Читать книгу Ransom for a Prince - Lisa Childs, Lisa Childs, Livia Reasoner - Страница 7

“Mama, is he a real prince? Like in my stories, like the one who kissed Sleeping Beauty?”

Jessica glanced up from the sink of dishes to focus on the television on the counter nearest the farmhouse table. She had turned the channel to cartoons for Samantha to watch while the four-year-old ate her breakfast, but the screen displayed no animated figures. Just a tall man in a dark, tailored suit.

As a reporter announced that Prince Sebastian Cavanaugh had called this press conference at the sheriff’s office, a camera zoomed in on the royal’s face. It was all chiseled features—rigid jaw, aristocratic cheekbones beneath intense, dark blue eyes and his nose was just slightly bent in an arrogant tilt. She doubted it could have once been broken. After all, he was a prince—privileged and protected.

He was one of the five rulers of island nations in the Mediterranean, who had, along with their entourages, converged on Dumont, Wyoming, for a summit meeting two weeks ago. That meeting had yet to occur.

Jessica didn’t need to listen to the press conference to learn why; she already knew. Too well. Every time she closed her eyes she saw why: the flames illuminating the night sky, rising up from the charred metal of the limousine she’d been following from the Wind River Ranch and Resort. If only the fire was all she’d seen…

Her breath hitching, she blinked open her eyes and focused on the television again. And on the prince. She lost herself in the depths of those dark blue eyes as he stepped up to the mic at the podium set up in the sheriff’s office, which was located in the Wind River County Courthouse.

“Mama?” Samantha asked, her voice soft with confusion.

Jessica never ignored her daughter, but she still couldn’t tear her gaze from the screen.

“I am Prince Sebastian Cavanaugh, coruler with my brother, Antoine, of the island nation of Barajas.”

The little girl’s breath shuddered out with a gasp of awe. “He is a real prince.”

“Yes,” Jessica murmured—finally—in acknowledgment.

“Barajas,” Cavanaugh continued, “is part of COIN, the Coalition of Island Nations consisting of Kyros, Nadar and Jamala, that came to your country—and your particular county—for a special summit to discuss trade agreements that would benefit the United States as well as COIN.”

Cameras flashed in his face as reporters interrupted with questions. A burly man, perhaps one of the royal’s security detail, stepped closer to the prince and leaned toward the microphone as if to warn the media to back off. But Prince Sebastian turned to him, an intense look in his eyes, and the man shrank back. Then the prince turned that stare on the reporters and the questions stopped, an eerie silence descending on the crowded outer office.

“Since our arrival, we have been under attack.” A muscle twitched in his lean cheek just above the tightly clenched jaw. “There have been vocal protests of our visit to your country. And there have been physical protests. On our first night here, an explosion occurred which killed a man.”

Jessica flinched but kept her eyes open so that she wouldn’t see again that horror. But it didn’t matter. The image was forever burned in her mind, like the body had burned.

“We have recently been made aware that there was a witness to that explosion,” Prince Cavanaugh continued. “We need this witness to come forward as we believe he or she has vital information.”

Jessica gasped. How had they found out? Who else might know that she’d been traveling that same road and had come upon the scene? She shivered.

The camera zoomed in on the prince. While an aura of arrogance and authority clung to the man’s broad shoulders and rigidly clenched jaw, he buried that pride as his gaze implored the witness to share what she knew. “This is a matter of life and death. A friend of mine—” his voice was gruff with emotion “—has been missing since the explosion. I am offering a substantial reward for information that will lead to his return.”

After another beat of silence from the reporters, the room erupted with questions. They shouted over each other, so their voices were unintelligible.

Prince Sebastian fixed that stare on the crowd again until they subsided to just excited murmurs. “One question at a time,” he directed them.

“How much is the reward?” Danny Harold asked. The reporter from the local television station had pushed closest to the podium.

The prince’s reply had the crowd gasping with surprise and awe.

“So it’s Sheik Amir Khalid who is missing?” Danny tossed out another question. “Do you believe he’s still alive or do you suspect he’s dead?”

The intensity of Prince Cavanaugh’s gaze changed from intimidation and arrogance to anguish and frustration. “We do not have enough information to determine the sheik’s whereabouts or his physical condition.”

“And you believe this witness might know where he or his body is?” Although many other reporters crowded the room, it was Danny who asked this question, too. Maybe it was because he was a local that his interest in the story seemed so personal.

The muscle twitched again in the prince’s lean cheek. “That is what we believe and why we are offering such a substantial reward.”

