Royal Lockdown

by Rebecca York

  “Yeah.” He was embarrassed, but he needed to add, “I believe that the right role models can make up for an awful lot of other sins.”

  “You overcame a difficult background.”

  “I stole your sapphire,” he heard himself saying and wished he wasn’t bent on making sure Princess Ariana backed off.

  Instead, she absolved him. “I understand why. I don’t like it, but I understand.”

  “I’m not proud of doing it,” he admitted. “In retrospect, it was a dumb idea.”

  He heard her swallow in the darkness. “You don’t have a monopoly on that. When I was angry with you out in Copley Square, I could have gotten us both killed.”

  “Well, as you said a moment ago, I understand why you were angry.” He wanted to reach out and clasp her hand, but he didn’t allow himself that luxury. Touching her was not a great idea, because if he put his hand on hers, he would want to do a whole lot more.

  Maybe the conversation was getting too personal for her, too, because she switched the subject.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say Liam Shea brainwashed his sons into going along on his hostage-taking scheme.”

  Glad that she’d focused on the enemy, he answered, “I was thinking the same thing.”

  In the darkness, she dragged in a breath and let it out in a rush. “Something else I’ve been thinking. If tonight was so important to Liam Shea, I’m guessing that he really was innocent of the charges.”

  Shane nodded. “Which means one of the team members set him up. And maybe he thinks he can get that man to confess before he kills him.”

  “Charming.” She made a small sound. “It wasn’t my father!”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “And it wasn’t you!”

  “How do you know? Maybe a man who would steal a sapphire would betray his team members.” He wasn’t sure why he’d said that. Perhaps because he wanted to hear her come to his defense.

  “We both know you didn’t do it. And you don’t have to bring up that chunk of rock again.”

  “Don’t call it a chunk of rock. It’s been important to your family for generations.”

  She pressed her finger to his lips. “Let’s not talk about it again, okay?”

  He nodded, and she stroked her fingers against his lips. It wasn’t what he’d expected, and he felt instant arousal shoot through him.

  He’d promised himself he wouldn’t touch her. But she was the one who had initiated the contact. He thanked fate for giving him a little longer with her, and he ached to take advantage of this time. But he’d already made enough mistakes with her. To keep from doing anything else he’d regret, he opened the door and climbed out of the car.

  Ariana did the same, coming around to his side of the vehicle but standing several feet away from him.

  She scuffed her foot against the pavement, then looked over at him. “So who framed Liam Shea? And why?”

  “It wasn’t any of the guys I’ve kept in close contact with. Not Chase. Not Ethan Matalon—who wasn’t here tonight. And not Ty Jones, the Secret Service agent.”

  “Two other men were on the mission besides my father, right?”

  “Yes. The commander of the team, Tom Bradley, is dead. But I thought he was an honorable man.”

  “Like Brutus?”

  Shane dealt with another fit of coughing, then said, “You mean in Julius Caesar? Brutus helped assassinate Caesar because he thought he was taking down a tyrant?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t think that’s the case here. Bradley testified against Shea. But I don’t think he would have set him up.”

  She turned to face him. “That leaves one more man who went along on the mission.”

  “The vice president.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much.”

  “Would he have set himself up as a war hero to advance his career?”

  Shane felt a wave of sickness in his throat. “I hope not. It’s hard to view him in that light.”

  She looked toward the nearest town houses, then back at him. “Tell me some more about the mission.”

  “You don’t really want to hear any more of the gory details.”

  “Maybe I can help you figure out what happened.”

  He sighed. “The court reviewed the evidence and convicted Shea.”

  “But now we have new information, if we can determine what’s relevant.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said Shea cut the power to the building too soon, which alerted the hostage takers that you were coming in to free the prisoners. But why would he do that? He didn’t want the team to fail, did he?”

  Shane thought about that long-ago night and the trial afterward.

  “Shea said somebody gave him the signal to go ahead. But he didn’t have any proof, and the court put it down to his error. The failure was judged to be his fault.”

  “He was wounded, right?”

  “How do you know?”

  “When my father wouldn’t talk about it, I looked up accounts of the mission. But I never got all the details.”

  Before he could fill in some of the blanks, the sound of footsteps made them both go rigid.

  He wanted to shout at Ariana to get back in the car. But he knew it was already too late when shadowy figures came out of the darkness, boxing them in between the car and a brick wall.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Shane felt every muscle in his body tense.

  “Put your hands up, or I’ll slice your head off,” a hard voice ordered.

  Slice his head off? Like in one of those terrorist videos out there on the Internet? Was that where this thug was getting his lines?

  Maybe. But the guy speaking looked and sounded more like a street punk than a terrorist. A street punk with a knife. Shane had always liked a good knife fight, although he wasn’t exactly in great fighting shape at the moment. And he realized that the knife he’d had at the beginning of the evening was back in his tuxedo pocket.

