“There are some clothes in the box, too,” he said. “You should probably change into something warmer.” Spring nights were cold in Michigan, as a bitter gust blew through the open door.
She glanced down at the wrinkled scrubs and nodded. Then she lifted out the bundle of clothes. “Looks like some of these are yours.”
“Yeah.” Another cold gust blew through the open door, sending sparks shooting up the chimney. He caught the shirt and jeans she tossed at him.
“Here are the salts,” she said, passing over a bottle. “I’ll take these.” She held on to a sweater and pants. “And change in another room.”
“Why?” It wasn’t like he hadn’t already seen every inch of her. Again.
She pointed toward the man on the couch. “I didn’t kill him, remember? He could come around even before you use those on him.”
And Whit did. When a door to another room closed behind her, the man shifted on the couch and groaned, struggling to regain consciousness. Aaron dragged on his jeans. He grabbed up the ID badges from Serenity House that he’d dropped on the floor in front of the couch when he’d torn off his clothes earlier. He might not need them again. But just in case he did…
As his head popped through the collar of the heavy knit shirt he pulled over his head, he came face-to-face with Whit. The guy’s dark eyes were open and staring up at him. His brow furrowed with pain and confusion.
“Who hit me?” he asked, with another groan. “And what the hell did he hit me with?”
“Charlotte hit you with the butt of a gun,” he replied matter-of-factly. After all, Whit wouldn’t have followed him if he hadn’t discovered he was chasing down a lead to her whereabouts.
“You found Charlotte?” Whit scrambled up from the couch and peered around the dimly lit room, as if looking for the female bodyguard. “And she’s armed?” He slid his hand into his jacket, reaching for his own gun.
Aaron caught his arm. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Whit asked. He pointed at the scratch on Aaron’s forehead. “Did she do that? Did she shoot you?”
“It’s nothing,” he said, touching the mark on his head to remind himself. He’d forgotten all about the shard from the broken vase hitting him. “And she didn’t do it. She isn’t dangerous.”
Whit uttered a bitter laugh. “There’s no one more dangerous for you.” He shook his head with disgust. “This is why you shouldn’t have given me the slip back on St. Pierre. Family emergency—my ass.”
“You were supposed to stay there and guard the king,” Aaron reminded him. As if he’d needed another reminder of why they were no longer business partners. “Who’s protecting him? You didn’t bring him with you?” He grimaced at the thought of the king in the line of fire. It was bad enough that Charlotte had been.
Whit shook his head. “He’s still on St. Pierre, ensconced in the palace, with Zeke Rogers reinstated as head of his security in our absence.”
“Zeke?” Aaron hadn’t trusted the former mercenary and apparently neither had Charlotte since she’d recommended the king replace the man. “Is that wise?”
“With the guys we brought on as backup palace security, the king is safe,” Whit assured him.
Were Aaron and Charlotte safe now that Whit knew where they were? Aaron asked the question that had been nagging at him since Charlotte had hit Whit over the head. “How did you find me?”
“Stanley Jessup.”
Disappointment tugged at Aaron. Obviously the other man hadn’t forgiven him. “He had promised me that he wouldn’t tell you where I was.”
It had been the most important of all the favors Aaron had requested of their former client.
“I forced it out of him,” Whit defended the media mogul. The legendary businessman had never been forced into doing anything he hadn’t wanted to—except for burying the ashes of his only child. “I told him you were playing white knight again, and that you were probably going to get yourself killed.”
Even though Aaron had only gotten the scratch on his head and some bruises on his stomach, he couldn’t deny that he had had some close calls. “None of that was Charlotte’s fault. She’s a victim in all this.”
Whit shook his head. “No. Gabby is the real victim in all this. Did you find her?”
“No.”
A muscle twitched in Whit’s cheek, as if he’d tightly clenched his jaw. “Did Charlotte tell you what she did with her?”
