The Rancher's Christmas Princess (18 page)

Epilogue

Three months later

C
aptain Marcus Desmarais had been home for
more than a month now.

He’d been proud to serve as security for Her Highness Arabella
during her recent extended stay in the United States. He had great respect and
admiration for the princess—for all of the Bravo-Calabretti family.

And when Her Highness had decided to marry the father of her
lost friend’s baby, Marcus had been offered the chance to make the assignment in
Montana permanent. He had turned down the offer.

Marcus was Montedoran to the core. He was proud to go where his
country needed him. But to leave Montedoro for years?

Never.

His life was here, in the country of his birth. He had come
from nothing, up through the Sovereign’s Guard and into the newly formed Covert
Command Unit created by His Highness Alexander, third-born of the four
Bravo-Calabretti princes. Marcus loved his work and he was advancing swiftly and
steadily. He lived to serve his country.

And his new orders should be up on the CCU website that day.
Marcus fully expected another security assignment, which meant another trip out
of the homeland most likely. Being a bodyguard to the princely family was an
honor and he was good at it.

The CCU was a force of only fifty: fifty of Montedoro’s best,
brightest and strongest. Montedoro had no standing army. There was the
Sovereign’s Guard and the Civil Defense Corps. Beyond the Guard and the Corps,
it was for the CCU to do it all, from providing protection for the princely
family, to extracting Montedoran citizens from wrongful imprisonment worldwide,
to targeting and eliminating threats to Montedoran security and the safety of
its people.

At a little before nine that morning, Marcus entered his office
cubicle at CCU headquarters not far from the Prince’s Palace. He turned on his
computer and logged in to the CCU site.

The orders were there, as expected.

One look at them had his stomach dropping into his boots and
his blood spurting so furiously through his veins that he felt as though his
head would explode. He had to read the cursed thing through several times before
he finally accepted what he saw.

He was to provide personal security for Her Serene Highness
Rhiannon, who would be attending her sister’s wedding in Montana with the rest
of the princely family.

Rhia.
He thought the forbidden form
of her name before he could stop himself.
This cannot be
happening.

He wouldn’t
let
it happen. Surely
there had to be some way to...

He cut the pointless notion short. He had his orders and there
was no getting out of them. To try and change them would only draw attention to
the fact that he wanted them changed. It would have the higher-ups asking
questions he didn’t want anyone to ask, lest they somehow stumble upon the
answer.

There was nothing to do but accept the inevitable. He was a
soldier. He would do his duty and do it well. The past was the past.

It was years ago. It never should have happened.

He would wipe it from his mind.

* * * * *

Watch for Rhiannon and Marcus’s story,
HER HIGHNESS AND THE BODYGUARD
, coming in April
2013, only from Harlequin Special Edition.
Keep reading for an
excerpt of
Real Vintage Maverick
by Marie Ferrarella!

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Chapter One

I
t happened too quickly for him to even
think about it.

One minute, in a moment of exasperated desperation—because he
hadn’t yet bought a gift for Caroline’s birthday—Cody found himself walking into
the refurbished antique store that had, up until a few months ago, been called
The Tattered Saddle.

The next minute, he was hurrying across the room and
managed—just in time—to catch the young woman who was tumbling off a ladder.

Before he knew it, his arms were filled with the soft curves of
the same young woman.

She smelled of lavender and vanilla, nudging forth a sliver of
a memory he couldn’t quite catch hold of.

That was the way Cody remembered it when he later looked back
on the way his life had taken a dramatic turn toward the better that fateful
morning.

When he’d initially walked by the store’s show window, Cody had
automatically looked in. The shop appeared to be in a state of semi-chaos, but
it still looked a great deal more promising than when that crazy old coot Jasper
Fowler ran it.

Cody vaguely recalled hearing that the man hadn’t really been
interested in making any sort of a go of the shop. The whole place had actually
just been a front for a money-laundering enterprise. At any rate, the antique
shop had been shut down and boarded up in January, relegated to collecting even
more dust than it had displayed when its doors had been open to the public.

What had caught his eye was the notice Under new ownership in
the window and the store’s name—The Tattered Saddle—had been crossed out. But at
the moment, there was no new name to take its place. He had wondered if that was
an oversight or a ploy to draw curious customers into the shop.

Well, if it was under new ownership, maybe that meant that
there was new old merchandise to choose from. And that, in turn, might enable
him to find something for his sister here. As he recalled, Caroline was into old
things. Things that other people thought of as junk and wanted to discard, his
sister saw potential and promise in.

At least it was worth a shot, Cody told himself. He had tried
the doorknob and found that it gave under his hand. Turning it, he had walked
in.

Glancing around, his eyes were instantly drawn to the tall,
willowy figure on the other side of the room. She was wearing a long,
denim-colored skirt and her shirt was more or less the same color. The young
woman was precariously perched on the top step of a ladder that appeared to be
none too steady.

