I sputtered. “Were you going to tell me? He’s a madman. He’s blown up your daughter’s house, he kidnapped your granddaughter, he threatened your Queen!”
Grandmama set her teacup down. “Well, that last bit’s not that bad. Aurelia deserves it.”
“Did you tell him where to find me?”
“Do you want to know the truth about yourself, Caroline? About your heritage?”
The sudden, direct twist startled me. “I know everything about my heritage,” I said bitterly. “You forget what type of education a princess must endure.”
Astrid pinned me with her ice-sharp gaze. “Your other heritage. We’re Vox Umbra. It’s an organization the Sevines have been involved in for a long time.”
“This is real?” I asked, remembering Professor McIntosh’s evidence about fourteenth-century Inquisition documents. “This has been going on for nearly a thousand years?”
“Isn’t it fascinating?” Astrid closed her eyes slightly, enraptured at the thought, and I saw what had stimulated her passion for archeology.
Then she continued, “It’s simply a small group of influential people, bound by blood to ensure that the will of God is done on Earth. Historically speaking.”
“You’re religious zealots.”
My grandmother chuckled. “Perhaps in the past. In this century, we consider ourselves peacekeepers.”
“You’re powermongers.”
“We bring stability and prosperity to our nations.”
“By keeping a small cabal in authority.”
Grandmama was not bruised by my accusations. Instead, she looked almost…amused.
And I understood why. I raised my hand. “Okay, fine, I get your point.” It was ironic that I, raised in a palace, given all the princessy titles, would be shocked at such things as cabals that kept power in the hands of the few.
“But why would you bring Christian into all this? He’s running from the law!”
Grandmama pressed her lips together. “Throughout the centuries, a small group of families passed leadership of Vox Umbra among themselves. One by one, they would take a turn. Some were successful and some…well, we don’t speak of them anymore. Christian claimed his hereditary membership shortly before his engagement to Theodora.” She lifted her hands. “Who knew he’d turn out to be one of the rotten apples?”
None of this made much sense. “But if he’s Vox Umbra…why would he try to destroy the Driedish monarchy? You just said the organization is interested in stability and peacekeeping.”
Now Astrid’s smile had faded. “That is what we’re wondering. He’s a loose cannon, obviously, but he’s clearly found asylum with some other members.”
“And he’s blown up buildings, and kidnapped people, and he knows—”
I broke off before I shared too much.
But this was Astrid Decht-Sevine. “What does he know about you, Caroline?” she asked softly.
“He knows what I’ve done.”
Her eyebrows lifted slightly. “Ah.” She let silence do the pressuring for her.
Finally, I had to admit it. “For years, I’ve published newspaper stories under pen names.” I paused. “Some of them were stories about my family.”
If Astrid was shocked, or disgusted, I couldn’t tell. “What were these names?”
“Cordelia Lancaster. And Clémence Diederich.”
She frowned a little and then shook a finger at me. “The Formula One series in the British paper. I wondered how the reporter knew so much about Stavros’s team.”
My stomach twisted. Trading in secret insider information never stayed secret, did it?
“How does Christian know of all this?” Astrid asked me.
How indeed. I shook my head. “I don’t know, but Christian will tell everyone all the things I’ve done if I don’t help him put his story out there. To publish it. Let the world know it.”
Astrid straightened, as cool and as dangerous as her epee. “We cannot let that happen.”
“Which part?”
“All of it, darling. You’re one of us,” my grandmama continued. “You’ll just have to help us stop him.”
I cursed softly. Being dragged into more drama was not my plan. Which is what I told her. “I thought I’d go to Patagonia next. I’ve heard it’s nice,” I finished.
Astrid was not impressed with me. “This is not who you are. You are a Sevine woman.”
“Mother ran away,” I said, a little like a toddler, if I’m honest. But of course, Astrid ignored that.
“What if Christian was threatening your sister Sophia? What would you do to stop him from hurting her?”
The surge of anger, the rush of violence, caused my fist to clench. “To protect someone I love, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do,” I said quietly.
Astrid smiled warmly. “Well, then, welcome to Vox Umbra, Caroline of Sevine.” She extended a hand to me. “Now, let’s catch that bastard.”
Hugh found me on a balcony.
The night air was cold, and I now knew from experience how warm I’d find Hugh’s embrace.
But I couldn’t go to him.
Astrid and I had concocted a simple yet effective plan, but in order for it to work, I’d have to lie to everyone involved.
It had been surprisingly easy to agree to this. After all, I’d been lying to the world for a very long time, it seemed. No one knew the real me; no one knew my secrets or my dreams.
The only person who had been able to unlock that door recently was Hugh Konnor.
And now I had to slam it shut. Lock the bolt.
Which was fine.
He didn’t want me, not really. And I couldn’t have him. Not without destroying his life. Which wasn’t a very polite thing to do, now, was it?
So. I would lie. Hide in plain sight. And ensure the safety of my family, the stability of my country and the secrecy of an organization whose existence I’d only just discovered today.
