Chapter 35
CHAPTER 35
Max’s body stiffened at the sight of Hugo. He’d been expecting his ancestor to show up, but he’d hoped Hugo would be fashionably late. So late that the party would be nearly over.
Attended only by his one remaining henchman Wulfdag, who by rights should be in jail with the others, Hugo was dressed in a formal black evening jacket and trousers. He’d left his red sash at home, but the left side of his chest was covered with row upon row of medals—a ridiculous amount of medals, perhaps to compensate for the horse race lost that morning.
Perhaps to compensate for the mortification of being caught trying to cheat. Something the other partygoers remembered clearly, judging by their expressions as they frowned at him.
Fortunately, the mayor and a woman Max took to be the mayor’s wife hurried to greet the Evil Prince, and Max turned Cally toward her suitors.
Turned her reluctantly. She was dazzling in a demure violet-blue dress that showed her womanly curves while covering everything but her arms and a hint of her breasts. Dazzling and delectable and sparking his love and desire into a fiery heat he never wanted to let go.
He’d never fully appreciated before how captivating a bare arm could be when the rest of the woman was covered with satin and lace.
But he’d promised June that he’d facilitate Cally’s way tonight with the suitors—the first quest June had tasked him with, to give the suitors every chance with her daughter. It wasn’t the kind of quest a prince was usually sent on—usually there was something in it for the prince himself—but this particular prince wasn’t really eligible for the maiden he’d set his mind on, not when he was leaving for a different century—a different world—in less than a few weeks’ time. It was more of a diplomatic mission, to assuage any hard feelings the suitors’ families might have, and leave them with a feeling of goodwill, of a good fight fought, that they’d come to try for the hand of the Sky Top princess and had had a fair shot.
A primitive part of him said he wouldn’t give an inch to the suitors. If he loved her less, he might have kept her to himself for the duration of the party.
But her reputation was vital. Her marriage important to her future. And though he hated the idea of helping another man win her hand, he wasn’t going to stand in her—or her suitors’—way.
But no one said he couldn’t make the suitors jealous. If they were worthy of his Miss Calico, they had to prove it.
“Oh, look,” he said to her with another nod toward the refreshment tables, “there’s Mr. Anderson and his parents.” She was down to four serious suitors now, Finn having tacitly left the field the moment he’d left the Sky Top, the two of them—Finn and Cally—back to their friendship as childhood buddies, though no one had acknowledged the shift aloud. “Come,” Max said in a light, formal tone, “let’s greet them. They are, in a sense, your guests here.”
Cally frowned up at him. “What’s come over you, Max?” And the sound of her pretty voice calling him by his name charmed him again.
“Just following your mother’s orders,” he said in a low tone. If there was any chance Cally could fall in love with one of the young men who’d been at the Sky Top, or anyone else here at the dance who was eligible, June wanted Max to step aside and give Cally the opportunity to do just that. His role, as a member of the Zalgravian royal family, was to impress the skeptics among the suitors’ parents that she was suitable for their sons. “You look ravishing, by the way,” he told her. “I’ll have to keep my eyes on those young men you had out at the ranch.”
She grinned, a pure Miss Calico grin, sending his heart soaring. “All right,” she told him, and he knew she’d figured out what he was up to. “I’ll behave.”
And though his heart shouted ‘She’s mine,’ he smiled and led her toward the other men.
Max had no trouble at all winning over the suitors’ parents. He hadn’t been called Prince Charming by the paparazzi for nothing. He escorted Cally from one set of richly dressed parents to another, along with June and Bart and Livia, entertaining the four families who’d come a great distance in the hopes of an alliance with the Sky Top Ranch, Max telling tales of royal balls and finery for the mothers, and stories of battles fought and won for the fathers, all of it easing away any memories they had of the horse race that morning, and Max’s fight with Hugo.
He’d even won over the suitors, the young men falling over themselves with invitations to their activities in Cheyenne and Denver, not one of them suspecting he’d served briefly at the Sky Top as a butler.
But once he relinquished his Miss Calico to the suitors, so the young men could plead their individual cases, he had a more difficult time than he’d thought he would keeping an eye on her. The other women at the dance had decided he was to their taste, and he’d found himself with no end of admirers.