  Even in the dark he detected a flash of movement and flicked his eyes to the right, seeing another guy on the other side of Ariana.

  Shane managed not to mutter a curse as he sized up the opposition, grateful that at least he’d gotten his breath back. Thank God, because it looked as if he didn’t have much choice about defending himself and Ariana.

  Beside him, she had gone rigid.

  He kept his gaze away from her and studied the guy nearest to him. The punk looked to be in his late teens or early twenties, with shoulder-length dark hair that was limp with grease, big prominent teeth and a little goatee that seemed completely out of place on his youthful face.

  He held a hunting knife in his right hand. Probably the wide, slightly curved blade gave him a sense of invincibility. Shane hoped the guy was in for a shock.

  “Bring the woman over here,” he called out to his accomplice.

  Shane felt his gut clench as the other assailant took a step toward Ariana. His hair was shorter than his friend’s, and he was clean-shaven, but he had a safety pin piercing his left eyebrow. Like his partner he was dressed in faded jeans and a dark T-shirt. And he also carried a knife. Probably these hoods thought that the blackout was a good time to advance their fortunes, and they’d come across two honest citizens who should have stayed inside where they belonged.

  Ariana looked terrified. He ached to tell her everything was going to be okay. At the same time, he wanted to shout out that if they did anything to hurt the woman, they were dead.

  But he figured that in the present situation, surprise was his best ally. So he kept his mouth shut, his posture slightly slumped, and his gaze fixed on the two troublemakers as he considered his options.

  The four of them were standing on the sidewalk in an upper-class Boston neighborhood.

  He doubted any of the local residents would come running out of their houses if he shouted for help. The residents would be keeping their heads down, hoping to make it through the black
out in one piece.

  “Give me your wallet,” one of the punks demanded.

  “I don’t have one,” Shane answered. He was telling the truth. His wallet was back at the church. Not that he would have given it up if he’d had it.

  “Don’t give me that crap.”

  “I came outside without it.”

  The thug gave Ariana an appraising look, then turned back to Shane. “She’s a pretty little thing. Did you sneak out of the house to meet her in the car?”

  “No,” Shane clipped out.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Swaggering a little now, the man moved in, then spotted the bulge in the front pocket of Shane’s jeans. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  Only the Beau Pays sapphire.

  When the man reached toward the pocket, Shane moved, slapping the hand away, and at the same time bringing his other hand up to deflect the knife that came slicing down toward his throat.

  He’d had training in street-fighting methods, and even without a knife, he was better prepared to defend himself than the guy attacking him.

  “Run,” he yelled to Ariana as he lashed out at the man’s knife arm.

  To his dismay, she did just the opposite. As he moved forward, so did she. She kicked out at the man standing over her, catching him squarely in the crotch.

  The man bellowed and doubled over, which gave Ariana the opportunity to bring her hand down in a chopping motion on his shoulders, just below his neck.

  Shane noticed the move. Noticed, too, that she could have killed the guy if she’d moved her hand an inch higher. The action told him that she’d had very professional defensive training along with her art and dancing lessons.

  That knowledge flashed through his mind as he fought with the other thug, moving his arms in rhythm to deflect the knife slashes, then catching the guy’s elbow and thrusting the knife back toward him, so that the assailant cut his own shoulder.

  He cried out in pain and surprise.

  “Come on,” Shane offered between pants. “You want some more punishment? I’ll be glad to give it to you.”

  Both men cursed. The one who’d been chopped by Ariana scrambled to his feet and backed away, his friend following. When they were ten feet from Shane and Ariana, they turned and ran.

  “Where did you learn those moves?” Shane asked, hoping he didn’t sound like he needed a respirator.

  Ariana gave him what she hoped was a cocky smile. “Part of my private lessons.”

  “The part you didn’t mention.” He laughed appreciatively. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

  As they stood there in the moonlight, she felt her whole body tingling. “That was quite exhilarating,” she said. “I never thought I’d actually be in hand-to-hand combat.”

  “You are a very brave woman.”

  “I don’t think I had a choice.”

  “Yeah.” He dragged in a breath and let it out. “I want to ask you a question.”

  She nodded.

  “A few minutes ago, you were fighting for your life. Back at the reception, you were going to turn yourself in. Did you think you could fight off men armed with automatic weapons?”

  “No.”

  “So you were going to let them kill you?”

  She gave him a direct look. “What would you have done if they’d said they’d start killing innocent people unless you turned over Shane Peters?”

  She knew he’d taken the point when he winced, then said, “I would have had to go up there.”

  “Then you understand my dilemma.”

  “But your country needs you.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Sometimes rulers have to make hard choices.”

  He spoke to her the way her father might have spoken. “The hard choice may be keeping yourself safe so you can rule your country and continue the Beau Pays line.”

  “And live with the guilt of causing the deaths of innocent people?”

  “Yes. That might be the kind of decision you have to make when you’re sitting on the throne. It’s like the president of the United States. They put him on a helicopter and got him out of Boston while everybody else had to wait.”

