Ransom for a Prince Page 8

  “And I am not one of your subjects,” she reminded him. “You are not my prince.” No matter how much she might fantasize that he could have been. “You are not responsible for me or my safety.”

  He turned off to the ranch, driving past the sign for the Double J, or as it appeared, T. “If these men are, as I believe, after you because of what you witnessed, then you are most definitely my responsibility. After you spoke to the others, word could have leaked out that revealed your identity.”

  “But I didn’t really see anything, not anything that will lead back to who planted the bomb or even tell you where the sheik is.”

  “But everyone might not believe you shared everything that you witnessed.”

  “Do you?”

  Pulling up near the house, he braked the Suburban and turned toward her. He studied her with that implacable stare of his before replying, “I do.”

  She expelled a shaky breath of relief. She didn’t want him to think that she’d held anything back that could help him find his friend or the people after them. “Thank you…”

  “For believing you?”

  “And for the ride. But how will you get back to the resort?” She couldn’t drive him back. She and Samantha needed to leave the ranch right away.

  “I will drive back…with you and your daughter. I want to make sure that the two of you will be safe. So I will not let you out of my sight.”

  She shivered again as his words echoed those an other man had vowed to her. She had eventually escaped Evgeny, though.

  Could she escape the prince? Did she want to?

  His body tensed, his hands gripping the wheel as his stare went beyond her to the front door. She turned to follow his gaze and her heart slammed against her ribs. The door was open, the jamb splintered.

  “Oh, my God!” Her hands shaking, she threw open the passenger’s door, jumped down from the SUV and ran toward the steps to the porch. “Samantha! Helen!”

  She had thought that because Evgeny didn’t know about his daughter that the child would be safe—safer even when her mother wasn’t around. But she’d been wrong. Evgeny hadn’t just come back for her. He’d come back for their child, too.

  Was she too late to stop him from taking what mattered even more to her than her own life?

  Chapter Nine

  Sebastian caught Jessica just as she was running up the steps to the porch. He wrapped one arm around her waist and clasped his palm across her mouth. “Shh…they could still be inside.”

  Her eyes widened, her fear edging toward hysteria.

  “I’ll go in first,” he said. “You call Sheriff Wolf.” He pressed his cell into her hand and gently pushed her back toward the Suburban.

  She hesitated and opened her mouth, as if about to argue with him. Then he withdrew his gun from the waistband of his jeans. She nodded and, with shaking fingers, punched numbers into his phone.

  Forcing his heart rate to steady and his breathing to slow and even out, he crept up onto the porch, the worn stair treads barely creaking beneath his weight. Even before his military training, he’d learned how to move without making a sound. His gun drawn, he stepped through the open door into the foyer. Buckshot had torn the faded wallpaper on the foyer walls and peppered the door with holes, so that sunlight shone through it like Swiss cheese.

  Something horrible had happened here. Sebastian blamed himself. That van must have followed him earlier despite his efforts to run them off. And when Sebastian had thwarted their attempt at the resort to grab Jessica, they had come back to the ranch to wait for her. Or perhaps it had been the other shooter—the one from the badlands—who had been watching him all along.

  Jessica’s friend, the owner of the ranch, must have tried to stop them. Where were they—the woman and the little girl?

  He had not seen the van or any other vehicle, so he was almost certain the people who’d broken into the house were gone. Otherwise he would not have left Jessica alone outside. But still, he moved silently through the house, in case one of them had stayed behind. He peered through archways into rooms filled with overturned furniture.

  A moan emanated from behind a closed door. He carefully pushed it open, as far as he was able with a body lying behind it.

  Blood. So much blood…it flashed him back to other bodies he’d found. But that had been a long time ago, so he shook off the old memories.

  He dropped to his knees to check for a pulse. But before he could reach out, floorboards creaked behind him. There was someone else in the house. He ducked behind the door and lifted his gun. Although he had not fired one since his last deployment, he was ready to shoot.

  And kill.

  THE PRINCE’S PHONE clutched in her hand like a weapon, Jessica ventured into the only real home she and her daughter had ever known. Seeing the bullet holes and damage to that home had her flinching with pain. She fought down the scream and the sobs that burned her throat.

  She couldn’t give in to panic now, not when her daughter and Helen needed her. And maybe Sebastian needed her, too. While she’d waited—those agonizingly long minutes outside—she hadn’t heard anything. Not a gunshot. Not a shout. Not even a cry for help.

  What had happened? Where was everyone?

  A murmur emanated from the phone, but she pressed her hand tighter over it. She didn’t want to give away her presence in the house. But she also didn’t want to break her connection with the sheriff’s office, either. They were on their way, but they’d wanted her to stay on the phone and keep them apprised of the situation.

  She had no damn idea what the situation was. Or where her friend and her daughter were. Shaking with fear, she crept down the hall. She glanced through the archways into the front parlor and the living room as she passed them. The rooms were empty but for overturned furniture and pulled-out drawers.

  She crossed the wide hall to the dining room and pushed open the door…as far as it would go against the body blocking it. Before she could look down to see who was lying on the floor, something else caught her attention.

