Kitabı oku: «The Princess Predicament», sayfa 2

Chapter Two

Present day …

For six months Princess Gabriella St. Pierre had been missing—vanished from a hotel suite in Paris. A hotel suite that had become a gruesome crime scene where someone had died. For six months Whit Howell had been convinced she had been that someone. He had believed she was dead.

Just recently he’d learned that Gabby was alive and in hiding. Her life had been threatened. And instead of coming to him for protection, she had left the country. She hadn’t trusted him or anyone else. But then maybe that had been the smart thing to do. Her doppelgänger bodyguard had been kidnapped in her place and held hostage for the past six months.

If Gabriella hadn’t gone into hiding …

He shuddered at the thought of what might have happened to her. But then he shuddered at the thought of what still could have happened to her since no one had heard from her for six months.

Could someone have fulfilled the prophesy of that note? The man, who had accidentally abducted the bodyguard in Gabby’s place, claimed that he hadn’t written it. Given all the other crimes to which he’d confessed, it made no sense that he would deny writing a note. But if not him, then who? And had that person followed through on his threat?

Whit had to find Gabby. Now. He had to make sure she was safe. He knew where she’d gone after leaving the palace. Her destination was on the piece of paper he clutched so tightly in his hand that it had grown damp and fragile.

“Sir, are you all right?” a stewardess asked as she paused in the aisle and leaned over his seat.

He nodded, dismissing her concern.

She leaned closer and adjusted the air vent over him. “You look awfully warm, sir. We’ll be landing soon, but it may take a while to get to the gate.”

“I’ll be fine,” he assured her. Because he would be closer to Gabriella—or at least closer to where she had been last. But after the woman moved down the aisle, he reached up to brush away the sweat beading on his forehead. And he grimaced over moving his injured shoulder.

He had been shot—a through-and-through, so the bullet had damaged no arteries or muscles. But now he was beginning to worry that the wound could be getting infected. And where he was going, there was unlikely to be any medical assistance.

He didn’t care about his own discomfort though. He cared only about finding Gabriella and making damn sure she was alive and safe. And if he found her, he had to be strong and healthy enough to keep her safe.

Because it was probable that whoever had threatened her was still out there. Like everyone else, her stalker had probably thought her dead these past six months. But once they learned she was alive, they would be more determined than ever to carry out their threat.

“SHE’S ALIVE.”

Gabriella St. Pierre expelled a breath of relief at the news Lydia Green shared the moment the older woman had burst through the door. For six months Gabby had been holding her breath, waiting for a message from her bodyguard. Actually she’d been waiting for the woman to come for her.

Especially in the beginning. She hadn’t realized how pampered her life had been until she’d stayed here. The floor beneath her feet was dirt, the roof over her head thatch. A bird that had made it through her screenless window fluttered in a corner of the one room that had been her home for the past six months.

Once she had stopped waiting for Charlotte to come for her, she had gotten used to the primitive conditions. She had actually been happy here and relaxed in a way that she had never been at the palace. And it wasn’t just because she had been out of the public eye but because she had been out from under her father’s watchful eye, as well.

And beyond his control.

She had also been something she had never been before: useful. For the past six months she had been teaching children at the orphanage/school Lydia Green had built in a third-world country so remote and poor that no other charity or government had yet acknowledged it. But she had learned far more than she’d taught. She realized now that there was much more to being charitable than writing checks.

Lydia Green had given her life and her youth to helping those less fortunate. She’d grown up as a missionary, like her parents, traveling from third-world country to third-world country. After her parents had died, she could have chosen another life. She could have married and had a family. But Lydia had put aside whatever wants and needs she might have had and focused instead on others. She had become a missionary, too, and the only family she had left was a niece.

Charlotte. The women looked eerily similar. Lydia had the same caramel-brown eyes, but her hair was white rather than brown even though she was still in her fifties.

“Charlotte called?” The first day Gabriella had arrived, somewhere between the airport and the orphanage, she had lost the untraceable cell phone her bodyguard had given her. But it probably wouldn’t have come in as far into the jungle as the orphanage was.