What actually caught his attention was not that she looked like
an accident waiting to happen as she stretched her taut frame out, trying to
reach something that was on a higher shelf, but that with her long, straight
brown hair hanging loose about her back and shoulders, for just an instant, she
reminded him of Renee.

A feeling of déjà vu seized him and for a moment, his breath
caught in his throat.

Balancing herself on tiptoes, Catherine Clifton, the former
Tattered Saddle’s determined new owner, automatically turned around when she
heard the little bell over the front door ring. She hadn’t anticipated any
customers coming in until the store’s grand reopening. That wasn’t for a couple
more days at the very least. Most likely a couple of weeks. And only if she
could come up with a new name for the place.

“We’re not open for business yet,” Catherine called out.

The next thing out of her mouth was an involuntary shriek
because she’d lost her footing on the ladder and both she and the ladder were
heading for a collision with the wooden floor.

The ladder landed with a clatter.

Catherine, fortunately, did not.

She was saved from what could have been a very bruising fate by
the very person she’d just politely banished from the premises.

Landing in the cowboy’s strong, capable arms knocked the air
out of her and, along with it, anything else she might have said at that
moment.

Which was just as well because she would have hated coming
across like some blithering idiot. But right now, not a single coherent thought
completed itself in her head. It was filled with just scattered words and a
myriad of sensations.

Hot sensations.

Everything had faded into the background and Catherine was
instantly and acutely aware of the man whose arms she’d landed in. The
broad-shouldered, green-eyed, sandy-haired cowboy held her as if she weighed no
more than a small child. The muscles on his bare arms didn’t even appear to be
straining.

A tingling sensation danced through Catherine’s entire body,
which was stubbornly heating up despite all of her attempts to bank the
sensation—and her reaction to the man—down.

Her valiant efforts to the contrary, for just a moment, it felt
as if time had stood still, freezing this moment as it simultaneously bathed her
in a heretofore never experienced, all but debilitating, feeling of desire. For
two cents proper, using the excuse that this rugged-looking cowboy had saved
her, she would have kissed him. With feeling.

Catherine could absolutely visualize herself kissing him.

The fact that he was a complete stranger was neither here nor
there as far as she was concerned. Desire, she discovered at that moment, didn’t
have to make sense. It could thrive very well without even so much as a lick of
sense to it.

And for no particular reason at all, it occurred to her that
this man looked like the real deal. A cowboy. A real vintage cowboy.

Was he? Or had she managed to bump her head without knowing it
and was just hallucinating?

Their eyes met and held for a timeless instance. Only the
pounding of Catherine’s heart finally managed to sufficiently rouse her.

“Thank you,” she finally whispered.

Doing his best to focus and gather his exceedingly scattered
wits about him, Cody heard himself asking, “For what?”

Catherine let out a long, shaky breath before answering. “For
catching me.”

“Oh.” Of course that was what she meant. What did he think she
meant? Cody nodded his head. “Yeah. Right.”

The words emerged one at a time, each containing a sealed
thought. Thoughts he couldn’t begin to convey, or even understand.

Cody cleared his throat, then realized that he was still
holding the woman in his arms. He should have already released her.

Feeling awkward—he hadn’t spontaneously reacted to a woman in
this manner since his wife had died—he set her down. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” she told him. “I’m not.”
I’m
not sorry at all.
“If you hadn’t caught me just then, I might have
broken something—either some of the merchandise or, worse, one of my bones.”

The fact that if he hadn’t come in just now, her attention
wouldn’t have been thrown off and she very well could have remained perched on
the ladder was a point Catherine had no desire to bring up. Thinking of him as
her hero was far more pleasant.

Rather than comment, the tall cowboy merely nodded his head in
acknowledgment. At the same time, he began to back away.

“Didn’t mean to trespass,” he murmured by way of an apology. He
reached behind him for the doorknob, ready to make his getaway.

“You’re not trespassing,” Catherine was quick to protest. She
didn’t have the heart to chase out someone who could actually
buy
something in the store. “It’s just that I haven’t
exactly gotten the store ready for customers yet. But you can stay if you
like.”

If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn that her tone was
almost urging him to stay. And she had shifted her body so that she was now
standing between him and the front door.

Cody glanced around the store, still mulling over her initial
protest. “Looks okay to me,” he told her. “Actually, it looks a mite better than
it used to look when that old guy owned it.”

Catherine was eager to bring out the shop’s better features and
play them up so that she could attract actual customers rather than just the
pitying or dismissive glances that the store had been garnering before she’d
bought it. After the former owner had kidnapped Rose Traub, the people in
Thunder Canyon had deliberately shunned the store. And from what she’d heard,
before then the clientele was almost as ancient as some of the antiques that
were housed here. She wanted to change that as well. She wanted all age-groups
to have a reason to drop by and browse.

