by Selena Page
Roads & Royalty
Book Three of the Caprice Chronicles
Selena Page
Roads & Royalty
Copyright © 2016, Selena Page
Copyright © 2016, Selena Page
First electronic publication: August 2016
Selena Page
www.selenapage.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded, or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Caprice Chronicles
Love & Accusations
Smoke & Longing
Roads & Royalty
Sin & Redemption – Coming September 2016!
Find Selena Page online at www.selenapage.com or e-mail her at [email protected]
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 1
The coffee at Three Beans to the Wind was too bitter and too strong, but their baristas knew Amber on sight and their scones were the best around. The chain place down the road was more expensive, just as bitter, and twice as loud--and two coffee places was really above the limit for a tiny rural town like White Creek. So Amber found herself planted in a corner booth for yet another late Thursday morning breakfast, a pile of work stacked in front of her and a fresh-out-of-the-microwave scone serving as a mid-afternoon snack. Technically, she shouldn't be taking work out of the library, but as her boss liked to say, "If thirty-plus years in the basement hasn't killed this stuff, a day out in the fresh air is not likely to, either."
At this time of day in the middle of the week, the coffee shop was usually pretty dead--another mark in its favor, since the chain place always had at least four people on laptops crammed around its single public outlet. Here, whenever the door creaked open, Amber looked, but it was a rare occurrence. Someone else sitting down was even rarer.
So it came as some surprise when a man sat down next to her. Amber was the only customer in the seven-table store, and she'd picked her spot because it was inconvenient for just about everything--exit, creamers-and-sugar table, bathrooms. Most people liked to sit closer to the aisle, but this new customer sat down right next to her. Amber scooted a few inches away, shifting her purse to the other side of her, and frowned in the interloper's direction.
He was handsome, if you liked them a bit scruffy. His dark hair was tousled, his chin sported a two or three day growth of stubble, and his leather jacket had seen some definite wear. His dark eyes were knowing, and he had the kind of face that almost had to dimple. He smirked at her, as if he was inviting her to comment on his presence, his closeness, or the way he looked, like a male model pretending to be a biker. Amber frowned, hoping it would be enough to discourage him.
He smelled nice. Amber did her best not to notice things like that, but he was sitting close enough to her, barely two feet away, that it was hard to miss. He was sniffing the air, too, trying to be surreptitious about it.
No. She would have scooted farther away, but she was already against the wall. If he smelled that nice--like fresh sawdust and cinnamon--then there was probably something wrong with him. That was the way her luck had been working lately.
Luck. She might or might not have decided to believe in the Caprice family curse, but if her dating life was any indication, Amber was living a cursed existence.
He smiled at her, cocky and sure of himself. "I'd ask if you came here often, but there's a groove the shape of your perfect ass worn in that chair, so I'd have to say yes."
Amber knew better than to engage. It only encouraged them. "I was sitting when you got here." Somehow, here she was engaging him anyway. "There's no way you could know there was a groove, or that it matched." She wasn't going to say anything at all about her perfect ass.
"Well, your seat obviously must be perfect to match the rest of you. And you looked like I'd just walked into your living room uninvited when I sat down, so I made a guess on the groove."
Not another one. Amber turned away without answering. He could just be a cocky college kid. He wasn't. She had been cursed with a string of too-strange men and boys following her around since she was a teenager.
The last one had turned out to be a werewolf, which had necessitated a move to another town and introducing the hapless would-be alpha to her father.
Introducing most of her problems to her father tended to make the problems go away. The only issue with that technique was it required talking to her parents, which itself had a number of problems, including the part where she was trying to pretend her family didn't exist.
Amber grimaced.
"Aw, it was a bad line, I'll give you that, but I don't think it was that bad." He thrust a hand into Amber's vision. "Jack. Well, you can call me Jack."
"Amber. Busy." She ignored the hand. "As your very observant self might have noticed."
He probably wasn't a werewolf, or he'd be growling by now. But with that smell, the way he was exuding power, he was far less normal than anything she wanted in her life.
And he wouldn't stop.
"Yes, of course. But you looked like you might be willing to be less busy. I'm far more interesting than some old pieces of paper, after all."
She didn't have to look at Jack to see his grin. It leaked into his voice and the way his hand was still there, hovering at the edge of her vision.
The boy before the werewolf had been a vampire. Hardly a boy, he'd been one of her professors at college. She hadn't called her father on that one; she'd transferred to another class. The last thing she wanted was an interspecies war on the campus where she was trying to hide. That sort of thing was conspicuous.
