[Montacroix Royal Family Series 03] - The Outlaw Read Free

the clatter of poker chips. She could smell cigar smoke and beer and whiskey. And overly sweet perfume.
    "Noel?"
    Noel belatedly realized that Sabrina had been talking to her. "I'm sorry." Slightly disoriented, she shook her head in an attempt to clear it.
    "Are you all right?"
    The prudent thing to do was to lie. Noel opened her mouth to assure her sister-in-law that she was fine, when an image shimmered in her mind's eye. A misty picture of a single figure, seated tall astride a horse, his hands tied behind his back. Her fingers tightened on the edges of the engraved invitation.
    "No." Noel barely recognized her own faint, shaky voice. "Sabrina, something's very, very wrong."
    "Not with the dress."
    It was not a question. Just last month, Noel had told Sabrina and Burke that their dream of parenthood would soon be realized. Two days later, they'd received a telephone call from their attorney, informing them that an infant boy had just been born in a Montacroix hospital. A child whose young, unmarried mother was making the ultimate maternal sacrifice in putting him up for adoption.
    If she'd harbored any doubts about Noel having allegedly inherited the gift of second sight from her Gypsy grandmother, that day Sabrina had definitely become a believer.
    "No. It's not the dress."
    Noel began to shiver, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling of a cold rain that chilled all the way to the bone. But the rain was not as icy as a vivid, visual picture of a man's remarkably blue, angry eyes.
    "Excuse me, Sabrina, but I have to telephone Chantal."
    Before the day had ended, Noel was on her way to the Montacroix airport, where she was booked on a flight to Paris. From there, she'd take an Air France Concorde flight to New York, then change to American Airlines for another flight to Phoenix, where she'd arranged to rent a car to drive to Whiskey River, Arizona. The remote ranching community was located in the northern mountains near the Navajo Indian reservation.
    "I still do not understand why you have to leave now," her father, Prince Eduard, complained gruffly. Puzzled by her uncharacteristically rash behavior, her parents had insisted on accompanying her to the airport.
    "I don't exactly understand, myself," Noel admitted. "All I know is that I don't have any choice. I have some important connection with this sketch, Papa, I feel it. Since Chantal tells me the sketch is from Arizona, I must go there."
    "That sketch," Eduard told her, "is a hundred years old. And even with your gift—"
    "Eduard, dear." Jessica Giraudeau placed a calming hand atop her husband's. "We must allow Noel to follow her feelings," she counseled. "As Burke and Chantal have done."
    She gifted him with the soft, coaxing smile that had once charmed legions of men who'd sat in darkened theaters all over the world, dreaming impossible dreams as they watched the actress on the silver screen. Any man who'd ever met the ultraglamorous Jessica Thorne had wanted her. But Prince Eduard Giraudeau de Montacroix had been the one to win her hand. As well as her heart.
    "As we did," Jessica said, reminding him of their own rocky courtship. A courtship that had nearly cost the prince his crown.
    Eduard was not easily deterred. "Even if it destroys her chance for happiness?" Both women understood that his frustration was an attempt to mask his fatherly concern. "What if you do not return in time for the ceremony? Do you think Bertran is going to wait forever?"
    Noel refrained from pointing out that her fiancé had already patiently waited years, ever since first proposing to her on her seventeenth birthday. Such unwavering affection was admirable in these days of short-term relationships, she reminded herself.
    "It's a moot point, Papa," Noel murmured.
    The truth was that lately she'd been having strange, disloyal feelings about Bertran, feelings that she could not put into words. Why was it that her upcoming nuptials were causing her more misgivings than whatever might be