Chapter 26
CHAPTER 26
The next day, riding alongside Miss Calliope on horseback toward Mule Stop, Max felt a degree of shock at his first sight of the nineteenth-century town. In his own century, he’d driven through the small municipality on the way to the dedication of the new wildlife sanctuary. He hadn’t planned to spend any longer than that in the town—he’d arranged to stay at the mini-castle at the Crown while he put into motion his plans for the rest of the ranch and negotiated the water rights he needed from the James family.
But now, gazing down from the top of a hill onto the 1897 version of the place, he realized it had been easier to adjust to his travel through time while he’d been in the mountains, where less had changed over the last hundred and twenty-two years. The reality that he was in the nineteenth century was made immensely clear the instant he and the others he was traveling with—Miss Calliope and Bart and a host of ranch hands on horseback, June and Livia in a well-sprung, roofed buggy, plus Mrs. Zandt and her family, Luke Wade and his family, and assorted others in wagons and other conveyances—cleared the last of the sparsely wooded, grassy hills that abutted the rolling, sagebrush-covered prairie.
In his time, there was a wide, paved highway winding smoothly down this last hill to the flatlands, leading into the town a few miles away, the town full of modern buildings mixed with old, and covering many square miles.
In this time, a narrow, rutted, dirt wagon trail switchbacked down the steep hillside, its rough surface causing the buggy and other conveyances to bounce and jostle. Heat intensified as the last of the morning gave way to noontime, fatigue on everyone’s faces from hours and hours of riding, and their dawn start made sense now to Max. They navigated this last descent onto the dusty prairie, a rabbit scuttling through the sagebrush, and rode straight east three miles.
The wagon trail split when it reached Mule Stop, dividing into a sharp right turn to the south—heading, Miss Calliope told him, to Laramie—and a sharp left turn into the first block of what in Max’s time was quaintly known as Old Town. There, the trail became Main Street, the roadway smoother than the wagon trail, but it was still just packed dirt, dust rising in the hot air from wagon and buggy wheels, and the hooves of the many horses.
Indeed, there was nothing quaint and historic about Old Town now. The two-story brick buildings that lined the road looked fresh and new. The wood walkways in front of the buildings were vibrant with people whose clothing matched the old-fashioned signs hanging from the buildings. The smell of food wafted in the hot air, undercut by the scent of horse and manure, everything about the town alive and fully nineteenth century.
Sheriff Sam Creede’s town, Max realized, recognizing it more from the Creede television show than from the brief moments four days ago when he’d traveled in an air-conditioned electric SUV past the brick buildings on his way to the Crown of the West and the new wildlife sanctuary.
The television show had gotten the town right—so right that Max felt like he’d been here often. Dressed like an authentic cowboy, with Miss Calliope in her cowgirl clothes at his side, and Creede himself riding just ahead of them beside Bart, he felt like he was in a Creede episode.
But as Miss Calliope began to point things out to him, he began to realize it was as much her town as Creede’s, and maybe more so. With a happy joy, she called out greetings to nearly everyone they passed, the sound competing with the jingle of bridles in the hot air, the crunch of large metal wagon wheels over the dirt roadway.
And there were a great many greetings. Not only was their own traveling party a large one—they’d been joined by neighbors as they’d passed each ranch on the way to town, traveling in an increasingly larger group, their procession gathering up more riders, wagons, and buggies at each homestead, no one wanting to travel alone with the Evil Prince around. The town was filling rapidly with what Miss Calliope said were ranching families from all over the rest of Mule Stop County in advance of the town celebrations that would culminate in the town dance.
Indeed, among all the camaraderie and fun going on around him, it felt as if the party had already started. His mouth parched, Max unlooped the canteen strap he’d wrapped around his saddle horn and took a long swig of the warm water, shifting in the saddle as he drank, his body sore from the long ride, but he wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything, his heart light with the company of Miss Calliope in a way his heart had not ever been before.
Some of the neighbors who’d traveled with them peeled off to the left at the end of the first block, headed for an eating establishment called the Apothecary, where Miss Calliope said one could get a midday meal. More neighbors—of the male variety—left them in the second block, stopping outside the Mule Stop Saloon, on the same side of the street as the Apothecary, Creede peeling off to the right toward the jailhouse.
