Free The Christmas Princess by Patricia McLinn Page B

kidnapped.”
    “You were a baby when it happened,” Hunter pointed out.
    “But you’d think a famous kidnapping … I mean everybody’s heard about the Lindbergh baby and that was decades before I was born.”
    “It was kept quiet,” Sharon said. “There was never a ransom demand. It’s believed that agents of the defeated rebels took — possibly killed—”
    “Probably,” Hunter inserted.
    “—the baby as a final act of revenge. The king’s son-in-law had been assassinated three months before by rebels. When her husband was killed, the king’s daughter went into labor early, so the baby was a month premature. But the baby was healthy, and it seemed at least the princess would have her daughter. A year after the baby was taken, the princess died, too. They say she gave up. And the king was alone.”
    Empathy flickered across April’s face. “But why did he keep it quiet? If he’d told the world, maybe they could have found her.”
    “More likely, the rebels would have killed the baby, if they hadn’t already. Better to get rid of the evidence,” Hunter said. “Plus, he would have been flooded with false reports. Keeping details secret has made it easier to debunk false claimants.”
    “There have been leads over the years,” Sharon said. “Enough so he could never stop hoping. And now he faces this surgery. Doctors didn’t want him traveling for several weeks before the operation, so he’s here alone for the holidays and—”
    “Sharon wanted to give him a fairy-tale for Christmas.”
    Two pair of reproachful eyes turned on him. The irritation-tinged reproach in his boss’s brown eyes should have concerned him more. Instead, it was sympathy-washed reproach in April’s blue eyes that twitched his muscles into motion.
    He walked toward the door, turning back before crossing the threshold.
    “You have to make up your mind, April. Right now. We can contact the embassy and explain we were mistaken about the woman we thought might be his granddaughter. Or …”
    She stood. Her gaze steady.
    “I’ll meet the king.”
    * * *
    Hunter stifled any reaction. “We have a lot of work to do—”
    “No,” Sharon interrupted him. She squinted at April. “She should go to a salon — someplace great — be pampered, be treated like a—”
    “No salon. Too visible,” he interrupted in turn. “Besides, she’s not supposed to have been raised as a princess, remember?”
    “Just born as one,” April muttered.
    “Princess or no princess, the right hairstyle can make a woman feel more at ease than six months of protocol lessons..”
    “No. Too high profile.”
    “I do have split ends,” April said. “I should have had a trim last month. It doesn’t have to be fancy…”
    “Sure,” Sharon said, with entirely too much good humor. “Take her that little place where you get your hair cut, Hunter. Nobody would ever crack him. And that place would certainly be low profile enough.”
    Hunter’s hair was cut at a barbershop, owned and operated by Mack Dubronski, a retired Marine. Sharon was right that Mack would never breathe a word.
    A vision of the brawny barber leaning over April, his hands in her sudsy hair, her eyes closed in response to the touch, popped up like an evil hologram.
    “Maybe Sharon could trim the ends,” April said.
    “You can’t send a woman to meet a king without having her hair done,” Sharon said in the I’m-the-boss voice she used so seldom in the office, unless she was on the phone with her kids.
    He pulled out his cell phone as he walked out to the living room. “I’ll make arrangements.”
    * * *
    “What are we doing here?” April asked.
    Even after Sharon left and Derek returned, they’d kept her so busy she hadn’t had time to think about tomorrow. At least not much.
    She hadn’t questioned where they were going when Hunter escorted her out the hotel’s back door and into the waiting car Derek was driving.
    Now they’d pulled into a narrow alley almost