Protecting the Pregnant Princess by Lisa Childs

Author:Lisa Childs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

“This is why you don’t want to help me,” a soft voice murmured from the cover of the enveloping fog.

Startled, Aaron jerked—knocking the body off him so that it dropped onto the asphalt and rolled over. With the hole in her face from the bullet she’d taken in the back of her head, the woman was nearly unrecognizable but for the gray hair.

But she wasn’t Charlotte, who stepped from the fog and approached the car.

“You’re all right,” Aaron said, breathing a sigh of relief that she hadn’t been in the car—or entered the hospital yet.

She shook her head in denial, but he figured she was referring to her emotional state rather than her physical condition.

“It’s Sandy. The nurse who took care of me,” Charlotte said, identifying the woman. “She tried to help me, and look what she got for her trouble. Dead.”

“Driver’s dead, too,” Whit informed them. He flipped open a wallet he’d taken off the body. A curse whistled between his teeth.

“What?” Aaron asked.

“It’s that kid,” Whit replied, “the young investigative reporter who approached one of Stanley Jessup’s editors with the story about Princess Gabriella being here.”

“The nurse must have been his source,” Aaron said, leaning inside the car to see that the reporter had also been shot in the back of the head like the woman.

They had probably been meeting in the parking lot to discuss what she’d witnessed that evening when someone had executed them. He suspected that their killer had been hiding in the backseat, like Whit had back at Jessup’s rented cottage.

“That’s why they were killed, Charlotte,” he told her, trying to ease her guilt. She hadn’t asked to be kidnapped and held hostage in this place. “It had nothing to do with you.”

She shrugged off his reassurance. “It had everything to do with me. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been here. They would both still be alive.”

He couldn’t absolve her of guilt she was determined to hold on to—just as Whit hadn’t been able to absolve him three years ago when he’d thought Josie had been murdered on their watch. The only thing that might help her was learning the truth.

“Then we need to find out who put you in here,” he said, “because that’s who’s really responsible for these deaths.”

“We don’t know that,” Whit said, his dark gaze narrowed with suspicion as he stared at Charlotte. Maybe he’d taken her claim of responsibility literally.

As Aaron lifted the nurse’s body back into the car, he noted that her skin was already cold. “She’s been dead awhile,” he said. “They were probably killed shortly after Charlotte and I broke out of here. And our only lead to finding out who is behind all this is in that hospital.”

He gestured back at the three-story building. But Whit continued to study Charlotte. He obviously thought she was a more viable lead. But if she knew who’d put her in this place, she would have no desire to go back inside.

Instead she drew in an audible breath and started across the lot toward the building.

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