The Sky Top ranch hands stopped at the livery at the end of the second block, Max and the others going on past the big barn-like building and its next-door neighbor, a three-story brick town hall with white columns and a tower on top. Traveling on into the residential district, Max marveled at the immense Victorian houses lining the road.
Miss Calliope pointed at the first one on the left—three stories and painted white. The boardinghouse, she told him. Prairie stretched out behind the house toward the hills to the west, Mule Stop in this century built along the north-south length of Main Street and not having yet spread out in other directions. Small elm saplings lined the dirt road, planted in what looked like tended grass, a worn path through the grass serving as sidewalk.
“That there is Sheriff Sam’s house,” she said, pointing at another large Victorian a few blocks farther down on the left, this one pale-blue and trimmed in white and navy. “And that there is Doc’s,” she said of the house two doors down from Creede’s. “He and his wife Grace live there. She’s real kind.”
Up ahead, Bart turned his palomino stallion left onto the gravel drive of yet another graceful Victorian house, this one tall and spacious like the others, and painted a pale yellow, like one of Miss Calliope’s calico dresses. “This here,” she said with a touch of pride as they neared, “is ours.”
It was what Max would expect from the James family, the house substantial and elegant, with white and peach gingerbread trim that was dignified rather than whimsical, the bay windows in front glittering in the sun. Everything about the large house, modern for its time, looked prosperous, and large enough for June to host each of her children and their families, a gathering place which he suspected would be full of warmth and joy.
And what a great neighborhood, he grinned to himself. Creede and Doc just a few houses away…
Mrs. Zandt and her family pulled their covered wagon into the driveway, alongside June and Livia’s buggy, which stopped next to the house, near a side door reached by a flagstone path through blooming rose bushes. The Wade family turned in to the gravel driveway of the Victorian across the street.
“Luke and his wife own that place there,” Miss Calliope told Max.
The ranch hands, Max had learned earlier, would be staying with friends and family, or at the local boardinghouse, or over the saloon.
Following Bart to a large stable at the end of the gravel drive, Max quickly dismounted and crossed to Miss Calliope, grasping her by her firm waist and lifting her down from Apollo, though both of them knew she needed no help of his to climb off her horse.
She gave him a startled glance as he was lowering her to the ground, Max careful to not touch her body with his. Livia had given him a rundown on the social mores of nineteenth-century Mule Stop, and he was determined to treat Miss Calliope with propriety. “Thank you, prince,” Miss Calliope said, her pretty eyes looking as if she wasn’t sure she liked being helped from her horse, but she didn’t move from his grasp. Instead, as he let her go, she gave him the demure smile she had previously reserved primarily for her suitors. “Duke, I mean.”
Stepping back away from Apollo, and giving Miss Calliope room, he hung his brown cowboy hat on his horse’s saddle horn and took her leather-gloved hand in both of his. Now or never, he thought, and better he did it in front of her brother. “Do you think you could start calling me Max again, now and then?”
He had contemplated asking the question the entire ride to town, during the hours spent at her side, the two of them riding sometimes in silence among the beauty of the land, the two of them other times laughing and teasing, as if they’d known each other always, Max careful to be friendly, and not more. He didn’t wish to remind her of Hugo’s dastardly kidnapping yesterday. He wanted things to be light and fun.
And yet, deep inside, he wanted more.
She blushed at his question, a rosy hue upon her smooth cheeks. Unlike the others, she’d stopped calling him ‘Max’ to his face two and a half days ago, calling him ‘prince’ instead. “I don’t know,” she said in a tone that combined her demure, ladylike persona with the tomboy, overlaid with a shyness that both surprised and delighted him. “Sounds mighty personal to me.”
“I’d like to be personal, Miss Calico.”
Standing to Max’s left, over by the main door to the stable, where he was handing Zeus over to a stable boy, Bart cleared his throat.
Damn. Livia had told her husband too many stories from Royalty Watch , Max bet, ninety-five percent of them—and a hundred percent of the most outrageous ones—untrue.
Miss Calliope’s demure shyness turned into a smile that hinted of tomboy all around. “Reckon you’ve earned the right to call me Cally…Max.”
He kissed the back of her gloved hand, getting another startled glance from her. “Thank you, Cally. I am delighted to do so.”
Standing in the sun beside Apollo, with Prince Max holding her hand, Cally thought on last night, when she never did get the kiss she’d wanted. Ma and Bart and Max had stayed up late, makin’ plans, and she’d fallen asleep before the coast had been clear to sneak out.
