Free Alec's Royal Assignment (Man On A Mission Book 3) by Amelia Autin Page B

innocence, and had been almost from the moment he’d met him. But a gut feeling wasn’t evidence, and he didn’t really blame the crowd for its ambivalence.
    Princess Mara and her husband arrived last of all, and as the huge sea of people in the square raised a cheer for them, Alec moved forward. By way of greeting, he said sotto voce to McKinnon, “This is a security nightmare.”
    “Don’t I know it.” McKinnon smiled coldly. “I hope you’re strapped.” He tapped his right hand lightly over the breast of his formal suit. “I am.”
    “Since you told me to come prepared, you shouldn’t even have to ask.” Alec moved to the princess’s left side, knowing McKinnon wouldn’t yield the right side to anyone, king or commoner. Alec was right-handed, too, and his shoulder holster was rigged for a right-handed draw, same as McKinnon’s. But the princess was McKinnon’s wife—that was the bottom line. Anyone trying to hurt her would have to go through McKinnon first.
    The metal detector would have gone crazy on either of them—in addition to the gun in his shoulder holster, Alec was wearing his ankle holster with his backup gun—except McKinnon stepped to one side and spoke quietly to one of the guards there. “Yes, sir, it is all arranged,” the guard said respectfully in Zakharan, and he opened the velvet rope to let the three of them pass through to the right of the metal detector.
    An usher was waiting on the other side and led them down the center aisle, all the way to the front. He removed the ribbon blocking off the aisle to the front pew and seated them on the left side. Alec didn’t know who else was going to be seated after them, so he moved nearly all the way to the left, figuring that would leave plenty of room remaining for whoever would sit there—the king, the queen, their infant son and any security guards who would be accompanying them.
    Through the open door of the cathedral came a roar from the crowd, and Alec knew the royal family had arrived, right on time.
Let’s get this show on the road,
he told himself with a touch of humor. Movement to the left of the altar had his gaze sliding in that direction, his hand never far from the unbuttoned jacket of his morning suit. But it was only the archbishop, dressed in his ecclesiastical robes, with two bishops and a handful of acolytes coming from the sacristy, moving into place near the altar and the ancient marble baptismal font off to the right.
    The organist, who’d been playing for the past fifteen minutes, came to the end of Henry Purcell’s
Trumpet Tune.
He paused, waited for a signal, then nodded to the string quartet and moved right into Jeremiah Clarke’s
Trumpet Voluntary.
    The stately music filled the cathedral with sound, and Alec realized Angelina had been right. No assassin could stand behind the organ pipes while the music was playing, unless—and he’d been just as right about this—that person was wearing some kind of noise-canceling headgear. He’d already spotted plainclothes security guards stationed on both sides of the recessed area, so apparently she’d passed along his concern to whoever was in charge of security. But he couldn’t get it out of his mind that anything might happen.
And wasn’t that what McKinnon was worried about when he asked me to come armed?
    When everyone in the cathedral stood and turned toward the rear, Alec stood, too. But even as he faced the rear, his gaze was sweeping left and right, taking in every detail. Plainclothes security guards were everywhere, earpieces in place, looking for all the world like the Secret Service protecting the president of the United States, except none of them were wearing sunglasses—not inside the cathedral.
    Then he spotted Angelina coming up the already crowded far-right aisle—her left, his right—and his heart leaped at the sight of her. She was so beautiful as she slowly advanced, keeping pace with Zakhar’s king and his queen. The queen was