Sadness clutched at her and she nodded. That was why they had so many orphans living in the dorms. The compound consisted of classroom huts and living quarters. If disease hadn’t taken their parents, violence had.
“I’ve been safe here,” she reminded Lydia.
“At the school,” the woman agreed, “because the people here respect and appreciate that we’re helping the children. But once you leave here …”
“I’ll be fine,” she assured her although she wasn’t entirely certain she believed that herself.
“You have a bodyguard for a reason. Because of who you are, you’re always in danger.” Lydia was too busy and the country too remote for her to be up on current affairs, so Charlotte must have told her all about Gabby’s life.
Gabriella glanced down at her swollen belly. Her bare feet peeped out beneath it, her toes stained with dirt from the floor. “No one will recognize me.”
Not if they saw her now. She bore only a faint resemblance to the pampered princess who’d walked runways and red carpets.
But she wasn’t only physically different.
She didn’t need anyone to protect her anymore—especially since she really couldn’t trust anyone but herself. She had to protect her life and the life she was carrying inside her.
A WALL OF HEAT hit Whit when he stepped from the airport. Calling the cement block building with the metal roof an airport seemed a gross exaggeration, though. He stood on the dirt road outside, choking on the dust and the exhaust fumes from the passing vehicles. Cars. Jeeps. Motorbikes. A bus pulled up near the building, and people disembarked.
A pregnant woman caught his attention. She wore a floppy straw hat and big sunglasses, looking more Hollywood than third world. But her jeans were dirt-stained as was the worn blouse she wore with the buttons stretched taut over her swollen belly.
It couldn’t be Gabby.
Hell, she was pregnant; it couldn’t be Gabby …
His cell vibrated in his pocket, drawing his attention from the woman. He grabbed it up with a gruff, “Howell here.”
“Are you there?” Charlotte Green asked, her voice cracking with anxiety. “Have you found her yet?”
“The plane just landed,” he replied.
He had only glanced at his phone when he’d turned it back on, but he suspected all the calls he’d missed and the voice mails he had yet to retrieve had been from the princess’s very worried bodyguard.
“But Whit—”
“Give me a few minutes,” he told her. “You’re not even sure she’s still here.”
Wherever the hell here was; from his years as a U.S. Marine, he was well traveled but Whit had never even heard of this country before. Calling it a country was like calling that primitive building an airport—a gross exaggeration.
“I finally reached my aunt Lydia this morning,” Charlotte said. “She confirmed that Gabby is still at the orphanage.”
He exhaled a breath of relief. She was alive. And not lost. “That’s good.”
Nobody had kidnapped the princess as they had her bodyguard. Gabby was right where Charlotte had sent her six months ago. Why hadn’t she answered the woman’s previous calls then?
“She’s all right?”
“No.” Static crackled in the line, distorting whatever else Charlotte might have said.
He stopped walking, so that he didn’t lose the call entirely. Reception was probably best closest to the airport, so he took a few steps back into the throng of people.
“What’s wrong?” Whit asked, the anxiety all his now. “Has she been hurt?”
“Yeah …”
And he realized it wasn’t static in the line but Charlotte Green’s voice breaking with sobs. He had never heard the tough former U.S. Marshal cry before—not even when armed gunmen had been trying to kill them all. His heart slammed into his ribs as panic rushed through him. “Oh, my God …”
It had to be bad.
Not Gabriella.
She was the sweetest, most innocent person he’d ever met. Or at least she had been.
“Charlotte!” He needed her to pull it together and tell him what the hell had happened to the princess. In a country as primitive as this, it could have been anything. Disease. A rebel forces attack. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s my fault,” she murmured, sobs choking her voice. “It’s all my fault. I should have told her. I should have prepared her …”
“What?” he fired the question at her. “What should you have told her? What should you have prepared her for?”
The phone clanged and then a male voice spoke in his ear, “Whit, are you there?”
“Aaron?” He wasn’t surprised that his fellow bodyguard was with Charlotte. Since Aaron Timmer had found her after her six-month disappearance, the man had pretty much refused to leave her side. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t worry about that,” his fellow royal bodyguard advised. “It’s just personal stuff between Charlotte and Princess Gabriella.”
When the princess and her bodyguard had disappeared, Whit and Aaron had launched an extensive search to find them. Aaron had reached out for leads to their whereabouts. Whit had done the same, but he’d also dug deeply into their lives and discovered all their secrets, hoping that those revelations might lead him to them. So now he knew things about Princess Gabriella that she had yet to learn herself.
Or had she finally uncovered the truth? She must have and that was why Charlotte was so upset; she was probably full of guilt and regret. He recognized those emotions because he knew them too well himself.
“Damn it!” If that was the case, Gabby had to feel so betrayed. He added a few more curses.
“Whit,” Aaron interrupted his tirade. “Just find Gabriella and bring her home to St. Pierre Island. We’ll meet you there. The royal jet is about to land at the palace.”
“The king is still with you?” The monarch was really their responsibility, one that both men had shirked in favor of protecting the women instead. King Rafael St. Pierre hadn’t seemed to mind.
“He’s secure. Everything’s fine here,” Aaron assured Whit. “What about there?”
“I just got off the plane.” The third one. It had taken three planes—with not a single one of them as luxurious as the royal jet—over the course of three days to bring him to this remote corner of the world. And it would take a bus and a Jeep to get him to the orphanage deep in the jungle where the princess had been hiding for the past six months. “I haven’t had a chance to locate Gabby and assess the situation.”
Shots rang out. And he dropped low to the ground while he assessed this new situation. Who the hell was firing? And at whom? Him?
Nobody knew he’d been heading here but Charlotte and Aaron. Not that long ago he would have been suspicious; he would have considered that they might have set him up for an ambush. But the three of them had been through too much together recently. And if they’d wanted him dead, they wouldn’t have had to go to this much trouble to end his life. They could have just let him bleed out from the bullet wound to his shoulder.
But the shots weren’t being fired at him. They weren’t that close, nowhere near the dirt street where Whit stood yet. But the shots were loud because they echoed off metal. Someone was firing inside the airport. His hand shook as he lifted the cell to his ear again.
Aaron was shouting his name. “What the hell’s going on?