The Playboy Prince Read Online Free PDF Page B

put that scenario in her report and let her superiors chew on it awhile. She’d add to that the fact that no one had checked her bag. A small plastic explosive could be easily carried and easily planted.
    She walked from Wardrobe into a rehearsal hall walled with mirrors. With a little shock, she stared at her reflection on all sides. Then, as she had in the garden, she let out a low, easy laugh.
    Oh, Hannah, she thought, how miserably dull you are. Turning to the side, she shook her head. No, maroon did nothing for her, and the high-necked jacket with its bulky belt only made her look unattractively thin. The skirt came well below the knee to hide her legs. She’d braided her hair today, tightly, then had circled the braid at the base of her neck.
    Being a part of herself, it was the best cover she could have conceived. She’d been too skinny as a child, with unmanageable hair, and knees that were forever scraped. Her facial bones had been prominent even then, but in the young girl’s face had seemed too sharp, too angular.
    Then when the other girls had begun to bloom and curve, Hannah’s body had remained stubbornly straight. She’d been bright and athletic and cheerful. Boys had patted her on the back and called her a good sport, but they hadn’t been interested in taking her to any dances.
    She’d learned to ride, swim, shoot skeet and to put an arrow in a bull’s-eye from a hundred paces, but she hadn’t dated.
    She’d learned to speak Russian and French and enough Cantonese to surprise even her father, but she’d gone alone to her own graduation ball.
    When she turned twenty, her body changed, but Hannah hid the late blossoming under dull clothes. She’d already chosen her path in life. Beauty turned heads and in her field it was always best to go unnoticed.
    Now, she looked at the results in the wall of mirrors and was satisfied. No man would desire her. It was human nature to look at the physical shell and draw emotion from that long before you dipped beneath to the intellect or soul. No woman would envy her. Dull was safe, after all.
    No one would suspect a plain, bookish woman of excellent breeding and quiet social manners of deception or violence. Only a select few were aware that the woman beneath was capable of both.
    For a reason she couldn’t name, that thought made her turn away from her reflection. Deception had been with her all of her adult life, and yet she couldn’t quite dismiss the twinges of guilt she felt whenever Eve looked at her as a friend.
    It was a job, Hannah reminded herself. No emotional attachments, no emotional involvements were permitted. That was the first and most important rule of the game. She couldn’t afford to allow herself to like Eve, to even think of her as anything but a political symbol. If she did, everything she’d worked for could be lost.
    The envy had to go as well, Hannah reminded herself. It was a dangerous lapse to let herself look at thelove between the prince and Eve and wish something similar for herself. There was no room for love in her profession. There were only goals, commitments and risks.
    There would be no prince for her, royal or otherwise.
    But before she could prevent it, her thoughts turned to Bennett and the way he’d smiled at her in the moonlight.
    Idiot, she told herself and began tightening a few loose pins. He was the last person she should think about in a personal way. If for no other reason, there was his dossier and the astonishing list of women who’d been part of his life already.
    Use him, certainly, her mind went on. But don’t think about him as anything but a means to an end. Romantic fantasies had ended for her at sixteen. Ten years later, in the middle of her most important job, was hardly the time to begin to weave them again. She would do well to remember that the stiff-lipped, proper Lady Hannah would never see His Royal Highness Prince Bennett de Cordina in a romantic light.
    But the woman within dreamed and for a