Chapter 12
CHAPTER 12
Cally turned on the sofa next to her ma at the commotion sounding out front, dogs barkin’, horse hooves traveling fast toward the house.
Bart stood in the parlor’s doorway, talking low and fast to Livie and Max, then Max sent Cally a quick, serious glance and turned and walked out of sight into the great room, away from the front door, which meant Bart didn’t want him being a butler at the moment.
Her heart turned over. Which meant he didn’t want Max recognized by anyone.
Ignoring Mr. Gidding, who was braggin’ about his new coat, carriage, hat, and boots, she stood and hurried to the parlor window that overlooked the garden and front drive, and twitched the lace sheers a tiny bit to the side.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in a fancy blue military coat covered with more gold braid and medals than she’d ever seen at one time was out on the sweep, dismounting from a gray stallion that might—just might—give Apollo a run for his money. The man’s buff-colored riding breeches were neat and pristine. His dark hair was topped with an ornate, peaked, military-style hat.
Old-fashioned muttonchop sideburns and a bushy mustache hid much of his face. A red satin sash crossed his blue-coated chest.
It was the white scar that ran from the center of his ear and through his sideburn, then jaw, that startled her. No one had said nothin’ about a scar, nor had it been visible in his photograph in the Gazette .
With that scar, how could folks think Max was him?
But his mouth was like Max’s, if Max screwed his masculine lips up into an arrogant frown, something she’d never seen him do. Something she hoped she never did see him do. The man’s straight nose was the same, only Max didn’t tilt his into the air.
It was the uniformed stranger’s bearing, she realized, gazing at him through the tiny space between the lace and window frame, that spoke mostly of his relationship to Max. He carried himself with a confidence that brooked no doubt. Carried himself with an assurance of his welcome wherever he went.
Carried himself like a prince. For surely this was Evil Prince Hugo.
He strode to the porch steps with a strong, athletic stride that mimicked Max’s. His tall, black leather boots in the English style thudded across the dirt, then pounded up the front steps, announcing his arrival without sayin’ a word.
Behind him, three men dressed all the same in black outfits with gold buttons and trim waited astride their horses, glancing around at the Sky Top hands who’d gathered, all of the Sky Top hands toting a pistol.
Cally tensed. The Sky Top hands wouldn’t be toting pistols if Bart didn’t expect trouble. He must have set out a scout over on the high West Meadow, in case the Evil Prince made his way to their ranch, the scout giving Bart an advance warning, so’s he could be prepared.
The Evil Prince stopped outside the front door, seeming oblivious to all the faces at the front parlor window peering at him, Cally’s suitors having gathered behind her, Mr. Perth pulling the lace sheers full to the side. Up closer, the differences between Prince Hugo and Max were easier to see. Max was taller by several inches, broader, too. Though their eyes were the same shape, the Evil Prince’s had a mean scowl. Frown lines—lines of displeasure—had etched around his mouth, though he wasn’t—according to Max—more than thirty-two years old.
Max, she reckoned, was more fit, something that made her glad, even as it sent her insides dancing with them butterflies that came every time she thought of him.
A short, stout man dressed in black and with the look of a servant had followed the Evil Prince up onto the porch and rapped now on the front door with an ornate, gold-topped black cane.
Ma gently pulled Cally away from the window, the suitors taking her place by the glass, whispering conjectures among themselves.
Bart said something to Livie that Cally couldn’t hear, his face grave, then he went to the front door, the parlor going silent, Bart’s boots thudding quietly on the wood floor, thud , thud , thud …
The front door opened with a quiet click of the latch.
Cally hurried to Livie in the parlor’s doorway and peeked around the doorframe, keepin’ most of herself hidden, knowing Max had warned Bart and her ma against the Evil Prince setting eyes on her.
Standing outside on the porch, the short man gave Bart a short, sharp bow of his head. “His Royal Highness Prince Maximilian, Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Zalgravia, wishes a word with Mr. Bart James,” he said, his tone as haughty as Evil Prince Hugo’s face.
