The Christmas Princess (7 page)

“Ready, Leslie?” Tris asked from the doorway, then immediately stepped into the room, “What is it? Was that April? Is something wrong? Is that why she hadn’t called back earlier?”

Leslie caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Yes, it was April. She says everything’s fine.”

“She says,” Tris repeated, clearly understanding the significance of those words. They’d been friends before their marriages. With their husbands part of a trio of college friends, they’d become even closer over the years.

“She said she served dinner at the shelter and went to the animal shelter today with a
colleague
.”

“Not Reese?”

“Not Reese,” Leslie confirmed.

“Well, that shouldn’t break your heart. Though it does seem odd that Lois Warrington would allow it. Wasn’t her complaining about dog hair the reason April cut back her volunteering at the animal shelter?”

“Yes. And that’s something else. April’s adopted a dog. Rufus.”

Tris’ eyebrows rose. “A dog? Especially a dog named Rufus? In Lois Warrington’s house?”

Leslie smiled briefly. It was gone when she said, “Something’s going on, Tris.”

“Yes. But she’s an adult, Les. You can love and support and be available when she wants your help, but you can’t interfere.”

Leslie made a face. “You might be able to convince me of that, but if Grady gets an inkling …. Let’s keep this between us, for now, okay?”

There was a small fake Christmas tree lighting up a table near the hotel’s back elevator that had April “ohhhing” as soon as they came in.

He felt something like relief at the sound.

The trip to the storage unit hadn’t gone well.

At first he’d thought she was putting things in the hall in order to get at something else.

“Tell me which box you want, and I’ll get it,” he’d said.

“I want them all.”

“Why?”

“So I can put up decorations.”

“Where?”

She’d straightened, blinked. “The suite.”

He tipped his head toward the labels on two of the bigger boxes. “Tree stand? Lights? Ornaments? You can’t put up a tree in a hotel suite. They won’t allow it.”

She’d stepped into the hallway, her head down. She might have been checking the labels of the boxes. Or not. “I suppose they won’t.”

“You wouldn’t have put up this stuff if you were still engaged to Warrington. So it’s really not any different.”

Her lips parted, then clamped shut.

He said, “I’ll put the boxes back and—”

“No. I’m taking some.”

He would have been better off letting her take all the boxes and doing the sorting at the suite. It took so long that both their stomachs were growling, and he was fully aware that his exercises in reason — pointing out she couldn’t put up a tree in the suite and she wasn’t missing out on anything because she wouldn’t have had this stuff at the Warringtons’ — had not been appreciated.

“Stay here,” he ordered.

“They’re my boxes. I’ll carry them.”

“Stay here,” he repeated grimly, refraining from commenting that actually many were her trash bags, since she’d pulled items out of boxes and put them in bags.

She turned away as he went back outside.

And damned if she wasn’t talking to that waiter who clearly knew her and Rufus better than he should when he returned, schlepping the remaining boxes and bags from the car.

The waiter handed over the leash attached to the dog and seemed to be giving a report on his behavior. Hunter frowned. He’d thought Vanessa from housekeeping had been in charge of Rufus’ care while they were gone.

The waiter spotted him and melted away.

She looked over her shoulder, her gaze practically daring him to comment. Then her stomach growled.

“Let’s get upstairs and heat up these leftovers,” he said.

Rufus gave a happy yip.

At least one of them was happy.

They watched Chevy Chase in
Christmas Vacation
on TV while they ate leftovers from the shelter, followed by pumpkin and apple pie Manny brought from the kitchen for dessert. Hunter sat in an upholstered chair and she on the couch. Neither of them had said much.

Once when she laughed at Chevy Chase marooned in the attic, he looked at her as if she might have belonged at the business end of a scientist’s microscope, but later she noticed him smile at the squirrel rampaging in the house. So that was progress. Not that she was trying to reform the man or anything.

It was simple human compassion to be concerned.