And dance partners.
“Why are you dancin’ with all them strangers?” Cally demanded, coming up to him after doing her duty to her suitors, her mother having retrieved her from the out-of-town crowd to spend some time with her family.
And Max.
“Because your mother would be unhappy if I only danced with you.” In fact, June had been quite specific about that. It was the second of the quests she’d tasked him with, an adjunct to the first. And one of the reasons she and Bart had given him lessons in nineteenth-century dances that afternoon.
Though it had served a second, unforeseen purpose. The dancing had been an effective buffer from any confrontations with Hugo, who lurked with the town leaders, who seemed honored by his haughty presence, the arrogant scowl on Hugo’s face making Max wonder why he bothered being at the party at all.
Cally’s eyes lit up at Max’s words, her vibrant gaze on his face. “Do you only want to dance with me?”
He leaned closer, but still within the propriety zone. “Yes,” he whispered.
She sighed, as if his yes gave her pleasure.
He held out his hand. “I believe I hear the starting strains of a waltz.” The small orchestra of accordion, guitar, and what the locals called a fiddle had so far mostly played polkas and reels and square dances, and Max blessed them now for their knowledge of The Blue Danube . He gave Cally a low, respectful bow, as much for her as for anyone watching, his body rushing through with excitement at his first chance to hold her close that night. “May I have this dance?”
“Yes,” she said and took his hand, bare skin to bare skin, and happiness surged through him, mingling with the excitement.
The lithe body that had ridden her stallion to victory was graceful in Max’s arms as they twirled around the crowded dance floor. She was elegant, and womanly, and he realized this was the young woman who’d been so feted in Denver and Cheyenne, who’d been the lure that had brought five wealthy, well-connected young men and their parents from those towns to get to know her and her family better.
“It’s the Sky Top, prince,” she said with a grin, as if reading his mind.
“I think it’s more than the Sky Top,” he said, grinning back, the twinkle in her eyes sending desire flooding through his blood, and his heart felt light and joyful. His body felt strong and masculine in response to her femininity, and he wanted to keep her in his arms forever.
He spun her in a turn, coming near the front of the room, and getting a glower in return from Hugo, who stood near the double doors, being given a wide berth by the townspeople. Except for the town’s mayor, who was still unaccountably fawning over him, and Max wondered if the mayor was trying to get the donation Hugo had promised the town.
“I reckon you’ve made an enemy,” Cally whispered as he spun her away in a rustle of satin toward the back of the room.
“I reckon we share that enemy,” Max said, his hold tightening on her at that thought. “Among others,” he added as they swept past the one set of suitors’ parents—the Giddings—whom Max wasn’t quite sure he’d fully charmed.
“I can fend for myself,” she said.
“Are you reading my mind again?”
“It don’t take a mind reader to know you’re bein’ real careful about my reputation tonight.”
“Well, someone needs to support your mother in that endeavor. You certainly don’t, Miss Horse Race Winner.”
“Can’t be what I’m not, prince. I can’t imagine a life trying to be what someone else wants me to be, when what they want me to be is not myself.”
“There’s a great deal of wisdom in what you say.”
“Ma said that to me when she started making plans for meeting folks in Denver. She told me to take my pick of the current crop of young men, but only if they suited me. That it was more important that my future husband was the right one for me, than for me to try to impress the right society.” She spun under his arm, moving with the last few bars of the music, her skirt brushing against his trousers. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re wonderin’ why she went to all that trouble, when the man who’s going to suit me likely doesn’t have a mother for whom respectability is the primary quality she looks for in her son’s wife.”
“I reckon she wanted you to have every opportunity to find the right man.”
“Why, Max,” she said in her elegant, demure voice, that twinkle back in her eyes. “Why is it the more I speak like a respectable lady, the more you sound like a rough cowboy?”
“Well, ma’am,” Max drawled in his best impression of Sheriff Sam Creede, “I reckon?—”
A hard tap came on his shoulder.
The scent of strong cologne came on the air.
“I’ll cut in now,” Hugo said in his arrogant tone.