Aaron hadn’t been hit with anything other than that shard of glass or porcelain, but his head was beginning to ache. “What do you mean? What would Charlotte have done with Princess Gabriella? Do you think she’s hidden her because of the king arranging another marriage for her?”
That muscle twitched in Whit’s cheek again. “I thought so—at first,” he admitted. “But even though Gabby might have been upset with her father, she loves him too much to make him worry this way. If she was all right, she would have contacted somebody by now.”
“What makes you think Charlotte has anything to do with the princess not being able to contact anyone?” he said, wondering about Whit’s suspicions. Was it Whit’s cynicism talking or his own guilty conscience?
“She was the last one to see Gabby alive, so of course she had something to do with her disappearance. And I’m going to find out exactly what,” Whit vowed, his dark eyes raging with anger and determination. “Where the hell is she?”
“She can’t tell you anything,” Aaron said, edging between Whit and the door which Charlotte had shut behind herself. Everyone wanted information from Charlotte. He wanted only Charlotte.
Whit was no longer the man who never gave in to—hell, even appeared to—have emotions. The anger bubbled over into pure rage. “She is damn well going to tell me what she did to Gabby!”
“She can’t tell you anything!” Aaron shouted to get through to the stubborn man. He had never seen Whit so out of control. Maybe Charlotte had hit him too hard, like she had been hit too hard. “She doesn’t remember.”
Beneath the blond hair falling over his brow, furrows of confusion formed deep ridges. “Doesn’t remember? What the hell are you talking about?”
“She has amnesia.”
Whit stared incredulously at Aaron like he had just announced a spaceship landing on the island of St. Pierre. “What the hell—”
“She has a concussion,” he explained. “She doesn’t remember anything.”
Whit snorted. “That’s damn convenient. What doesn’t she remember?”
“Anything. She doesn’t remember anything.” But him. “She doesn’t even know who she is—if she’s Charlotte or Gabby.”
“And you fell for that?” Whit asked with a grimace of disgust.
“Why would she lie about something like that?” he asked because he had wondered, as well.
“Because the woman has lied to you about everything,” Whit said. “Hell, she was lying to you before you even met her.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Aaron’s stomach churned with a sick feeling of foreboding. “What has she lied to me about?”
That telltale muscle twitched in Whit’s cheek. “Josie.”
He fisted his hand, tempted to strike Whit again for even daring to mention the name of the woman who had died under their protection. “Josie? She didn’t even know Josie Jessup.”
“When Charlotte was with the U.S. Marshals, she staged Josie’s death and relocated her,” Whit said matter-of-factly, as if he was speaking the truth and not the wild fantasy that it had to be.
Aaron shook his head. “No. We were there—we both saw that house blow up.”
“But we didn’t see Josie in the house when it blew up,” Whit pointed out. “Her body was never recovered.”
“But her DNA…”
“Charlotte planted it and had a coroner identify the remains of a cadaver as Josie,” Whit explained. “It was her last case before she discovered who her own father was. Then she realized she w
ouldn’t ever have to work again if she played her cards right.”
Aaron couldn’t accept what Whit was saying. “Josie is dead.”
“Nope,” Whit corrected him. “She and Charlotte let you believe that.”
“You let me believe that!” And of all the people who had known about Josie going into the witness relocation program, his best friend should have been the one to tell him the truth. Then. Not now…
Now it was too late—to undo the damage that had been done to their friendship—too late to restore the trust that Aaron had lost.
“When you saw how much he’d been suffering, you would have told Stanley Jessup,” Whit said. “And no one could know where she was.”
“Do you know?”
“Charlotte is the only one authorized to know her whereabouts,” Whit replied. “Not even Charlotte’s partner with the U.S. Marshals knows.”
So Josie had to be the witness that Trigger had wanted to question Charlotte about—the one he claimed had gone missing. But how could he know that if he’d never known where she was?
“But I don’t care about Josie,” Whit said.