The second-to-last thing she wanted was yet another pretty supernatural following her around. She ignored his hand.
"They're very interesting pieces of paper." She flipped to the next page of clippings. They smelled like old newspaper and a bit like mold, and maybe if she breathed in enough of the clippings' scent, she wouldn't smell him anymore. "Also, I don't find you all that exciting so far."
"Oh, do you want me to be exciting?" He straightened up, ready to meet the challenge.
"No!" She lowered her voice before she worried the barista. "No, I don't want you to be exciting or interesting or sweet or charming, or anything else except gone. Please. I am trying to work. See? Old clippings. Work. Nice, banal, calm, everyday work."
"Not interesting?"
"I find banal and everyday to be very interesting, thank you." Why, why was she still talking to him? And how was his sawdust-and-cinnamon scent overwhelming even the newspaper clippings?
"Mmm. I bet
it's more safe than interesting. Has anyone ever told you that you smell very nice?"
Amber rolled her eyes. "Most people are more creative than that. They tell me I smell like expensive incense or like dried rose petals or white wine, which was the least creative, considering we were five feet from a vineyard at that point." She turned to look at him. "It's a good way for me to tell if I'm not interested in someone."
He was unabashed. He also had eyes like lavender petals and pupils that were more like slits than dots. "Well, it's a good thing I didn't say it, then, isn't it? I'm sure you stink, if I bothered to stick my nose in your hair. What are you doing, anyway?"
"If I tell you, will you go away?"
"If you tell me, I swear I will go away." Jack looked solemn for a moment, the mood ruined by a twinkle in his eye. "At least, I will take my coffee and leave the shop."
"I'm cataloging a series of old papers we found in the basement of the local history museum. Well, more like going through them to see if they need cataloging or can be recycled next Thursday." She flipped carefully to the next page of the book. "The article choice is pretty haphazard. It might be some family's personal collection, but none of the names match."
"Or perhaps they noted patterns you cannot see." He stood and bowed with an overdone flourish. "Thank you for sharing. I will be on my way." He paused. "Although, I might ask, where is this local history museum?"
Amber sighed. She was going to have to be rude to get rid of him.
"Coming to visit me isn't going to get you any further. It might make me throw things at you, and then you'd get me in trouble, and the whole thing would be very unpleasant."
"Ah . . . " He grinned. "But you see, I'm not coming to visit you. I have some local history questions. And now, I have to get going, as I did promise."
He smelled far too good. Amber watched his retreating backside. "The library. The museum's in the library. Down the street by the hardware store, second floor." She managed to answer before she had to shout or run after him. Maybe that salvaged some pride. Maybe.
He bowed, half to her and half to the door, and left.
Amber contemplated her coffee and her scone. She should see what he wanted in the museum, before he caused more trouble.
She should sit right here and finish her work. She sipped her coffee deliberately. Jack might smell beautiful. He might be a troublemaker. He was almost certainly supernatural. That didn't mean he was her problem.
She had got through three more bites of her scone before she headed out the door after him.
Chapter 2
This place was already starting to get under Jack's skin. Teachers and students, farmers and mechanics, they were all so boring. He ached for the bustle of the city again, the constant chaos, the places to get lost in, the weak places where he could walk down an alley and end up somewhere else entirely.
But in the little towns, there were far fewer people looking for him. And while they weren't looking for him, he could search for what he needed.
It had been a stroke of luck, finding that librarian in the coffee shop. And if luck wanted it to happen, there must be something for him to find out. Jack's luck could be aggressive sometimes, difficult most of the time, but in the end, it always led him where he needed to be.
The bus had broken down right outside this town. The chain coffee shop had been choked with a line out the door. The unpleasant woman had worked at the library.
Jack sniffed the air. It smelled of autumn and farmland, animals and not nearly enough people. And of that woman, un-charmable and rude and with the scent of vanilla and baked goods and power.
It had to be his imagination or something in the coffee shop throwing his nose off. If she'd been that powerful, she wouldn't have been able to ignore his scent. If she'd been that powerful, she would have known who he was.
Well, he might be kidding himself on that one. Jack was more notorious than exactly famous, especially in the right power circles. But even his notoriety wasn't the sort where someone would brush him off like a hobo looking for change.
If she'd had power, the kind he needed, he would have been able to feel it. She clearly wasn't what he was looking for. Besides, why would anyone with power hide themselves away in the middle of nowhere New York, where the only excitement was newspaper clippings from a hundred years ago?
