The Duke’s Covert Mission

by Julie Miller

  Her rush of gratitude was so intense that Ellie had the strangest urge to throw her arms around his neck, hold him close and kiss him senseless. But then, that had never been her way. Of course, she’d never spent any time with a man she wanted to kiss senseless. And she wasn’t sure how to go about doing that, anyway. Besides, she was loath to spoil this deep, safe, connected feeling they shared right now.

  “Ellie.” Hearing her name in that dark, helpless fog of a voice thrilled her more than any honey could.

  A flash of lightning illuminated the sky and left her blinded for an instant. The crack of thunder that followed on its heels was enough to shake her from this schoolgirl stupor. She was stranded in the woods with a virtual stranger to whom she’d given her trust, while a supposedly faithful royal confidant and a few hired goons pursued them with guns and knives and nasty tempers.

  Those sobering thoughts were all she needed for the sensible Ellie to come shining through. “What do you need me to do?”

  He pulled her hand away and gave it a squeeze. “Stay down. Stay put until I come for you.”

  And then he was gone.

  Ellie crawled up just far enough so she could watch Cade descend over the rocks on the other side and run in a zigzag pattern toward the white clapboard cabin. He glided over the ground like a wraith, and it amazed her how a man so brawny could be so light and quick on his feet. Despite the danger, the beauty of his form kindled a heat inside her that made the darkness and the moisture and the sense of malevolent eyes watching her from the shadows a little less noticeable.

  After he’d darted up onto the back porch and disappeared inside, Ellie crouched and waited on the hilltop behind a stand of tall grass and weeds. She made herself blink and look away from the cabin. She didn’t know what kind of supplies he was after, but apparently he wasn’t finding them. The seconds ticked into minutes and Ellie found herself clenching and unclenching her fingers in the mud beneath her, digging a miniature trough.

  Disgusted that the goop collected under her fingernails was all she had to show for what could be the last few minutes of her life, she sat up and wiped her nails on her pant leg. Now she knew why she always jumped in to help get things done. She hated waiting.

  Four days ago she’d been transcribing dictation and making phone calls and moving, unseen, through the background of the affairs of court and the king. Now, instead of being rewarded for her dedication and reliability with one perfect waltz at a grand ball, she was huddling in the mud wearing man-size clothes and praying she could just go home.

  But she’d settle for Cade reappearing. Her watch had long since been confiscated with the rest of the items in her purse. And though it was probably only a matter of minutes, it felt like hours had passed since she saw him jimmy the door with his knife and go inside.

  “Be patient,” she warned herself out loud. But when her fingers began their nervous digging a second time, Ellie shook herself free of this feeling of abandonment. She couldn’t just sit here. There must be something she could do to help.

  She could scout around. Keep watch while Cade was in the cabin. Her eyes were working just fine with her glasses, despite the dampness on her skin that kept them sliding down her nose. That was it. Do something.

  Even that simple, self-assigned task made her feel less antsy about sitting alone out here. She crinkled her nose as she tried to assess her surroundings. The first line of rain had been heavy enough to soak everything around her and fill the air with the dank scent of compost and rot.

  Not ten feet away, there was a pile of old moss-covered tree trunks that had run out of soil for their growing roots and toppled over. The real storm was yet to come and she had better be looking for some kind of shelter. The nature-made overhang could at least offer her a break from the wind, if not keep her warm and dry. Ellie climbed up on her hands and feet like a bear and sidled over to the dead trees, minding Cade’s request to stay out of sight.

  The galloping hoofbeats of continuous thunder pursued her across the distance, drawing her attention to the skies in the west, where lightning and wind stirred the clouds like a witch’s cauldron. Ellie shivered from within, thinking of the violence heading their way, of the violence they’d left behind.

  She climbed over the top of the highest trunk and dropped down on the other side. She rubbed her hands together, grateful for the reprieve from the weather—and froze.

  The air temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees since nightfall had arrived. But that wasn’t what let whatever body heat she had left seep out into the ground at her feet.

