Royal Protocol (8 page)

“What about the tour of the gardens she was to give afterward?”

“If this weather continues, I doubt anyone will mind if it’s canceled.”

Pushing back one of the filmy curtains, Gwen toyed with the top button of her jacket as she looked out at the gray. Rain still fell, merging sky and sea in shades of pewter and slate.

“What does she have the day after?” she asked, wondering how much time Harrison had spent out on those turbulent waters. He commanded the navy. To reach that position, he could well have spent an accumulation of years out there, riding the waves, fighting the elements.

“A meeting with the royal chef to confirm the menu for the dinner Saturday evening. An appointment with her couturier for the final fitting of her gown. The symphony, followed by a reception for the guest violinist.”

“I’ll take the meeting with the chef. The rest we’ll take as it comes.” She let the curtain fall. Her idea of adventure was a short sail around the harbor. The only time she’d been beyond the breakwater of the cove was to fly over it. “Hopefully, by then they will have found the prince and the king will be showing some improvement.”

“Do you really think that will be?”

Tightening her hold on the button, she faced the concern in the dedicated secretary’s angular face. “I can’t honestly say I know what to think,” she murmured, wishing she possessed the bold confidence of the man she’d
left a little over half an hour ago. She doubted he ever questioned himself, ever felt uncertainty or fear.

“I just know we have a lot to do in the next several days,” she concluded with a sigh.

“Where would Her Majesty like me to begin?”

“By calling Admiral Monteque.” Her hand fell. “Her Majesty wishes to see him here at his earliest convenience.”

G
wen was a worrier. She always had been. She stewed over details. Fretted over decisions. As a child, she’d feared constantly that she wouldn’t do well enough in school, that she wouldn’t be ladylike enough to suit her parents, that she might break one of her father’s rules about decorum or her mother’s about appearances. She’d lived her life in embassies and cut her teeth on protocol. Appearance was everything.

She had also spent much of her youth wishing she had the guts to go wading in the Trevi Fountain or climb onto the memorial in Trafalgar Square.

Had she done that, however, her mother would have had apoplexy. And her father would probably have sent her off to live with Tibetan nuns. Having no desire to ruin her mother’s health or live in seclusion, she’d remained the dutiful daughter—until she’d met and married a man who’d made her realize that she didn’t have to be
perfect for someone to care about her. Not that she had ever even come close. But Alex Corbin had, among so many other things, given her the courage to break the familial chains.

She was still working on getting up the nerve to climb a statue.

And she still worried. Only, now she worried about her friends and her family. At the moment her concern was for the queen and the queen’s daughters. The three princesses had arrived nearly an hour ago, and promptly disappeared into their mother’s salon.

From the chair behind Mrs. Ferth’s desk, she hung up the phone and fished around with her foot for her shoe. She had just canceled her own appointment with the Marlestone Library Restoration Committee that afternoon and rescheduled a meeting with the cellarmaster.

The afternoon had passed in a blur of telephone calls and more interviews with security personnel about who had been where in the palace when the prince had been kidnapped. In between, she had helped the queen’s secretary prioritize the earlier inquiries about the state dinner. Mrs. Ferth was now in the ladies’ office downstairs where she had enlisted the aid of Ladies Brigham and Galbraith in the effort of returning the 116 calls regarding the status of that event. As of half an hour ago, the switchboard was taking all other messages. Only internal calls were coming straight through.

“Gwen. I’m glad you’re still here.” Princess Meredith stepped through the salon door, stylish in a sage-green Armani pantsuit and with her lovely brown hair caught low at her nape. At twenty-eight, she was the oldest of the king and queen’s children, and considered by many to be one of the most intelligent women in Europe. To Gwen, her charming and outgoing personality also suited
her perfectly for her work as a liaison between the royal family and the Royal Intelligence Institute. “When was the last time you saw Owen?”

Having found her shoe, Gwen slipped on the low pump and rose, smoothing her skirt. “I saw him the night before last. A little before seven.” The security team who’d interviewed her—twice, now—had asked the same question. “I was taking the main staircase up to my room and passed him on his way down. He said he was on his way to dinner with all of you.”

“But you didn’t see him after that? Or hear him go back up?”

“I was in my room. As I told the gentlemen from security, as far as Amira’s and my rooms are from everyone else, all I could ever hear from there would be you and your sisters giggling when a night was warm enough to leave a window open.”