But here, now, with his lips leaving her glove, and her insides all a-tumble, she felt like she’d just had that kiss, that womanly feeling lighting up her belly again, her hands wanting to run through the dark hair of his bent head.
Bart cleared his throat for a second time, knocking her out of her womanly daze. Apollo stamped his front feet.
Slowly, Max let go of her hand, something she thought he wouldn’t have done if Bart hadn’t been there.
“Don’t you go chiding Max, Brother,” she told Bart, her gaze still on her prince as he raised his head and stood up straight, the sound of her ma’s buggy wheels coming toward them, Nick at the reins now. “He ain’t done nothing them suitors haven’t.”
“That,” Max said with a smile that looked as dazed as she felt, “is what concerns him.”
“Calliope,” Ma called out quietly from the back door of the house.
Bart strode to Apollo and grasped the horse’s reins.
Taking a steadying breath, Cally strode to the house, feeling as if something momentous had happened, and marveled that it had happened from a mere kiss to her hand.
Max stepped into the house with Bart, Bart not having said a word about Max kissing Cally’s hand, but his raised eyebrow and unsmiling face needed no words to convey their message: stay away from my sister, that eyebrow and face said.
The two of them entered the back of the building through a set of French doors, the sitting room on the other side having a magnificent view of the hills that edged the prairie three miles away to the west, hills that grew taller and taller until they were surpassed in the far distance by the Wind Dance Mountains.
The interior of the house was as elegant as the outside, full of mahogany-trimmed furniture and rich fabrics, and Max knew from his own family’s experience that the James family’s wealth would be on display the next few days for the sake of the suitors and their parents.
The suitors. Max frowned. Even though Cally had crossed two of the remaining five off her list, and one of the other three—Finn—was her buddy, and unlikely her future husband, the in-town social gatherings the Jameses had planned were going full steam ahead, since, as June had said, the suitors’ families had come all this way from Denver and Cheyenne to visit.
As further evidence of display, there was more household staff here than at the ranch, the staff already in residence and having begun preparations for the several entertainments June had arranged. After a large, refreshing meal, and a cool, refreshing wash with his orange-and-clove scented soap, Max put on a new set of cowboy clothes—a white Western shirt with black stitching, more denim trousers of pure cotton, and his dark-brown cowboy boots and hat, which had been brushed and cleaned by what at home would be considered a footman.
Freshly shaved, something he hadn’t bothered with at dawn, his hair washed and brushed into its natural waves, he stepped out of his bedroom on the second floor ready to meet nineteenth-century Mule Stop as himself, no butler disguise, no cotton pads in his cheeks, no formal stiffness, no British accent. Just himself, except he’d be introduced as the Duke of Balmont, in case Hugo dared to come to town for the upcoming local festivities.
Folks, Cally had said yesterday when they were making plans for coming into town today, would see the resemblance between Max and the Evil Prince, but Max didn’t have a telltale scar across his ear and jaw like Hugo did. He didn’t speak to others with Hugo’s princely arrogance.
Folks, once they knew Max’s resemblance was only due to being a family member, would soon treat him as himself, not Hugo.
A smile, she’d told him, would help.
He found her downstairs in the sunny back parlor, dressed in a yellow calico frock that matched the house, with narrow sleeves and white zigzag trim at the neckline, her long, dark hair up in a simple twist in back. “I reckon you’d like to meet my friends,” she said, jumping up from a wood-trimmed, flowered-velvet love seat by the French doors, a pair of highly polished cowgirl boots on her feet. A faint hint of rosewater wafted from her.
“You reckon right,” he said. “Shall we go exploring?” He wanted to see if Hugo had come to town. He wanted to put into action his plan to take the war to the Evil Prince.
He wanted to experience Cally’s Mule Stop, to meet her friends, to learn everything he could about her, so that when he returned home, he would have a memory that would never fade.
If he was honest, he didn’t want to miss a moment with her. The suitor who was lucky enough to win her hand, out of this first batch of six, or a future batch, would have the rest of his life to spend with her.
Max…well, he had two or three more weeks, at most, and a part of him rebelled. Who said he had to leave her?
Who said he had to go?
She led him through the cool house to the front door, and together they stepped outside into the hot afternoon.
The roadway was still busy with buggies, wagons, and riders, seeming even more crowded than just two hours ago. The elm saplings drooped in the heat.
