Protecting the Pregnant Princess. Lisa Childs

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      For my parents, Jack and Mary Lou Childs. Alzheimer’s disease has stolen her memories of their long life together, but he is still her hero—loving and protecting her. While her mind doesn’t always remember him, her heart will never forget that he is the love of her life.

       Prologue

      Heat scorched his face and hands, but Aaron Timmer ignored the pain and ran headlong toward the fire. His breath whooshed out of his burning lungs as his body dropped, tackled to the ground.

      “You damn fool, what the hell are you thinking?” asked the man who’d knocked him down.

      “We have to save her!” As her bodyguards, saving her was their responsibility. But she had become more than just a job to Aaron.

      “It’s too late.” The house—the safe house—they had stashed her in was fully engulfed. the roof was gone, and flames were rising up toward the trees overhead. Leaves caught fire, dissolving into sparks that rained down onto the blackened lawn surrounding the house.

      “We shouldn’t have left her.” But Aaron’s partner, Whitaker Howell, had insisted that she would be fine—that no one could have possibly figured out where she was.

      Obviously someone had.

      He rolled over and swung his fist right into Whit’s hard jaw. His knuckles cracked and stung as blood oozed from them. He shook off the pain and pushed away Whit’s limp body. Then he turned back to the burning frame of the house, debris strewn wide around the yard from the explosion.

      It was too late. She was gone.

       Three years later…

      BLOOD SPATTERED THE ivory brocade walls of the Parisian hotel suite. Holes were torn through the paper, causing plaster and insulation to spill onto the hardwood floor. Some of the holes were big, probably from a fist or a foot; others smaller and blackened with gunpowder. The glass in the windows was broken, the frames splintered. Shots had been fired. And there had been one hell of a struggle.

      Aaron’s heart hammered against his ribs, panic and fear overwhelming him as he surveyed the gruesome crime scene.

      A whistle hissed through clenched teeth—not his but Whit’s, the man with whom he’d vowed to never work again after that tragedy three years ago. But a couple of months ago he’d been offered an opportunity too good to pass up. Only after he’d accepted the position as a royal bodyguard had he learned that he was actually going to share that assignment with his former business partner and friend.

      That safe house explosion had destroyed whatever bond they’d formed in war, fighting together in Afghanistan. After the fire, they had only fought each other. So Aaron should have walked away from this job. He should have known how it would end.

      “She put up one hell of a fight,” Whit said, his deep voice almost reverent with respect. “But there’s no way they survived…”

      Aaron shook his head, refusing to accept that they were gone. She couldn’t be gone. Charlotte Green was too strong and too smart to not have survived whatever had happened to her.

      What the hell had happened to her?

      To them? Charlotte Green was also a royal bodyguard for the princess of St. Pierre Island, an affluent nation near Greece.

      Aaron and Whit had retraced their steps from their missed flight home, back to the hotel they’d been booked into in Paris. The suite had been destroyed. But despite the amount of blood pooled on the hardwood floor, the Parisian authorities had found no bodies. No witnesses. No leads at all. And no hope for survivors.

      King Rafael St. Pierre nodded in agreement with Whit Howell’s statement of resignation. Aaron clenched his fists, wanting to punch both men in the face. He couldn’t strike the king though, and not just because he was paid generously to protect the ruler of St. Pierre. He couldn’t hurt the man because Rafael was already hurting so much that he probably wouldn’t even feel the blow.

      Whit, on the other hand…

      For the past three years Aaron had wanted to do much more than just strike the man. He had damn sure never intended to work with him again. But when they’d both been hired, separately, to protect the king, neither had been willing to give up the job—a security job they’d been lucky to get after what had happened to the last person they’d protected together.

      The king was fine, though. Physically. Emotionally, he was a wreck. The man, once fit and vital, was showing every year and then some of his age in the slump of his back and shoulders and in the gray that now liberally streaked his dark hair. Clearly Rafael St. Pierre was beside himself with grief.

      Despite how far he and Whit went back, to a friendship forged under fire in Afghanistan, Aaron never knew exactly what his ex-business partner was thinking. Or feeling, or if Whit was even capable of feeling anything at all.

      As dissimilar as they were physically, Whit being blond and dark-eyed and Aaron dark-haired with light blue eyes, they were even more unlike emotionally. Aaron was feeling too much; frustration, fear and grief battled for dominance inside him. But then anger swept aside those emotions, snapping his control. He shouted a question at both men, “How can you just give up?”

      Whit’s head snapped back, as if Aaron had slugged him. And the king flinched, his naturally tan complexion fading to a pasty white that made him look as dead as he believed his daughter and her female bodyguard to be.

      Whit glanced at the king, as if worried that the once so powerful man might keel over and die. They could protect the ruler from a bullet but not a heart attack. Or a broken heart. Whit turned back to Aaron, his intense stare a silent warning for him to control his temper.

      He had to speak his mind. “Charlotte Green is the best damn bodyguard I’ve ever worked with.” Before she’d gone into private duty protection, she had been a U.S. Marshal. “She could have fought them off. She could have protected them both. She devoted herself to protecting the