The Christmas Princess (8 page)

Memories tried to encircle him like the hazed light around each pole below.

He pivoted, strode to the couch, snagged a red and green quilted pillow from the corner and tossed it to a nearby chair so it wasn’t in his way, and sat.

He put his feet on the coffee table, pressed his shoulders against the cushion to stretch the muscles in his back. This was a heck of a lot more comfortable than a hundred other places he’d spent a night, or — if it came to that — the bed in the apartment he rented off Connecticut Avenue. He’d sleep fine when he was tired enough.

April’s decorative pillow showed a Santa in a rustic red coat in profile with a bag of toys over his shoulder and a dog standing at his side. The dog looked like that dog at the shelter. Dragon, that’s what she’d called him. Or maybe the pillow was getting old and frayed.

He grabbed the pillow from the chair and shoved it behind his back where it would do some good and he wouldn’t have to look at it.

“How’re you getting along with Hunter and Derek?”

Sharon spoke into a silence broken only by occasional tapping as they did online shopping side by side on the suite’s couch. Online was the way to shop for anyone in princess school.

April looked over at her. “Fine, I guess. Derek’s very pleasant. And a hard worker,” she added, remembering she was talking to his supervisor.

“And Hunter? Is he a hard worker, too?”

“Relentless.”

Sharon chuckled.

“He’s very—” She leaned over to stroke Rufus, who was curled up between their feet, buying time to think before she spoke this time. “—dedicated to his job. He could, uh, relax a little. The way he acts going in a door … I’ll probably have bruises from him yanking me behind him when we got back from the shelter last night.”

She smiled, but Sharon’s expression had gone serious. “You know why he does that?”

To be annoying? “No.”

“If there are two operatives, one covers front, one rear. But if there’s only one, he or she assesses the known — wherever you are now — for dangers. Once assured there are none, he or she enters the unknown first. So if there are any dangers there, the operative takes the risk, not the protectee.”

“I didn’t …” She swallowed. Sharon meant serious dangers and risk. “I didn’t realize. He never said—”

Sharon emitted an abbreviated chuckle. “And he never will. Not Impenetrable Pierce.”

“That’s his nickname?”

“Not one you want to call him, April. He doesn’t like it.”

“But you use it?”

“I’m privileged. I’ve known him since Day One in DS — Diplomatic Security — and he doesn’t scare me the way he does the rest of them. I tell you, if more Special Agents had three-year-olds, they’d be a lot less intimidated by Hunter. You should have seen my Ben when…”

Sharon told the tale well. And the next one. And the one after.

April was interested. Very interested. She asked to see photos of Sharon’s family and home because she was interested. Truly interested. She only wished she could have found out more about Hunter Pierce first.

It was a sure thing she wouldn’t get any information from him.

Hunter walked into the suite mid-afternoon to find April and Sharon side-by-side on the couch, apparently surfing the Internet. Rufus raised his head, saw who it was, gave a couple thumps of his tail and settled back down.

Hunter frowned. “Kenton’s supposed to be here.”

“Hello to you, too, Pierce. I stopped by while Ross has the kids at a football game this afternoon, and as long as I’m here, I gave Derek a couple hours off. You haven’t given anyone—” She flicked her gaze toward April. “—time to breathe this week.”

“We’re Christmas shopping,” April said, smiling. “One of my favorite things.”

Sharon snorted. “Don’t you keep up with the news? It’s all a commercial plot. Christmas — the holidays — are terrible for us. We eat too much, drink too much, stress too much. We rush around trying to pack too much into too few days, travel great distances in bad weather and all to see people who can drive us crazy in the shortest amount of time known to man. People — intelligent people, mind you — who
know
you’re a grown up, yet can’t seem to get past the fact they changed your diapers in some distant, dim past, leaving you forever locked in that stage in their minds.”

Hunter watched April’s face as she stared at the other woman. Was she feeling bad because of the reminder that she wouldn’t be spending these holidays with either her now-ex-fiancé or her family?

“Sharon—” he tried.