Not bad for a Tuesday.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” he said, in a bossy bass. “It’s freezing.”
“I’m a native Driedener,” I said, with a rueful smile at the dark shadows of the Alps around us. “I laugh at cold wind.”
“Hmph,” was all he said as he draped a blanket around my shoulders.
My heart twinged a little at that gesture. This was why I went gaga for him at nineteen. Because he did these things that a bodyguard did and I always misinterpreted them as something more intimate, more meaningful.
“We need to talk,” he said.
Another heart string pulled. Nope. I wasn’t falling for it.
“You’ll be happy to know that Astrid and I had a long talk. She’s convinced me to go back to Drieden.”
Hugh pulled back, his face filled with skeptical surprise.
“I’m not staying,” I told him sternly. “I…can’t. She simply has some business that she might need some assistance with.”
It was the truth. Astrid was convinced that a Vox Umbra member in Drieden had helped Christian. She felt that if I was in the country, and if Christian wanted to meet with me, he’d feel more confident coming forward and we could potentially catch him, and identify his protector at the same time.
“Have you told your sister?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t seen her. Not since we were…” I let that drift off, uncomfortably reminded about all the places Hugh had placed his hands—and lips—just a while ago.
Our gazes locked. He looked down at me with a molten golden stare and I got the distinct impression that he was thinking about the same things.
“We can’t,” I started.
“No,” he agreed quickly.
Too quickly. I felt the familiar resistance, the old wound of his rejection, that he found me ridiculous and repulsive, but I remembered. His finge
rs, his touch, the way he greedily tasted me.
My inner princess was now offended. “Why can’t we?” I demanded. “A lot of men think I’m attractive. A lot of women, too,” I added, for good measure.
A tense sigh tore of out of him. “I know.”
“You know that I’m attractive, or you know that a lot of other people think I’m hot enough to…” My voice tapered out under the undeniable heat of his gaze. “Kiss,” I ended lamely.
“You don’t want to be with someone like me,” Hugh said, almost kindly.
“Someone like you?” There was my alter ego, Awkward Repeating Robot, again. “Are you gay?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Impotent?”
His mouth slid to one side. “No.”
I wracked my brain for other possible reasons why I would not want to be with this tall, handsome, extremely competent man with intense eyes and clever hands and a loyal heart and…oh. Crap.
“You’re married.”
“No.”
“Otherwise attached?”
Another frustrated sigh. “No. I’m a fucking street kid from Koras who joined the army simply to get food and a roof over my head. I’m a government employee with cheap suits, tattoos, a government pension that starts in two months and absolutely no knowledge about expensive wine or the Crusades or the fucking king who got himself killed in that supermarket car park.” Suddenly, Hugh was much closer, practically looming over me.
“Wait. You think you’re not good enough for me?” I laughed. Oh, irony was delicious. “You know I’m not a princess anymore, right?”
“So you keep saying. But all I see is the daughter of the next king of Drieden.”
I held his gaze for a long moment. “Liar,” I finally said.
“What did you call me?”
“You heard me. I called you a liar. If all you saw was an untouchable princess, then you wouldn’t have done what you did.”
“It was a mistake.”
“Not on the couch,” I said. “In the stables. When I was nineteen and asked you to take my virginity. You know what I think?”
“I couldn’t possibly guess.”
“I think you were tempted to take me up on the offer.”
“You were a child.”
“I was nineteen. You were—what, twenty-five?” I shook my head. It wasn’t an unheard-of, insurmountable age difference. “You saw me as something else.”
“You’re right.”
“See?”
He leaned in, inches away from my face. “I saw you as trouble.”
It all clicked then. Hugh’s fundamental nature, how he took his job so seriously. He’d said it in Italy, hadn’t he? He thought his job was to protect me from my own bad decisions.
Even if my bad decision was him.
“Fine.” I said, even though it most definitely was not. I backed away and regarded him solemnly. Like a giant jar of candies that held a prize, if only I could guess the correct amount inside. “You win.”
Strange how Hugh didn’t seem happy about that statement. “What do I win?” he asked, as if was already regretting asking the question.
“You think I’m trouble, you don’t want us to be involved. Fine. You win. We’ll go back to Drieden, I’ll keep doing my thing and you’ll never have to see me again.”
“Like hell you will.”
I smiled. I saw what he was about now. “Then you’ll agree to my terms.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The first rule was simple: Don’t tell Thea anything.
Hugh didn’t like this rule, but he didn’t like anything I suggested. Ever. I could suggest getting some chocolate cake for his mother’s birthday and he’d probably tell me his mother would die from an acute chocolate allergy and I was a horrible person for even suggesting it.
“Once Thea finds out, she’ll have her creepy security detail all over me,” I explained. And that would make it much harder for me to get close to Christian. Astrid had agreed with my theory that Christian had approached me because I was the one outside of the palace walls—metaphorically and literally. I was easier to approach if I was all alone.