Especially after that reaction at the shelter’s Thanksgiving Dinner. He’d looked as if he expected to be shot any second. And as if that expectation made him all the more determined to stand his ground.

The news came on, led by a piece about another shelter giving out meals.

“I don’t think I thanked you for yet helping at the shelter,” she said.

“No problem.”

But it had been a problem. She was sure of it. Something about it had bothered him and —

He didn’t move, yet she felt the shift in his intensity. She realized the anchor was teasing a piece to come after a commercial break about the King of Bariavak’s surgery.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked abruptly.

He looked at her, then back to the screen as if the merits of the breakfast food being extolled there required great concentration. “Media gives us an idea of what the general public knows.”

“I don’t mean watching the news. This.” She gestured around the suite. “Me. Princess school.”

“Princess sch—?” He’d almost grinned. At least she thought that’s where his mouth had been headed until he clamped down on it. His voice was even. “It’s my job.”

“Why? I mean why do you do security for State,” she added quickly, because she guessed he was about to answer the
why
with
because my boss told me to
.

“It’s a good job. And I’m good at it.”

“There are a lot of other government agencies involved in security or law enforcement or—”

“News is coming back on. Don’t you want to see this?”

Damn him. Of course she did.

As she watched the clips of the King of Bariavak and listened to information about his being in D.C. in preparation for serious surgery after the first of the year, another part of her mind wondered if Hunter’s ability to shut down her questions was part of being good at his job.

Hunter arrived in perfect time Friday morning. She’d showered and dressed and was beginning to open the boxes and bags they’d brought from her storage unit yesterday.

“Good, you’re just in time to help me.”

He gave the open box in front of her a dour look. “We have work to do.”

“But it’s Christmas—”

“It’s the day after Thanksgiving. You asked for Thanksgiving, and you got it. Now it’s time to get back to work.”

“Don’t you have any Christmas spirit?”

“No.”

She sat back on her heels, challenging him. “What do you do for Christmas?”

“I work.”

“All day?”

“Often.”

“But not every year and even when you work all day you have to go home eventually. What do you do then?”

“I sit on the couch, drink a beer, and watch an NBA game.”

“You don’t have any traditions?”

“I told you. I sit on the couch—”

“Fine. What about a special meal?”

He shook his head.

“Turkey?”

Head shake.

“Beef roast? Ham?”

Head shake.

“Pie or cookies? Ah.” The head shake had faltered. “Cookies.”

“Sharon gives cookies to a lot of people.” He sounded defensive.

“Homemade Christmas cookies. That’s nice.” She brought her gaze back to him. “Sharon knows you very well, doesn’t she?”

She could have almost sworn he jumped. A small jump, like a nerve ticking under his skin. “No.”

“Sure she does, because you’re friends.”

“We’ve worked together a long time. She’s my boss.”

“One doesn’t preclude the other. I worked for Gerard Littrell and we were friends. I’m friends with Zoe and she’s my boss.”

“We’re not.” The dour look was back in full force. “It’s time to get to work.”

Feeling oddly cheerful she said, “No dancing or handshakes, since Derek’s not here to do the grunt work.”

“We’ll go over terminology and etiquette.”

She groaned. There went her cheerfulness. His, on the other hand, appeared to increase.

“Plus Bariavak’s geography and history.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Then I get at least an hour to ask questions about the king.”

He looked back at her without expression. “Yes, all right.”

“And you
answer
the questions,” she specified.

He raised both hands, palms toward her. As if such a dodge had never occurred to him, but the twitch of his mouth gave him away. “What I can tell you within operational protocol.”

April closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the top of the couch cushion.

Her mind felt like what was left over after winemakers squeeze every last bit of juice out of a grape. Smashed, deflated, empty.

Boy, she’d thought Great-Grandmother Beatrice’s lessons in deportment were tough.

