As much as I'm a made-my-bones-selling-routers guy, in smaller, simple networks, you quite often do not need a router.

Furthermore, if you have a "switch" or "bridge" that uses "spanning tree", you really won't need a router.

If you draw a picture of what you're trying to accomplish, I could jot down the sorts of config options you'd need to set up to operate without a router. What routers do is push all the "magic" of how packets arrive from point A to point B into one box in the center of the network. However, with default "next hop" and static routing configuration (available in Windows quite nicely), for a small network with the little bit of hassle of some configuration on each node, you have no need for a router or switch to get packets to flow where they need to go.

There used to be LOTS of small networks that used "static routing" configurations back in the early 90's, when switches were $20K and we at cisco were charging even more (like $30K+) for small routers.