“I’m Bart James,” Cally’s brother said in a neutral tone.
Evil Prince Hugo gave him an arrogant nod, as if deigning to acknowledge Bart’s presence.
Bart gave a curt nod back, not offering his hand for a shake.
Anyone who knew anything about Bart knew that was a dangerous sign.
Not that the prince offered his hand. Cally doubted he knew what a handshake was. His snobbish eyes scanned the great room over Bart’s shoulder, his shoulders and back stiff and erect in his ornate uniform. His cold gaze paused on Cally when it reached the parlor’s doorway for what her mother would consider an insolent moment that lasted too long.
Everything about him read contempt for her family.
Bart stepped out onto the front porch, forcing the prince backward, Bart not invitin’ the man inside.
A cold fury flashed in the prince’s mean eyes.
How could anyone have mistaken Max for him?
“Daughter,” Ma said in a low tone.
Cally turned from the doorway back into the parlor.
Max had slipped around the outside of the ranch house from the kitchen door in the back, stopping among the thick pine at the end of the front porch nearest the picnic table, out of sight as his ancestor had stomped up the porch steps, but not out of hearing.
He wondered if Bart understood the depth of the insult he’d just given Evil Prince Hugo by not inviting him in.
He doubted Bart would care.
The two men stood facing each other on the front porch, Max getting a good look through the trees at their profiles. Four men had arrived with the Evil Prince, one of them the short, stout, black-coated equerry who’d rapped on the door. The others were recognizable to Max as three of Hugo’s four Zalgravian henchmen, two of them the men he’d seen with Hugo yesterday right after the flood. Dressed in the royal Zalgravian livery of black with gold trim, and still astride their horses, the three gathered in a tight group out on the sweep at the end of the drive, their gazes on their boss.
Four times as many Sky Top ranch hands stood around the mounted men, pistols in their hands, not aimed at anyone—not yet—but none of them had been carrying pistols earlier that day.
A long silence fell between the two men on the porch. The rest of the ranch seemed hushed—the rush of the river on the other side of the house. The chirping birds in the cottonwood trees along the riverbank.
Leaning with one hand against one of the rough-barked pine trees around him, Max strained to hear, the hot air filled with pine scent.
“I’ve come to discuss the vandalism,” Hugo finally said. His jaw was tight, the muscle there ticking. His side view gave Max a good look at the long scar over his ear and jaw, supposedly earned in a sword fight over a gambling dispute.
In the rustic setting of the Sky Top, his ornate, formal military coat looked ridiculous, especially compared to Bart’s elegant, restrained suit.
“What vandalism is that, prince?” Bart said with a perfect poker face, as if he had no idea he, along with his sister and his twenty-first-century guest, had made quick work yesterday of destroying the unlawful fence Hugo had strung across Matthew Fielding’s land.
“‘Your Highness,’” Hugo corrected.
“No need to be formal,” Bart said. “You can call me Mr. James.”
Hugo’s face turned red, the slash of white scar along his jaw standing out sharper. “You will refer to me as ‘Your Highness,’” he said, his posture turning stiffer, rigid with fury.
Bart was a brave, or perhaps a foolish, man. But Max had spent enough time with him to know he’d never stand by while Hugo terrorized his neighbors. “Folks out here earn the respect of others, prince,” Bart said. “Not demand it. Now what vandalism did you wish to discuss?”
“Someone has ripped down my new fence,” Hugo said, spitting out each word as if it were a dart meant to pierce Bart’s heart.
“That’s a mighty shame,” Bart said, not sounding upset at all. “Which fence is that?”
“The one that bounds the northeast corner of my property, which encompasses valuable grazing land and the creek that runs through it.”
“Isn’t that Matthew Fielding’s land?” Bart said, calm and collected, no accusation in his voice.