Lydia expelled her own breath of relief over finally hearing from her niece and nodded. “The connection was very bad, so I couldn’t understand much of what Charlotte was saying …”

The orphanage landline wasn’t much better than the cell phone. There was rarely a dial tone—the lines either damaged by falling trees, the oppressive humidity or rebel fighting.

“Did she tell you where she’s been and why she hasn’t contacted us?” Not knowing had driven Gabriella nearly crazy so that she had begun to suspect the worst—that Charlotte was dead. Or almost as bad, that Charlotte had betrayed her.

Lydia closed her eyes, as if trying to remember or perhaps to forget, and her brow furrowed. “I—I think she said she’d been kidnapped …”

“Kidnapped?” Gabby gasped the word as fear clutched at her. That would explain why they hadn’t heard from the former U.S. Marshal. “Where? When?”

“It happened in Paris.”

Gabriella’s breath caught with a gasp. “Paris?”

She was the one who was supposed to have gone to Paris; that was what anyone who’d seen them would have believed. Whoever had abducted Charlotte had really meant to kidnap Gabby. She shuddered in reaction and in remembrance of all the kidnapping attempts she had escaped during her twenty-four years of life. If not for the bodyguards her father had hired to protect her, she probably would not have survived her childhood.

“Is she all right?”

“Yes, yes,” Lydia replied anxiously, “and she said that the kidnapper has been caught.”

“So I can leave …” Gabby should have been relieved; months ago she would have been ecstatic. But since then she had learned so much about herself. So much she had yet to deal with.

“She said for you to wait.”

“She’s coming here?” Nerves fluttered in Gabby’s stomach. She was relieved Charlotte was all right, but she wasn’t ready to see her.

Or anyone else.

“She’s sending someone to get you,” Lydia replied, with obvious disappointment that she would not see her niece.

Gabriella was to be picked up and delivered like a package—not a person. Until she’d met Lydia and the children at the orphanage, no one had ever treated Gabriella like a person. Pride stung, she shook her head and said, “That won’t be necessary.”

“You’re going to stay?” Lydia asked hopefully.

“I would love to,” she answered honestly. Here she was needed not for what she was but who she was. She loved teaching the children. “But I can’t …”

She had no idea who was coming for her, but she wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Given her luck, it would probably be Whit, and he was the very last person she wanted to see. Now. And maybe ever again.

Lydia nodded, but that disappointment was back on her face, tugging her lips into a slight frown. “I understand that you have a life you need to get back to …”

Her existence in St. Pierre had never been her life; it had never been her choice. But that was only part of the reason she didn’t plan on going back.

“But I would love to have you here,” Lydia said, her voice trembling slightly, “with me …”

They had only begun to get to know each other. If they had met sooner, Gabriella’s life would have been so different—so much better.

Tears burning her eyes, Gabriella moved across the small room to embrace the older woman. “Thank you …”

Lydia Green was the first person in her life who had ever been completely honest with her.

“Thank you,” she said, clutching Gabriella close. “You are amazing with the kids. They all love you so much.” She eased back and reached between them to touch Gabby’s protruding belly. “You’re going to make a wonderful mother.”

The baby fluttered inside Gabriella, as if in agreement or maybe argument with the older woman’s words. Was she going to make a wonderful mother? She hadn’t had an example of one to emulate. Her throat choked now with tears, she could barely murmur another, “Thank you …”

She didn’t want to leave, but she couldn’t stay. “Can I get a ride to the bus stop in town?”

She needed a Jeep to take her to a bus and the bus to take her to a plane. It wasn’t a fast trip to get anywhere in this country while the person coming for her would probably be using the royal jet and private ground transportation. She needed to move quickly.

“You really should wait for whoever Charlotte is sending for you,” Lydia gently insisted. “This is a dangerous country.”

Sadness clutched at her and she nodded. That was why they had so many orphans living in the dorms. The compound consisted of classroom huts and living quarters. If disease hadn’t taken their parents, violence had.

“I’ve been safe here,” she reminded Lydia.

“At the school,” the woman agreed, “because the people here respect and appreciate that we’re helping the children. But once you leave here …”

“I’ll be fine,” she assured her although she wasn’t entirely certain she believed that herself.