Jack reminded himself, a little amused that he was going to look at hundred-year-old newspaper clippings. But that, of course, was different.
The library was hard to miss, just past the antique hardware store that probably still had tools from 1909. Jack thought about peeking in the window, but the past didn't interest him. That was how you got stuck in it. Except sometimes--like now--when he needed information. But this was about the future.
Jack hesitated at the door to the library. Old power was stored in places like this, even--maybe especially--in weird little backwaters where nothing ever happened.
Well, and wasn't that what he was looking for? A place old and powerful and full of knowledge. Jack bulled forward. You never knew until you tried, wasn't that the saying?
The building inside looked, well, not exactly mundane but boring. Books and an elderly woman behind the counter, kids reading at a table, a rusty scythe on the wall with a sign hanging from it: Museum upstairs.
Right. That's what Jack needed to find her. If she'd been here, he'd know it. If she hadn't, he could get out of this place before the woman with the obnoxious, self- righteous, lovely smell returned.
He was halfway up the stairs--more farm implements hung from the walls, and Jack wondered if they knew how much power was in some of those ancient tools--when the front door to the library opened.
He didn't have to turn around; he could smell her. He kept climbing the stairs.
Why had he even sat down to talk to her anyway? You know why, he told himself. Because she smelled like power. Like something interesting. Now she was going to follow him around, making sure he didn't . . . what? Mess up her filing system? Why had he ever thought she was worth talking to?
"The local history section is filed mostly by the pile system." Her voice followed him up the stairs. "If there's something specific you want to find, you're going to need a guide and a map, and possibly some flares and a good pickaxe."
"Is it your department?" Why was he still talking to her? Why does she smell so delicious?
"I'm just the assistant. The woman who keeps this place is about a hundred years old and works once every two weeks."
"Of course she does." Jack sighed. The little old ladies were a lot easier to deal with. "All right, do you have a flare, a map, or a pickaxe?"
"No, but I have two flashlights and me." She reached around him to unlock the door.
Jack breathed in slowly. Was she trying to brush against him, or was that a happy coincidence? He wanted to pull her to him, bury his nose in her hair, and taste that scent, that power. He pulled away as she frowned at him.
"Are you really looking for something?"
"What, you think I'd come here just to bother you?" She was so annoying, so full of herself. And yet, if he hadn't been on a mission, he might have come here to see if he could taunt her some more. As it was, he needed to find out if this library had what he wanted, and he had to do it soon.
"You wouldn't be the first to stalk me here, if you did." She pushed the door open from behind him. "What are you looking for, anyway?"
"A person." He held up both of his hands before she could light into him. "I'm looking to see if someone came this way, oh, a few decades ago? Maybe fifty, sixty years? She might not have stayed long enough to leave a trace, but if she did, I figure it would probably be here."
"Is this an ancestor hunt or a missing person case?" She switched on three rickety overhead lights and turned around in time to catch Jack's expression. "Don't look so surprised. You're obviously not a stranger to the strange."
"What a graceful way to put that." He raised his best winning eyebrow at her.
If she was going to be pissy, he didn't want to go into it. "All right."
"So, tell me about this person." She stopped with her hands hovering over an ancient ledger book. She looked like she belonged here, the flickering lights picking out highlights in her sun-kissed blond hair and adding more warmth to an already tanned complexion. With her frown gone, she was quite pretty, her long-lashed blue eyes waiting for an answer from him.
Jack glowered--at her, at the book, at this whole situation. "Haven't you people computerized yet? This is archaic."
She raised her eyebrows. "That's an unusual complaint. From someone like you, I mean; we hear it all the time from high school students."
"I'm an unusual person."
"I noticed. Your smell is starting to stink this place up."
"I'm not the one that stinks." He glared at her. Stinking! She was becoming ruder and ruder!
"It's a matter of perspective. The person we're looking for is?"
"She would have shown up here around 1945. She has a habit--had a habit, I guess--of using names with the initials A.B."
"All right, so we're looking for a woman--"
"A stunningly gorgeous woman." He'd seen the portraits and the photographs. It wasn't why he was chasing her, but it was a nice bonus.
"A woman, probably with the initials A.B., who arrived in town around 1945 and proceeded to be either notable or strange or maybe both." Amber nodded sharply. It was as if something came over the woman; her whole demeanor and even her scent changed. She started walking through the stacks of books and paperwork, her back to him.
Jack found he didn't like it. "She was probably quite wealthy, too."
"Of course she was." She seemed determined not to be moved. "They usually are, aren't they?"
"What do you mean, they?" He trailed after her.