Danny snorted. “That substantial reward is going to have every kook coming out of the woodwork with a cockamamie story so they can claim the money.”

“Kooks?” the prince repeated, arching a golden brown brow.

“Crazies, crackpots,” Danny translated.

Prince Sebastian’s lips—the bottom one full and sensual—curved into a slight grin. “My brother, Prince Antoine, has a way of determining when a person is telling the truth or a lie.”

Danny nodded in agreement. “He was an interrogator with military special forces.”

The prince neither confirmed nor denied the reporter’s statement. He just stared again, his blue eyes unblinking.

“And you were a sniper.”

“Any more questions?” Prince Cavanaugh asked.

Jessica had many. So did her daughter.

“What’s a matter, Mama?” The little girl slid out of her chair to join Jessica at the sink. She tugged on her soapy hand to gain her mother’s attention.

“Nothing,” Jessica replied as she turned toward her daughter. The sun streaming through the windows glinted off the little girl’s honey brown hair and sparkled in her gray eyes, highlighting the child’s concern. Jessica forced a reassuring smile. “I just got caught up in the news, like you sometimes do your cartoons.”

“Didn’t you ever seen a prince before?”

Jessica wasn’t exactly certain what she’d seen that night except that it was probably enough to put her daughter and her in danger. Well, more danger than they were already in.

“There’re no such things as princes,” a husky but feminine voice murmured as Helen Jeffries joined them in the kitchen. The tall woman stomped her boots on the woven rug at the back door, knocking off mud and straw.

“Is, too,” Samantha said, pointing at the television screen. “He’s a real prince.”

Helen snorted. “He might legally be a prince, but I’ve yet to meet a man who’s a real prince.”

The little girl’s forehead scrunched up with confusion. “The ones in my books and movies aren’t real?”

“Fairy tales,” Helen replied cynically. “Not real.”

“What about Clay McGuire?” Jessica asked about the rancher Helen dated.

The older woman snorted again. “He’s a cowboy.”

“Can’t princes be cowboys?” Samantha asked.

Jessica chucked her daughter’s slightly pointed chin. “You got that backward, honey.”

The little girl’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “How?”

“Cowboys can’t be princes,” Helen explained with a grin. She stepped closer to the sink and dipped her hands into the sudsy water.

“You should have let me feed the animals,” Jessica said. Then she would have missed that special report.

Helen shook her head. She’d owned and managed the Double J alone for years. The older woman was so fiercely independent and proud that she insisted on doing more of the chores herself. Jessica was proud, too, though and had convinced Helen to accept her help in lieu of the room and board she refused to let Jessica pay her. “I’d rather work in the barn than the kitchen,” Helen said as she brushed a fingertip across Samantha’s button nose, leaving a dab of foam on the upturned tip of it.

Jessica lifted up her daughter and hugged her sweet-smelling body close. “Sweetheart, why don’t you run up to your room and change out of your pajamas and into your clothes?”

“Do I have school today?” Samantha asked, her gray eyes bright with hope.

Preschool was in session today, but Jessica didn’t dare bring Samantha into town when it was overrun with media. “No school. You have work to do here instead, young lady. You have to pick up all the toys in your room.”

“There’re not that many, Mama,” Samantha said, wriggling down from her arms.

Jessica’s heart clutched with sadness that it was true. She wasn’t able to afford everything her little girl deserved. “You still have to pick them up.”

Samantha, feet dragging, headed up the back stairwell in the kitchen. The house was a foursquare, two-story farmhouse. It had a large foyer with a grand staircase as well as the back stairwell. It also had more bedrooms than they needed. Now. But the ranch owner had plans to someday turn her home into a women’s shelter. She’d put her plan in motion when she’d offered Jessica shelter more than four years ago.

Helen narrowed her eyes and focused on Jessica. “What’s going on? You never lie to her.”

“I have,” Jessica regretfully admitted. Every time the little girl asked about her father.

With understanding Helen nodded. “Why won’t you bring her to school?”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“School is too dangerous?”

“It’s too dangerous for us to go to town right now.” The prince’s press conference had whipped the media into a frenzy, and they’d already been doing too much filming around Wind River County and the town of Dumont.

If she’d been caught on camera…

Helen sighed. “Crazy stuff going on since those damn royals came to Dumont. That explosion. Gunfire. And poor Clay…” His family had been among the most vocal protestors of the COIN summit. Now his youngest boy sat in jail.

“Mr. McGuire will be okay,” Jessica assured her friend. “He has you.”

Helen shrugged as if she wasn’t so worried that Jessica usually found her staring at the TV into the early hours of the morning instead of sleeping. “He’s busy. I’m busy. We just see each other occasionally, you know. Nothing serious.”