It had been years since she’d had that experience. Those young girls were young women now. Lovely young women, Gwen thought as Princess Anastasia slipped past her sister and gave her halfhearted smile. The willowy Princess Ana, dressed in her riding clothes, possessed her father’s great love of the outdoors. She could also be every inch as opinionated as he was, but her fair coloring and striking blues eyes were definitely inherited from her mother.

“The security people keep asking questions, but no one is giving us any answers. We’re just trying to figure out the sequence of events ourselves,” Ana explained, looking less weary but just as strained as her mother—who walked in behind her. “Meredith and Pierce left first, and Mum and Meg and I left a bit after. Owen was finishing a brandy and said he’d be up shortly.

“When he didn’t come down to breakfast yesterday,”
Ana continued, pacing restlessly toward the marble fireplace, “we all thought he’d decided to go out and do a little partying of his own with his friends. To celebrate Meredith’s engagement to Pierce,” she explained, since the dinner the night before had turned into an impromptu engagement party of sorts. “I thought maybe he’d gotten himself stewed and was sleeping in.”

“His bed apparently wasn’t even slept in,” Meredith expanded. “And there were signs of a struggle. A door to his bureau was open, and the things atop it had fallen over or onto the floor. It was as if someone had been thrown against it.” She pulled in a deep breath, remaining stoic for her mother. “That is absolutely all we know. The only reason we know that much is because Owen’s valet told my chambermaid.”

Distressed that they could obtain more information from the royal grapevine than from their own security people, trying to mask it, the oldest princess turned to her mother. “Did you say it was about eleven o’clock when the three of you left?”

Standing by the damask divan, Marissa gave a shallow nod and slowly sank to a cushion.

Gwen thought the queen had made it beautifully through the circus of the press conference and second round of security interviews, but she had refused breakfast and lunch, and her lack of rest last night was becoming more visible by the hour. Even Roberto’s artfully applied makeup could no longer hide the worst of the stress.

“It seems so,” Marissa said to Meredith, “but we’ve been over it so many times I’m beginning to question even what I thought I knew. I simply can’t believe that someone was inside our home and that no one…not even a guard…saw or heard a thing.”

Princess Megan, the shy new bride of Jean-Paul Augustuve, the Earl of Silvershire, sat down quietly next to her mother. Meg had come from a walk on the beach with her new husband and her bodyguard. A few grains of sand clung to the hem of the designer jeans she wore with a baggy white sweater.

Her shoulder-length brown hair gleamed with auburn highlights, but her green eyes betrayed little of the joy that had brightened them only days ago when she’d returned from her honeymoon.

“None of us can believe any of this.” Her wedding ring flashed brightly as she placed her hand on her mother’s. “Not about Father. Not about Owen…”

Marissa folded her free hand over Meg’s. “At least we know you and the baby are all right. I don’t know what I’d do if we had to worry about you, too.” New concern deepened the lines of worry, anyway. “You’re certain Dr. Waltham said everything was all right?”

“Positive. He said all the test results look great. It was the same strain of encephalitis as Father’s, but my case was so mild that the baby wasn’t affected. Your first grandchild is just fine.”

Anastasia had been studying a small silver-framed picture of her and her siblings as she stood by the fireplace. Placing it back on the marble mantel, she arched an eyebrow at her middle sister. “Do you know what it is, yet?”

A hint of animation slipped into Meg’s pretty face as she placed a protective hand over the tiny bulge of her stomach. The child she carried had precipitated one of the hastier royal weddings on record. “We don’t want to know. We want it to be a surprise.” Animation faded. “And we want Father to be well. And for Owen to be found safe.”

“It doesn’t help that they’re leaving us in the dark,” Meredith murmured. “I can’t get anything out of Pierce. I haven’t even seen him today.”

The young woman’s frustration was completely understandable to Gwen. Meredith had been engaged to Colonel Prescott less than twelve hours when the rug had been pulled out from under her family’s world.

“It’s possible that we know all they know,” Gwen offered, suspecting that the colonel was as swamped as Harrison appeared to be with all that was going on.

Meredith gave her a thin, uneasy smile. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Her restlessness growing, she turned from the window. “I’m going to the office. At least there I can find out what rumors are going around. Here there’s nothing to do but wait until someone decides to tell us something.”

As protective of the princesses as she was of her own daughter, Gwen turned to the door. “I’ll call your bodyguard and your escort.”

“Is the escort really necessary?” Meredith asked.

All it took was the thought of a threat to another of her children to return certainty to the queen’s voice. “Absolutely,” Marissa insisted before Gwen could say a word. “We are all under full security. You girls have all known since you were children what that means. If you leave the residence, you have a full guard.”

