by Romancing the Crown Series (13-in-1 bundle) (v1. 0) (lit)
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 into 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, this 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?"
He knew that this was going to take more than a little while. Though he liked to keep on top of the latest technology, his grandfather's idea of typing fast amounted to three words a minute. Tops.
The bartender jerked a thumb toward the small table that was set up against the back wall. A coffee-maker, its pot half empty, was standing there. "Yeah, but it'll cost you."
Way ahead of the man, Max had already produced another five-dollar bill and placed it next to its mate on the bar.
Cara tried not to dwell on the man she'd left drugged in the bar. She knew it went with the territory but she couldn't help feeling guilty, even though she'd slipped the bartender fifty bucks to let Ryker sleep it off in the back room. She forced her thoughts back on her job.
It amazed Cara how the simplest things often tripped people up.
Using credit cards had become an established way of life. People did it without a second thought, not realizing that they were simultaneously generating a paper trail as they paid for their entertainment, or their shoes or their gas.
Weber might be able to do without the entertainment or the shoes, but the gas, she was betting, since he was driving a car in his getaway attempt, was another story.
With her cell phone and her portable fax machine, along with several other state-of-the-art items stashed in the trunk of her car, Cara had managed to track Weber down via the activity on his credit card.
It helped having connections in the right places, she thought with a smile as she looked at the latest reported transaction.
Weber had purchased not only gas, but a burrito and a giant-size soft drink at a convenience store on highway 25. It was only fifteen miles away.
Putting pedal to the metal, she was there faster than the law would have smiled upon, the worn photograph of Kevin Weber she'd been showing around sitting on the passenger side beside her.
Screeching to a halt next to the small, squat convenience building, its paint peeling away under the unrelenting sun, Cara grabbed the photograph and dashed inside the store.
The temperature in the interior was only marginally cooler than it was outside. The air felt almost thick as she crossed to the counter. The man behind it looked as if he was ready to wilt.
Cara held up the photograph. "Hi, I'm wondering if you've seen this man in the last few hours?"
The man took only a couple of seconds to study the photograph. The other minute and a half were spent studying her.
"He did and Weber's heading north. My guess is that he might be working his way to Canada."
The clerk in front of her nodded in affirmation.
For the first time, Cara fully understood what was meant when someone said they could have been knocked over by a feather.
That voice could only belong to—
She swung around, her eyes wide, her mind racing. She knew who she was going to see even before she looked at him. Max Ryker.
Her mouth went dry. "You're better than I thought you were."
"And you're more underhanded than I gave you credit for." Taking her by the arm, he pulled her aside. He saw the way the man behind the counter was looking at them, his hand hovering over the telephone receiver. "Just a family spat, mister. If you don't want any trouble, just go about your business," Max told the barrel-chested man. His smile faded the moment he had her a safe distance away from her would-be protector. "What the hell did you put in my drink?"
Cara raised her chin. She'd never reacted well to being questioned. Her eyes swept over him. He looked none the worse for wear. The sleepy look in his eyes gave him a sexy appearance from where she stood.
"Nothing fatal."
He snorted. "Obviously." As she began to pull away, his grip on her upper arm tightened. "I don't appreciate being drugged and then dumped."
She looked at him indignantly. "I paid the bartender fifty dollars to let you sleep it off on a bed in the back room."
"It was a cot and it wasn't worth even fifty cents and change," he informed her. But where he'd slept wasn't the issue. What he'd had was. "Now, what the hell did you put in my drink—the truth," he warned.
"Clonazepam." She gave him the generic name. "It puts you out, that's all."
Max was familiar with the drug. It had made the rounds as everything from a tranquilizer to a sleeping pill to a recreational drug for what he deemed to be the mentally arrested, but predominantly was prescribed fo
r seizures.
He arched a brow, looking at her, trying to make a judgment call that was right for a change when it came to her.
"Yours?"
Cara shook her head. She didn't believe in taking anything more powerful than aspirin, and then only under extreme conditions.
"I know this pharmacist who isn't exactly always on the straight and narrow."
The man was only one of an arsenal of people she'd compiled over her lifetime, people who she turned to whenever she needed a favor that didn't exactly fall within the proper lines smiled upon by society. She figured it was her due, after all the time she'd spent being passed from one house to another, trudging from one closed-clique class to the next over the process of transplantation.
"You wake up a little out of focus," she told him, "a little sluggish, maybe with a fuzzy coating on your tongue, but with no harm done."
If that was a "little" out of focus, then he was Santa Claus's helper. He narrowed his eyes, looking directly at her.
"No harm done—except that you took off."
She shrugged nonchalantly, wishing he'd release her. "Hey, it was just one of those things."
"Don't get cute with me, Rivers. I don't appreciate being drugged and abandoned."
At his raised tone, her own temper flared. "And I don't appreciate being aced out of ten thousand dollars or strong-armed by a bully." This time, she pulled harder against his grip.
Frowning, he released her. "Nobody's strong-arming you."
"Oh, no?" She rubbed her arm to get the circulation going. The man had one hell of an iron grip. "Then what do you call insisting on taking my bail jumper to Outer Slobovia?"
"That's Montebello," he informed her, struggling not to allow the corners of his mouth to curve.
He could almost see the fire leaping in her eyes. Though he was annoyed as hell about her costing him Weber, not to mention time, he had to admit there was something appealing about the way lightning bolts all but came shooting from every part of her.