The admission surprised Aaron because he’d thought the other man had been as attracted to the American princess as he had been. Well, he’d thought that until Whit had talked him into leaving her momentarily unprotected. Now Aaron knew why he had—if he believed what the other man was telling him. Now. More than three years after the fact.
“I care about Gabby,” Whit admitted. “I want to know what Charlotte did to her. Let me talk to her! Now!”
Aaron was afraid that talking wasn’t all Whit intended to do to Charlotte. And Aaron hadn’t found her only to lose her again.
But then had he ever really had her? Betrayal struck him like a fist in the gut. Did he have any idea who she actually was?
*
THIS MAN, THIS stranger who’d broken into the cottage—he knew Charlotte. He knew her better even than the man with whom she’d made love because Whit Howell knew all her secrets. All the secrets she hadn’t really wanted to remember.
Aaron had been in love with another woman—so in love with her that he’d turned on his best friend. He’d given up his business. His life. He had been so in love with Josie Jessup that he would have never been able to fall for another woman.
No matter what feelings Charlotte might have had for him, they would never be returned. And now she heard the suspicion in his voice as he questioned his emotional friend.
“Why do you think Charlotte would hurt the princess? They were so close. She had surgery to look like her, to protect her!”
Charlotte closed her eyes, and the image was there—of her face. But it wasn’t her face at all. The golden brown eyes were wide and full of innocence and naïveté. And the skin was so smooth, completely free of lines of old scars or stress. Princess Gabriella St. Pierre had spent her life so sheltered that she’d been completely unaware of what the world was really like.
It would have been so easy to take advantage of that youth and innocence. So easy to dupe her…
“Charlotte Green had surgery, so she could take over Princess Gabriella’s life and her inheritance.”
Aaron’s derisive snort permeated the door behind which Charlotte stood. “That might have worked if everyone wasn’t aware that she’d had that surgery. Everyone in the king’s inner circle—his business associates, lawyers and financial advisors—knows Princess Gabriella has a doppelganger.”
“Charlotte isn’t just a doppelganger.”
“No,” Aaron agreed. “She’s her bodyguard and her friend.”
“She’s her sister.”
“No.”
Charlotte silently echoed that denial. Sisters grew up together or were at least aware of each other’s existence. Charlotte hadn’t been until her mom had finally conned the wrong person and wound up dead, leaving behind documents that Charlotte had never seen before, documents that had proved that her mother’s outrageous lies had actually been the truth.
“Why do you think they looked so much alike?” Whit asked.
“The surgery—”
“Hadn’t changed her height or build or coloring,” Whit pointed out. “Even before the surgery they’d looked eerily similar.”
“How do you know?” Aaron asked and then bitterly answered his own question, “Oh, that’s right, you met her before…when you helped her stage Josie’s death.”
Jealousy kicked Charlotte in the stomach just as the baby did. Why had she given in to her attraction to him even though she had known that he had already given his heart to another? She patted her belly soothingly.
Apologetically…
“She’s good at staging murder scenes,” Whit said.
“Like Paris?”
“Maybe that wasn’t staged,” Whit said. “Maybe that was a real murder scene. Maybe she killed Gabby.”
“I don’t think—”
“No, man, you don’t!” Whit accused him. “You feel. And you let those feelings cloud your judgment. That’s why you couldn’t know about Josie.”
“Why couldn’t I know about Charlotte?” he asked, his voice gruff with anger. “Why didn’t you tell me that she’s the king’s daughter, too?”
“Because King St. Pierre didn’t want anyone to know.”
Charlotte flinched, feeling rejected all over again. Her father hadn’t wanted his dirty little secret to come out. But he’d been happy to use her to protect the daughter he had wanted. The one he had loved.
“And that’s why she did this,” Whit explained. “With his legitimate heir dead, he’ll be forced to acknowledge his illegitimate one—if he wants to continue his reign in St. Pierre.”
