Rhia blinked down at the unconscious cowboy, not
really sure what had happened. “Is he...?”
“Ten minutes from now he’ll be fine.”
No one else in the bar seemed to have noticed. They were behind a pillar, just off the dance floor, out of the light.
And then, for the first time in eight years, Marcus
touched her. She gasped as he took her in his arms and danced with her, turning her, moving both of them smoothly and swiftly toward the door.
She didn’t argue. Beyond the fact that his touch had stunned her into silence, she was more than ready to leave Rowdy’s Roadhouse behind. She only stared up into his haunting almost-green eyes and felt the deepest, saddest sense of longing. For him—a man who would hardly speak to her.
The longing made it all worse than ever. She looked in his distant eyes and saw herself: a complete disappointment, both as a princess and as a woman.
* * *
Marcus expected her to resist, to struggle free of his hold, to order him never, ever to lay a hand on her again. But she did none of those things. She let him dance her to the door and then when he released her only to grab her hand, she let him pull her along, out the door and down the steps, all without a single word.
It was snowing hard already and the wind was up. The sky overhead was starless, soot-gray, an anvil waiting to drop. He’d spent the worst of the winter in Elk Creek, providing security for Her Highness Arabella. He knew what was coming.
More snow. Probably a lot of it. The temperature was very cold and getting colder.
She staggered a little behind him and stared in a dazed way up at the sky. “You were right. It is snowing. It looks rather bad.”
“Keep walking,” he instructed. “The SUV is this way....”
She lowered her head and did what he’d told her to do. Her hand felt cool and small in his and he had to block out a few too-sweet memories of their forbidden weeks together at UCLA. During that time, they were always holding hands.
He led her down the middle row of vehicles. Since his arrival, the lot had thinned out a good deal. There were plenty of empty spaces now. Evidently, many of Rowdy’s patrons had made their escape before the snow really
started coming down. They passed the red pickup, the roof and bed of which were already wearing a mantle of white. And then, at last, they reached the SUV. He opened the backseat door for her and snow slid off the roof to plop at their feet.
She did jerk her hand free of his then. And she said one word, “No.”
He had to actively resist his initial reaction, which was to scoop her up and put her in there bodily. “No, what, Rhiannon? No, you’re not going, after all?”
She wrapped her arms around herself. She was shivering. “No, I’m not riding in back. I’ll sit up in front, next to you.”
It simply wasn’t done, for Her Highness to ride in front with the driver. She knew that perfectly well.
But what did it matter at this point? If doing what was not done and sitting in front would get her into the vehicle, so be it. “All right. Hurry. We need to get on the road.” He herded her around the front of the car, pulled open the passenger door for her and waited until she was safely inside. “Put on your seat belt,” he said, and closed the door.
When he climbed in behind the wheel, she was shivering so hard that her teeth were chattering. He got the engine going and the heater running and then he backed out of the space and headed for the highway.
Something wasn’t right.
And then it came to him. No one else was getting on the road. They had been the only ones leaving when they went out the door. No others seemed to have come out since then. The locals probably had the right idea. Those who hadn’t left earlier were not going. They would wait out the worst of it.
He put his foot on the brake before pulling out of the parking lot and venturing onto the windblown, snow-thick highway. “It might be wiser to wait it out. Everyone else appears to be doing that.”
She didn’t look at him. She had her arms tightly wrapped around herself and her head scrunched down into her shoulders, like a turtle pulled into its shell. At least her shivering seemed to have abated a little. “No.” She spoke softly. Without animosity, but with what seemed to him a deep and infinite sadness. “Please. Can we just go to Elk Creek? I couldn’t bear to go back in there now.”
He considered suggesting that they take rooms at the motel behind the roadhouse to wait out the storm. But she was in no condition to spend the night in some cheap motor lodge. The Drop On Inn was hardly the lap of luxury, but at least her family would be there, including her favorite sister, Alice. Sometimes Alice displayed bad judgment, but from what he knew of her, she had a good heart. Rhiannon trusted her absolutely and counted on her for support. It was a night when Rhiannon could probably use a little support.
“You’re certain you want to risk the highway in this weather?” he asked one more time.
She nodded, still staring straight ahead. “Please. Let’s just go.”
So off they went.
* * *
The snow came down harder. And the wind blew the thick whiteness horizontally, straight at the windshield. He drove slowly, with care.
But it was bad and getting worse. Almost immediately, visibility went from poor to practically nothing. He started thinking about suggesting again that it would be safer to turn around and go back. But by now he wasn’t sure if that actually would be safer. He couldn’t see the shoulder on either side of the road. And if another vehicle appeared while he was trying to turn...
He kept going forward. The wipers labored to clear the snow from the glass. Rhiannon sat beside him, silent. And very still.
She would be all right. Of course she would. She was a strong and admirable woman with a core of steel. He just needed to get her back to safety with her family and everything would be all right. Just needed to...
Rhiannon gasped.
