Chapter 36
CHAPTER 36
Max’s hands tightened their grip on Cally, not too hard, but not, she thought, willing to let her go. Tension seemed to flood his body, the strong muscles holding her going taut.
Tension flooded her own body, a moment of unaccustomed panic rushing into her chest at the thought of the Evil Prince touching her in any way, even in a formal dance. The thought made her stomach sick, made it hard to breathe.
Before she or Max could say anything, Livie swept between them and Prince Hugo, her pretty rose-colored dress shimmering in the chandelier light. “There you are, Calliope. I need your help, Sister.” She gave the two men a big smile. “Womanly things,” she said in apology, and grasping Cally’s arm, she hauled her away through the other dancers toward Ma, who stood near the refreshment tables.
“Livie,” Cally whispered. “I can’t leave Max to face the Evil Prince.”
“Yes, you can,” Livie said, “Everyone here has heard about Max’s fight with Prince Hugo this morning, and most of them saw it in person. The last thing we need is you in the middle of that conversation right now on the dance floor. The less anyone associates you with the Evil Prince, the better.”
Cally’s gaze never left Max. “Stop, Livie,” she said as they reached the edge of the dance floor, Bart coming quickly through the crowd to join them. A fierce need to protect her prince surged through her. “I’ll stay here with you, but I want to hear what those two are sayin’.”
If politeness could have a knife-sharp edge, Max thought, he and Hugo—wielding their royal propriety—were engaged in a deadly duel. “Lovely girl,” the Evil Prince said with a glance at Cally. Then his eyes bored into Max. “Tell me, duke,” he said over the start of the orchestra’s next tune, this one a lively polka, Hugo standing like a rock amid the stream of new dancers. “We had so little time to converse the other day at my ranch. What brings you here to America?”
The couples polkaing around them began to slow, obviously trying to overhear Hugo’s words, but he’d switched to Zalgravian after his comment about Cally. Nineteenth-century Zalgravian, which was different enough from the twenty-first-century version to make Hugo’s nascent suspicions of Max go even deeper if Max tried to speak it.
Mindful of June’s three quests, mindful of Cally’s reputation, Max forced a smile on his face and shrugged. “I had a desire to climb the Rocky Mountains,” he said in English over the loud music, having a feeling Hugo was testing him, and he wondered again how much their fight that morning had started Hugo questioning who he was. The fact that Hugo was calling him ‘duke’ rather than ‘Balmont’ made him wonder even more. “My travels crossed paths with the charming James family, and when I learned how near your new property was to this area, I couldn’t return to Zalgravia without seeing your famed Crown of the West Ranch.”
“And your sister, duke? Where is she while you climb mountains?”
“Why, back in Zalgravia with her new husband,” Max said, blessing again his grandmother, who had demanded Max know his family tree inside and out. A second blessing went out to the people of Mule Stop in Max’s time, whose antagonism toward his family had spurred him to refresh his memory of that family tree and its history. “Surely you have heard their good news.”
A sour look came to Hugo’s hairy face. “Another heir.”
“But not as important of an heir as the one you will beget.”
Hugo’s gaze went to Cally, who stood taut and worried twenty feet away at the fringe of the dancers, flanked by Livia and Bart, both of them smiling at the young woman, pretending as if nothing was wrong. “The subject bores me.”
“It does not bore the king.” In fact, from what Max had learned from his grandmother and family letters, it enraged the king that thirty-two-year-old Hugo had not so much as married. “I have heard talk of the Lady Annaliese as a match for his firstborn son.”
Another sour look.
“Though Lady Annaliese is as respectable as these fine ladies of Mule Stop,” Max said with a nod at the women dancing past them, Max avoiding even the slightest glance at Cally. “Even a prince must pass muster in her and her mother’s eyes.”
A hard gaze met Max’s, Hugo’s mouth tight, going white at the corners. His bushy mustache seemed to bristle. “I warn you, duke. I tolerate no interference.”
“And I warn you, Prince Maximilian Alphonse Edwin Hugo,” Max said, embarking on June’s third quest, one he’d already tasked himself with long before she had. “I tolerate no smirch on the family name of the House of Balmont.”
“Who do you think won?” Bart said, his arm going around Livie at the edge of the dance floor. The dark evening suit he wore was as fine as Max’s—out of respect for the suitors’ families, he’d told Cally when they’d left the house, and to fit in with the formality of his royal guest the Duke of Balmont. The hardness of his gaze on the Evil Prince right now told her he was ready to come to the ‘duke’s’ aid if needed.
Around them, the crowd watching the confrontation—some of them on the dance floor, some of them along the fringe—broke into hushed, excited whispers as the orchestra played the last few bars of the polka.
“My money’s on Max,” Livie said.
“Mine, too,” Cally said, but the rage in the Evil Prince’s eyes before he strode away from Max worried at her heart. “That varmint won’t give up easy.”
“No,” Bart said as Max strode toward them. “But neither do we.”
Max stopped at Cally’s side and crooked his elbow toward her, his face as inscrutable as stone.
“Do you believe he’ll take heed?” Bart asked him.
“No,” Max said as Cally took his arm. “But he’s been warned.”