Protecting the Princess Read online

  “You’ve got to sign the agreement in person.” Kirk’s expression was somber. “Linus heard rumors that Bosch intends to keep a close eye on the Hall of Justice. If you show up there—”

  “But Bosch and his men wouldn’t dare make a move in such a public place. They could be charged with treason.”

  “They could. But only if their mission fails. If they remove your family from the picture, there won’t be anyone to charge them with treason.” He looked at the soldiers and back to her, and his lips pinched together with displeasure. “You won’t go alone.”

  It took Stasi a moment to connect all the dots. She pictured herself walking into the Hall of Justice with Kirk at her side, but realized that was foolish. No doubt just getting inside the Hall of Justice would be tricky. Besides, she’d told Kirk to keep his distance.

  The man knew how to follow orders.

  Settling into the nearest unoccupied chair, Stasi turned her attention to the documents in front of her. Sixteen pages was a lot to read, especially when she could hardly make it through the first sentence without thinking about Kirk.

  There were still too many variables outside of their control, and Kirk felt the lapse acutely. The Hall of Justice was too large a building, for one thing, with far more entrances and exits than they could cover. And he wasn’t about to rely on the existing security—if there were security personnel on hand at all, he suspected they might be working for anyone. No, it wouldn’t do to trust them.

  Then, of course, there was the issue of transportation. With the bulletproof royal limousines destroyed in the ambush on the motorcade the week before, there was nothing in the royal garage that would protect the princess. Besides that, he wasn’t convinced they should try to get anything out of the garages, since it would mean going back to the palace, and he knew he’d overstepped his welcome there as far as Viktor Bosch was concerned. They’d have to use their own cars, but none of them were bulletproof.

  He seriously considered putting Stasi in body armor.

  Ultimately he knew it came down to the fact that he didn’t like letting her out of his sight—not with all the threats against her. But she’d asked him to stand down. He had to respect her decision, even if he didn’t agree with it.

  Stasi answered her phone and waved him over. Kirk stood by her chair until she closed the call, then crouched down in the crowded room so he could talk to her.

  “Isabelle and Levi are planning to meet with Father this morning. They heard the news about the ruling council and are hoping to fly into Sardis by noon. They don’t want to come without Mother and Father, but you and I both know they’ll have their hands full prying them away from Lucca and his men.” She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.

  Her gesture gave him hope, as did her words. “If your father could be convinced to return, perhaps you won’t have to sign anything. Should we wait?”

  For a long moment she looked him full in the face, her small hand kneading his fingers worriedly. Finally, she stood and pulled him toward the relative privacy of the kitchen. Ducking into the small space between the refrigerator and the corner cupboards, she whispered, “Mother’s journal raised issues about the agreements Father made with 8 and some of his associates. If the deals he made came to light, he wouldn’t be eligible to rule. He could be charged with treason.”

  “I wonder, then, why Valli and the generals haven’t exposed him. You’d think they’d use what they have to get the king off his throne.”

  “As long as Father is willing to work with them, they’ve nothing to gain by exposing the deals they’ve made with him. They must still feel he’s more useful to them, perhaps as a means of leading them to the scepter. Besides, there’s a good chance in exposing him, they’d divulge their own hand in all of it. They can’t risk that.”

  “I suppose you’re right. If your father came back to claim the throne and turned his back on their deal, they’d no doubt set up someone to take the fall on their behalf.” Kirk hadn’t realized when he’d stepped into the nook by the cupboards just how small the space was.

  Stasi’s earnest face looked up at him from mere inches away, and the light scent of vanilla undertones from her coffee only made her that much more appealing. “What do you think I should do?”

  “I think…” Kirk began slowly, trying to generate a thought beyond the image of her closer in his arms, but there was little use to that.

  Her hands traced a line down his cheek. “Your injuries are healing,” she noted softly. Her touch felt so gentle, so irresistibly sweet.

  “Let me accompany you to the Hall of Justice,” he implored quietly.

  “So you think I should go, even if my father may be on his way?”

  Kirk tried to straighten out just what it was he thought. Mostly he wanted to be somewhere a bit more private with her than the kitchen, with a lot less to worry about than the future of Lydia. “Your father’s arrival won’t change the Bardici’s claim to the throne. Ultimately, both you and your sister need to sign the covenant, but it’s going to be dangerous, whatever you choose.” He brushed back a lock of her blond hair, which was still damp from her shower. “I want to be with you.”

  “I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to you.” Stasi had somehow gotten taller, or perhaps risen up on her tiptoes. The tip of her nose brushed his.

  “Kirk!”

  Kirk jumped backward at the gruff sound of his father’s voice.

  “I need to speak with you. Outside.”

  The grim set of Albert Covington’s jowls made Kirk feel as though he was a little boy again, caught in some dreadful mischief. In fact, the only time he could recall his father looking quite so angry was on the fated day when he was twelve years old and had been told to stay away from Anastasia.