Was that really because they were too busy or because they both had their reasons for avoiding involvement? Jessica understood their reasons; she had her own. But then the prince’s face filled the television screen again as the station replayed the earlier live broadcast. His deep blue gaze implored the witness to come forward, to ease some of his anxiety over his missing friend.

“Can you watch Samantha for me for a little while?” she asked the older woman.

Helen nodded. “Of course I can. And I don’t blame you. That’s a lot of money.”

“I’m not claiming the reward.”

“But, Jess—”

“I need to pick up my last check from the Wind River Ranch and Resort.” She’d worked part-time as a dishwasher there because she had thought she would be safe hiding away in the hotel kitchen. She’d been wrong. About everything. “Then I’m packing up Samantha’s and my things and leaving the Double J.”

Helen gasped in surprise.

“You probably thought that you’d never get rid of us—”

“Never wanted to, honey, you know that,” her friend assured her. “I don’t want you to go now.”

“I have to,” Jessica insisted. “It’s getting too dangerous here. I should have left earlier—right after it happened. Hell, I should have left before the royals even arrived. I knew their meeting would bring the media down on Dumont.”

But she hadn’t expected the rest of it: the explosion, the murder…

“PRINCE SEBASTIAN, I wish you wouldn’t have done that,” Sheriff Jake Wolf said with a long-suffering sigh.

The younger man had had his hands full since they’d come to his county for their summit meeting. According to what the royals had learned, Wolf had already had enough to deal with since getting elected the year before, like corruption within his department and perhaps within the police department of Dumont. That was why Sebastian had chosen the sheriff’s office in which to announce the reward for information.

“You agreed to the press conference,” he reminded him.

“The amount of the reward you offered is the problem.” Wolf groaned. “Danny Harold was right. It’ll draw out every kook. Hell, it already is drawing ’em out.” He gestured toward his deputies and office staff, all of whom were on a phone.

“It’s been a couple of weeks since the explosion, but this witness has yet to come forward,” Sebastian pointed out, frustration gnawing at his tense stomach. “Apparently this person needs more incentive than the satisfaction of doing the right thing.”

“Or he or she is too scared to come forward,” the sheriff replied.

With good cause, too, given the evidence that had recently come to light. The royals had only just learned about the witness when Sheik Efraim Aziz discovered a posting on a special internet bulletin board that had promised to “take care” of the witness.

“The proper incentive has been known to make a person overcome his deepest fears,” Sebastian said. But how would the witness know he was in danger unless someone had acted upon the “hit” put out on him?

“Maybe this person isn’t able to come forward anymore.” The sheriff voiced Sebastian’s deepest fear.

If the witness had already been disposed of, then he and his friends may never discover what had happened to Amir. They wouldn’t know if he, too, had already been disposed of.

One of the deputies stood up and gestured wildly for the sheriff’s attention. When Wolf headed toward the young man’s desk, Sebastian followed, his pulse quickening in anticipation. “What is it?” the sheriff asked.

“The prince is actually right here,” the deputy replied—but to the caller, not his superior. He pressed his palm over the receiver and held it out. “She’ll speak to only you, Your Highness.”

Despite the trepidation clutching his heart, Sebastian reached for the phone with a steady hand. He had learned long ago to control his physical reactions because he’d had to have a steady finger on the trigger. But he couldn’t control the curse from slipping through his lips when he heard only a dial tone.

“She’s gone?” the deputy asked.

Sebastian jerked his head in a rough nod. “Did you get the number from the caller ID?”

“It was blocked,” the young man replied.

“Can you trace it?”

The deputy’s face flushed. “I don’t think the call lasted long enough.”

“Then maybe she is coming here—to talk to me. Maybe she only wanted to know if I was here.” That had to be it. To collect the money for her eyewitness account, or her cockamamy story if the persistent reporter and the sheriff were correct, she needed to talk to him.

“Or she’s setting up a trap,” Sheriff Wolf said. “You and the other royals have been threatened. There have been previous attempts on some of your lives.”

Sebastian gave in to a slight grin. “You believe it is now my turn?”

“And thanks to that press conference you just held, they know where you are.”

“So they will storm the courthouse to kill me?”

“Prince Stefan was nearly shot outside this very building, his security guard killed,” the sheriff reminded him, his voice pitched low so that any of the lingering reporters would not overhear. “These are bold criminals.”

The royals had been warned that they were all in danger even before they’d landed on American soil. Then the limo had exploded, probably when someone had suspected they would all be riding in it. No one had been able to determine who was behind the explosion, so they were still in danger. “We have taken precautions.”