“You have a bodyguard for a reason. Because of who you are, you’re always in danger.” Lydia was too busy and the country too remote for her to be up on current affairs, so Charlotte must have told her all about Gabby’s life.

Gabriella glanced down at her swollen belly. Her bare feet peeped out beneath it, her toes stained with dirt from the floor. “No one will recognize me.”

Not if they saw her now. She bore only a faint resemblance to the pampered princess who’d walked runways and red carpets.

But she wasn’t only physically different.

She didn’t need anyone to protect her anymore—especially since she really couldn’t trust anyone but herself. She had to protect her life and the life she was carrying inside her.

A WALL OF HEAT hit Whit when he stepped from the airport. Calling the cement block building with the metal roof an airport seemed a gross exaggeration, though. He stood on the dirt road outside, choking on the dust and the exhaust fumes from the passing vehicles. Cars. Jeeps. Motorbikes. A bus pulled up near the building, and people disembarked.

A pregnant woman caught his attention. She wore a floppy straw hat and big sunglasses, looking more Hollywood than third world. But her jeans were dirt-stained as was the worn blouse she wore with the buttons stretched taut over her swollen belly.

It couldn’t be Gabby.

Hell, she was pregnant; it couldn’t be Gabby …

His cell vibrated in his pocket, drawing his attention from the woman. He grabbed it up with a gruff, “Howell here.”

“Are you there?” Charlotte Green asked, her voice cracking with anxiety. “Have you found her yet?”

“The plane just landed,” he replied.

He had only glanced at his phone when he’d turned it back on, but he suspected all the calls he’d missed and the voice mails he had yet to retrieve had been from the princess’s very worried bodyguard.

“But Whit—”

“Give me a few minutes,” he told her. “You’re not even sure she’s still here.”

Wherever the hell here was; from his years as a U.S. Marine, he was well traveled but Whit had never even heard of this country before. Calling it a country was like calling that primitive building an airport—a gross exaggeration.

“I finally reached my aunt Lydia this morning,” Charlotte said. “She confirmed that Gabby is still at the orphanage.”

He exhaled a breath of relief. She was alive. And not lost. “That’s good.”

Nobody had kidnapped the princess as they had her bodyguard. Gabby was right where Charlotte had sent her six months ago. Why hadn’t she answered the woman’s previous calls then?

“She’s all right?”

“No.” Static crackled in the line, distorting whatever else Charlotte might have said.

He stopped walking, so that he didn’t lose the call entirely. Reception was probably best closest to the airport, so he took a few steps back into the throng of people.

“What’s wrong?” Whit asked, the anxiety all his now. “Has she been hurt?”

“Yeah …”

And he realized it wasn’t static in the line but Charlotte Green’s voice breaking with sobs. He had never heard the tough former U.S. Marshal cry before—not even when armed gunmen had been trying to kill them all. His heart slammed into his ribs as panic rushed through him. “Oh, my God …”

It had to be bad.

Not Gabriella.

She was the sweetest, most innocent person he’d ever met. Or at least she had been.

“Charlotte!” He needed her to pull it together and tell him what the hell had happened to the princess. In a country as primitive as this, it could have been anything. Disease. A rebel forces attack. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s my fault,” she murmured, sobs choking her voice. “It’s all my fault. I should have told her. I should have prepared her …”

“What?” he fired the question at her. “What should you have told her? What should you have prepared her for?”

The phone clanged and then a male voice spoke in his ear, “Whit, are you there?”

“Aaron?” He wasn’t surprised that his fellow bodyguard was with Charlotte. Since Aaron Timmer had found her after her six-month disappearance, the man had pretty much refused to leave her side. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t worry about that,” his fellow royal bodyguard advised. “It’s just personal stuff between Charlotte and Princess Gabriella.”

When the princess and her bodyguard had disappeared, Whit and Aaron had launched an extensive search to find them. Aaron had reached out for leads to their whereabouts. Whit had done the same, but he’d also dug deeply into their lives and discovered all their secrets, hoping that those revelations might lead him to them. So now he knew things about Princess Gabriella that she had yet to learn herself.

Or had she finally uncovered the truth? She must have and that was why Charlotte was so upset; she was probably full of guilt and regret. He recognized those emotions because he knew them too well himself.