“Oh, and we spend money we can’t afford,” she continued, “because our mercenary offspring have been brainwashed by the megabucks machine of advertising conglomerates. We stay up until 3 a.m. wrapping heaps of packages — not to mention the impossible task of inserting Tab B2 into Slot 5AA — and the little heathens have all the paper shredded and the packages ripped apart by 5:02 a.m. Twenty minutes later they’re looking around for something new.

“And dinner! Don’t get me started on Christmas Day dinner. We’ve gotta have all of Ross’ family dishes and then there’s the real dinner —
my
family’s dinner. I feel like I cook for a month, then they plow through it in four and a half minutes. Except for the cookies, of course. Those they eat until they could fuel the entire Eastern seaboard with their sugar high. ”

April’s lips compressed.

He tried to change the subject. “It’s time to—”

Neither woman paid any attention. April spoke over him. “And you love it all, don’t you, Sharon?”

His boss opened her mouth, and he braced for a flow of hot words. Instead, she held her breath a second then released it in a puff. “Yeah, I do. It’s a great time.”

They smiled at each other.

He would never, in his life, understand women.

“So, what do your kids want for Christmas this year?” April asked her, leaning over to look at her screen.

“Oh, God, what don’t they want?” Sharon said. “Deposit the inventory of a ToyRUs warehouse in our family room and we’d be all set.”

He sat in the closer upholstered chair. “No more talk of shopping or Christmas. There’s too much to do.”

Sharon chuckled. “Hunter Pierce, the
real
Grinch.”

But April’s eyes were pinned on him, and they had gone huge.

“Hunter.” She sounded a little breathless. Almost as if she’d read the news on his face or in his voice somehow. But that wasn’t possible. People didn’t read him.

“The king will see you tomorrow. Three o’clock.”

Sharon whooped. “Hot damn!”

Rufus sat up, looking around, probably checking if he needed to bark at something.

April’s eyes widened even more. “He wants to see me?”

“He’s agreed to see you.”

She didn’t seem to notice his correction. “Tomorrow.”

“You’ll do fine.”

She met his eyes.

Then she looked away, stood, and walked into the bedroom.

When his gaze shifted back from the still-open door, Sharon held up one stop-sign hand before following April.

Rufus stared at him a moment, then trotted after the women.

Hunter waited. Maybe five seconds.

“I can’t do this. You have to postpone,” April was saying to Sharon as he entered the room. “Better yet, call it off.”

“What’s the problem?” he demanded.

April snapped. “Problem? For starters, let’s try that I have no idea why I’m doing this. All your talk of operational security. You’ve told me hardly anything about this king who’s—”

“We spent hours on him yesterday.”

“—supposed to be my grandfather. Dates. Facts. Not who he
is
. How can I—?”

“It would make him suspicious if you knew too much. The princess was taken when she was a baby in a crib. It’s not as if he’d expect her to have memories of him, the family, or that life.”

“That is not the point. I can’t believe I’ve gone along with this. Was I nuts?”

She opened her tote bag, pushing around the contents in an apparent search for something. All the while she muttered about being nuts, as well as something about a jaw and adventure. More accurately, s
tupid adventure
.

“Hah!” She pulled out a Metro card from the bottom of the tote. “It’s been interesting, but I’m out of here and—”

“You’re scared,” he said.

She whirled on him, bringing one end of Rufus’ leash with her. “Scared? Damn right I am, along with about a dozen other things.”

“April—” Sharon started.

“No, I’m sorry, Sharon. You’ve been great, but Mr. Silent Sam over there put me on the wrong side of his need-to-know-line, his operational security, and I went along with it. But now all I can think about is this king — this elderly man I’m going to meet and lie to. Pretend I’m the granddaughter he’s been searching for all these years. I can’t do it. Not without a better reason than I’ve been given so far.”

He opened his mouth.

“Don’t say it, Pierce. I won’t tell anyone anything anytime anyway. Or I’ll go to jail. I wouldn’t tell anyhow—who’d believe it? — but the jail thing clinches it. Besides, how much do I really know? Why’s a mystery to me and who or what aren’t much better. So your precious operational security is safe. But I’m leaving.”

“You can’t take the Metro,” he said.