  “Lenny.” She inched back a step, slipped, caught herself on the slimy bark of the tree she’d just scaled. “I, uh…You startled me. Cade’s here. With me.” She tried to defend herself with words.

  He stared at her through the darkness, unblinking, unsmiling. He held a small gun in his hand, pointed right at her. He’d always been so quiet, so big, so immovable.

  A bolt of lightning exploded across the sky and Ellie screamed. She slapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a second scream as a trailing edge of electricity in the clouds dappled the sky like fireworks.

  It provided enough light to see what she needed to. More than she ever wanted to.

  Lenny was dead.

  Sitting on a rock with a thick pen clutched in his fist, not the gun she’d imagined in the shadows. His forehead bore a dime-size hole.

  “Oh, Lenny.” Tears stung her eyes and burned in her throat. He sat there, his gray, puffy cheeks forever frozen in a look of surprise. He looked for all the world as if he’d been sitting there, writing a note, when someone discovered his hiding place just as she had. She’d screamed at the discovery, but someone else had shot him.

  She’d screamed.

  The realization ripped through her with the electrifying charge of one of those lightning bolts. “Stupid move, Ellie.”

  This hill was only a mile or so from the cabin where they’d left Jerome and Winston Rademacher and the other man Cade had mentioned. She didn’t know if the rain would muffle the sound or not, but she wasn’t waiting to find out if she’d given away her location. Their location.

  She’d endangered them both.

  “Cade?” She whispered his name on a panicked plea, then kick-started her body past the shock of finding Lenny and scrambled up the stack of fallen tree trunks. “Cade?” Would they go to the cabin first if they’d heard her? To the dock? “Cade?” She had to warn him.

  The boats she wore on her feet gave her little traction. She slipped on the moss and tumbled backward, rolling into Lenny’s body and knocking him off his perch. His big, stiff body fell like a mighty oak onto her legs. This time she stopped the scream in her throat.

  She pushed and tugged and scooted out from beneath him in the slippery mud. As she backed away from the mercenary’s lifeless body, her hand hit something solid. She looked down before rolling onto her hands and knees and picking it up.

  Another notebook. Small and black. Just like the one she’d stolen from Cade. Was Lenny writing his memoirs? Confessing his crimes? Had he been working undercover, too?

  Whatever the reason, the other notebook had been important to Cade. Using nothing more than that piece of knowledge to make her decision, she stuffed the notebook into a pocket and scrambled out of the shelter.

  She didn’t stop at the crest of the hill this time. She sat on her bottom and half-slid, half-fell down the other side into the clearing. When her feet hit level ground, she took off running. “Cade?”

  A bright flash distracted her from her run toward the cabin. But it wasn’t lightning this time.

  It was help.

  The sweep of headlights cut through the curtain of rain as a pickup truck pulled into the gravel driveway beside the house. Like a moth drawn to the flame of promised safety, Ellie ran straight for the vehicle.

  Fat drops pelted the uneven ground, splashing mud onto her legs and filling her shoes with water. “Help us! Please.” She waved her arms in t
he air to get the driver’s attention.

  When she heard the gears grinding into park, she slowed her aching legs to a walk and let her mouth drop open, breathing in huge gulps of air and spitting out the water running down her face. A bolt of lightning burst across the sky, standing the hairs on the back of her neck on end. She ducked and covered her ears as an explosion of thunder hammered the air at nearly the same instant.

  “Ellie…!” Cade called to her, but whatever else he said was muffled by rain and distance.

  The cab light of the truck came on as the driver opened the door. A shock of snowy hair gleamed white and bright. The fisherman!

  What was his name? She squinted into the spotlighting glare of the headlights. “Mr. Costa?” She remembered his reaction when she’d run to him the other day and collapsed at his feet. She hurried her step when she saw him climb back into the cab and close the door. “I’m not crazy. Please. We’re in trouble. We need your help.”