“Damn it!” If that was the case, Gabby had to feel so betrayed. He added a few more curses.

“Whit,” Aaron interrupted his tirade. “Just find Gabriella and bring her home to St. Pierre Island. We’ll meet you there. The royal jet is about to land at the palace.”

“The king is still with you?” The monarch was really their responsibility, one that both men had shirked in favor of protecting the women instead. King Rafael St. Pierre hadn’t seemed to mind.

“He’s secure. Everything’s fine here,” Aaron assured Whit. “What about there?”

“I just got off the plane.” The third one. It had taken three planes—with not a single one of them as luxurious as the royal jet—over the course of three days to bring him to this remote corner of the world. And it would take a bus and a Jeep to get him to the orphanage deep in the jungle where the princess had been hiding for the past six months. “I haven’t had a chance to locate Gabby and assess the situation.”

Shots rang out. And he dropped low to the ground while he assessed this new situation. Who the hell was firing? And at whom? Him?

Nobody knew he’d been heading here but Charlotte and Aaron. Not that long ago he would have been suspicious; he would have considered that they might have set him up for an ambush. But the three of them had been through too much together recently. And if they’d wanted him dead, they wouldn’t have had to go to this much trouble to end his life. They could have just let him bleed out from the bullet wound to his shoulder.

But the shots weren’t being fired at him. They weren’t that close, nowhere near the dirt street where Whit stood yet. But the shots were loud because they echoed off metal. Someone was firing inside the airport. His hand shook as he lifted the cell to his ear again.

Aaron was shouting his name. “What the hell’s going on? Are those shots?”

“I’m going to check it out,” he said as he headed toward the building—shoving through the wave of people running from it.

“You need to get Gabriella,” Aaron shouted but still Whit could barely hear him over the shrieks and screams of the fleeing people.

Whit flashed back to that woman getting off the bus and heading inside the airport. “Gabby! Is Gabby pregnant?”

“Yes—according to Charlotte’s aunt.”

It was hardly something the woman would have lied about. But how? But when? And whom?

“She’s probably six months along,” Aaron added.

Realization dawned on Whit, overwhelming him with too many emotions to sort through let alone deal with.

Oh, God …

“That’s Gabby …” Inside the airport where shots were being fired.

He shoved the phone in his pocket and reached for his gun before he remembered that he didn’t have one on him. He hadn’t been able to get one on the first plane he’d boarded in Michigan and hadn’t had time to find one here.

Would he be able to save her? Or was he already too late?

Chapter Three

As disguises went, the hat and the glasses were weak. But it had fooled Whitaker Howell. He had barely glanced at her when she’d disembarked from the crowded bus. Of course he had seemed distracted, as he’d been reaching for his phone while moving quickly through the crowd milling from and to the airport.

She’d had to fight the urge to gawk at him. He had looked so infuriatingly handsome and sexy in a black T-shirt and jeans. But the sense of betrayal and resentment and anger overwhelmed her attraction for him. She didn’t want to see Whit Howell much less be attracted to him any longer.

When she’d glimpsed him through the window, she’d thought about staying put in her seat. But since he was probably the one who’d been sent to retrieve her, he would have boarded the bus for the return trip and she would have been trapped.

When Charlotte had become her bodyguard three years ago, that was one of the first self-defense lessons she had taught Gabriella. Avoid confined places with limited exits. And given her girth, the exits on the bus had definitely been limited for her since it wasn’t likely she’d been able to squeeze her belly out one of those tiny windows. So she had gotten off the bus and hurried toward the airport.

That was another of Charlotte’s lessons. Stay in crowded, public places. So Gabriella had breathed a sigh of relief when she’d walked into the busy airport. She needed to buy a ticket for the first leg of the long journey ahead of her. She still had most of the cash Charlotte had given her to travel. She hadn’t needed it at the orphanage. Even though she was using cash, she would still have to present identification. She fumbled inside her overstuffed carry-on bag for the fake ID that Charlotte had provided along with the cash.

She couldn’t even remember the name under which she’d traveled. Brigitte? Beverly? As she searched her bag for the wallet, she stumbled and collided with a body. A beefy hand closed around her arm—probably to steady her.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. She glanced up with a smile, but when she met the gaze of the man who’d grabbed her, her smile froze.