Another car had appeared, coming on way too fast in the opposite direction. He couldn’t actually see the vehicle yet. Just four blinding lights: a pair of headlights and another pair higher up, the kind the local ranchers sometimes mounted above the windshield.
“Marcus!” Rhia whispered low. “Oh, my God...”
“It’s all right,” he told her, though she had to know that it wasn’t.
“Marcus, I’m so sorry. So sorry about everything....”
“Shh,” he soothed. And lied again. “It’s all right.” He leaned on the horn.
But it did no good.
The four blinding beams of light started turning. All at once, they illuminated the far side of the road as the vehicle itself appeared, a brown pickup skidding sideways, no longer in the opposite lane but straight ahead in theirs and sliding fast right for them.
Marcus saw the driver in the pickup’s side window. An old fellow in a straw cowboy hat, eyes like two black holes, mouth agape.
There was only one choice and Marcus took it. He turned the wheel sharply toward the shoulder. The pickup whipped by, clipping them in the rear as it went, causing a bone-jarring second of impact, but then skidding on, vanishing into the maelstrom behind them.
He tried to swerve the wheel back into the lane. But it was no good. The snow-thick, icy road surface provided no purchase. The SUV kept going, right over the bank and off the road.
Chapter Four
Rhia’s spinning mind couldn’t keep up with the crash as it happened. She saw the brown truck skidding sideways at them, the face of a terrified old man in a big hat. And then, all at once they were over the side of the road, the front of the SUV suddenly pointing straight down. She closed her eyes, braced herself and waited to die as they dropped off the edge of the cliff.
But it wasn’t a cliff, after all.
They hit bottom almost instantly, the nose of the SUV coming up a little and leveling out, the impact stunning enough to send a jolt of pure agony singing up her spine. A giant fluffy wall appeared, came st
raight at her and smacked her in the face and chest. It was already deflating when she realized it was the air bag.
By then, the SUV had stopped moving. The only sounds were the creaks and the cracking and strange airy sighs of a vehicle that would probably never be drivable again.
“Rhia. My God...” Marcus was half out of his seat, bending close to her. “Rhia, are you...?”
She dared to reach out, to touch his dear, forbidden face. Real. Warm. A little rough with a day’s worth of beard, just she remembered it in her lonely, tortured dreams. “You just called me Rhia...” He’d never called her that, not since their brief time together. It was unacceptable for him to call her by her full first name. But to call her Rhia was, for him, beyond the pale.
“My God,” he said again. “Are you injured?”
She closed her eyes, ran a quick physical inventory. When she opened them, she dared a nervous smile. “No. I’m all right. Pretty shaken up, but all right.”
“Thank God.”
“You?”
“Fine,” he said quickly, dismissing his own condition the way he always dismissed everything concerning his well-being.
She thought of the other driver then, and stiffened.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What hurts? Tell me.”
“That poor old man in the truck...” She reached over and unhooked her seat belt. “We have to get out, go to him. That pickup must have crashed.”
“Wait.”
“But, Marcus...”
“I’ll call for an ambulance.” He spoke to the thing in his ear. “Call nine-one-one.” She waited anxiously for him to ask for an ambulance. But a moment later, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and checked the display.
“What?” she demanded.
He looked at her again. “No signal. Must be the storm.”
“Oh, no...”
He put the phone away and rehooked his seat belt. “Put your belt back on.”
She did what he asked. “What are you going to do?”
“See if I can get us going again, get us out of this ditch.”
It could be possible, couldn’t it? The headlights were still working. They gleamed strangely, half buried in the snowbank the vehicle had scraped up like a plow as they hit the ditch. The windshield and windows were still intact. The front end looked pretty bad, though, all crooked and crumpled.
Marcus reached around his deflated air bag and started the car.
Or he tried to. All he raised was a click, after which the headlights went dark.
The whites of his eyes gleamed at her through the shadows. “Don’t worry. I’ll try again.” He did. Another click. And again. More clicking, but not even a hint of a response from the engine.
“Uh-oh,” she said softly. And she thought of that poor old cowboy again. “Marcus. We have to get out of this vehicle and get back up to the road. We have to make sure that man is all right.”
He regarded her steadily through the gloom. “You’re shivering.”
The engine wasn’t working—and that meant neither was the heater. She wrapped her arms around herself and ordered her teeth not to chatter. “It’s nothing. I am fine.”
His iron jaw was set. “Your high-heeled shoes are made of satin and you don’t have a coat.”
She despised herself right then. Stuck in a snowbank without proper gear. An old man could die because she’d just had to get away from the man sitting next to her. “I’m sorry, so sorry. It’s all my fault. I know that. But we have to do something. At least we have to see if there’s anything we can do.”
He reached over the back of the seat and came up with a lap blanket. “Wrap this around you.” He shoved it at her. “I didn’t hear a crash, so it could be that that cowboy regained control of his pickup.”
“How could we have heard a crash? We were crashing.”