“Charlotte wouldn’t do something like that,” Aaron protested, but his argument had weakened, his voice lower now with doubt.
She had to nearly press her ear against the wood to hear him.
“You don’t know Charlotte Green at all,” Whit said, almost gently. “You have no idea what she’s capable of…”
But Charlotte finally did—as all of her memories came rushing back over her. They struck her like blows. And as the pain overwhelmed her, she wanted to strike back.
*
FISTS CLENCHED AT his sides, Aaron struggled for control. He wouldn’t hit Whit—despite his gut-wrenching need to pummel the other man until he took back every last word he’d uttered.
“You have no proof to back up all these wild accusations.” His head reeled from them, making him wonder if he had been hit harder than a graze. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because I always had your back,” Whit said. “Because we were closer than friends—we were like brothers.”
“Until Josie…” Losing her had cost them their friendship. But then they hadn’t really lost her.
“There was nothing between me and her, you know,” Whit said.
Aaron had thought there’d been, and he’d resented Whit for acting on the attraction Aaron had struggled to ignore. Because he’d wanted to be professional, had wanted to keep her safe. And all these years he’d thought he’d failed. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Because he realized those feelings for Josie hadn’t been real. He’d liked her, had admired her beauty and brains, but he hadn’t loved her. He’d only loved one woman, but now that might have been a lie, too.
If he were to believe Whit…
“What you’re saying is wrong,” Aaron pointed out. “None of it makes sense.”
“Greed always makes sense,” Whit insisted, his words an unwitting reminder of how much money had mattered to him. His background was completely opposite Aaron’s; Whit had grown up poor with a single dad who’d struggled to support them. Whit had been denied all the things he’d wanted. Had he gotten sick of going without all the things that money could buy—all the things he’d always considered so important?
“But if she’d intended to pull the switch, why had she talked the king into hiring us?” Aaron wondered.
�
��Maybe the king’s head of security had been on to her,” Whit suggested. “Maybe she thought we would be easier to dupe than the guard who’d known Gabriella her whole life.”
At Serenity House, Aaron had had his doubts about her identity. And she and the princess had disappeared just a couple of months after he and Whit had been hired. “I can’t believe this…”
“Let’s ask her,” Whit suggested. “Get her out here to explain herself.”
She wouldn’t be able to explain what she couldn’t remember. But was Whit right? Had her claim of amnesia just been a trick? Was it all a trick? His legs didn’t feel quite steady as he walked across the room to that closed door. “Charlotte?”
She didn’t reply. She had probably heard every word of their conversation—why hadn’t she come out earlier to explain herself? He reached for the knob, but it wouldn’t turn. She’d locked him out. Like he had the front door, he kicked the door until it broke free of the jamb.
Cold air, flowing through an open window, hit him in the face like a shotgun blast.
“She’s gone?” Whit asked, leaning against the broken jamb behind Aaron.
He shut his eyes as dread pummeled him. “Tell me you didn’t leave the keys in the car.”
Whit cursed profusely. They both turned toward the front door—just in time to see the flash of a gun as it fired directly at them.
He’d been such a fool—such a damn fool to fall for her lies. To fall for her. And now he was about to become a dead fool…
Chapter Eight
As he had just minutes ago, Aaron knocked Whit to the ground again. Bullets flew over their heads and filled the room. Stuffing burst from the holes in the couch and wood splintered—in the furniture and the walls behind them. And the sound was deafening, rattling the windows and shaking the pictures off the walls.
It wasn’t a handgun firing at them—more likely a machine gun or some other automatic rifle. Even if they could get off a shot, they were outgunned.
“We have to get the hell out of here!” Aaron said. When he’d first found the cabin, he had scoped it out and knew all the exits. He dragged Whit across the floor with him, toward the back door. It was the one he’d left unlocked earlier. But instead of reaching up to turn the knob, he just kicked it open as he had the others.
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