It wasn’t Whit. He had probably already boarded the bus on its return trip to the orphanage. She didn’t know this man, but from the look on his deeply tanned face, he knew her—or at least he knew of her. Most people thought her life a fairy tale; she had always considered it more a cartoon—and if that were the case, this man would have dollar signs instead of pupils in his eyes.

“Excuse me,” she said and tried to pull free of the man’s grasp.

But he held on to her so tightly that he pinched the muscles in her arm. “You will come with me,” he told her, his voice thick with a heavy accent.

She was thousands of miles from home, but it had come to her. First Whit and now this man, who sounded as though he was either from St. Pierre Island or close to it, probably from one of the neighboring islands to which her father had promised her. Well, he’d promised her to their princes, but she would belong to the island, too. Like a possession—that was how her father treated her.

And it was how this man obviously intended to treat her. She glared at him, which, since she’d taken off her sunglasses in the dimly lit building, should have been intimidating. Charlotte hadn’t had to teach her that glare—the one that made a person unapproachable. Gabriella had learned that glare at an early age—from her mother, or the woman she’d always thought was her mother.

The man, however, was not intimidated, or at least not intimidated enough to release her.

So she pulled harder, fighting his grip on her arm.

“Let me go!” she demanded, the imperious tone borrowed from her father this time. No one had ever dared refuse one of his commands, no matter how very much she had wanted to.

The first time he’d offered her as a fiancée she’d been too young and sheltered to understand that arranged marriages were archaic and humiliating. She’d also been friends with her first fiancé—she and Prince Linus had grown up together—spending all her holidays home from boarding school with him.

But the night of the ball her father had broken that engagement and promised her to another man, a prince who’d already been engaged to one of Gabriella’s cousins. So her father had actually broken two engagements that night. He hadn’t cared about the people—not that he’d ever considered her a person—he’d cared only about the politics, about using her to link St. Pierre to another, more affluent country.

The man moved, tugging Gabriella along with him. He pulled her through people—toward one of the wide open doors that led to the airstrip in the back and the private planes. The planes for which a person didn’t need a ticket or even a flight manifest in this country …

And if Gabriella got on that plane, she would probably never get off again. Or at least she would never be free again. Panic overwhelmed her, pressing on her lungs so that she couldn’t draw a deep breath.

Don’t panic.

Charlotte was undoubtedly still thousands of miles away, but it was her voice in Gabriella’s ear, speaking with authority and confidence. And hopefully, in this case, the truth for once.

Gabriella exhaled a shaky breath and then dragged in a deep one, filling and expanding her lungs with air. It was stale and heavy with the humidity and the odor of sweaty bodies and jet fuel and cigarette smoke. There was no airport security to help her. She had to take care of herself.

Assess the situation.

Despite the lies, Charlotte had helped her. Perhaps she had even considered her lies helping Gabriella, protecting her. But Charlotte had known there would be times like this when she wouldn’t be there, so she had taught Gabby how to protect herself.

The man wasn’t much taller than she was. But he was heavier—much heavier even with the extra pounds she was carrying in her belly. Most of his extra weight was muscle. He had no neck but had a broad back and shoulders. And at the small of his back, there was a big bulge. He had definitely come in on a private plane and from some airport with about the same level of security as this one. None.

Choose the most effective mode of protection.

Charlotte had been trained to fight and shoot and had years of experience doing both. She had taught Gabby some simple but effective moves. But Gabriella’s experience using those methods had been in simulated fights with Charlotte, whom she hadn’t wanted to hurt. Then.

A sob caught in her lungs. She didn’t want to hurt her now, either. Or avoid her like she’d initially thought. She wanted to see Charlotte and talk to her, give her a chance to explain her actions and her reason for keeping so many secrets. But Gabriella couldn’t do that if she didn’t get the chance—if she wound up held hostage or worse.

And by effective, I mean violent …

Charlotte Green had lived a violent life, and she possessed the scars to prove it. Both physical and emotional.

Gabby only had the emotional scars until now.

