“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.
“Come out now, miss. You’ve been in there long enough.”
The gruff command had her muscles tensing in protest and preparation for battle. But she was still too weak to fight.
The door had no lock, so it opened easily to the man who usually stood guard outside her room. Unlike the other hospital employees who wore scrubs, he wore a dark suit, and his black hair was oily and slicked back on his big, heavily featured head. His suit jacket shifted, revealing his holstered weapon. A Glock. As if familiar with the trigger, her fingers itched to grab for it.
But she would have to get close to the creep and if she got close, he could touch her, probably overpower her before she ever pulled the weapon from the holster. A cold chill chased down her spine, and she shivered in reaction.
A nurse moved around the guard. “You’re cold,” she said. “You need to get back into bed.” The gray-haired woman wrapped an arm around Jane and helped her from the bathroom to the bed. The woman had a small, shiny metal nameplate pinned to her uniform shirt. She had a name: Sandy.
Jane found herself leaning heavily against the shorter woman. Her knees trembled, her legs turning into jelly in reaction to the short walk. With a tremulous sigh of relief she dropped onto the mattress.
“Put the restraints on her,” the gruff-voiced guard ordered. He spoke with a heavy accent—some dialect she suspected she should have recognized if she could even recognize her own face right now.
“No, please,” Jane implored the nurse, not the man. She doubted she could sway him. But the woman… “Sandy, please…”
The nurse turned toward the man, though. “Mr. Centerenian, do we have to? She’s not strong enough to—”
“Put the restraints on her!” he snapped. “You remember what happened to her the last time you didn’t…”
Deep red color flushed the woman’s face and neck. But was her reaction in embarrassment or anger?
What had happened the last time Jane hadn’t had on the restraints? She hadn’t simply fallen out of bed…if that was what he was trying to imply.
Jane doubted the bruise on her head had come from a fall since she had no other corresponding bruises on her shoulder, arm or hip. At least not recent ones. But she had a plethora of fading bruises and even older scars.
More than likely the bruise on her face had come from a blow. She glanced again at the holster and the gun visible through Mr. Centerenian’s open jacket. The handle of the Glock could have left such a bruise and bump on her temple. It also could have killed her.
From the loss of her memory and her strength, she suspected it nearly had. This ma
n had attacked a pregnant woman? What kind of guard was he? He definitely wasn’t there for her protection.
The nurse’s hands trembled as she reached for the restraints that were attached to the bed railings.
“Sandy, please…” Jane implored her.
But the nurse wouldn’t meet her gaze. She kept her head down, eyes averted, as she attached the strips of canvas and Velcro to Jane’s wrists.
“Tight,” the man ordered gruffly.
Sandy ripped loose the Velcro and readjusted the straps. But now the restraints felt even looser. The nurse snuck a quick, apologetic glance at Jane before turning away and heading toward the door. Sandy couldn’t open it and leave though. She had to wait, her body visibly tense, for the man to unlock it.
Mr. Centerenian stared at Jane, his heavy brows lowered over his dark eyes. He studied her face and then the restraints. She sucked in a breath, afraid that he might test them. But finally he turned away, too, and unlocked the door by swiping his ID badge through a card-reading lock mechanism. The badge had his intimidating photograph on it, above his intimidating name.
Jane Doe was hardly intimidating. What the hell was her real name?
Once the door closed Jane was alone in the room, and she struggled with her looser restraints. She tugged them up and down, working them against the railings of the bed, so that the fabric and Velcro loosened even more. But she weakened, too.
Panting for breath, she collapsed against the pillows piled on the raised bed and closed her eyes. Pain throbbed in her head, and she fought to focus. She needed to plan her escape.
Even if Jane got loose, she didn’t have the ID badge she needed to get out of the room. But then how could she when she didn’t even have an ID? Of course she was a patient here—not an employee.
But the slightly sympathetic nurse didn’t have one, either. The only way Jane would get the hell out of this place was to get one of those card-reading badges off another employee.
The guard was armed, and Jane was too weak and probably too pregnant to overpower Mr. Centerenian anyway. So whatever employee or visitor stepped into her room next would be the one she ambushed.
Images flashed behind her closed eyes, images of her fists and feet flying—connecting with muscle and bone, as she fought for her life.
Against the guard?
Or were those brief flashes of memory of another time, another fight or fights?
Who the hell was Jane Doe really?
Chapter Two
A sigh of disappointment came from the man standing next to Aaron. “It’s not Charlotte,” he said.
The guy wasn’t Whit Howell. Aaron had managed to leave him behind on St. Pierre Island. But this man had met him at the airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Once Aaron had dealt with his anger over the guy flagging his passport to monitor his travel, he had made use of him…for the fake credentials that had gotten Aaron on staff at Serenity House. Problem was that the U.S. Marshal had insisted on coming along.
Jason “Trigger” Herrema pushed his hand through his steel-gray hair. “Damn, I’d really hoped she was still alive.”
“You and me both.” The only difference was that Aaron wasn’t entirely convinced that this woman wasn’t Charlotte. Through the small window in the door of hospital room 00, he couldn’t see much more than her perfect profile: slightly upturned nose, delicately sculpted cheekbone, heavily lashed eye.
Charlotte’s partner didn’t think it was her because Charlotte Green hadn’t had a perfect profile…until she’d taken on the job of protecting the princess and had plastic surgery to make herself look exactly like the royal heiress. Because they had already shared the same build and coloring, it hadn’t even taken much surgery to complete the transformation.
