The Princess Predicament. Lisa Childs

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СКАЧАТЬ …”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