She wouldn’t be able to use her simulated fight moves to fend off this muscular man—probably not even if she wasn’t six months pregnant. But because she was six months pregnant, she couldn’t risk the baby getting hurt.

So instead she reached for the gun and pulled it from beneath the man’s sweat-dampened shirt. The weapon was heavier than she remembered. She hadn’t held one in the past six months. But before that she’d held one several times. With both hands, using one to hold and balance the gun while she focused on flicking off the safety and pulling the trigger with the other.

But the man held one of her hands. When he felt her grab the gun, he jerked her around and reached for the gun. So she fumbled with it quickly, sliding the safety and squeezing the trigger.

Because she hadn’t wanted to hit anyone else in the crowded airport, she’d aimed the barrel up and fired the bullet into the metal ceiling. Birds, living in the rafters, flew into a frenzy. And so did the people as the bullet ricocheted back into the cement. She breathed a sigh of relief that it struck no one. But the cement chipped, kicking up pieces of it with dust.

The man jumped, as if he’d felt the whiz of the bullet near his foot. And he lurched back. When he did, he released her arm. Now she had two hands, which she used to steady the gun and aim the barrel—this time at the man’s chest.

People screamed and ran toward the exits. They thought she was dangerous. The man didn’t seem to share their sentiment because he stepped forward again, advancing on her.

“I will shoot!” she warned him.

He chuckled. Then, his voice full of condescension, said, “You are a princess. What do you know of shooting guns?”

“More than enough to kill you …” Like the simulated fights, she hadn’t shot a weapon with the intent of hurting anyone … except for all the targets she had killed. She was good at head shots. Even better at the heart-kill shot.

Of course those targets hadn’t been moving. And the man was—advancing on her with no regard for the weapon. He was mad, too, his eyes dark with rage. If he got his hands on her again, he wasn’t just going to kidnap her. He was going to hurt her. And hurting her would hurt her unborn child.

So when he lunged toward her, she fired again.

ANOTHER SHOT RANG out. But it didn’t echo off metal as the earlier shot had. It was muffled—as if it had struck something. Or someone …

Gabriella …

Whit held back the shout that burned his lungs. Yelling her name might only put her in danger—if she wasn’t already—or increase the danger if she was. Maybe that hadn’t been Gabby he’d glimpsed getting off the bus. Maybe she was still back at the orphanage. If she’d known someone was coming for her, wouldn’t she have stayed and waited?

Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to be found. If the shooting involved her, she had been found, but the wrong person had done the finding. The person who’d written that threatening note?

Whit shoved through the screaming people who were nearly stampeding in their haste to escape the building. There was no sign of the pregnant woman he’d glimpsed getting off the bus. She wasn’t with the others running away.

And then he saw her and realized that she was the one they were all running from—she was the one with the gun. She gripped it in both hands.

As Whit neared her, he noticed the blood spattered on her face, and his heart slammed into his ribs with fear for her safety.

“Gabby,” he spoke softly, so as to not startle her, but she still jumped and swung toward him with her body and with the barrel of her gun.

He barely glanced at it, focusing instead on her face—on her incredibly beautiful face but for those droplets of blood.

Anxiously he asked, “Are you hurt?”

A groan—low and pain-filled—cut through the clamor of running people. Gabriella’s lips had parted, but she was not the one who uttered the sound. Whit lowered his gaze to the man who had dropped to his knees in front of Gabby. The burly man clutched his shoulder and blood oozed between his fingers.

Whit flinched, his own shoulder wound stinging in reaction. “What the hell’s going on?”

Gabby took one hand from the gun to tug down the brim of her hat—as if her weak disguise could fool him twice.

The man took advantage of her distraction and looser grip and reached for the gun. But he could only grab at it with one hand, as his other arm hung limply from his bleeding shoulder. He had the element of surprise though and snapped it free of her grasp.

She lunged back for it, her swollen belly on the same level as the barrel of the gun. But Whit moved faster than she did and stepped between them. Before the man could move his finger to the trigger of the gun, Whit slammed his fist into the wounded man’s jaw. The guy’s eyes rolled back into his head as his consciousness fled, and he fell back onto the cement floor of the airport, blood pooling beneath his gunshot wound.