“Your security force?” the sheriff scoffed.

“It is true that some of our men have proven themselves without honor and allegiance.”

“As you said, with the proper incentive…”

Money. Vengeance. Jealousy. Sebastian wasn’t certain exactly what had compelled their men to turn against them, and because of that, he wasn’t certain he could trust any of the others to not turn as well. “That is why I must remain here, in case the witness does want to talk to me. No one else can be trusted.”

“No one?” the sheriff asked, his jaw tensing with anger.

“It is not only our security team that has been bribed.”

“True.” Law enforcement had also been involved in some of the attacks.

“Because no one can be trusted, we have no option but to protect ourselves.”

The sheriff shook his head. “You have another option. Go home. Go back to your islands and away from the danger and let me do my job without your interference.”

“We will not leave until our friend is found.”

“Then I hope like hell that was the witness on the phone and that she’s coming in to talk to you.”

Sebastian narrowed his eyes and studied the younger man’s face. Was he telling the truth? Of everyone Sebastian had met in Wyoming, he almost trusted Sheriff Wolf. But with lives at stake, he couldn’t allow himself to trust anyone but Antoine. “I can take care of myself, Sheriff.”

“Danny was right about your military training?”

Sebastian nodded.

“But being a sniper is different than being the one who’s hunted. In the service, you remained a safe distance from the action. If you stay here, you can’t.”

“I’m not certain Barajas would be a safe distance from the action.” There was a chance that his and his brother’s enemies had been behind the explosion in hope of killing him and Antoine. Because of their military background, they had several enemies.

The sheriff expelled a ragged sigh of resignation. “The danger could follow you home. It probably is better that you all stay where I can protect you.”

Sebastian chuckled. “As I said, Sheriff, I will protect myself as well as the witness. I will wait here until she arrives to claim her reward for the information she’s been withholding.”

“You could have a long wait,” Wolf warned. “It may already be too late for that witness.”

IT WASN’T TOO LATE. She could turn around and head to the Wind River Ranch and Resort to collect that last check, like she had intended. But instead Jessica steered the Suburban around a couple of television station vans that still lined the street. Even though it had been a few hours since the prince’s press conference, they remained outside the three-story beige brick county courthouse that housed the sheriff’s office. Was he still here?

She maneuvered the ranch vehicle into an empty space quite a ways down the block. Then she glanced at the cell phone she’d dropped onto the passenger seat. Why had she called? Because of his damned eyes, imploring her to do the right thing. But was this the right thing?

If one of the camera crew captured her on film and nationally broadcast the coverage…

Would he recognize her? She glanced into the rearview mirror and even after nearly five years of this auburn color and long, straight style, she barely recognized herself except for her eyes. She could have tried to hide the brown with colored contacts, but she wouldn’t have been able to hide the fear that she’d never stopped feeling. Not with him out there, determined to find her.

And kill her.

But it wasn’t just her life she risked by coming here. She could be risking the sheik’s, too. What if he was safer if no one knew he was alive? But she remembered the anguish and frustration in Prince Sebastian Cavanaugh’s blue gaze, and guilt churned in her stomach. He had to know what had happened to his friend. She had to tell him.

Her fingers trembling, she fumbled with the handle before opening the driver’s door and sliding out of the vehicle. Then, head down, she hurried past the reporters’ vans. She hesitated outside the county courthouse before pushing open the door and stepping inside. Security scanners blocked the foyer, but while she stepped into a line, she could see into the outer office where the conference had been held. A few reporters waited while cameramen filmed the deputies taking calls.

Were those calls coming from people trying to claim the reward? But no one else had seen what she had, except for whoever she’d spied driving away from the scene. Maybe that person had decided to come forward and Jessica didn’t need to be here; she didn’t need to risk her own safety. Or Samantha’s.

She stepped out of the security line and backed toward the doors. She couldn’t risk going inside with all those cameras. But before she could turn away, Prince Sebastian looked up from the desk over which he’d been leaning. And his deep blue gaze met hers.

Panic accelerated her pulse, so that it leaped at her throat and hammered at her wrists. Even though several feet and people separated them, she had confirmation that the television screen had not made him more handsome than reality. With his golden brown hair, those piercing eyes and his long, lean body, he was as handsome in person as he’d been on the screen. More so even. Heat flashed through her along with the panic.

But then a camera flashed and another lens turned toward her, and panic won out. She turned and ran. But the sick feeling in her stomach warned her that it was already too late. Coming here had been a mistake. One that would probably get her killed.