Raye Morgan - The Lost Princes - Darius, Cassius and Monte

Relationships were out. Period.

He wondered, and not for the first time, what Monte would think of what he was doing. He wanted to call him but this wasn’t the place—nor the time. He had to be somewhere secure. Later—once they found a place near the coast to stay for the night, he would find a way to contact his brother.

She slept for two hours and then woke, stretching like a kitten and looking up at him as though she were surprised to see him.

“Hi,” she said. “You’re still here.”

“Where would I go?” he asked, half amused.

She shrugged. “Since my life became a bad dream, I expect dreamlike things to happen all the time. Maybe a Mad Hatter at the wheel, or at the very least, an angry hedgehog.”

“It’s a dormouse,” he muttered, making way for another car to merge onto the roadway in front of him.

“All right, an angry dormouse.” She smiled, amused that he would know the finer points of the Alice in Wonderland story. “So you’re neither?”

“Nope. But I have been accused of White Rabbit tendencies in the past.” He gave her a sideways grin. “Always late for that important date.”

“Ah.” She nodded wisely. “Annoying trait, that.”

“Yes. They say habitual lateness is a form of selfishness, but I think it’s something else entirely.”

“Like what?” She was curious since she was always late for everything herself and would like to find a good new excuse for it.

But he never got to the point of telling her. Cici intervened with a long, loud demand for attention from the backseat.

“Wow, she’s hungry,” Ayme noted, going up on her knees to tend to her over the back of the seat. She pulled a bottle of formula out of the baby bag, regretting that she couldn’t warm it. But Cici wasn’t picky at the moment. She sucked on the liquid as though someone had been starving her.

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, little girl,” Ayme cooed at her. “There’s a lot of that hunger thing going around.”

“Subtle hint,” he commented.

“I can get less subtle if it bothers you,” she said, flicking a smile his way. “Do we have any food with us at all?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Oh.” His answer was disappointing, but pretty much what she’d expected. “Are we planning to rectify that anytime soon?” she asked, trying to be diplomatic about it.

He grunted. “I guess we could stop when we see something promising.”

“Good. You don’t want me to start wailing away like Cici does. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

She spent the next ten minutes feeding the baby, then pulled her up awkwardly and tried to burp her. David noted the lack of grace in her efforts, but he didn’t say anything. She would learn, he figured. Either that, or she would find Cici’s father and head back to Texas, free of burdens and swearing off children for all time. It seemed to be one of those either-or deals.

“We need a real car seat for her,” he said as Ayme settled her back into the backseat. “If we get stopped by the police, this makeshift bed won’t cut it. We’ll probably both get carted away for child endangerment.”

She plunked herself back into her seat and fastened the seat belt, then tensed, waiting for the inevitable complaints from the back. After a moment she began to relax. To her surprise, Cici wasn’t crying. What a relief!

“When I was young,” she told David, “my father would put me in a wash basket and strap me to the seat and carry me all over the Texas Panhandle on his daily route.”

“Those were the days when you could do things like that.” He nodded with regret. “Those days are gone.”

“Pity.”

He almost smiled thinking of her as a young sprout, peering over the edge of the basket at the world.

“What did he do on his route. Salesman?”

“No, he was a supervisor for the Department of Agriculture. He checked out crops and stuff. Gave advice.” She smiled, remembering.

“It was fun going along with him. My mother worked as a school secretary in those days, so my father was basically babysitting me and my sister.” She laughed softly. Memories.

“Sam’s basket was strapped right next to mine. As we got older, we got to play with a lot of great farm animals. Those were the best days.” She sighed. “I always liked animals more than people, anyway.”

“Hey.”

“When I was a child, silly. Things have changed now.”

The funny thing was he wasn’t so sure all that much had changed with her. From the little bit she’d told him of her life, he had a pretty good idea of how hard she worked and how little she played. Someone ought to show her how to have a little fun.

Someone. Not him, of course, but someone.

They stopped at a small general store and he went in, leaving her in the car entertaining the baby. Minutes later he came out with a car seat in tow.

“This ought to do it,” he said, and in no time at all they were back on the road, Cici officially ensconced in the proper equipment.

“She seems to like it fine,” Ayme noted. “She’s already falling back to sleep.”

He handed her a couple of sandwiches he’d picked up in the store and she looked at them suspiciously.

“This isn’t going to be one of those strange British things, is it?” she asked. “Vegemite or Marmite or whatever?”

He grinned. “Those are Australian and British, respectively. I’m Dutch. We eat kippers!”

“What’s a kippers?”

“Kippers are canned herring, usually smoked.”

“Fish?” She pulled back the paper. “Oh, no! What is that smell?”

“It’s a great smell,” he retorted. “A nice, sea-faring nation smell. Lots of protein. Eat up. You’ll love it.”

She was ravenously hungry, so she did eat up, but she complained the whole time. He ate his own kipper sandwich with relish.

“Good stuff,” he remarked as he finished up. For some reason the fact that she was complaining so much about the food had put him in a marvelous mood. “That’ll hold us until we get in later tonight.”

She rolled her eyes, but more as a way to tease him than for real. Now that she’d had something to eat, she was sleepy again, but that made her feel guilty.

“Would you like me to drive?” she said. “You must be dead on your feet. You need some sleep.”

He shook his head. “Do you have a license?” he noted.

“No,” she said sadly. “Only for Texas.”

“That won’t work.”

She sighed. “Sorry.”

But in another few minutes, she was asleep again.

Just looking at her made him smile. He bit it off and tried to scowl instead. He wasn’t going to let her get to him. He wasn’t that easy. Was he?

When he couldn’t resist glancing at her again he realized that maybe he was. But what the hell, it didn’t mean a thing. It was just that she was so open and natural and so completely different from the women he was used to. For years now, he’d been hanging out with a pretty sophisticated crowd. And that was on purpose. He’d found out early that you could find out a lot if you hung with the right people and learned to listen. He had a very large hole in his life. He needed some very specialized information to fill it in.

Twenty-five years before, he’d been woken in the middle of a terrifying night, bundled up and raced out of the burning castle he’d lived in all six years of his young life. He knew now that his parents were being murdered at about the same time. It was likely that many of his brothers and sisters were killed as well. But one old man whose face still haunted his dreams had come to his room and saved his life that night.

Taken by people who were strangers to him from his island nation and smuggled into the Netherlands, he arrived the next day, a shaken and somewhat traumatized refugee, at the noisy, cheerful home of the Dykstra family. He was told this would be his new home, his new family, and that he must never speak of Ambria, never let anyone know anything about his past. The people who brought him there then melted away into the scenery and were never seen again—at least not by him. And there he was, suddenly a Dykstra, suddenly Dutch. And not allowed to ask any questions, ever.