  He excused himself from Stasi and followed his red-faced father out to the garage.

  “She’s a princess!” Albert hadn’t quite gotten the door shut after them before he started in. “More than that, she’s the only hope this country has right now, and I won’t have you seducing her.”

  “I wasn’t—” Kirk began, feeling all the more like the boy who’d been scolded half his lifetime ago.

  “Son, I’ve tried to tell you. I’ve asked you. I’ve begged you. You can run after any other girl in the kingdom, but leave the princess alone.”

  With all that was hanging over them that day, Kirk couldn’t stand that his father would press the issue. Rather than take his father’s words as law as he always had before, Kirk countered, “This isn’t about me and Stasi, is it, Dad? There was only one girl in all of Covington you weren’t supposed to go near. Mom got sent off to Europe, but it didn’t change the way you felt about her.”

  His father’s red face became, if possible, that much redder. “Leaving Georgia tore our families apart. It took them ten years before they would speak to either of us, and fifteen years to speak to each other. The greatest mistake of my life was running off to Lydia with your mother.”

  “Why?” Kirk didn’t understand. “You love her, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. It’s because I love her that I can’t stand what we did to our families. You hardly knew your grandparents. I wanted to go home last week when the ambush first struck, but as your mother said, where would we go? We can’t go home now. This is the only home we have left, and I won’t have you tearing it apart by disgracing Her Royal Highness.” He took a breath, and a little of the furious red drained from his face. “Have you seen the way she looks at you?”

  “I can’t help how she—”

  “Yes, you can. You’ve been leading her on all this time. It’s not fair to her.”

  “I’m not leading her on. If anything, I’ve been trying to push her away.”

  “Not from what I’ve seen. You love her. Deny it!”
r />   “I can’t deny it.”

  His father headed for the door. “You’ve got to deny it—for her sake and the sake of Lydia. Our country is caught up in a vicious tug-of-war, and we need every man we can get pulling on our side.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re distracting the princess.” With that, Albert left the garage and pulled the door shut after him.

  Kirk scowled. Much as he’d tried to deny—to himself and everyone else—his feelings for Stasi, his father had hit the nail on the head. He did love Stasi. But his father was also correct when he said that he had no right to her.

  And if the unfolding plans were any indication, Stasi had a future in politics ahead of her. The nation of Lydia needed her leadership. She didn’t need him as a distraction.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at the screen, debating. Dialing his grandfather in Georgia, Kirk kept the conversation brief. “If my parents return to Georgia, can they stay with you?”

  His grandfather let out a long, low chuckle. “You know, I’ve been wondering for years what it would take to bring them back home. Apparently, from what I see on the news, it takes a country torn apart.”

  “So you’re not still so angry with them for running away together that you won’t even speak to them?”

  “Son, I got over that years ago.”

  Kirk closed his eyes, his heart pounding. “Maybe you should tell them that.”

  “Maybe I should.” His grandfather sounded thoughtful. “Maybe this insurgent uprising wasn’t all a bad thing. You wouldn’t want to come home, too, would you? The local sheriff is always looking for deputies. They’d love to have someone with your background.”

  “I don’t know.” Kirk wasn’t even sure what a deputy did. He thought about the Westerns he’d loved as a kid. It was a different world over there in America. But moving to the United States would give him an excuse to leave Stasi. If he couldn’t be around her without acting on the growing feelings between them, then for her sake, he needed to leave.

  “Maybe that’s something I could look into. I need to go.” He closed the call with his grandfather and then looked at his phone.

  Sure, he enjoyed Georgia, but could he leave Lydia and Stasi behind?

  Did he have any other choice?

  Stasi grabbed Kirk’s hand as he came back inside and pulled him toward the television. “Breaking news report,” she explained.

  “What has Parliament decided now?”

  “Not them—the weather. There’s quite a squall moving across the Mediterranean. It’s expected to hit Lydia in two hours. Isabelle’s plane may not be able to land. They might not even take off.” She watched his face as he absorbed the news. “What do you think we should do?”

  Kirk looked thoughtful. “We’ve been praying all along that God would help us, haven’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you suppose this is His way of helping?”

  “By sending a storm?” Linus asked from near his elbow, where he watched the radar image of the swirling storm clouds.

  “Do you know anyone else who controls the weather?” Kirk challenged.

  Stasi couldn’t help but smile at the image Kirk’s words evoked, of God riding up on a storm cloud to save them just like in the Bible stories of old. The kings and queens of Lydia had changed many times since Acts chapter sixteen first mentioned its founder, but God hadn’t changed. And God was ultimately the leader of their small nation. “Should we try to time our visit to Parliament to correspond with the storm?”

  “What do you think?” Kirk looked around the room at the men who’d assembled.

  “There will likely be some confusion the moment the storm hits,” Galen noted. “If we arrive just before the storm, we could take advantage of that window of time when our enemies will be most distracted. It may not be much of an advantage.”