Aaron had seen a before photo of Charlotte; she’d had one of her and her aunt on the bedside table in her room in the palace in St. Pierre. She’d had a crooked nose from being broken too many times and an ugly, jagged scar on her cheek from a wanted killer’s knife blade. It was no wonder her old partner didn’t recognize her now.
But it had to be Charlotte.
Aaron couldn’t look away from her; he couldn’t focus on anyone but her, which was exactly how he had reacted the first time he’d met the tough female bodyguard. Even more than her beauty, he’d been drawn to her strength and her character. And even lying in that bed, she was strong—she had to be to have survived the attack in the hotel room in Paris.
“I need to talk to the princess,” Aaron said. Obviously Charlotte hadn’t told her old partner about her surgery, so neither would Aaron. If she had wanted the U.S. Marshal to know about her physical transformation, she would have informed him already. Maybe she hadn’t trusted this guy. And if she hadn’t, Aaron didn’t dare trust him, either. “Someone needs to keep an eye out for the goon that was guarding her door.”
They’d waited until the muscular man had slipped outside for a cigarette. “And maybe check around to see if Charlotte’s been visiting her.” He doubted it. If this was the princess and Charlotte knew she was here, she would have broken her out of this creepy hospital long ago.
Unless Charlotte wasn’t who Aaron had thought she was. Unless she was the one keeping Gabriella here…
The Marshal nodded in agreement. “I can ask some of the nurses about her visitors and keep an eye out for the big guy.”
“The princess knows me,” Aaron said, “so I’ll talk to her.”
Trigger glanced inside the room again. “Just because she knows you doesn’t mean you’re going to get any information out of her.”
“Maybe not,” Aaron agreed. “But maybe she can shed some light on what happened in Paris—”
Trigger interrupted with an urgent whisper, “And what happened to Charlotte!”
“Exactly,” Aaron said with a nod. “I have to try to find out what she knows.”
Trigger’s shoulders drooped in a shrug of defeat, as if he was already giving up. “Don’t expect much. I doubt that girl knows anything. I worked with Charlotte for four years, and I never knew what was going on with her.”
“I had a partner like that, too,” Aaron muttered beneath his breath as the U.S. Marshal headed toward the nurses’ station.
Was it possible that Whit had sold out? Was he the one behind what had happened in Paris?
And what about Charlotte? Had he been wrong about her, too? Maybe she’d had her own agenda where the princess was concerned.
Only one way to find out…
He clutched his fake ID badge and swiped it through the security lock beside the door. After a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching him, he slipped inside the room and shut the door at his back.
She didn’t awaken; she didn’t even stir in her sleep or shift beneath the thick blankets covering her. Was she all right? Or heavily sedated?
If she was Charlotte, then whoever had brought her here would have had to keep her subdued somehow. Drugs made sense.
He stepped closer, checking for an IV, but there was nothing. However, her arms were strapped to the bed railings.
“Are you all right?” he whispered, reaching out to touch her. He tipped her face toward him. He’d been able to tell the women apart—because Gabriella was younger with a wide-eyed innocence. And because Charlotte had made his heart race. But now his heart slammed against his ribs when he noticed the angry bruise marring her silky skin. “Oh, my God…what the hell happened to you?”
This injury was not from the struggle in the hotel room. Much of the bruise was still brilliant with color; it was a recent wound.
Despite his hand cupping her face, she didn’t react to his touch. Her lids didn’t flicker; her thick lashes lay against her high cheekbones. He ran his fingertips along the edge of her jaw toward her throat to check for a pulse. But as he leaned over her, his arm brushed against her stomach and beneath the blanket, something shifted, almost as if kicking him.
It wasn’t just her body beneath the heavy blankets. Or at least it was
n’t the shape of her formerly lithely muscled body; it had changed due to the rounded mound of her stomach.
“Oh, my God!” He felt as if he had been kicked—and a hell of a lot harder than that slight movement against his arm.
This woman was pregnant. So she couldn’t be Charlotte, who had been adamant about never becoming a mother. She had to be the princess. But he hadn’t known…he hadn’t realized…that the princess must have already been carrying a royal heir when she and Charlotte disappeared.
While he stared down at her stomach, she moved. Suddenly. Her hands wrapped tight around his throat, pushing hard against his windpipe. Despite the pressure he managed to gasp out one word, “Charlotte.”
He had no doubt now—he had found Charlotte. And if her death grip was any indication, she wasn’t happy that he had.
*
“CHARLOTTE…” she whispered the name back at him. It felt familiar on her lips. Was it her name? Or had she used it for someone else?
She wanted to ask the man, but for him to reply, she would have to loosen her grip. And then she wouldn’t be able to overpower him. She’d caught him by surprise, playing possum as she had; otherwise she never would have managed to get her hands on him.
He was nearly as big as the other guard. But his body was all long, lean muscle. His hair was dark, nearly black, and his eyes were a startlingly light blue. His eyes struck a chord of familiarity within her just like the name he’d called her.
Did she know him? Or had she just seen him before in here? He had one of those name badges clipped to what was apparently a uniform shirt. It was a drab green that matched the drawstring pants of what looked like hospital scrubs. So he obviously worked here.
She needed that badge to escape. She needed to escape even more than she needed to know who the hell she was. But her grip loosened, as his hands grasped hers and easily pulled them from his throat. She cursed her weakness and then she cursed him. “You son of a bitch!” She wriggled, trying to tug her wrists from his grip. But his hands were strong. “Let me go!”
Protecting the Pregnant Princess Page 2