Protecting the Pregnant Princess. Lisa Childs

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      If only Stanley knew the real story…

      But the women had been checked into that Parisian hotel under aliases. To prevent the paparazzi from hounding the princess, Charlotte had developed several alternative identities for them. She had been that thorough and that good.

      Still was—she couldn’t be dead. Aaron had already lost one woman he thought he might have been falling for—Stanley Jessup’s daughter.

      “Why call me?” Aaron asked the newsman. “Why talk to me at all?”

      “I don’t blame you or Whit for what happened three years ago,” Jessup assured him. “Neither should you.”

      Stanley, despite grieving for his daughter, might have found a way to absolve them of any culpability. But Aaron hadn’t.

      “Do you want me to call you back after I get more details?” Stanley asked. “I’m going to talk to this young reporter to verify he really has a source inside the sanatorium. Then I’ll see if he can get a picture to prove it’s actually her.”

      “No,” Aaron replied. He couldn’t trust anyone else to do that. No one else would know for certain which woman she really was. “Just tell me the name of this psychiatric hospital.”

      “Serenity House,” Stanley divulged freely. “I’m going to have that reporter follow up with his source, too, Aaron. Anything Princess Gabby does is newsworthy, and this story is a hell of a lot more exciting than her attending a fashion show or movie premiere. And she hasn’t even hit one of those in a few months—maybe longer. In fact, she’s kind of dropped off the face of the earth.”

      Or so everyone had believed. But if it really was her…

      “I know I don’t have any right to ask you for a favor…”

      “You said that when you called the first time,” Jessup reminded him, “when you asked me if I’d heard anything recently about the princess.”

      “So I definitely don’t have any right to ask you for a second favor,” Aaron amended himself.

      “That’s BS,” Stanley replied with a snort of disgust. “You can ask me anything, but I have the right to refuse if you’re going to ask what I think you are.”

      “I’m not asking you not to run with the story,” Aaron assured the man. He knew Stanley Jessup too well to ask that. “I’m just asking you to run in place until I get there.”

      “So hold off on printing anything?”

      “Just until I get there and personally confirm if it’s really Princess Gabriella.”

      Stanley snorted again. “Since she was ten years old, Princess Gabriella St. Pierre’s face has been everywhere—magazines, newspapers, entertainment magazines.” Most of those he owned. “Everybody knows what her royal highness looks like.”

      Everyone did. But unfortunately she was no longer the only one who looked like her. The woman committed to the private sanatorium wasn’t necessarily Princess Gabriella.

      “Just hold off?” Aaron asked.

      Stanley Jessup’s sigh of resignation rattled the phone. “Sure.”

      “And one more favor—”

      The older man chuckled. “So what’s this? The third one now?”

      “This is important,” Aaron said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if it wasn’t…” If Charlotte wasn’t missing, he would have never been so insensitive as to contact Stanley Jessup again. He hated that probably just the sound of his voice reminded the man of all that he had lost: everything.

      “I can tell that this is important to you,” the older man replied. “So what’s this third favor?”

      Maybe the most important. “If Whit calls, don’t tell him what you’ve told me.”

      “About the explosion not being his fault?”

      Aaron snorted now. It had been Whit’s fault; he’d convinced him that the safe house was really safe. That was why he couldn’t trust another woman’s safety to his former partner. “Don’t tell him about Princess Gabriella.”

      “He’ll read it for himself.”

      “Let him find out that way, and let me find out first if it’s really the princess.” Or Charlotte.

      “You don’t trust Whit?”

      Not anymore. Whit had always cared more about the money than Aaron had. Maybe he cared too much. Maybe he’d been bought off—three years ago and now. Both times there must have been a man on the inside. Aaron hated to think that that man was one he’d once considered a friend—a man at whose side he’d fought. But war had changed so many veterans. Whit had changed. Maybe he’d gone from killing for his country to killing for the highest bidder.

      “Promise me,” Aaron beseeched his old client.

      Jessup grunted. “You make it all sound so life and death. She’s just a spoiled heiress who’s probably been committed to this private hospital to get cleaned up or dried out.”

      Aaron had only interacted with the princess for a couple of months before her disappearance. Even at parties she’d never had more than a few sips of champagne and she had never appeared under the influence of drugs, either.

      If this really was Princess Gabby at Serenity House, she wasn’t there for rehab.

      SHE STARED AT the stranger in the mirror above the bathroom sink. The woman had long—very long—caramel-brown hair hanging over her thin shoulders. And her face had delicate features and wide brown eyes. And a bruise on her temple that was fading from purple to yellow.

      She lifted her hand and pressed her fingertips against the slightly swollen flesh. Pain throbbed yet inside her head, weakening her legs. She dropped both hands to the edge of the sink and held on until the dizziness passed. She needed to regain her strength, but even more she needed to regain her memory.

      She didn’t even recognize her own damn face in the mirror. “Who are you?” she asked that woman staring back at her through the glass. She needed a name—even if it wasn’t her real one. She needed an identity. “Jane,” she whispered. “Jane Doe.”

      Wasn’t that what authorities called female amnesiacs…and unidentified dead female bodies?

      Drawing in a shaky breath, Jane moved her hand from her head to her belly. her flesh shifted beneath her palm, moving as something—somebody—moved inside her.

      She didn’t recognize her face or her body. What the hell was wrong with her? Maybe that was why she’d been locked up in this weird hospital/prison. Maybe it was for her own damn good. Her belly moved again as the baby kicked inside her, as if in protest of her thought.

      “You want out of here, too,” Jane murmured.

      A fist hammered at the door, rattling the wood in the frame. The pounding rattled her brain inside her skull.

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