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