Ana spun from the mantel, distress marring her refined features. “Even to go for a ride?”

Apprehension slipped into Marissa’s eyes. Seeing it, Gwen interceded.

“That probably wouldn’t be a good idea, Ana.” Whenever the headstrong princess had been troubled as a child, she could inevitably be found in the stables. The
horses seemed to be her refuge. “Anyone could be in the woods.”

“Rory would be with me,” she insisted, speaking of the bodyguard she’d had for years. “He’s always protected me. I don’t need other guards.”

What she meant was that she didn’t want those men around. She was seeking solitude—something she definitely wouldn’t find flanked by soldiers bearing arms.

“You’re best off staying in the palace,” Gwen gently insisted. “Or going to work.”

“I’d rather go for a ride. I can’t concentrate on work. And I can’t stand just sitting waiting to hear something.”

“None of us can,” Megan offered, her tone conciliatory. But whatever else she was about to say was abruptly silenced by the sharp rap on the outer door.

“That will be the admiral,” Gwen murmured. Caught a bit off guard by the way her heart bumped her breastbone, she glanced toward the queen. “What do you want me to do?”

The look in Marissa’s eyes seemed to say, Ask him to go away.

“Marissa?” she quietly prodded.

The breath the woman drew momentarily straightened her shoulders. “I sent for him. Since the man is practically running the country at the moment, I supposed we’d best let him in.”

Harrison had run from one meeting to another that afternoon, all with the minister of foreign relations, the RET and the royal press secretary. Or some combination thereof. He would meet again with the press secretary the moment he left there. Hopefully, to give him the statement the queen had omitted from her speech that morning.

He needed a definitive response from Her Majesty about the state dinner.

He needed a firm commitment from her about a laundry list of details he had yet to address with her because he could never get her alone.

When the door of the queen’s drawing room was opened to him, he decided that more than anything else, he needed a break.

The last thing he’d expected was to be greeted by a roomful of women. Beautiful women, he had to concede, nodding to the royal females clustered around the divan. Consciously keeping his glance from drifting to the particularly disturbing lady who’d opened the door, he stepped inside.

The Princesses Meredith and Anastasia moved back to reveal their mother. Princess Megan remained where she was on the cushion beside her.

“Your Majesty,” he said, covering his quick dismay with a deep bow. He had exactly thirty minutes before the United States ambassador arrived from Washington. Meeting with the press secretary first no longer looked like a possibility. “I came as soon as I could get away. I didn’t realize I would have the pleasure of seeing Your Highnesses.”

Princess Anastasia immediately demanded his attention.

“Admiral Monteque,” she said, frowning. “Since you’re here, you can answer something for us.”

Moving into the room behind Harrison, Gwen watched Ana’s glance slide nonchalantly over the impressive rows of medal ribbons on his equally impressive chest as she tipped back her head. In the rarefied atmosphere the girls had been raised in, they had become as accustomed to men of rank as they were other royalty and celebrities.

“We understand an escort is necessary if we wish to leave the residence.”

The crystal chandelier above them caught the threads of silver in his dark hair as he nodded. “That is correct, Your Highness.”

“Do you have reason to think something is going to happen to us?”

“I have reason to think we should be cautious,” he replied, the deep tones of his voice utterly certain. “Security was breached here. I believe Sir Selwyn explained that until the situation with your brother is resolved, we can’t be too careful with any of you.”

“I want to go for a horseback ride.”

“The woods are the last place you should go. We have no way to secure them.”

“Gwen…Lady Gwendolyn,” the queen quickly corrected, “already told you that.”

“I just don’t understand why,” Ana insisted. “No one will tell us anything.”

It wasn’t petulance in her tone. It was frustration.

Feeling as if he could pace out of his skin himself, Harrison couldn’t help but think there was a lot of that going around.

“It’s because whoever took your brother could easily decide they need another hostage,” he told her. “If something were to happen to him, they would have backup. Historically, female hostages don’t fare as well.”

Princess Meredith’s astute glance pinned him. “I’m sure you don’t mean they fare worse because women are considered weaker, Admiral Monteque.”

Being a gentleman, he hesitated. Colonel Prescott’s fiancée was normally not the sort to challenge. Apparently she was feeling that same frustration, too. “No, Your
Highness. The reason they don’t fare as well is because of the temptations they present to their captors.”

As his meaning sank in, the girls’ glances faltered.

Gwen apparently noticed that, too.

“Do you want me to call for an escort?” she asked Meredith.

“Please,” came the princess’s complying reply.

“I think I’ll just go to my room,” Princess Anastasia murmured.