McKinnon's Royal Mission (17 page)

Was that why Janet didn’t trust me?
he wondered, seeing the failure of his marriage clearly for the first time.
Because I didn’t trust her enough to let her see the man I really am?

With a sense of shock he realized that only twice in his adult life had he ever let anyone inside his defenses. Only two people had been allowed to get close to him emotionally—Keira and the princess. And only once had he trusted. The woman he’d trusted
hadn’t
been the woman he loved more than life itself.

He buried his face in his hands.

* * *

Two hours later his cell phone rang, startling Trace from a restless, dream-disturbed sleep. He fumbled for the phone, wondering who the hell could be calling him on Christmas Day. “McKinnon,” he growled once he finally managed to get the cell phone answered.

“It’s me,” Keira said in his ear, “so don’t think you can scare me off with your big, bad, bear imitation.”

Trace sat up and rubbed a hand over his face. He tried to see what time it was, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. “What time is it?”

“Never mind that,” his former partner told him sternly. “I have someone here who wants to say something to you.” There was a brief silence, followed by a faraway, “It’s Trace, Alyssa. Tell him what you want to say.”

Alyssa’s little girl voice gurgled in his ear. “Dank-oo, Dace.”

“You’re welcome, sweetie,” he managed. “I hope you liked it.”

Keira came back on the phone. “She loved it. You knew she would. But you’ve got to stop spoiling her.”

“Is she having a good Christmas?”

“All four of my brothers are here. My mom’s here. And Cody, of course. All dancing attendance on her. And Santa Claus left her a boatload of presents under the tree and a stocking filled with a dentist’s worst nightmares. But her ‘Dace’ isn’t here, so she’s miserable.”

Trace laughed. “Yeah, right.”

Keira laughed, too. “Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. Hang on a sec. Cody, can you take Alyssa for a few minutes?” A deep rumble answered her, followed by a moment of silence, and then Keira came back on the line. “Okay, I’m back. Cody’s got Alyssa and I’m barricaded in the laundry room, so I might have ten minutes, tops.”

“Don’t interrupt your Christmas for me.”

“Please,” Keira said drily. “Don’t give me that crap. This is me, remember? Your former partner? The one you didn’t hesitate to ask if I was in love with Cody two and half years ago? The one you didn’t hesitate to ask if I was sleeping with him? Does that ring any bells?”

Trace winced. “Yeah. I seem to recall having the gall to ask you those questions.”

Keira’s voice turned serious. “Alec just told me Mara went back to Zakhar. Lock, stock and barrel.”

For a moment he’d let himself forget, but now it came roaring back, a freight train thundering down the track, smashing right into his heart. “Yeah.”

“He didn’t say, but he didn’t have to—I saw the look he and Liam exchanged when I told them you weren’t coming for Christmas dinner. You had something to do with it. Right?”

“Right.”

“Are you out of your ever-loving, freaking mind?”

Trace was startled into laughing again, a rusty sound that held echoes of pain. “Don’t pull any punches, Keira. Tell me what you
really
think.”

“I’ll tell you, but I’m not sure you want to hear what I have to say.”

He didn’t respond at first, just rubbed his hand over his face again, then he said slowly, seriously, his tone an indictment of himself and his actions, “Whatever you’re thinking, it can’t be any worse than I’ve already said to myself.”

“I wasn’t planning on calling you names. I was just going to tell you the real reason I wanted you to be Alyssa’s godfather, and let you take it from there.”

Trace hesitated. “Because you knew that if anything happened to you and Cody, I’d protect her with my life?”

“No. That might have been Cody’s reason, but it wasn’t mine.”

Puzzled, he asked, “Then why?”

He could hear her draw a deep breath in his ear and expel it slowly. “It’s two things, really. Because there’s a capacity for love in you far beyond most men. I don’t even know if you’re aware of it yourself, but I see it in you. And because you respect women. I mean really
respect
them, and not just as women, as people. If anything happened to Cody and me, I wanted my daughter raised by a man who could give her roots and wings. The roots that can only come from unconditional love, and the wings that can only grow strong when you’re allowed to fly free as far as they will take you.”

Trace squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed the lump in his throat that threatened to overwhelm him. But Keira wasn’t finished.

“I love my brothers, you know that. But I grew up with them. I know them inside and out. They would give Alyssa the roots she needs, but I don’t know if they would give her wings. And
that’s
why I wanted you to be her godfather and not one of them.”

“Keira...” He couldn’t go beyond that one word.

