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.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  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.

  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.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  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.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27