The Princess Predicament. Lisa Childs

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      Her fingers trembled as she unfolded the paper and silently read the ominous warning: “You will die before you will ever marry the prince …”

      Whitaker Howell had not left her that note. So the intruder must have. He or she hadn’t been just an opportunistic guest looking for a souvenir or a member of the paparazzi looking for a story. The intruder had broken into her rooms with the intent of leaving the threat. Or of carrying it out … with Gabriella’s death.

       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 СКАЧАТЬ