“Alyssa deserves the best. And that’s you.” She cleared her throat. “There’s just one more thing I have to tell you, and then I’ll let you go. Liam told me—he thought it was funny, and it is, in a way, but it’s a little pathetic, too—Mara was taking cooking lessons from her chefs, did you know that?”

“No.”

“Apparently she was trying to make herself more self-sufficient, like me.”

“That doesn’t make sense—you can’t cook.”

“No, but she didn’t know that until Alec told her. What she
does
know is that you hold me in high esteem. And do you know what she told Alec when he asked her how she’d been injured? She said, ‘I only did what Keira would have done in that situation.’”

Trace uttered a pithy, four-letter word.

“That’s all I wanted to tell you. Okay, that’s
not
all I wanted to tell you, but I don’t think I need to tell you anything more. You’re a smart man—you’ve never given yourself the credit you deserve, but you were a great teacher and I owe you a lot. The only thing I regret about marrying Cody is losing you as a partner—and if you
ever
tell him I said I regret anything about marrying him I’ll call you a liar to your face,” she ended with a laugh that had him laughing, too. “He feels guilty enough about it as it is. Oh, and that reminds me,” she said swiftly before he could hang up. “Cody asked me to check on a license plate number for you, along with the make and model of the car it belongs to. He said you thought the New World Militia or the Russian mob might be tailing you.”

“Yeah.”

“You had him so worried he would barely let Alyssa and me out of his sight, and he opened an agency investigation immediately. He even called Callahan to warn him. And that was
not
a comfortable conversation, let me tell you.”

“Forewarned is forearmed.”

“Yes, but...you were way off base.”

Despite his lack of sleep Trace was suddenly alert. “How do you know?”

“Because that car belongs to—hold on to your hat—the king of Zakhar.”

Chapter 16

“W
hat?”
Trace couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.

“That’s what Cody said when I told him. I had to trace it through a couple of shell corporations, but I nailed it down yesterday. So if you were being followed—and I’m not saying you weren’t—it was probably just the king being an overprotective brother.”

“You’re positive?”
The princess wasn’t in danger because of me,
he thought with an overwhelming sense of relief.
I didn’t put her at risk.

“I’m not positive he was just being an overprotective brother, but I
am
positive the tail didn’t involve the New World Militia or the
Bratva
, the Brotherhood. Unless the king of Zakhar is a member of the Russian mob,” she added drily.

“You’re the best, Keira. I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably still be saying it when we’re both old and gray. Thank you
very
much!” After he hung up Trace put the cell phone down and stared at the SIG SAUER still sitting on the coffee table. Thinking about what Keira had just told him.

They weren’t gunning for me,
he thought thankfully.
Whatever the explanation is, they weren’t gunning for me. Which means I can put that fear for the princess to bed.

Then he thought about the other things Keira had told him earlier—and everything she hadn’t said. He thought about Alyssa, about the sweet, darling girl she was, and the woman she would someday become. His princess would have been just as sweet and darling as a child, and she had grown into a woman who had flown far beyond anything anyone could ever have imagined, knowing her crippling childhood with the father who never loved her. Who besides her brother had given
her
roots and wings? How had she found the courage to fly? Yet somehow she had.

...I cannot ask you to be less than the man you are. But I
can
ask you to let me be a woman for you... If you love me, then nothing else matters. If you love me, please do not talk of what I deserve... Since I have known you all I have wanted to be was a woman. Your woman...

His woman. No, that wasn’t true. She didn’t just want to be his woman, his lover. That’s what she’d said, but he knew her better than that. His princess might try to be a modern American woman, but she was old-fashioned in some endearing ways. Cooking lessons? That wasn’t her trying to be self-sufficient. That was her wanting to be his wife in the traditional Zakharian sense.

He didn’t give a damn about her cooking skills—they could eat frozen dinners or fast food every night for all he cared. But he suddenly saw a vision of the two of them messing around in the kitchen together after a long, hectic day—teaching for her, an agency investigation for him. He wouldn’t be able to share much about his job with her, but then she had never pushed him to tell her things; she respected the boundaries he couldn’t cross. And she wouldn’t be able to share much about her job with him, either. Not because of security restrictions, but because her specialty was beyond his comprehension—if he’d learned nothing else attending her classes while guarding her, he’d learned that.

But those things didn’t matter. She just wanted to belong to him...and have him belong to her. Simple...yet profound. Wasn’t that what he wanted, too?