Turning south, Cally led Max back toward the small business district, taking the worn path through the grass that edged the road. Passersby called out greetings to her, even as they inspected Max with curious gazes, nineteenth-century Mule Stop small enough to notice strangers right off. Sharper looks came from some, and Max wondered if those townspeople had encountered Hugo, and were mistaking Max for him, and were concerned that a member of the James family would have anything to do with the haughty prince.
As they left the residential area behind and stepped up onto the wood walkway that bordered the brick buildings on the west side of the street, Max wanted to shout to the world he was one of the good guys, not Hugo. He wanted to tuck Cally’s hand in the crook of his arm and be her official escort. He wanted to hold her hand.
He wanted to put his arm around her and hold her close as she pointed out the sights to him, wanted to claim her as his to all the suitors they had yet to encounter, all the townspeople.
All the world.
Good God, he was besotted.
Bowing to propriety, he smiled and strode beside her, touching nothing.
Everyone, it seemed, was her friend.
“Howdy, Stubby,” she said to a short, grizzled man in a striped gray Western shirt and denim trousers outside the Apothecary at the start of the second block of brick buildings, his hands full with two glasses of what smelled like lemonade. A gold band around the crown of his tall, broad-brimmed white cowboy hat glinted in the bright sun. The large, engraved gold belt buckle and fancy cowboy boots he wore hinted at his wealth.
“Howdy, Miss Cally.” He gave her a courtly nod and handed her one of the glasses.
“This here is Duke Max,” she said with a nod at Max. “Duke Max, this is Mr. Stubby Ogg, proprietor of the Apothecary and the Mule Stop Saloon.”
“Howdy,” Stubby said with a tip of his hat and thrust the second glass into Max’s hand.
“Howdy,” Max said with a tip of his own, just like he’d seen Creede do in his television series. “And thank you,” he said, raising the cool glass.
“You ridin’ in tomorrow’s race?” Stubby asked Cally.
“I shore am,” she said with an impish glint in her pretty eyes. “Apollo and I are going to take the trophy this year.”
“You took it last year,” Stubby said.
Cally grinned and sipped what Max had discovered was sweet lemonade.
“How about you, feller?” Stubby asked Max. “You ridin’ in tomorrow’s race?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Max said. He leaned closer to Cally as Stubby moved away to greet a young family striding up to the Apothecary. “Does your mother know what you’re planning to do?” he whispered.
Cally just smiled, that demure smile she’d given him earlier, only at full wattage this time, unlike he’d ever seen her do before, and he felt his heart stop for a moment at the rush of desire that ran through him, his mind going blank. He lost interest in the horse race. Lost interest in anything but her lovely mouth.
“You realize she’s invited the most eligible bachelors from Denver and Cheyenne to your house for supper tonight,” he said, trying to regain his equilibrium. “They’ll likely attend tomorrow’s race.” He glanced around in a pointed fashion at all the posters in every storefront window advertising the event.
“Are you jealous, prince?” she said in her demure voice.
He gazed at her for a long moment, a long moment in which the tomboy began to peek through. “Yes. I am jealous.”
“Yet here you are, talking with me and drinking lemonade in the sun while them other fellers are paying calls to the town leaders with their mothers.”
Max laughed, beginning to realize how much the demure young woman and the impish tomboy were two sides of the same coin. “I’d say I felt sorry for your mother if she didn’t already know you well enough to anticipate you riding in tomorrow’s race.”
They had walked to the end of the brick buildings, pausing for a moment in the hot sun at the end of Main Street to gaze at the miles of prairie stretching out south of town, and were coming back on the other side of the road, when one of Cally’s suitors, Mr. Vann—the one who’d brought her the moss-packed roses—stepped outside a wood door marked ‘Mayor’ in stenciled black paint. Dressed in what Max figured would be considered city clothes—a dark-brown, squared-off suit jacket and straight-legged trousers, with a bowler-like hat—his dark mustache as trim as ever, he was accompanied by a richly attired woman who resembled him in the brow and eyes, and was of an age to be his mother.
Cally immediately shifted into demure mode, and Max stifled a laugh. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Vann,” she said. “Mr. Vann. It is so kind of you to visit us in Mule Stop. My mother looks forward to your presence at her soirée this evening.”