Hugo’s jaw tightened again. His gray stallion out on the sweep of the drive began to stamp fretfully, as if sensing Hugo’s mood.
The muscle beside the thin line of Hugo’s mouth began to tic, along with the one in his jaw.
Score one for Bart.
Hugo gave Bart a haughty frown. “I had hoped you would know who the culprit is.”
Bart shook his head. “Now that would be illegal,” he said, “destroying someone’s rightful property. The folks I know around here are honest and law abiding.”
The front door opened, and Max tensed, afraid Miss Calliope would come out and tell Hugo what she thought of him and his fence and dam. But it was Mr. Perth of Cheyenne who strode out onto the porch from the great room, stopping in his formal afternoon attire beside Bart as if Miss Calliope and the Sky Top were already his. “I can vouch for the family, Your Highness,” he said, as haughty as Hugo, and as arrogant, the young suitor assuming Bart and the others needed vouching for, and Max frowned, concerned that Mr. Perth might already be acquainted with the Evil Prince, and wondering if the young suitor had seen the resemblance to Max that so many others had. “They’ve been here all afternoon.”
“Surely, you would know the miscreants in the county,” Hugo said to Bart, ignoring the young man. “The ne’er-do-wells. The men who would do this work for a fee.”
Bart stiffened. Tension filled the air. “What are you implying?” he said, his voice going hard, his stance rigid. The Sky Top ranch hands out on the sweep seemed ready to raise their guns.
Hugo’s men looked as if they’d like nothing more than a shootout.
Straightening from the rough-barked tree, Max cursed his and Miss Calliope and Bart’s little adventure yesterday, tearing down Hugo’s unauthorized fence. At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. But now, it was only bringing trouble to the James family.
Trouble to Miss Calliope, in the form of the Evil Prince.
Hugo brought his hand down in an impatient gesture. “You are the local attorney-at-law, are you not?”
Max thought of the legal letter Bart had sent Hugo regarding the water rights the prince was trying to dam up, a letter Hugo seemed to be ignoring as he stood face to face with Bart. A letter Bart was clearly not going to bring up in front of his guests.
“You are a friend of the sheriff,” Hugo said. “It is your business to know the lawbreakers.”
“Can’t help you, prince.” Bart’s voice was implacable, and Max saw Miss Calliope’s stubbornness in the man, only it wasn’t stubbornness, he realized. Not in either of them. It was strength. Determination. A strong determination to see a wrong righted. To stop an injustice.
Max could stop an injustice. The injustice his ancestor would, at some point in the near future, inflict upon Miss Calliope.
His heart twisted with pain at what that injustice might be.
Hugo gazed for a long moment at Bart, his face as inscrutable as stone—uh, oh, Max thought, any inscrutable expressions among the princes of Zalgravia always, always , spelled trouble for their enemies—then Hugo turned and strode down the porch steps and rode away with his men without another word.
The rest of the afternoon and evening was a swirl of activity, for both Max and Miss Calliope, activity that had kept him reluctantly out of her orbit, though she would have been difficult to get near in any case, as besieged as she was by the six suitors. Fortunately, Mrs. James had laughed at Max’s suggestion he help serve the formal supper that evening in the ranch house, and he’d eaten in the kitchen instead with the staff, and helped them with the dishes, getting a play-by-play from Mrs. Zandt of the conversation in the dining room.
When the suitors had finally been sent to bed, all of them but Finn yawning over the long day of travel they’d endured, and Max’s butlering duties were done, he changed clothes in the small bedroom at the end of the hallway where Livia and Mrs. Wade had held the fittings for his butler suit, the room now designated his since he’d been kicked out of the guest cabin.
Donning his twenty-first-century jeans—which had miraculously survived the flood—and the borrowed red plaid shirt, both garments freshly laundered, he returned to the kitchen at the back of the house for a brown bottle of sarsaparilla like the one he’d had with supper and went out through the empty great room to the empty front porch, the family having retired to their own bedrooms, as worn out, he thought, as the suitors.