  A different door slammed off to her right. “Ellie!” Cade shot out the back of the cabin and came toward her at a dead run. Because he was dressed in black and lost in the shadows, she couldn’t make out the contortions of his upper body.

  “We can get that ride into town.” She shielded her eyes from the headlights and turned his way. He was putting something into his pocket. No. Taking something out. “I found Lenny on the other side of the hill. He’s dead.”

  “Get out of the light!” His hoarse shout made no sense.

  “Did you hear me?” She pointed to Tony Costa. “He’ll help us—”

  Ellie turned to show him their white-haired neighbor. Her eyes rounded in shock. Her mouth opened in a silent scream.

  Tony Costa had pulled a rifle from his truck and was taking aim.

  At her.

  “No!” Perfectly targeted in the headlights, Ellie instinctively backed away. Suddenly it seemed as if her vision had taken on super powers. With her senses translating everything in slow motion, she spotted the black line of the rifle barrel and followed it up to the cold, unblinking eye that had her in its sights. Costa’s long, tanned finger curled around the trigger and squeezed.

  Fortunately Cade moved in real time.

  For the briefest of moments, he was airborne in the light. She heard the rifle report as loud as the thunderstorm itself. Cade slammed into her, knocking her to the ground. They slid in the mud and disappeared into the darkness beyond the headlights.

  “Are you hit?” he rasped in her ear.

  Crushed between man and earth, Ellie could only shake her head.

  He rolled off her. Air rushed into her lungs and Ellie sat up. “Are you?”

  Instead of answering, Cade rose on his knees and steadied his gun with both hands. He shot twice, taking out both headlights.

  “Move,” he said. Ellie had already scrambled to her feet by the time he cupped her elbow and urged her into a stooping run toward the lake. “Get in the boat.”

  A string of curses in fluid French and botched English chased them down to the dock. A rain of unseen bullets smacked into the ground at their feet with such force that Ellie could no longer distinguish between gunshots and thunder.

  “Cade?” Mud and gravel gave way to wood beneath their feet.

  “Get in.” Ellie jumped down into the boat a step ahead of Cade. “Get the ropes.”

  She crawled over the seats and lifted the first rope from its mooring post while Cade started the engine. Tony Costa slammed the door of his truck and gunned the engine, spinning out gravel and mud until he found traction.

  Ellie moved to the back rope. But soaked with water, it had expanded into a tight ring around its post. She fought to untie the knot, but the swollen hemp wouldn’t budge.

  The boat’s motor roared to life. It danced in the water, waiting to be thrown into gear. Costa’s truck barreled across the clearing. Cade fired blindly into the darkness.

  “Ellie!”

  Lightning flashed. Costa careened to a screeching stop.

  “It’s stuck!”

  Ellie jumped back as a small projectile dinged off the side of the boat. Cade hit a switch on his gun and an empty magazine popped out. He loaded a second round of bullets and kept shooting. The next heavenly illumination revealed Costa braced behind the cover of his truck, taking sure aim at the boat.

  “Today, Ellie!”

  She spied what she needed in the same flash of light that temporarily blinded Costa. She lunged across the seats and pulled Cade’s knife from his boot. The steel blade was thick and shiny and made a satisfying thunk against the aluminum bulkwark as she chopped through the rope.

  “Go!”

  Cade backed the boat away from the dock. “Stay down,” he warned, turning the exposed stern toward Costa and throttling the engine up to full. Ellie rocked between the seats, hunkering down into a ball while the old boat skipped out toward open water beyond the range of Costa’s rifle.

  The storm churned rough whitecaps along the surface of the lake, but Ellie’s stomach gladly endured the lurching ride. After several minutes Cade slowed the boat to a cruising speed and snapped his gun back in the holster.

  “My knife?” As he breathed easier, so did she. She scooted across the seats and handed him his knife, handle first. In one, seemingly fluid movement, he slipped the knife into his boot and reached for her.