He pulled out his wallet and picked up his cell phone. He had to call information to get the number, and the last-minute purchase put a dent in his credit card balance, but fifteen minutes later he had a flight to Zakhar booked for New Year’s Eve, the earliest flight available.

Exhaustion tugged at Trace and he made his way slowly into the bedroom, afraid he still wouldn’t be able to sleep. But whether it was because he’d never brought the princess to the bedroom in his cabin, or because he was literally weaving on his feet or because his conscience was finally at peace now that he’d made his flight reservation, he slept the clock around and then some.

When he woke the next evening he had a vague memory of waking once or twice and stumbling to the bathroom, then falling back into bed almost immediately, but he couldn’t have said exactly how many times it had happened. Now when he woke he was aware of two things: the sun was already setting and he was ravenous. He tried to remember if he had any food in the kitchen. He didn’t feel up to driving in to town to one of the restaurants there, but he would if he had to.

I should keep this place stocked better,
he told himself a few minutes later as he dumped a can of Beefaroni into a pot with a can of green beans, both cans near their expiration dates. He stirred it all together and watched impatiently until it was warm enough to be edible—he was too hungry to wait for it to be truly hot. Then he stood over the sink and wolfed the mixture down. It was surprisingly good.
Or maybe I was so hungry old shoes would have tasted good,
he thought humorously. He had just run water in the pot to let it soak before washing, when he heard a faint sound at the front door.

He automatically reached for the SIG SAUER in his shoulder holster and cursed when his hand came up empty, then remembered he’d left his gun on the coffee table the day before. He made a diving leap for the gun just as both the front and back doors burst open. And that was the last thing he remembered clearly for a long, long time...

* * *

Drugged. They’d kept him drugged. He’d been trussed up like a chicken, blindfolded, drugged and transported. Where? For what purpose? And who was it? The New World Militia? The Russian mob? Someone else? And why? Why bother transporting him? More dangerous that way, more likely that something would go wrong and they’d be discovered. Why not just kill him and get it over with?

He didn’t realize he was floating in and out of consciousness. Didn’t realize that after the first time he was no longer bound, gagged or blindfolded. Just drugged. He didn’t realize he’d been fed three separate times, and that the drugs had been administered in his food. He also didn’t realize a physician had carefully monitored his vital signs the entire time he was a captive.

But some part of him
had
recognized he was on a plane—that droning sound was unmistakable, and in his drugged state he sometimes thought he was back in the Marine Corps, flying in a military transport into and out of Afghanistan. Other times he thought he was dead, waiting in limbo for God to decide his fate—heaven or hell. He examined his conscience and figured it was a toss-up, unless God gave him the benefit of the doubt for good intentions.

He woke for the last time as he was being strapped down on a stretcher, then carried gently out of a plane. His first confused thought was that he’d woken up in Brigadoon, the fairy-tale city of stage-and-screen fame that only appeared once every hundred years. Snow-capped peaks ringed the city around him; the air was fresh and pure; and quaint, winding streets led upward from the airport toward a palace on a hill. Then he knew where he was. And unless he was much mistaken, he wasn’t about to die anytime soon.

* * *

Trace was ushered into a long, spacious room, and the door was closed behind him. His kidnappers had given him time to recover, time for the drugs to be completely washed from his system, but they hadn’t told him a damned thing. His clothes had been taken, cleaned and returned to him, although he felt partially naked without his shoulder holster and gun—he’d gone strapped for so long he didn’t feel dressed without it. Then they’d brought him here...and left him.

He took a look around. Mirrors interspersed with life-size portraits lined one side, tall windows the other. It made the room look twice as big as it really was, although it was big enough to play flag football in. Not that anyone would, because the furnishings were priceless antiques.

He wandered down one side, casually glancing at the portraits of long-dead rulers of Zakhar until his attention was riveted by a relatively recent family portrait of a man, a woman and a baby. The man he recognized as the previous king of Zakhar—Mara’s father. And the woman, the woman could have been Mara, but he knew it must have been her mother.

I didn’t realize the princess resembles her mother so closely,
he thought. But the more he studied the portrait the more he realized there were noticeable differences. The woman in the portrait had hair that was more golden than Mara’s honey-brown color, and there was an expression on her face he’d never seen on Mara’s—a haughty superiority that matched the expression on her husband’s face. On occasion the princess had been haughty, even peremptory at times, but never superior.

And the beauty of the woman in the painting owed a lot to artifice. Her face was meticulously made up to enhance her beauty, but it was a cold, impersonal look, like a fashion model in a glossy magazine. There was none of the soft, natural warmth Mara exuded.