The sun still lit the sky, though it was low in the west, dropping toward the distant peaks of the Wind Dance Mountains and sending long shadows across the front drive and outbuildings. The Summer River tumbled around the end of the house, the sound a constant undertone. The heat began to cool, the few birds still singing and chirping fading slowly out.
The latest Mule Stop Gazette , which had arrived just that afternoon, lay beside the checkerboard on the long picnic table, and leaning one hand on the tabletop, he spread out the paper with the other and read the latest news—two young couples recently married, a missing milk cow, four new books in the local library, one by Mark Twain—all the while strategizing how to defeat Hugo.
Quietly, the front door opened.
His heart beat faster, and he turned, hoping Miss Calliope…
Livia stepped outside, a lavender-and-white knitted shawl over the lavender dress she’d worn to supper, a shawl he doubted she needed in the evening warmth but which Bart—protective father-to-be that he was—had likely put around her shoulders. She sat in the rocking chair closest to him, moving carefully and a bit awkwardly, waving away his outstretched arm as he moved to assist her, then gave him a quiet smile once she was settled. “I’ve read about you,” she said in a voice as quiet as her smile.
“You mean, you’ve read about my ancestor in this local rag,” he said, sitting down on the end of the picnic bench next to the house, and pointed out the front page article about Hugo’s plans for the Crown of the West, complete with a new, larger photograph of the Evil Prince than in the previous edition. Clearly, someone at the Gazette had a crush on royalty.
“No,” Livia said, “I’ve read about you on the Internet.”
“Oh.” His face began to heat, though she’d already told him yesterday when he’d first arrived that she was familiar with Royalty Watch . “That.”
“Did you really drive an armored SUV into the Adriatic Sea on your eighteenth birthday?”
His heart jerked. “Only onto the sand.” Though not for lack of trying. He’d felt stifled by his security team’s nonstop presence. “How did you?—?”
“My best friend in the future loves the Royalty Watch blog. The one you feature in prominently. Frequently.” She folded her hands over her large belly. “At least, you used to, two years ago, before I came here.”
“You can’t believe everything on the Inter?—”
“When you took an Italian sports car up the Spanish Steps in Rome at two in the morning to win a bet, was the Count of Prindisia’s daughter along for the ride?”
“That,” he said with dignity, “is none of your business.”
“It’s June’s business, if you keep looking at Cally the way you have been.”
“I have not been gazing at Miss Calliope in any way other than respectfully.”
She looked at him for a long moment, the sky dimming a bit as the sun dropped behind the mountains, the birds in the trees going quiet. Chirping insects took the lead. “I think you don’t realize how you look at her,” she said, the sky spreading with pink.
Max folded the newspaper and shoved it away, feeling abruptly done with the nineteenth century. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think you don’t realize how full of delight you are when you gaze at her. How full of joy.”
He thought of the lift he got to his heart every time he encountered Miss Calliope. The raw vitality that thrummed through his veins.
The desire that had been building from the moment he’d first met her.
He shut down that last thought. Looked Livia in the eye. “You have my word that I?—”
“Oh, I know. Bart doesn’t trust you, but you’ve been here for two days now, and you’ve treated Cally with nothing but respect. I suspect those Royalty Watch blogs were mostly exaggerated.”
“Mostly,” he said. “And those that aren’t are from when I was a teenager.”
Livia gave him a grin, then the grin faded to a thoughtful expression. “It’s just that I’ve noticed Cally has been getting a sparkle in her eyes when she looks at you .”
Max’s heart gave a ridiculous leap.
“I know being here is a little like living out your fantasy of being in the Wild West. It’s Cally I’m worried about. What happens to her when you leave?”
She stays alive, Max hoped, thinking of Evil Prince Hugo’s visit that afternoon. He gazed up past the porch roof at the stars starting to come out in the darkening sky. She stays alive.