  Ellie willingly walked into the snug circle of his arm. She wrapped her arms around his waist and cuddled close, burying her nose in the wet-heat smell of Cade’s chest. “Why was he shooting at us?”

  “The usual reason.”

  She didn’t have the strength to muster a smile. “Does everyone want us dead?”

  He pressed a kiss to the crown of her head and tightened his grip around her shoulders. “No. Not everyone. I like you in one piece.”

  She hugged him tightly, silently sending him the same message.

  “Tony Costa’s a hit man. I imagine Rademacher hired him to get rid of Lenny and Jerome and me when the job was done. You got added to the list when—”

  “—it turned out I wasn’t a princess.”

  Cade released the wheel to tip up her chin. Lightning rippled through the clouds above him, silhouetting him like a dark champion against the backdrop of the roiling sky in the instant before he kissed her.

  A giddy sense of relief rushed through Ellie, making her legs weak, making her heart strong. She was finally in a place without dead bodies, without men who harbored greed and murder in their eyes. She was with Cade. Her hero. Her brave, outcast hero.

  She stretched up on tiptoe, trying to offer him solace in return for saving her life. The friction of their wet clothes and searching mouths bound them together in a healing, calming heat. He explored her lips leisurely, tenderly, thoroughly, before lifting his head and tucking her under his chin.

  He returned his attention to the wheel. “You’re a princess in my book. They don’t come with any more class and grace under pressure than you do. Hang tough a while longer, okay? I’ll call in for backup, but I imagine we’ll have to find a safe spot to hole up for the night.”

  Like Ellie, the storm had spent most of its energy. But she wanted to live up to the gruff compliment in Cade’s words. Despite the reassurance of his solid strength, she was keenly aware of the danger of being out on the open water while lightning still sparked in the clouds above them.

  She rested her cheek over his heart, imagining she could somehow protect his most vulnerable spot there. “Your hide may be tough, but you’re not impervious to lightning bolts. Find someplace to stop. Soon.”

  The laughter in his chest rumbled like a soothing caress in her ear. “Yes, Your Highness.”

  He shifted their positions so that she could take the wheel and steer while he pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. Though he worked with his typical machinelike precision, he moved up behind her and wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her back against his chest as if he took as much comfort in their physical contact as she did. />
  She could hear his heartbeat and the distant ringing of a phone somewhere across his cellular connection. Ellie found herself listening as intently as Cade when the line clicked, indicating his call had gone through.

  But he waited for the other party to speak first. “Allo?”

  Cade’s heartbeat stuttered at the man’s foreign greeting. Then his heart resumed its steady rhythm at a faster pace.

  “What’s wrong?” Ellie whispered.

  He clamped his hand over her mouth, shushing her. His whole body stiffened with an alert readiness that knocked the supports right out from under the false sense of contentment his embrace had given her just moments ago.

  He said five words in their native language. “Any news about the scandal?”

  “Excuse me?” The other man sounded as confused as Ellie.

  Cade continued in English. “If the king’s around, tell him his travel plans have changed.”

  Was he speaking in code? Or babbling gibberish? The Easton she knew wasn’t going anywhere until he’d found the right grandchild to name as his successor to the throne.

  Ellie held her breath, waiting for the other man’s reply.

  “I’ll give him the message.”

  Cade released her and turned off his phone.

  Ellie had a bad feeling about whatever had just transpired. “I hate to make the association, but does scandal have something to do with you?”

  “Not now, Ellie.”

  He guided her down to a seat and hooked a life jacket around her neck before opening up the throttle again and steering the boat toward an unknown shore.

  A very bad feeling, indeed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Easton Carradigne, King of Korosol, walked into the study he’d commandeered at his daughter-in-law’s penthouse and found his grandson, Markus, setting the phone down on the desk.

  The phone.

  He stepped into the room undetected, leaving the door slightly ajar. There were servants down the hall, clearing the dining room table after dinner. He felt reassured, knowing someone could hear him if… He didn’t enjoy being alone with Prince Markus. Not if he could help it.