  “If it’s the only advantage we have, we should use it.” Jason looked convinced.

  “I agree.” Stasi took a deep breath. They were going to go through with it, then. “That means we should leave in an hour and a half. Can we be ready by then?”

  “We can.”

  “We will.”

  “We don’t have much choice.”

  The men all seemed to agree, so Stasi encouraged them to make their final preparations. As they bent over their maps, Kirk leaned close to her.

  “Where do you want me?”

  Stasi couldn’t help looking into his eyes, and her breath caught. She could think of a lot of places she wanted him to be—mostly as far from danger as possible. And she wished she could go with him.

  “You can’t go in, Kirk. You’re injured. It’s too much of a risk.”

  “We don’t have enough men to cover the whole building. You need everyone you can get.”

  “There’s something to be said for that.” She tried to think. Every time she tried to envision herself walking into the Hall of Justice, her stomach knotted with the same sickening fear that had left her retching over the side of Kirk’s sailboat a week before. Having him nearby would have a comforting effect on her nerves. She already knew that from much practice.

  “You can ride with me. But when we reach the front doors, fall back. A team will accompany me inside. You’ll stay posted at the front doors.”

  For a long moment, Kirk’s expression remained too stony to read. But then his lips bent up with a resigned smile.

  “If anything seems amiss, don’t hesitate to come right back out,” Kirk cautioned Stasi as the car rumbled along the cobbled streets to the Hall of Justice. “We can always try again another time. If anything happens to you, there won’t be another time.”

  Stasi simply squeezed his hand, her eyes trained on the dark clouds that rolled ever nearer. The wind, which had been eerily still for most of the last hour, had begun to pick up, whipping flags and tree branches with sudden gusts. The streets were likewise unusually empty—whether because of the pending storm or the political turmoil, Kirk wasn’t sure, but it gave him an odd sense of foreboding.

  Kirk returned the squeeze, wishing Stasi didn’t have to go through what was about to happen, or at the very least, that he could guarantee she’d come through it just fine. But neither of those options was on the table. “If at any point you feel you’re in over your head, we can turn around. You don’t have to go right now.”

  “Now is as good a time as any, and probably the best shot we’ll get. We can’t leave the country to the Bardicis to hand over to 8. This is the only way I can stop them.”

  The first fat drops of rain began to spatter down as Kirk led Stasi from the car to the doors of the Hall of Justice. The other two cars that accompanied them came to a stop, and their men filed out. As promised, Kirk waited just under the porte cochere while Stasi continued inside with two men in front of her, and two behind.

  The security guards standing just inside the door wore sunglasses, in spite of the rain. Kirk tried to get a decent look at them before the doors went shut, but didn’t see enough of either man to determine if they were friend or foe. He certainly wasn’t going to trust them to stop anyone who might head in after Stasi.

  They hadn’t advertised the time of their arrival. He hoped Stasi could get her signature on the documents and be back out before anyone realized she was even in Sardis.

  Kirk reached inside his pocket and felt for the push-to-talk switch that connected to the microphone attachment of his earpiece security kit. Galen and his men had driven halfway around the building to the side doors. Another man, Simon, took his position on the other side of the porte cochere from Kirk.

  Across the street, Kirk caught sight of his father fiddling with his earpiece. Albert Covington was connected by phone to Theresa, who’d taken a van to the
rural landing strip in hopes that Isabelle’s plane would be able to land. They’d had no contact with the elder princess all that morning, and could only pray her contingent had made their flight. No doubt she and Levi had their hands too full to call. He could only pray it was because they were en route to Sardis.

  For several long, anxious minutes, nothing seemed to be happening. Kirk had almost begun to hope they’d make it through the signing without incident when he saw his father answer his phone across the street. Albert’s face blanched, and a moment later he darted over, one hand on the driver’s door of the car Kirk and Stasi had arrived in, which was still parked with the other two vehicles, awaiting their departure.

  “Isabelle landed. Your mother picked them up,” he shouted across to Kirk, not bothering with his earpiece. “They’re being followed by five cars.”

  “Go!” Kirk yelled, waving him off.

  Albert got inside the car and pulled away. The private landing strip wasn’t far outside the city. He’d have little trouble finding Theresa—but what was one car against five?

  Kirk squeezed the transmitting button and spoke into his microphone. “We’ve got tails on Princess Isabelle’s car. Five vehicles.” He paused for just a second. Much as he hated pulling men away from Stasi’s security detail, they’d lose everything if Isabelle was caught—especially if she had her father with her. And if the men didn’t hurry, they might not catch up to Albert. “Galen, can you spare a car?”

  “No problem. We’re half-asleep over here. I’m sending a driver out now.”

  Simon leaped out from under the porte cochere to the rear vehicle. “Will you be all right if I leave?”

  Kirk hesitated. Should he send the man? His mother was outnumbered and in need of assistance. Surely Stasi was safe at the Hall of Justice. They had little more to fear than the storm that threatened to unleash its rage around them.