She considered that with her eyes closed. Well, they were tough. They’d seemed downright impossible, not to mention unreasonable when she’d first encountered them as an adolescent. Now … they were still tough, but they covered a lot of situations, and covered them well.

The ones Hunter kept hitting her with were just so detailed and arcane.

That pretty much described what he’d told her about Bariavak’s history, too. Lots of dates, treaties, and dodging enemies thanks to the mountains that nearly surrounded the country.

He’d taken the same approach with her questions about King Jozef and his family.

“In 1962, his father—”

“No more dates. Tell me what his father was like. Better yet, what was his daughter like?”

“I never met her.”

“You never met any of these fusty old treaties, either,” she snapped, and saw the twitch of his mouth again. “Okay, you say you can’t tell me any details of how the baby princess went missing because of operational security. But what do the reports of Princess Sofia’s character and personality and relationship with her parents and husband say?”

Getting it out of him wasn’t quite that simple. But she did begin to get a sense of a young woman whose mother had died when she was a girl, who had rebelled against her father strenuously in her teens, then had reconciled with him, especially after her marriage.

April empathized with Sofia — the death of a beloved parent as a child, the period of rebellion, the reconnecting and mellowing. One place where their stories diverged was that Sofia had married a man her father approved of in what appeared to have been a love match.

Her family hadn’t voiced overt disapproval of Reese. Then again, it turned out he hadn’t been a love match.

That was interesting … She said the phrase inside her head again.
He hadn’t been a love match
.

Nope. Hardly a twinge.

And she never had gotten around to crying over the end of the engagement. Not even about him having his mother doing the breaking up.

It was like she—

“Have you thought through what you will tell King Jozef if he’ll see you?” Hunter asked.

Her eyes popped open. “Tell him?”

“About yourself.”

“The truth.”

His brows dropped into a frown. “This might not be the time for the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“I’m not going to…”
Lie to him
. But she was. That’s exactly what she was going to do. By presenting herself as a
possibility
that she didn’t believe in.

“You don’t have to tell him a lot.” Apparently he’d interpreted her phrase differently. “But you do need to be prepared for him to ask you questions. About your childhood. What you remember of your parents.”

“But won’t that—”

“No. If the princess survived the kidnapping she’d have been too young to remember anything about it or life before it. So your memories of your parents don’t rule you out. Neither does the paper trail.”

She nodded slowly. “Because my parents moved around a lot and didn’t keep records. I remember Great-Grandma Beatrice and Leslie having trouble getting me enrolled in school when I started living with them.”

“You had to have been in school before you were thirteen,” he objected.

“Oh, yeah. But when they asked for records, Melly would keep stalling and stalling them. If we didn’t move on anyway, she’d buy time by pulling me out of that school and putting me in another.”

“That’s not easy.”

His voice was even, but she knew with absolute certainty that he understood. Because he’d experienced something similar?

“No, it’s not.”

“But you don’t let it define you.”

Now she really wondered if he was talking about her or himself.

Either way, she confirmed, “No, you don’t.”

Hunter stopped outside the hotel suite’s bedroom door and listened. April was restless tonight.

As if she might be wondering what she’d gotten herself into.

She couldn’t say he hadn’t given her a chance to back out. Even after she’d said she’d do it.

You don’t want to spend Christmas with your family?

He never should have asked that. And she’d homed right in on it.

Weren’t you the one who wanted me to do this?

Answering with the
No
that had been in the back of his throat wouldn’t have been a good idea on many levels.

He paced across the living room, standing at an angle to the window to look down. Every other street light had a large green representation of a red-ribboned wreath hanging from it. The alternate poles held flags with red and green and gold.

Decorations had popped up all over, like an army of Aprils had been at work.

He’d kept her too busy to do much, but she’d still managed to set out a dozen or so decorations.

He shouldn’t have let her bring all this stuff from her storage unit. He shouldn’t have let her go to the animal shelter. He sure as hell shouldn’t have served up food beside her to those people.