“I’m her creepy security detail,” Hugh said evenly.
“Exactly.” I smiled sweetly. He did not seem won over by my charm. Strange.
And so the lying began. I shook off any vague discomfort that was creeping up on me. Like I said, my hunch was that I could lure Christian in if I was more accessible, but every time I told Hugh that I was offering myself up as bait, he got all weird about it. And if he got weird about it, then I could just imagine Thea getting equally weird and protective about it.
But my older sister was the intelligent one in the family and she immediately guessed I was hiding something when I found her to tell her that I would be accompanying her on her flight back to Drieden.
“What are you not telling me?” Her eyes focused on Hugh, correctly identifying him as the weak link. He’d probably crumble under her skillful and adept interrogation, which is why I wasn’t telling him anything of my plan.
“Don’t speak to him like that,” I snapped at her.
She looked shocked. “He works for me.”
“Are you saying I don’t deserve a bodyguard?”
“No,” she said instantly. “Of course you do.”
“Are you asking him to betray my confidence?”
“No, but—”
“You and I both know that a good security officer has to also have a certain trust with the person they’re charged with protecting.”
My plan was working perfectly. Thea was completely distracted from pressing Hugh on details and was not totally focused on me. “Yes, I agree,” she said reasonably. “But I found him on top of you, with his hands under your shirt and his tongue down your throat. That’s a level of trust that I’ve never reached with my security staff.”
For some reason, Hugh coughed just then, and Thea’s cheeks colored in response. “Wait,” I said abruptly. “Have you two…”
“No!” they said in unison.
“Good,” I mumbled uncomfortably.
“You two…” Thea looked between us, shaking her head. “I’m worried. I heard about Mother’s house. What happened with the team there was a horrible shame. And Grandmama said you were wounded…” She said this to Hugh, but once again I jumped in. To save him from my sister’s tricks.
“A different incident,” I told her. “I did it to him.”
“You?” She looked confused, for some reason.
“Yes,” I said. “He keeps jumping out of the dark and surprising me. I had to protect myself.”
“You. You shot Hugh?” she asked.
“Is it so hard to believe a princess might carry a gun?”
She looked discomfited by that question and I realized my mistake. “Of course, my apologies. I didn’t mean to presume. It’s simply a habit to refer to myself as a princess in such a way. Especially when I’m around my family.” I was embarrassed. Even though I had been liberated from my royal family, a breach of protocol inferring that I had a title which I did not have was awkward, to say the least. Would I ever get used to it? Not being a princess? Feeling like an outsider?
I was scared I wouldn’t.
“It’s all right…” Thea paused, started again. “We should probably talk about that. There have been…developments.”
Her cagey way of describing insider family matters only made it worse, underlining that I had not been in the inner circle for the past six months, nor would I ever be again.
“It’s fine,” I said, trying to cut her off before either of us said something we would regret. “It’s fine,” I repeated, in case she didn’t believe me the first time. “I’m going back to Drieden City. Tonight, I think. I have some old friends to meet.”
Thea’s s
mile was one of relief and delight. “Oh Caroline, I’m so glad to hear it. We’ve been worried about you, all by yourself, alone, with no one around.”
“You don’t need to make it sound so pathetic,” I said. “It’s what I wanted. What I still want. I just need to take care of a few things, that’s all.”
My response was curt enough to make her press her lips together for a moment. She looked at Hugh and for a brief instant I wondered if something more passed between them than an innocent glance. But then she spoke again. “And Hugh will be going back with you? To Drieden City?”
It felt like a trap. It smelled like a trap. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to sidestep it.
The best I could do was, “If he likes.”
It was not a good way out of whatever trap Thea had just laid for me. She turned to him then, a funny little smile on her face. “Hugh? Will you be accompanying my sister to Drieden City?”
Hugh must have smelled the smell of trap, too, because his jaw tightened and he just nodded in response.
Thea smiled broadly. “Excellent.”
Even if I was going back to Drieden, Hugh wasn’t going to get his wish of tossing me behind the palace gates and throwing away the key.
He’d been working for the royal family long enough to realize that wasn’t quite how it worked.
A person had to be invited into a palace, after all. And as I was not officially part of the royal family, I couldn’t simply walk up to the door and use the key hidden under the fake rock in the garden.
(Just kidding. Officially, THERE IS NO PALACE KEY HIDDEN UNDER ANY FAKE ROCKS IN THE GARDEN.)
(It’s hidden in a fake soda can.)
So when we landed at the private airport outside Drieden City and the pilot asked us where the limousine should take us, Hugh was only half frustrated when I told him, “The Hotel Ilysium.”
Hugh got that look on his face that said he was about to argue with me, and I had to shut that down quickly. “It’s where my mother always stays when she is in the city. They have excellent security—you probably know it well yourself.”
“Caroline.” He used my name to make me stop blabbering on. I complied. “I’m on sabbatical.”
The Royal Bodyguard Page 14