“Good afternoon, Miss Calliope.” Mrs. Vann was gracious enough in her manner to Cally, as befit a woman wishing to marry her jerk of a son to a pretty heiress, and Max silently exhaled in relief that word of yesterday’s abduction had not made its way to at least this suitor and his mother. Nor to any others, that he could tell. None of them had sent their regrets about not attending that evening’s entertainment at the James house.
Nor had any of the townspeople they’d met have anything but smiles and greetings of goodwill for Cally.
Mrs. Vann turned to Max, giving him a once-over that made it clear she didn’t think much of him, her nose turning up a bit, as if a local cowboy was beneath her notice, even though it was her expensively embellished dress and the satin-trimmed hat perched on her upswept hair that were out of place among all the simple calico and gingham worn around them.
“May I introduce the Duke of Balmont?” Cally said in a formal tone, and Max had a feeling she was trying hard not to giggle. “Duke, this is Mrs. Vann of Cheyenne, and her son Mr. Vann.”
Max gave a small, formal bow. “How do you do?” he said in his full Zalgravian accent, watching closely for any signs of recognition from Mr. Vann, for any sense that the young man had figured out that the butler who’d waited on him at the Sky Top was the same man being introduced to him now as a duke. But Mr. Vann merely gave a nod back, as if unsure how to greet a foreign duke.
Mrs. Vann, however, gave Max a slight, quite unnecessary curtsey, and he marveled again at the ease with which the James family, Creede, Roy, and Doc had accepted his royal status without feeling the need for any such protocol. Including the use of his title—except for his Miss Calico—and he knew he loved the freedom from that protocol, and felt accepted for himself for the first time in a very long time.
“How do you do, Your Grace?” Mrs. Vann said as she rose from the slight curtsey, an ambitious, calculating expression coming to her eyes, as if she was figuring out the value of an acquaintance with a royal duke, just as her son’s eyes had calculated the value of the Sky Top Ranch.
“The duke is an old family friend,” Cally said. “He kindly agreed to visit with us while he is in our country.”
Mr. Vann scowled.
Mrs. Vann gave Max an ingratiating smile. “I understand,” she said, “that a prince from your country has purchased land in this area.” And Max watched her calculating expression shift to the social benefits of an introduction to a prince.
A duke was one thing. A royal prince was another.
“Yes,” Max said coolly. “He has.”
“Will he be joining the festivities this week?” Mrs. Vann asked.
“I have no idea of his plans,” Max said, lending arrogance to his coolness. “Hugo and I rarely cross paths.” Thank God.
“Duke,” Creede called out from halfway down the next block, standing just outside a doorway with a wood sign hanging out on a metal rod from the brick wall.
“Until this evening, then,” Max said with a short, haughty nod and escorted Cally toward the sheriff.
Cally stepped inside the jailhouse ahead of Sheriff Sam and her prince, her heart beating fast at meeting up with Mrs. Vann. It was hard enough to be a lady around a woman who so clearly was what her ma called a social climber, and a not very nice one, either. It was even harder not to giggle or laugh when Max put on a haughty face and spoke with a cold, arrogant voice.
Max. That’s what he’d asked her to call him to his face when they’d arrived at her family’s house in town. Just ‘Max.’
A small thrill went through her lower belly. It was just a name, she told herself. But it was more than that. She’d been real careful the last two and a half days to not call him by his first name. Ma had said it wasn’t proper for a young woman to be so informal with him, though everyone else in the family called him that. She’d taken to calling him ‘prince,’ then thinking about him as her prince.
His request she call him ‘Max’ had felt like another step along the path their kisses had started them on. Her telling him to call her Cally felt like another.
He stepped inside the jailhouse behind her, her every sense aware of him, of the things he did, and what he thought, and she wondered what he made of the rough wood planks that made up the floor, the gun cabinet along the wall to the left, the doorway to the jail cells in back, which must have been empty, seeing as how the door was closed.
A large oak desk sat on the right, situated near the back wall and facing the large window that overlooked the street, the word ‘Sheriff” stenciled in a half circle in dark letters across the glass, and it was here at the desk they found Roy and Bart. Roy was sittin’ on the near side in one of the straight-backed oak chairs Sheriff Sam used for deputies and guests who weren’t under arrest. Bart was leaning one hip against the desk itself, the desktop stacked with homemade fruit pies and other baked goods that the ladies of the town made for Sheriff Sam and Roy, the sight and smell of the food making Cally hungry.
