop. "That's life."

  She seemed to be swaying more, he thought. Had the tempo gotten faster? "What's a nice girl like you doing in a job like this?"

  Her eyes glinted slightly, though her expression never changed. "Making a decent living the fastest way I know how."

  Her scent was beginning to swirl around his senses. He was having difficulty focusing on the

  conversation instead of wanting her, but he forged on. "Why not try for something less dangerous?"

  She shook her head. "That's two questions. You've exceeded your quota."

  He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself, telling himself that everything wasn't tilting—the way he could have sworn it was. "It's an off-shoot of the first questions. Call it la."

  "I'd call you conniving."

  He smiled. Or thought he did. It was getting harder and harder to tell.

  "I've been called worse." The room was beginning to go at a really dangerous speed. Sweat popped out on his brow. "Is it me, or is it hot in here?"

  The look she gave him was purely innocent. "Is that a line?"

  "No, that's—" He lost his train of thought, even as he was attempting to reach for it. "Maybe we should sit the rest of this one out."

  Placing his hand to her spine, he escorted her from the floor. Max's head was starting to feel as if it weighed a ton. The bar appeared to be much farther away than it had just a moment ago.

  Each step back took more and more effort on his part. He found he had to rest his arm across her shoulders just to keep from falling over.

  He tried to focus on her face, hoping that would negate or at least balance out the spinning. "What was in those drinks?"

  "Just scotch. But the glasses probably don't always get washed properly," she guessed. "Maybe there was something else left over from the last..."

  He didn't hear the end of her sentence. The buzzing in his head became too loud.

  And then the room around him folded itself up until it became less than a tiny pinprick. The next second, the pinprick had disappeared entirely.

  Max thought he was falling, but that might have been his imagination.

  Everything stopped.

  * * *

  Nothing looked familiar.

  Max had absolutely no idea where he was, only that his head was killing him and the effort to open his eyes cost him dearly. Each lid felt as if it was glued in place and had to be pried open.

  When it was, he found the immediate area encased in a milky shroud. Repeated blinking finally made the shroud disappear.

  He'd had hangovers in his time, royal ones if he could be forgiven the pun, and he'd never felt like this before. Neither had he passed out on three drinks before, no matter how potent they'd been.

  Just what the hell had happened, and how did he get here, wherever "here" was?

  He smelled a proverbial rat. A honey-blonde one with gray-blue eyes, fantastic legs and one hell of a well-shaped butt.

  Holding on to the wall beside him, he sat up. Max had to really concentrate to keep the world from tilting over on its side. Only when it was in its rightful place did he finally try to take in his surroundings.

  He was in a small area that appeared to be a storage room of some kind. There were broken chairs tucked away in one corner beside unopened cases of liquor. He realized that he'd been lying on a cot that smelled of beer and various other things, some of which were hard to place, others far too easily identified. He hadn't been the first to sleep on it.

  He pressed a hand to his stomach, willing himself not to throw up.

  Rising on shaky legs, he made his way over to the closed door and tried it.

  To his surprise, the knob turned. He wasn't locked in. Opening the door, Max discovered that he was inside the bar he'd come to with Cara. Last night, if the thin beams of sun that were pushing their way through the partially closed slats at the window were any indication of the time.

  Like so many things, the room had looked a lot better in semidarkness. There were dust motes everywhere he looked.

  "Anybody here?" he called out.

  No one answered.

  Gingerly he touched the back of his head, looking for telltale knots that would have indicated his getting hit, which would have explained his sudden passage into darkness.

  There were none. No one had hit him in the head to eliminate his presence on the scene.

  The odd taste in his mouth told him that scotch hadn't been the only thing he'd ingested last night.

  She'd drugged him.

  Somehow, when he hadn't been looking, the sharp-tongued bounty hunter with the killer body had slipped something into his drink and drugged him.

  Why?

  The most obvious reason, he decided, struggling to curb his anger at being duped like some kind of novice, was that she thought he was a threat to her getting the bounty on Weber.

  He heard a noise to his left and immediately reached for the weapon he always kept strapped around his ankle. It wasn't there.

  The woman must have taken it, he thought, cursing under his breath. Why should that surprise him?

  Wary, Max grabbed a bottle from the counter behind the bar and held it by its neck, ready to smash the bottom off on the bar and use the jagged portion as a weapon at a moment's notice.

  "You break that, you pay for it," the man who had tended bar last night told him, coming into the room. He set down the broom and dustpan he was carrying and scratched his thin, concave chest. A cigarette butt hung out of the corner of his mouth as if it was permanently fixed there. The bartender indicated the other bottles behind Max. "You might want to use something less expensive."

  Annoyed, Max put the bottle back down on the bar. "Where is she?"

  The man coughed before finally asking, "Who?"

  Impatience clawed at Max as he struggled to clear his head. It still felt as if all his thoughts were under water.

  "The woman I was in here with last night. And before you tell me that you don't know who I'm talking about, I saw the way you looked at her. Like you'd already met. If you didn't know her, you wouldn't have put me in your back room to sleep it off."

  The bartender laughed. It sounded more like a cackle and was followed up by a hacking cough. "I don't know her. Not in any real sense of the word. She's been here a few times and she gave me fifty bucks to let you sack out in the back room." He picked up the broom again and began sweeping halfheartedly. "Would've given me ten more if the lock on the door worked, but it's busted, just my luck."

  Max didn't know if he was buying into this, but the buzz in his head was making it hard to think. "So you don't know her."

  The man paused again, his expression wistful beneath the day old stubble. "No, but I'd sure like to. Don't meet many of those in my line of work—fiery, not used up," he clarified, then gestured around the establishment. "'Case you hadn't noticed, thi
s isn't exactly an upscale club."

  Max didn't bother commenting. He needed answers and if he wasn't going to get them from this character who was little more than one step removed from a barfly himself, he had to fall back on a tried-and-true method. "Got a phone around here?"

  The bartender reached behind the bar and brought out an old-fashioned, stark black dial-up telephone straight out of the last century. He placed it on the bar in front of Max.

  "But it'll cost you," he said as Max reached for the telephone.

  Digging into his pocket, Max pulled out a bill, glanced at it to see the denomination and slapped it down on the counter. Pulling the telephone over, Max dialed his office number back in Newport Beach. Three rings later, he heard his grandfather pick up and give the name of the agency.

  "Hi, it's Max," he said into the receiver. He talked quickly, before his grandfather could ask any questions. "I need you to look someone up for me. Cara Rivers. Get me everything you can find: driver's license number, address, priors if there are any, everything," he emphasized again.

  "What state am I looking in?" Bill asked, knowing better than to assume anything. Max got around.

  Max paused, thinking, trying to pluck facts out of the murky sea that still surrounded his brain. Concentrating, he remembered the woman mentioning something about Shady Rock, Colorado. Maybe that was her point of origin. It was worth a try.

  "Colorado." He saw the bartender looking his way. The man made no effort not to look as if he was listening. "Start with a place named Shady Rock."

  "Shady Rock, huh?" Bill chuckled. "That's almost as good as Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, or that other place, Hot Coffee."

  Max was not in the mood to see the humor in anything, least of all his condition. He was supposed to be able to see through people like Cara Rivers. And most of all, he wasn't supposed to get himself drugged.

  "Almost," he agreed. Covering the receiver as he heard his grandfather begin to slowly type on the computer keyboard, Max looked at the bartender. "Got any coffee around here?"