“I sure can. I can—”

“You’re right.
You
can.
Rufus
can’t.”

She snapped her mouth closed.

“Sit down, April.” He pointed to the bed. “Please,” he added.

Her glare went on another beat before she put the Metro card and leash down with a show of keeping them within easy reach.

“There was no reason for you to know more unless King Jozef would see you. Now there is. Like I told you yesterday, Bariavak is nearly encircled by impenetrable mountains with one pass through them. That pass is what this is all about. The pass makes permission to fly through Bariavak’s airspace important. Without it, planes have to detour hundreds of miles or risk the peaks.”

“A lot of planes have been lost in those mountains,” Sharon filled in.

He continued, “Like I said yesterday, Bariavak has withstood the conquests that have swept the region over centuries because of its location in this mountain stronghold. However, there was a little-known conflict there almost thirty years ago. The U.S. and other allies sent select troops to help the king retain power when threatened by insurgents fostered by a neighboring country. Parliamentary reforms have—”

“The complete geopolitical ramifications can wait, Hunter,” Sharon interrupted. “The woman wants the real skinny.”

“For starters,” April said, “what does my pretending to be a princess have to do with flying through the pass?”

“King Jozef is considered friendly to the United States and our allies. However, as you know, he’s scheduled for major surgery in early January, complicated by his age. His heir is unreliable. Our government wants the king to sign an extension of the overflight agreement before his surgery.”

“He’s said no?”

“No. But he hasn’t said yes.’’ Hunter sounded absolutely detached. “He has said that at this stage in his life he would like more than anything else to find his granddaughter."

“But … you’re setting all this up to trick him? To—”

“To give an old man a happy holiday season? Perhaps his last?”

At Sharon’s question, April snapped her head around.

“It’s all in how you look at it,” Sharon continued. “He hasn’t had the easiest of lives. The king and his wife lost a number of children as babies. Then his wife died. His daughter, his only child to reach adulthood, had given birth to her first baby, a girl, when the uprising started. The baby was kidnapped from the palace — right out of her nursery — the very night victory over the insurgents was declared.”

“I don’t remember anything about this princess being kidnapped.”

“You were a baby when it happened,” Hunter pointed out.

“But you’d think a famous kidnapping … I mean everybody’s heard about the Lindbergh baby and that was decades before I was born.”

“It was kept quiet,” Sharon said. “There was never a ransom demand. It’s believed that agents of the defeated rebels took — possibly killed—”

“Probably,” Hunter inserted.

“—the baby as a final act of revenge. The king’s son-in-law had been assassinated three months before by rebels. When her husband was killed, the king’s daughter went into labor early, so the baby was a month premature. But the baby was healthy, and it seemed at least the princess would have her daughter. A year after the baby was taken, the princess died, too. They say she gave up. And the king was alone.”

Empathy flickered across April’s face. “But why did he keep it quiet? If he’d told the world, maybe they could have found her.”

“More likely, the rebels would have killed the baby, if they hadn’t already. Better to get rid of the evidence,” Hunter said. “Plus, he would have been flooded with false reports. Keeping details secret has made it easier to debunk false claimants.”

“There have been leads over the years,” Sharon said. “Enough so he could never stop hoping. And now he faces this surgery. Doctors didn’t want him traveling for several weeks before the operation, so he’s here alone for the holidays and—”

“Sharon wanted to give him a fairy-tale for Christmas.”

Two pair of reproachful eyes turned on him. The irritation-tinged reproach in his boss’s brown eyes should have concerned him more. Instead, it was sympathy-washed reproach in April’s blue eyes that twitched his muscles into motion.

He walked toward the door, turning back before crossing the threshold.

“You have to make up your mind, April. Right now. We can contact the embassy and explain we were mistaken about the woman we thought might be his granddaughter. Or …”

She stood. Her gaze steady.

“I’ll meet the king.”

Hunter stifled any reaction. “We have a lot of work to do—”

“No,” Sharon interrupted him. She squinted at April. “She should go to a salon — someplace great — be pampered, be treated like a—”

“No salon. Too visible,” he interrupted in turn. “Besides, she’s not supposed to have been raised as a princess, remember?”