  The barrel of the gun pointed directly at her face. She sucked in a breath, but before she could expel it in a scream, the gun lowered. And the prince stepped out from behind the door.

  “Damn it, Jessica,” Sebastian said, his voice low with frustration. “I told you to wait outside. I have not yet secured the house.” But instead of rushing off to another room, he dropped to his knees beside the body.

  And so did Jessica, her heart rising to her throat and choking her as she saw all the blood. It stained her friend’s gray hair and covered her swollen face. “Helen!”

  “She’s alive,” Sebastian assured her, his fingers closed around the older woman’s wrist. “But she needs an ambulance.”

  Jessica thrust the phone at him. “They’re sending out police cars.” She hadn’t asked for an ambulance. She’d hoped they wouldn’t need one. Tears streamed down her face as she leaned over her friend.

  Was the woman even conscious?

  The prince spoke into the phone, giving them his assessment of Helen’s injuries and relaying the urgency for medical assistance.

  “Helen, I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “So sorry…”

  The ranch owner moaned and shifted on the floor.

  Jessica reached for her hand. Helen’s nails were torn; she’d fought off her attackers. “Helen, where is Samantha? Did he get her?”

  The older woman tried to squeeze Jessica’s hand, but her grip was weak and her hand dropped back to the floor. If Helen had been conscious when they’d found her, she wasn’t now.

  “Helen!”

  “She’s breathing. An ambulance is coming. She’ll be all right,” the prince assured her. His arm slid around her shoulders, offering comfort as well as protection. He kept glancing around, checking the corners of the room for Helen’s attackers.

  “Stay with her,” he said, “while I check the rest of the house.”

  Removing his arm and his protection, he left the room then. H
e left her alone at Helen’s side, clutching the battered woman’s limp hand. Jessica wasn’t worried about him coming across the men who had so horribly beaten her friend.

  But for them, the house felt empty. Too quiet now that Helen had stopped moaning, so that no one else could have still been inside. She didn’t even hear Sebastian moving around; he moved more silently than the wind that blew through an open window. She only noticed his return because she felt his presence.

  “They’re gone,” he said, his hand dropping to her shoulder and squeezing gently as he leaned over her.

  “What about Samantha?” she asked, the words burning her heart as well as her throat. If the child had been hiding, she would have come out when she’d heard Jessica’s voice. “Where is my little girl?”

  HER VOICE, THICK with emotion as she asked that heartbreaking question, reached inside Sebastian and squeezed his heart in a tight fist.

  “We’ll find her,” he promised and hoped it was a promise he would be able to keep. “The police will be here soon, as will Antoine and the most trusted members of our security detail. We will begin an extensive search for her then.”

  She squeezed her friend’s hand and then lurched to her feet. “If she’s not already gone, she’ll be hiding. I taught her to hide if strangers ever tried to break into the ranch.”

  Darkness filled Sebastian’s mind, blinding him to all but the past. Memories pummeled him, memories of hiding in the dark, of daring not to breathe, of trying to quiet even his own heartbeat so that they were not discovered. But unlike the child who might be hiding alone, he’d had Antoine. He’d had chubby fingers clutching his hand, reminding him that he was not alone.

  He cleared the emotion of those old memories from his throat and asked, “Where would she hide?”

  Jessica glanced to the open window. “She could be anywhere. I taught her to run and hide.”

  Many years ago, his father had taught him and Antoine that same serious game of hide and hope like hell to never be found.

  Sirens wailed, announcing the arrival of the police cars and the ambulance. But beneath that noise, Sebastian heard another one. A faint clunk of something dropping and rolling across a hardwood floor.

  He reached for his gun again, but Jessica clutched his hand and stopped him.

  “Maybe it’s her,” she said, hope lifting her voice. “Maybe she’s still here.”

  Or perhaps one of the men had been left behind and Sebastian hadn’t discovered him in his first search of the house. Before he could share that concern with Jessica, she rushed off to follow the noise coming from the back of the house, under the stairwell that led up from the country kitchen to the second story. The empty space beneath the steps had been enclosed with oak cabinets and doors to add to the cupboard space of the kitchen.

  When Jessica reached for the handle on the pantry door, he caught her wrist and stopped her. “You don’t know that it’s her.”

  “No man would fit in there,” she said. “The space is too shallow.” She shrugged off his grasp and pulled open the door.

  A broom, a bucket and a vacuum cleaner filled the space. There was no small body cowering inside.

  He squeezed Jessica’s shoulder, knowing that she must be filled with disappointment. But she reached inside the pantry and pushed aside the back panel of the cupboard to reveal another dark space, one that led deeper under the stairs and had no light except for the flashlight that rolled across the floor. But it was turned off or burned out.

  The unlit hiding space brought him back more than thirty years to that dark closet in which he and Antoine had hidden. They hadn’t been able to see anything…until much later when they had finally crawled out.

  But they’d heard everything. And they’d felt everything.

  “Samantha!” Jessica called out, fear cracking her voice. “Baby, are you in there?”

  And if the child was hiding in the dark space, she would be able to hear and feel how terrified her mother was. The terror radiated off Jessica in waves that were drowning her and probably threatened to tow the child under with her.