He put up both hands. “Don’t argue. Just wrap the blanket around you.” He undid his belt again, reached across her, popped her belt open for the second time then slid the blanket behind her and closed it around her.
She stared into those eyes that would forever fill her lonely dreams, breathed in his still-remembered scent: plain soap, all man. “But, Marcus—”
“I will go, all right?”
“Oh, Marcus...”
“Take the blanket.” He drew one of her hands from the warm folds. “Hold it close around you....”
She did what he said. He let go of her and she felt absurdly bereft. Then he told her again, in an even, calming sort of tone, “I will go. I will go and check and see if there’s anything I can do.” He slid over to the backseat so smoothly, she didn’t realize what he was doing until he was behind her.
Bewildered, she turned to stare at him over her shoulder. Was it those tequila shots she’d foolishly drunk at Rowdy’s? The accident? This whole awful day with Marcus right there every time she turned around, reminding her so cruelly of everything they would never have?
Probably all of the above. But whatever the reason, her brain seemed to be working as if in a fog, her reactions all out of whack, delayed. Wrong.
She’d pushed him to go out there and see about the old man. But now that he had said he would go, she suddenly realized how very foolish that would be. “Wait. No, I... That’s not right. You can’t go alone. It’s a blizzard out there and it’s not safe....”
He was bending over the floor of the backseat by then. But he stopped what he was doing and straightened enough that his shadowed gaze found hers. “We need to go see about that cowboy who almost ran us over. You can’t go, you have to see that. So that leaves me. But now you don’t want me to go. Make up your mind. Please.”
What mind? “I...” She stared at him hopelessly. He let out a long breath and bent over the backseat floor again. She kicked off her ruined shoes, shoved the air bag aside and drew her feet up under her, hoarding her body’s warmth.
He straightened again and light filled the cab.
She blinked. “A flashlight? Where did that come from?”
He dropped another blanket over the seat. “Put this around your legs and feet.”
She hastened to do what he instructed. “But where...?”
“There’s an emergency kit under the floor back here. Another blanket, a second flashlight, jumper cables, flares, a thermal tarp, things like that.”
“It...came with the vehicle?”
“For a price. You know your brother.”
Alexander. Of course. She should have realized. Alex was extremely security- and safety-conscious—almost scarily so. “I don’t suppose there’s a pair of size seven and a half women’s snow boots and a nice down jacket?”
“Dream on.” In the weird, slanting beam of the flashlight, she saw his mouth twitch. Good Lord, he had almost smiled. If things weren’t so dire, that would have done her heart good.
“Marcus.”
“What now?”
“I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to go out there.”
“Is that a command?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” She huffed out a hard breath and drew the blankets closer around her.
His gaze stayed locked on hers. Level. Unwavering. “It was an honest question.”
“Can we just...dispense with all that, at least until we’re safely back at the motor lodge?”
He considered. “Fair enough. Then I will decide. And I think it’s best if I try to get up to the road, at least. I’ll set some flares.” He held them up. “And I’ll see if that brown pickup is anywhere nearby—and if it is, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do for the driver.”
She knew he was right in what he planned to do, even though she longed to beg him not to do it. “You won’t go far?”
“No. My main responsibility is you, to keep you safe and well. You’re the priority.” She was so grateful to hear him say that—at the same time as she felt deeply ashamed to have gotten them into this awful situation. She had behaved badly on any number of levels and her e
vening of adventure had somehow gotten completely out of control. She sent a little prayer to heaven that God would be merciful and protect the man who was only trying to protect her. He added, “I’ll stay well to the shoulder and I won’t get out of sight of the flares that I set.”
She took a slower, deeper breath. “Yes. All right.”
He tried his phone one more time. “Dead air,” he said softly. He flicked the door lock beside him. The front door on the driver’s side was jammed against the bank, but the back door looked as though it might have some play. He pulled the handle and put his rocklike shoulder into it. With much crunching and groaning, the door slowly opened. It didn’t open far. Too soon it was lodged in the snow on the bank. Freezing air swirled in. “Stay bundled up,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.” And with that, he slipped out into the storm.
“Be safe,” she whispered, as he wrestled the door free of the snowbank and pushed it shut behind him.
She stared over the seat, tracking the flashlight’s glow as he slogged away from the car. He began to climb the bank. Too soon, she lost the light—and him. The view through the rear window was a narrow one from the front seat.
That was unbearable—to have lost sight of him so soon. She scrambled over the seat and then over that seat so she could look out the back. From there, she could see a faint glow up on the road. “Please, please God, keep him safe....” She had to resist the urge to bargain with the Almighty. She’d been foolish enough in the past few hours. She wasn’t going to start trying to make deals with God.
Through the swirling haze of the snow, she saw a flash of sizzling brightness, followed by the red glow of a flare. Then came a second flash and there were two. The flares lit the upper rim of the ditch. His flashlight beam began moving along the shoulder, back the way they had come.
37 Her Highness and the Bodyguard Page 4