Romancing the Crown: Max & Elena: The Disenchanted Duke. Marie Ferrarella

way I know how.”

      Her scent was beginning to swirl around his senses. He was having difficulty focusing on the conversation instead of wanting her, but he forged on. “Why not try for something less dangerous?”

      She shook her head. “That’s two questions. You’ve exceeded your quota.”

      He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself, telling himself that everything wasn’t tilting—the way he could have sworn it was. “It’s an off-shoot of the first questions. Call it 1a.”

      “I’d call you conniving.”

      He smiled. Or thought he did. It was getting harder and harder to tell.

      “I’ve been called worse.” The room was beginning to go at a really dangerous speed. Sweat popped out on his brow. “Is it me, or is it hot in here?”

      The look she gave him was purely innocent. “Is that a line?”

      “No, that’s—” He lost his train of thought, even as he was attempting to reach for it. “Maybe we should sit the rest of this one out.”

      Placing his hand to her spine, he escorted her from the floor. Max’s head was starting to feel as if it weighed a ton. The bar appeared to be much farther away than it had just a moment ago.

      Each step back took more and more effort on his part. He found he had to rest his arm across her shoulders just to keep from falling over.

      He tried to focus on her face, hoping that would negate or at least balance out the spinning. “What was in those drinks?”

      “Just scotch. But the glasses probably don’t always get washed properly,” she guessed. “Maybe there was something else left over from the last…”

      He didn’t hear the end of her sentence. The buzzing in his head became too loud.

      And then the room around him folded itself up until it became less than a tiny pinprick. The next second, the pinprick had disappeared entirely.

      Max thought he was falling, but that might have been his imagination.

      Everything stopped.

      Nothing looked familiar.

      Max had absolutely no idea where he was, only that his head was killing him and the effort to open his eyes cost him dearly. Each lid felt as if it was glued in place and had to be pried open.

      When it was, he found the immediate area encased in a milky shroud. Repeated blinking finally made the shroud disappear.

      He’d had hangovers in his time, royal ones if he could be forgiven the pun, and he’d never felt like this before. Neither had he passed out on three drinks before, no matter how potent they’d been.

      Just what the hell had happened, and how did he get here, wherever “here” was?

      He smelled a proverbial rat. A honey-blonde one with gray-blue eyes, fantastic legs and one hell of a well-shaped butt.

      Holding on to the wall beside him, he sat up. Max had to really concentrate to keep the world from tilting over on its side. Only when it was in its rightful place did he finally try to take in his surroundings.

      He was in a small area that appeared to be a storage room of some kind. There were broken chairs tucked away in one corner beside unopened cases of liquor. He realized that he’d been lying on a cot that smelled of beer and various other things, some of which were hard to place, others far too easily identified. He hadn’t been the first to sleep on it.

      He pressed a hand to his stomach, willing himself not to throw up.

      Rising on shaky legs, he made his way over to the closed door and tried it.

      To his surprise, the knob turned. He wasn’t locked in. Opening the door, Max discovered that he was inside the bar he’d come to with Cara. Last night, if the thin beams of sun that were pushing their way through the partially closed slats at the window were any indication of the time.

      Like so many things, the room had looked a lot better in semidarkness. There were dust motes everywhere he looked.

      “Anybody here?” he called out.

      No one answered.

      Gingerly he touched the back of his head, looking for telltale knots that would have indicated his getting hit, which would have explained his sudden passage into darkness.

      There were none. No one had hit him in the head to eliminate his presence on the scene.

      The odd taste in his mouth told him that scotch hadn’t been the only thing he’d ingested last night.

      She’d drugged him.

      Somehow, when he hadn’t been looking, the sharp-tongued bounty hunter with the killer body had slipped something into his drink and drugged him.

      Why?

      The most obvious reason, he decided, struggling to curb his anger at being duped like some kind of novice, was that she thought he was a threat to her getting the bounty on Weber.

      He heard a noise to his left and immediately reached for the weapon he always kept strapped around his ankle. It wasn’t there.

      The woman must have taken it, he thought, cursing under his breath. Why should that surprise him?

      Wary, Max grabbed a bottle from the counter behind the bar and held it by its neck, ready to smash the bottom off on the bar and use the jagged portion as a weapon at a moment’s notice.

      “You break that, you pay for it,” the man who had tended bar last night told him, coming into the room. He set down the broom and dustpan he was carrying and scratched his thin, concave chest. A cigarette butt hung out of the corner of his mouth as if it was permanently fixed there. The bartender indicated the other bottles behind Max. “You might want to use something less expensive.”

      Annoyed, Max put the bottle back down on the bar. “Where is she?”

      The man coughed before finally asking, “Who?”

      Impatience clawed at Max as he struggled to clear his head. It still felt as if all his thoughts were under water.

      “The woman I was in here with last night. And before you tell me that you don’t know who I’m talking about, I saw the way you looked at her. Like you’d already met. If you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t have put me in your back room to sleep it off.”

      The bartender laughed. It sounded more like a cackle and was followed up by a hacking cough. “I don’t know her. Not in any real sense of the word. She’s been here a few times and she gave me fifty bucks to let you sack out in the back room.” He picked up the broom again and began sweeping halfheartedly. “Would’ve given me ten more if the lock on the door worked, but it’s busted, just my luck.”

      Max didn’t know if he was buying into this, but the buzz in his head was making it hard to think. “So you don’t know her.”

      The man paused again, his expression wistful beneath the day old stubble. “No, but I’d sure like to. Don’t meet many of those in my line of work—fiery, not used up,” he clarified, then gestured around the establishment. “’Case you hadn’t noticed, this isn’t exactly an upscale club.”

      Max didn’t bother commenting. He needed answers and if he wasn’t going to get them from this character who was little more than one step removed from a barfly himself, he had to fall back on a tried-and-true method. “Got a phone around here?”

      The bartender reached behind the bar and brought out an old-fashioned, stark black dial-up telephone straight out of the last century. He placed it on the bar in front of Max.

      “But it’ll cost you,” he said as Max reached for the telephone.

      Digging into his pocket, Max pulled out a bill, glanced at it to see the denomination and slapped it down on the counter. Pulling the telephone over, Max dialed