Fowler wasn’t in the picture anymore, having been sent to
prison, and the shop was something that she wanted to take on as a project,
something that belonged to her exclusively. After a lifetime of being the go-to
person, the main caregiver in a family of eight and always putting everyone
else’s needs ahead her own, it occurred to Catherine that time—and life—was
slipping by her. She needed to make her own way before she woke up one morning
to discover that she was no longer young, no longer able to grab her slice of
the pie that life had to offer.

Since this sexy-looking cowboy seemed familiar with the way the
store had been before she’d taken over, Catherine made a natural assumption and
asked, “Did you come in here often when Mr. Fowler owned it?”

“No,” he told her honestly. Antiques had never held any
interest for him. And they still didn’t, except that he knew his sister liked
them. “But I walked by the store whenever I was in town and I’d look in.”

Mild curiosity was responsible for that. He might not look it,
but Cody had made a point of always taking in all of his surroundings. It kept
him from being caught off guard—the way he had when Renee had become ill.

“Oh,” Catherine murmured. All right, the place had held no real
attraction for him, at least it hadn’t before. But he’d walked in this morning.
Something had obviously changed. “Well, what made you come in today?”

She glanced over her shoulder to see if there was anything
unusual out on display that might have caught the cowboy’s eye. But nothing
stood out for her.

Cody wasn’t sure what this gregarious woman was fishing for,
but he could only tell her the truth. “I’m looking for a present for my sister.
Her birthday’s coming up and I need to get something into the mail soon if it’s
going to get there in time.”

Okay, she wasn’t making herself clear, Catherine thought.
Desperate to hone in on a reliable “X-Factor,” she tried again.

“Why here?” she pressed. “Why didn’t you just go to the mall?
There’re lots of stores there.” And heaven knew a far more eclectic collection
of things for someone to choose from.

The expression that fleetingly passed over the cowboy’s tanned
face told her exactly what he thought of malls.

But when he finally spoke, he employed a measured, thoughtful
cadence. “I haven’t put much thought into it,” he readily admitted. “I guess I
came here because I wanted to give Caroline something that’s genuine, that isn’t
mass-produced. Something that isn’t in every store from New York City to Los
Angeles,” Cody explained.

He looked around the shop again, but not before discovering
that it took a bit of effort to tear his eyes away from the shop’s new owner.
Close up, the talkative young woman didn’t really look like Renee, but there was
an essence, a spark, an unnamable
something
about
her that did remind him of his late wife. So much so that even as he told
himself that he really should be leaving, he found himself continuing to linger
on the premises.

“The stuff in this store is...” His voice trailed off for a
moment as he searched for the right word. It took a little doing. For the most
part, Cody Overton was a man given to doing, not talking.

Catherine cocked her head, waiting for him to finish his
sentence. When he didn’t, she supplied a word for him. “Old?”

“Real,” he finally said, feeling the word more aptly described
what he was looking for. “And yeah, old,” he agreed after a beat. “But there’s
nothing wrong with old as long as it’s not falling apart,” he was quick to
clarify.

Catherine smiled. She liked his philosophy. In a way, it
embodied her own.

And then, just like that, an idea came to her.

Her eyes brightened as she looked up at the cowboy that fate
had sent her way. This could be one of those happy accidents people were always
talking about, she thought.

But first, she needed to backtrack a little. “I’m sorry, I
completely forgot my manners. My name’s Catherine Clifton,” she told him,
putting her hand out. “I’m the new owner,” she added needlessly.

Cody looked down at her hand for a moment, as if he was rather
uncertain whether to take it or not. He wasn’t a man who went out of his way to
meet people. Even an extremely attractive woman. He kept to himself for the most
part.

But again, there was something about this woman that pulled at
him. That nudged him. After a beat, he slipped his hand over hers.

“Cody Overton.” He felt it only right to tell her his name
since she had given him hers.

He watched in mute fascination as the smile began in her eyes,
then feathered down to her lips. “Pleased to meet you, Cody Overton,” she said.
“You’re my very first customer.”

“Haven’t bought anything yet,” he felt obligated to point
out.

The man was obviously a stickler for the truth, she couldn’t
help thinking. She liked that. Moreover, she could really use someone like that,
someone who would tell her the truth no matter what.

She paused a moment, wondering how the man would react to what
she was about to propose.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Catherine felt good about this. The sparkle in her deep,
chocolate-colored eyes grew as she dove in. “Cody, how old are you?” she wanted
to know.

The question caught him completely off guard. The last time he
recalled being asked his age like that, he’d been a teenager, picking up a
six-pack of beer for his buddy and himself. At the time, he’d figured that his
deep voice and his height would make questioning unnecessary. He’d assumed
wrong.