The Disenchanted Duke

by Marie Ferrarella

  Cara found herself wishing that she had met people like the Adlers when she had been in the system. Living with people who had such genuine affection for each other would have painted a completely different picture of the world for her. There would have been depth instead of shallowness, affection instead of fear.

  During the course of the meal, she watched them exchange secret glances, saw the sheriff pat his wife affectionately several times and watched Martha Adler reciprocate in kind.

  Words weren't necessary, they had their own brand of communication.

  Serving coffee after the best meal Cara could remember having in recent history, Mrs. Adler cozied up to her guests on the worn Herculon sofa in the family room. Cara couldn't help smiling to herself. For all the world the woman looked exactly like the image she'd had as a child of Mrs. Santa Claus.

  Before she'd been stripped of her fantasies and her innocence.

  "So how long have you two been together?" Martha wanted to know.

  "Martha, you don't ask those kinds of questions of guests," the sheriff chided.

  Her eyes were almost violet in their innocence as she looked at first her husband, then the pair she was entertaining. "But how else am I going to know things, Joe?"

  Max began to answer, but Cara was quick to intercede. "Five years."

  "You've been married that long?" Martha asked. To Max's continued surprise, Cara nodded. "But where's your wedding ring, dear?"

  All right, let's hear this one, Max thought, leaving the floor opened to her.

  Cara bit her lower lip, as if she were debating admitting the woman into this portion of her life. It gave Max pause. Rivers was a great little actress. Which meant she could use her skills on him. How was he to trust anything she told him?

  "We were too poor to afford a ring," Cara finally said. "When we were married by the justice of the peace, he had to used one of the judge's cigar bands." She smiled warmly at Max. "I wore it until it ripped. Now, nothing else seems good enough to replace it."

  There were tears in Martha's eyes. She placed her hand over the sheriff's. "Is that the sweetest thing you've ever heard, Joe?"

  Her husband nodded in agreement.

  Max shut the door behind him to the small room the Adlers had brought them to. It was a step up from the last motel room they'd shared. Smaller, it had only a tiny shower stall and toilet for a bathroom, but it was bright and clean and reflected the same kind of love he'd witnessed in the Adlers's home.

  His mother would have thrived with a man like that, he thought. She would have been far better off if she'd fallen for someone as simple as Joe Adler rather than losing her heart to a dashing prince who never realized the gift he'd been given.

  Turning around, Max looked at Cara. The woman was a constant source of confusion for him. "Why did you tell them we were married?"

  She would have thought he'd understand.

  "That was a sweet, conventional woman and I didn't want to shock her. The sheriff said there was only one bed," she reminded him. "It doesn't matter what century it is, that woman is of the mom-baseball-apple-pie generation."

  He supposed he could see her point. But where had the details come from? "Cigar band?" he queried. "What made you come up with that?"

  Cara laughed softly to herself. "Saw it in a movie on TV once. At the time I thought it was hopelessly romantic. When the couple finally got rich, he bought her a wedding ring fashioned exactly like a cigar band, using diamonds and rubies to form the Indian chief's features." She remembered praying with all her heart that there would be a man like that in her life someday.

  "You don't strike me as the type to like sentimental things like that."

  When she turned around, she found he was right behind her. There wasn't all that much space in the room. It was difficult not to bump up against each other.

  Taking a step back, she tossed her head, shutting down. She had to learn to stop sharing tiny things with him. It compromised her somehow.

  "I'm not." Cara indicated the bed. "Same arrangement as last time?"

  He'd taken the right side, she the left. "Fine with me."

  * * *

  The problem was, she thought as she lay down half an hour later, that it really wasn't fine with her. The bed was smaller than the one in the motel room, the walls were closer and as for him, well, Ryker was far too close for comfort.

  It didn't look as if sleep was going to be in her immediate future, Cara prophesied, scrunching up her pillow beneath her.

  She was wrong.

  She was asleep within ten minutes.

  It was Max who couldn't sleep.

  Chapter 10

  "No, Ted. Don't. Please, don't. Don't."

  Max had just spent the last few hours watching the woman beside him sleep, alternating between feeling something for her he didn't want to put into any sort of a context and being aroused by Cara's close proximity. Just when he thought it was hopeless, he started to drift off.

  The words, the heart-wrenching plea, penetrated his brain, breaking up the haze of sleep that was beginning to descend over him.

  Max woke with a start, instantly becoming aware that the woman he was sharing a bed with was thrashing from side to side as if she were desperately trying to avoid something.

  Or someone.

  But she was sound asleep.

  Hesitating, Max thought of letting whatever she was dreaming about play out its course. She was obviously having a nightmare and he knew that if he woke her up, Rivers would lash out at him for touching her, accusing him of trying to take advantage of her while she was asleep.

  He knew without it being said that the woman was highly protective of her boundaries. If he deigned to wake her up from a nightmare, she'd probably have his head for seeing her in such a vulnerable light.

  He watched her for a moment, the way he had for most of the night.

  The nightmare didn't abate.

  It was hard to ignore what was happening and impossible to fall back asleep when Rivers was breathing so hard. It was as if she were running.