  Because the four-year-old could feel Jessica’s fear, he was careful to control his own. But he was feeling fear, too—fear that he was getting too involved with this single mother and with the little girl he had yet to meet.

  “Samantha,” he murmured gently, “you can come out, sweetheart. The bad men are gone.”

  “Prince Sebastian is telling the truth, honey,” Jessica added. “They are all gone. And you can hear the sirens. The police are on their way. You’re safe.”

  Something shifted in the shadows, but the child would not come out.

  “You’re smart,” Sebastian praised her. “You have found a very good hiding place. When my brother and I were young boys, we had to hide often from bad men. But we never knew how long to hide before it was safe to come out again. So my father gave us a code word he would use to tell us when it was safe to come out of hiding.”

  “Sebastian?” Jessica uttered his name in a gasp of surprise over his admission. No one knew about his and Antoine’s past. King Omar had kept the true story from the media.

  “This code word had to be something that only our father and my brother and I would know. No one else could guess at it then. No one else could trick us to come out of hiding.”

  Tires squealed as cars stopped in front of the house. But Sebastian’s focus remained on the darkness. “So your mother needs to tell you something that only the two of you know. She needs to remind you of a secret only the two of you share, so I will step away now. I will go talk to the policemen and when you’re ready to come out, perhaps you can talk to the policemen, too.”

  He stepped back from the dark, intending to give Jessica and her daughter this moment alone. But just as he turned around, someone moved quickly—coming out of the shadows to clasp his hand.

  He stared down at the little girl. Her golden brown hair was tangled around her tear-stained face. Dust and cobwebs clung to her faded jeans and striped shirt. She stared up at him with eyes as wide as her mother’s, but instead of the warm brown, hers were a smoky, serious gray.

  “You’re the prince,” she said. “From TV.”

  Jessica had dropped to her knees in front of her child, her arms winding tight around the girl’s small frame. “Thank God you’re all right. Thank God you were hiding.”

  Just because she’d been hiding didn’t mean she hadn’t heard everything that had happened in her house, to her friend. He entwined his fingers with hers. “You were very smart to do as your mother told you,” he praised her again, like he wished his grandfather had once praised either him or Antoine. “But why did you come out before you and your mother shared a secret?”

  “We did,” the child replied. “You’re the secret.”

  He chuckled. “I’m the secret?”

  “You’re real,” she said, her voice full of awe. “You’re a real prince.” She glanced at his jeans and boots. “And you’re a cowboy, too.” She turned toward her mother. “Helen was wrong. Princes can be cowboys.”

  He opened his mouth to tell her that he was no cowboy. But she was smiling up at him—a smile that lit up her whole face as if sunshine beamed right out of her eyes. And it warmed him from the outside in, straight to his heart.

  He had been right to be afraid. He was in too deep with Jessica and with her beautiful, brave little girl. He was falling for them both—and he, better than most, knew that loving someone didn’t mean that you would always be able to protect them.

  But he vowed then, as he stared down into that little girl’s smiling face, that he would try as hard as his father had. And if, like his father, he failed, he would at least die trying.

  Chapter Ten

  “Helen will be all right, then?” Jessica asked again, needing assurance.

  The E.R. doctor, a young dark-haired woman, stood over the bed where an unconscious Helen lay, looking so battered and broken. “She has some broken ribs, a fractured nose and
a concussion. We need to keep her for observation because of the concussion. Barring any complications, she will be able to go home within a couple of days.”

  Home.

  Alone.

  Guilt clutched at Jessica, stealing her breath. She would not be able to go home with her friend. She couldn’t take care of Helen. She and Samantha had to leave. And in the long run, that would be better—safer—for Helen to have her out of her life. Hell, it would have been better for her had Jessica left years ago, or at least weeks ago when all the royals had descended on Dumont with their media coverage and press conferences.

  She stepped out of Helen’s room and leaned against the corridor wall, trying to catch her breath. Since finding the door of the ranch house forced open, she hadn’t been able to breathe. After several deep breaths, she dug out the cell phone she’d grabbed and shoved into her pocket before Sebastian had driven her and Samantha to the hospital. It wasn’t the prince’s phone. It was the one she and Helen used on the ranch, and now she punched in one of Helen’s preprogrammed numbers.

  A gruff voice uttered no greeting, just a, “Damn, woman, you don’t need to keep checking on me. I’m fine. It will all work out just fine.”

  “Mr. McGuire, it’s Jessica. Not Helen.”

  “Jessica?”

  “I—I live with Helen.”

  “Yes, I know who you are, but why are you calling me?” He groaned. “Oh, God, the sirens…I thought they were heading to the resort, that there was more trouble with those damn royals. Guess I should have known Callie would let me know if there was a problem there since she’s fallen for one of those visiting sheiks.”

  Callie was the rancher’s daughter and the assistant to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs. She worked out of D.C. but had been born and raised at the Seven M Ranch in Wind River. It was on the other side of the Rattlesnake Badlands from the Double J.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with the royals, Mr. McGuire.” Even though Prince Sebastian believed otherwise, she knew better. This was all her fault. “Helen’s at the hospital.”