Feeling right at home—she’d been in here many a time since she was a little girl, the sheriff, no matter who it was, always a good friend of her family’s—she sat in the other straight-backed chair beside Roy.
“Just like the TV show,” Max said in a quiet voice, coming up to stand behind her, his words giving her a hankering to see this show about Sheriff Sam.
“Kit and Sally stayed home this year?” Roy asked Bart.
Bart nodded. “They’ll have their own party with the Fieldings and the Porters and the ranch hands who stayed at the Sky Top to protect the herd.”
Sheriff Sam sat down in the oak swivel chair on the far side of the desk, his back to the wall. “Who was that woman you were talking to?” he said to Cally and Max, shoving a plate of oatmeal cookies across the desk toward the rest of them.
“Mrs. Vann and her son,” Cally said, taking a big cookie full of plump raisins, the cookies likely the ones Miss Lila Ford was known for, Miss Lila havin’ her eye on Sheriff Sam since she moved to town a year ago. “One of my suitors. Don’t worry none. Max was real royal to her.”
Max laughed, that happy, rich laugh that lightened her own heart. “Just enough arrogance for her to try to please me in order to wheedle an introduction to Hugo. Or at least, that was what she was hinting at.”
Just enough arrogance, Cally suspected, to keep Mrs. Vann from speaking against Cally after tomorrow’s race. “Hinting mighty strongly,” she said. Folks sure did act strange just to spend time with folks they thought were their betters, when those folks only had money, or titles, that others didn’t have, and might just be a snake or a skunk, like her ma said, and not a person of character. “I ain’t seen anyone curtsey to you before,” she said to her prince. The curtsey had surprised her, and made her wonder what else Max, as a prince, was used to. “Is that something folks are supposed to do?”
“Here in the United States?” Max said, leaning past her and taking one of the cookies. “Only if they’re sticklers for propriety. For my part, it’s refreshing to be treated like everyone else.” He turned to Sheriff Sam in the swivel chair. “Has Hugo shown up in town?”
“Not yet,” Sheriff Sam said. He looked downright dangerous as he spoke, and she wondered how much trouble he thought Max’s relative could bring to a whole town, and she shuddered, remembering the trouble the Evil Prince had tried to bring to her.
Max rested his hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.
Roy reached for a cookie. “Word is Prince Hugo plans to be here by tonight.”
Max frowned. “Where’s he staying?”
Cally couldn’t imagine the Evil Prince at the boardinghouse or over the saloon.
“He built himself a house down at the north end of Main Street last month,” Roy said. “Next to the Calder house.”
Next to Cally’s suitors, she realized. “Is that goin’ to be a problem?” she asked Bart. “Him bein’ so close to my suitors?”
Was that going to be a problem for her ? That shiver of apprehension she felt every time she thought of the Evil Prince had struck her again today walking through town, a place she’d always felt safe before. But today, she’d found herself wary of strangers in a way she hadn’t been in the past, not since being kidnapped yesterday.
It was a relief to come inside the sheriff’s office, surrounded by folks she’d known her whole life, enveloped in a safety she’d always taken for granted.
Bart shook his head. “Not as long as none of the suitors recognize Max as our butler while they were at the ranch.”
“Mr. Vann didn’t seem to recognize me,” Max said. And truly, Cally thought, there wasn’t much resemblance between the butler and the duke, even if one set aside the physical disguise he’d worn as a butler, and the British accent he’d used when he spoke.
It was in the way he held himself, one as a servant, doing the bidding of others, his face frozen in a non-expression that said nothing of his thoughts or feelings while around the suitors. The other was as a man of clear confidence and strength, with an arrogance and cold haughtiness toward the suitors and their parents when it served a purpose.
“May I ask you to escort Miss Calliope back to the house?” he said now to Bart.
“What for?” she said, feeling abandoned, which was silly. She knew her family and friends were being cautious, not letting her out of their sight, not with the Evil Prince and his henchmen expected in town, not after what happened yesterday. But she’d enjoyed herself more with Max than she ever had with a feller, walking down the street beside him, introducing him to her friends.
Watching him play the arrogant duke to Mrs. Vann and her ambitious, calculating son.
“I have some errands to attend to,” Max said. “Ones I would prefer not be traced back to you and your family.”
“Are you goin’ after the Evil Prince?” she said, her heart beating faster, knowing he was doing it for her.
“I am,” he said with that low bow of deference and mischief all rolled into one, and left them.