The vast, marble-tiled room was empty of people save for himself, but not for long. A side door opened and a man walked through, closing the door firmly behind him. He was tall and well built, and he carried himself like a soldier, but there was something else about him that Trace couldn’t put a finger on. Then it came to him. This man had that same regal air Mara did.

He stopped a few feet away from Trace. His eyes flickered to the family portrait that had held Trace’s interest. “Yes,” he said without preamble. “Mara resembles our mother. That only complicated things for her where my father was concerned, especially as she grew older.”

He turned his attention back to Trace. “I apologize for the necessity of kidnapping you,” he said in the same precise English his sister used, the precision a dead giveaway it wasn’t his first language. “I needed to talk to you and it was impossible for me to leave Zakhar at this time.”

Trace shifted his stance belligerently. Being kidnapped still rankled. “You couldn’t just do it over the phone?”

“No.” Nothing more, just that no.

The silence stretched out as each man assessed the other. Trace saw a man a shade taller than his own nearly six feet two, just as fit, a few years younger. He could see the family resemblance in their coloring and their eyes, but whereas the princess was feminine down to her fingertips, the king was very much a man’s man. There was also a sense of physical power held in check, and Trace remembered how Mara had once described her brother—
he is a man who will always be stronger than anyone who goes against him.

Now Trace knew she hadn’t been exaggerating. Zakhar’s king was a man first, and a king second. He waited for the king to say something, but the silence between them remained unbroken until Trace finally said, “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

Without warning the king asked, “Is my sister pregnant?”

It took a second for the question to sink in. Then Trace swore and hit him. The king had an iron jaw, and though he was staggered by the blow, it didn’t knock him down. Trace expected a return punch and readied himself for it, but the king just stood there rubbing his jaw with one powerful hand, a faint smile on his face.

When it was clear he had no intention of starting—or finishing—a brawl, Trace relaxed slightly and flexed his fingers, pain that had been blocked out in the heat of the moment suddenly making itself known. It hurt like hell, but he didn’t regret it.

He raised his gaze from his throbbing knuckles to the man in front of him. “I never touched your sister,” he told the king in a harsh tone. His innate honesty made him add, “Not that way. You slander her by insinuating—” Only then did he realize the original question hadn’t been asked in English, and his vehement response had been the same. Only then did he realize the king had used a crude Zakharan term for pregnancy, one that only a native Zakharian would know. He’d been baited deliberately for exactly the response he’d given.

“That is why I could not ask you over the phone,” the king said, in English this time, still with that faint smile. “Your reaction tells me three things.” He ticked them off. “One, you understand and speak Zakharan. Unless I am mistaken—and I rarely am—you probably speak it like a native.” He didn’t wait for Trace to either confirm or deny this statement before continuing.

“Two, you do not give a damn who I am. That is good,” he said approvingly. “Better than I had hoped.” His smile faded. “And three, you would defend my sister’s honor as if it were your own.” He considered Trace for a moment. “So I have to ask—why is she here and not in America?”

Taken aback, Trace could only say, “I... It’s Christmas break. The university is closed until school starts up again in mid-January.” It was a lie, because he knew she had no intention of returning. But it was the only thing he could think of.

“Yes, but she is here and you are there. At least, that is where she thinks you are. So why is she here...alone?”

A dozen responses went through Trace’s head, but none he could say to the king of Zakhar. So he just pressed his lips sternly together and refused to speak.

“What do you know of my father?”

The question came out of the blue, and took him by surprise. “Enough,” Trace said, glancing at the portrait on the wall. His tone was grim, bitter. “Enough to know I’m very sorry he’s dead...because I would have liked to meet him in a dark alley.”

The king nodded his agreement. “If that is how you feel then you know Mara has been wounded in a way no child should ever be wounded.” For a moment his eyes were hard and cold, and Trace could relate. “I tried to make it up to her, but I am just her brother, and it was not enough. For years I thought she would never recover, that she would live apart in her own little world forever, no matter what I did.”

The king’s jaw tightened. “Seven years ago my father tried to force Mara into an arranged marriage. Some women could have survived that kind of marriage, but not Mara—it would have destroyed her. I could not let that happen, so I put a stop to it.”

“How did you—” Trace began, then remembered little things Mara had told him about her brother, and understood. “Leverage.”

“If you like,” the king said. “Some would call it blackmail. The end result is the same.”