  Or suffering.

  "No," she begged, her eyes squeezed shut, "leave me alone. Leave me alone." There was a barely suppressed sob in her voice.

  Nightmare or not, he couldn't just allow her to agonize like this. His hand on her shoulder, Max tried to shake her lightly.

  When she shrank from his touch, he tried again, a little harder this time.

  "Rivers, wake up, you're having a nightmare." She moaned in response. A gut-wrenching, frightened moan. This time, he shook her more roughly. "You hear me? It's a nightmare. It's not real. Wake up."

  Her eyes flew open, disoriented, huge. Terrified.

  Until this moment, Max would have bet anything that the bounty hunter beside him wasn't capable of being frightened, not like any mortal woman.

  But she could be.

  There were tears in her eyes, he realized.

  Because he was a royal and because he was his mother's son, Max had always been first and foremost a protector. Seeing the tears sliding down her cheek brought out the qualities that had been ingrained in him since childhood.

  Taking her into his arms, Max held her before she was completely awake or conscious of her surroundings.

  And then awareness struck. She realized she was being held. Cara immediately began to struggle, to twist and strain against him, cursing his soul to hell along with the rest of him.

  "Leave me alone, Ted, or I swear I'll—"

  Instinct would have him let a rattler go before it bit. But this wasn't a rattler, this was a woman, a hurting woman and Max held her tightly, talking to her as if he were trying to gentle a stray dog that had been abused. There was a soft side to his heart when it came to the downtrodden and the frightened and he refused to be pushed away.

  Rivers hadn't had a nightmare, he realized, she'd had a flashback. Back to a time when someone or something had terrified her. Badly.

  "Shhh." He rocked with her, slowly, the way someone would
comforting a child. But these were not childish fears, he knew. They were fears that belonged to a woman. "I'm not Ted. It's all right, Rivers, it's over. You're here, safe. No one's going to hurt you, you're safe," he repeated.

  The sound of his voice, his words, sank in. For a moment, Cara sagged against him as relief washed over her. A dream, it had been a dream. A nightmare recreating the nightmare she'd lived through.

  The one she would never be rid of, no matter how hard she tried to block it out. It found her in the night, when her defenses were down, ripping into any peace she might have found during the day.

  Taking a deep breath, Cara willed herself to calm down, to steady her pulse.

  And then she realized that Ryker was holding her.

  Jerking back, pushing her hands against his chest to hold him in place, she looked at him accusingly. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

  Well, she was back to normal, he thought. It was like being confronted with both the lady and the tiger and he wasn't sure, in their present agitated state, which one could do the most harm.

  "Trying to wake you up."

  She didn't believe him. Like every other man, he was trying to take advantage of her. She should have known better than to trust him.

  "Oh, right. By putting a half nelson on me?" she demanded.

  He'd known this reaction was coming, but it still annoyed him. "Only way to keep you from taking a swing at me."

  His answer cut through her tirade-in-the-making. "I tried to hit you?"

  He laughed, shaking his head. Awake or asleep, she was definitely someone to contend with.

  "Hit, bite, gouge," he elaborated. "You're hell on wheels, Rivers." And then he paused before asking, "Who's Ted?"

  "Nobody," she snapped.

  His curiosity was aroused. Reeled in, he didn't back off that easily. "Must have been somebody. You were pleading with him to leave you alone."

  Her eyes narrowed. It was none of his business. "I said nobody. If I hit you, I'm sorry," she said tersely, then shrugged noncommittally. "Just a nightmare that got out of hand."

  It was more than that and they both knew it, Max thought. His eyes never left her face. "You were crying."

  Her chin went up, daring him to argue. "Probably because you were holding me too tight."

  He shrugged, knowing the issue would go no further because she wouldn't allow it to.

  "Yeah, probably." And then he paused, giving it one more try. "You know, if you want to talk—"

  What was he, some kind of tabloid groupie trying to get a fix? "I don't."

  She'd almost snapped his head off with her answer. "Right." He didn't need this aggravation. Lying down again, Max turned on his side, his back toward her. "Good night."

  "Good night," she muttered.

  There was no way she was going to sleep, Cara thought, frustrated. Shutting her eyes would only bring all the vivid images back. Images that had had her shaking in the night more than once.

  Except that this time, she wasn't alone. She was with someone, someone who had tried, for whatever reason, to make the images go away.

  She pressed her lips together, thinking. Debating.

  Somewhere, she'd heard that confession was good for the soul and while she had nothing to confess in the absolute sense of the word, maybe sharing something that continued to haunt her might lessen some of its power over her.

  What did she have to lose? After they got Weber back to Shady Rock, she'd never see this man again. Maybe purging a little to an almost anonymous stranger would actually do her some good.

  She took a deep breath.

  "Ted was my foster brother. Ted Henderson. He was the all-American golden boy, only son of the last family I stayed with."

  The people she ran away from, he remembered. Max rolled over toward her, saying nothing. Not altogether sure he wasn't imagining the sound of her voice. He waited for her to say something else.