  “And before that he was willing to turn himself over to the gunmen to save people’s lives.”

  He nodded, conceding the point.

  She made a frustrated gesture with her arm. “Too bad I don’t live a couple of hundred years ago when rulers could do anything they wanted.”

  “If they went too far, sometimes they got executed. You know, like Louis XVI. Or Charles I of England. Or several Russian czars I can think of.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  He gave her a crooked grin. “It’s easier to give advice when it doesn’t apply directly to you.”

  “Let’s not get too far off track,” she said, reminding herself that she hadn’t been planning to get into another fight with Shane Peters. Quite the contrary.

  Deliberately, she looked around at the darkened houses on either side of the street.

  She took a step toward the wall to their right, then made a small sound of pain when she put weight on her right ankle.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I must have twisted my ankle in the fight,” she answered.

  “And I was standing here arguing with you. You need to sit down.”

  “Yes.”

  She limped over to the wall, being careful not to put much weight on the foot. When she reached the vertical surface, she leaned against it.

  “We just had a demonstration of how dangerous it is to be out here in the blackout,” Shane said. “Maybe we should go back to your previous plan and head for the nearest police station.”

  “I can’t walk very far. And we can’t drive up to a police station in a stolen car,” she murmured.

  He looked back at the car they’d borrowed. “You have a good point there.”

  Surveying the darkened street, he said, “If we tried to walk, you could lean on me.”

  “But we’d have to go pretty slowly. And those men could come back. Or we could bump into someone else with robbery on their minds.”

  She moved along the wall, favoring her right foot, then stopped when she came to a wooden door. “Maybe this will open.”

  Before he could tell her it was a bad idea, she turned the handle and the door swung inward.

  “We’ll be safer inside than on the street. But not if someone sees us going in. Hurry,” she said, moving inside as quickly as she dared.

  Once inside, she held her breath until Shane followed. They were in a walled garden. The house must have been on a double lot because it was more than fifteen yards away. They were standing in a landscaped area that included a small swimming pool.

  “So you’re adding breaking and entering to car theft?” he asked, his voice teasing.

  “Apparently.” As she looked around their refuge, she leaned her hand against the back of a garden bench. When she saw the small building on the other side of the pool, she caught her breath.

  “What?”

  “The summerhouse.”

  “What about it?”

  Her mouth was so dry that she could hardly speak. “I…imagined it. I mean I saw it in my mind. And here it is. The same place.”

  “You saw it? When?”

  “Back at the reception, when we were under the control of the Sheas,” she said in a low voice. “I wanted to escape to a place like that. And here it is.”

  She didn’t add that it had been when they were under the table, when he’d been trying to take her mind off what was going on around them by kissing her.

  “It must be a sign,” she murmured. A sign that I’m doing the right thing. The thought lodged in her mind, but she didn’t speak it aloud.

  “A sign of what?”

  “That we’re supposed to be here,” she said. Feeling vindicated, she limped farther into the garden and toward the summerhouse.

  �
�You believe in signs and portents?”

  “Well, I’d never admit to my father that I do. But there have been times in my life when they were important.”

  “Like when?”

  “Like when I was a little girl, and I was afraid to go out on one of the balconies at home. I kept dreaming that it would fall off the castle. Then one night, in a big storm, it did.”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Well, I wasn’t afraid of any of the other balconies. Just that one. So I don’t think so.”

  “Do you need help walking?”

  “No,” she answered as she crossed the cement deck beside the pool.

  “What if the home owner comes out with a shotgun?” he asked.

  “They’re not home.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The lights are off,” she answered, then started to giggle.

  “The lights are off all over the city,” he reminded her.

  “That’s why it’s funny. But I think they would have heard the knife fight. Then they would have been listening and come out with big flashlights to challenge us when we came through the gate.”

  “What would you have done?”

  She drew herself up taller. “I would have told them they were providing refuge to Princess Ariana of Beau Pays, and I would give them a reward in return.” She looked back at him. “In case you can’t tell, that’s her royal highness talking.”

  “I can tell.”

  She opened the door to the summerhouse and said, “Do you still have those matches?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are candles in here.” She held up two glass jars that had been sitting on one of the low tables.

  “Okay.” He struck a match and lit the candles, then set them back on the tables. They cast a warm glow around the little room, flickering on the furniture and the man standing next to her.

  SHANE COULDN’T TAKE HIS EYES off Ariana. She looked so beautiful that his throat tightened. It tightened even further when she sat down on what looked like a double bed but was probably a double-wide chaise longue with the backrest in the flat position. The chaise was set at an angle so that it took up the center of the room.

  She reached to take off her shoes, then turned so she could swing her legs onto the cushion. After rolling up the leg of her jeans, she bent to assess the damage to her ankle, running her fingers from her foot to her calf. He assumed she was trying to see how badly she’d hurt herself, but the gesture came across as erotic. Seductive.