  When she didn't, he prodded. "And this Ted, he's the reason you ran away?"

  "Yes." Even the admission was hard for her to voice. Because if she admitted that Ted was the reason she ran away, she had to admit what he had done to her.

  Max had seen the terror in her eyes before she'd focused them. He was acquainted with that look. His line of work had brought him to the lunatic fringe more than once.

  "Did he hurt you?"

  Did he hurt you? The question seemed to mock her. In a thousand ways you couldn 't even begin to imagine.

  Out loud, Cara admitted, "He didn't think so. He thought he was doing me a favor." Her mouth twisted bitterly. The tears came of their own accord. She wasn't even aware of them at first. "Indoctrinating me in the ways of womanhood was what he called it. I tried to fight him off, but he was too strong, too sure I was going to love it."

  Her voice caught and it took her a moment before she could continue. "I tried to tell his mother, but she wouldn't believe me. Nobody would believe that he would do such a thing. Everybody loved him." The suppressed anguish gave way to anger. She swiped at the tears that refused to stop, frustrated by their advent, pained by the memory that rose in her mind. "I was so crazy about him when I was first placed there. He was so handsome, so funny, so kind. I was so flattered when he began to pay attention to me." She pressed her lips together again, wrestling with the guilt. "Maybe I didn't realize—"

  "That you had done something to bring it on yourself?" Max second-guessed her thoughts.

  Cara froze, then anger flashed in her eyes. "I didn't."

  Max wiped a tear away from her cheek with his thumb. "No," he agreed softly with conviction, "you didn't."

  But if that were true, then why had everything fallen apart so drastically for her? The Hendersons were wealthy people, they could have afforded to wait, to let nature take its course and have the baby arrive with family in attendance, she thought.

  Except that no one ever knew.

  "I got pregnant." She looked at Max defiantly, daring him to say anything derogatory. When he didn't, she continued. "That's when I ran away. I knew they would blame me, the Hendersons. They were so crazy about their son. They would say it was all my fault for tempting him. I was afraid they were going to make me get an abortion. And I was afraid that he would try something again." Her voice caught as the memories came flooding back. "So I ran away."

  "What happened to the baby?"

  Her voice was small, distant. "I lost it. I got sick and I lost it." She pressed her hands to her lips, trying to keep back the sobs. It had been so long since she thought of that, of the baby she never had a chance to hold, the baby she had loved from the moment she'd known of its existence—despite its origin.

  There was so much love in her heart that had nowhere to go. That had never had anywhere to go.

  This time, when Ryker took her into his arms, she didn't struggle, she let herself accept the comfort he offered. It was only temporary. This was only talking out loud to a man destined to disappear from her life, nothing more. She didn't have to be afraid of the consequences, didn't have to risk the hurt again.

  Max held her, rocking with her, feeling for her. For the girl she had been, frightened, alone with nowhere to turn and no one to believe her.

  Faced with tenderness instead of antagonism, Cara could feel herself breaking down. She began to cry. And damned herself for it as well as him. If he'd only been distant, critical, she could have kept it together.

  Max sensed the internal struggle she was waging, understood the need she had to release the pain that was there.

  "It's okay," he told her softly. "Let it out. You can cry, no one'll know."

  "You'll know." Her voice was muffled against his chest.

  He felt her warm breath through his shirt. The sensation made him feel closer to her. "I don't count, Cara."

  She looked up at him, her face streaked with tears. He'd never said her first name before. The walls inside her crumbled.

  "Yes," she said quietly, "you do."

  Max couldn't help himse
lf then. She'd stirred something within him, something that went beyond the boundaries of being a protector, something that spoke to him on a gut level, where he lived.

  Very gently, Max brought his lips down to hers and kissed her.

  He waited for her to shove him away. It was in her nature, what he had come to expect from her.

  She surprised him.

  Cara wound her arms around his neck and drew him to her even as she drew herself up to him, and returned the kiss with such passion, such need that it left him completely breathless.

  Completely captivated.

  The kiss deepened as he gathered her to him, holding her as if she were something precious, something fragile that could break at the slightest pressure. Someone he had to protect at all costs.

  She could have cried, he was so gentle. And yet, there was something explosive about the way he kissed her.

  A fire began in her belly, a fire that spread to her loins and her limbs, engulfing her with a vulnerability that was completely foreign to her, a vulnerability that reduced her to a mass of needs that begged to be met, desires that not only bordered on the physical, but were tied tightly to the emotional.

  She kissed him back, kissed him as if she was never going to be kissed or kiss again. Kissed him as if he could save her from the abyss that loomed before her, lonely and large.

  Kissed him as if there was no yesterday, no tomorrow, only now.

  Forever.

  All of her life, she'd always been the strong one because there was no one else to rely on, nowhere else to turn. She'd been strong because there had been no choice and had learned never to let her barriers down because the consequences were too grave.

  But just for tonight, she didn't want to be strong. She wanted to be held and if not loved, then made love to, made love with. If it was all fantasy, all make-believe, then she would deal with it in the harsh morning light. But for now, she needed to have someone with her, someone she could pretend cared.