The Princess Predicament Read Online Free PDF Page B

only put her in danger—if she wasn’t already—or increase the danger if she was. Maybe that hadn’t been Gabby he’d glimpsed getting off the bus. Maybe she was still back at the orphanage. If she’d known someone was coming for her, wouldn’t she have stayed and waited?
    Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to be found. If the shooting involved her, she had been found, but the wrong person had done the finding. The person who’d written that threatening note?
    Whit shoved through the screaming people who were nearly stampeding in their haste to escape the building. There was no sign of the pregnant woman he’d glimpsed getting off the bus. She wasn’t with the others running away.
    And then he saw her and realized that she was the one they were all running from—she was the one with the gun. She gripped it in both hands.
    As Whit neared her, he noticed the blood spattered on her face, and his heart slammed into his ribs with fear for her safety.
    “Gabby,” he spoke softly, so as to not startle her, but she still jumped and swung toward him with her body and with the barrel of her gun.
    He barely glanced at it, focusing instead on her face—on her incredibly beautiful face but for those droplets of blood.
    Anxiously he asked, “Are you hurt?”
    A groan—low and pain-filled—cut through the clamor of running people. Gabriella’s lips had parted, but she was not the one who uttered the sound. Whit lowered his gaze to the man who had dropped to his knees in front of Gabby. The burly man clutched his shoulder and blood oozed between his fingers.
    Whit flinched, his own shoulder wound stinging in reaction. “What the hell’s going on?”
    Gabby took one hand from the gun to tug down the brim of her hat—as if her weak disguise could fool him twice.
    The man took advantage of her distraction and looser grip and reached for the gun. But he could only grab at it with one hand, as his other arm hung limply from his bleeding shoulder. He had the element of surprise though and snapped it free of her grasp.
    She lunged back for it, her swollen belly on the same level as the barrel of the gun. But Whit moved faster than she did and stepped between them. Before the man could move his finger to the trigger of the gun, Whit slammed his fist into the wounded man’s jaw. The guy’s eyes rolled back into his head as his consciousness fled, and he fell back onto the cement floor of the airport, blood pooling beneath his gunshot wound.
    Whit’s shoulder ached from delivering the knock-out punch, and he growled a curse. But his pain was nothing in comparison to the fear overwhelming him. He’d only just learned where Gabby was and he’d nearly lost her again.
    Maybe forever this time—if the man had managed to pull the trigger before Whit had knocked him out.
    “What the hell were you thinking?” he shouted the question at Princess Gabriella.
    His fear wasn’t for himself but for her, and he hadn’t felt an emotion that intense since the night before she disappeared. The night she’d begged him to stay with her. At first he’d thought she’d only wanted protection but then he’d realized that she’d wanted more.
    She’d wanted him. But then the next morning she’d left him without a backward glance. So he’d probably just been her way of rebelling against her father’s attempts to control her life. That was what that night had been about, but what about today?
    “I—I was defending myself,” she stammered in a strangely hoarse tone, as if she’d lost her voice or was trying to disguise it. She ducked down and reached for the gun that had dropped to the floor with the man.
    But Whit beat her to the weapon, clutching it tightly in his fist. “No more shooting for you, Princess.”
    “I’m not a princess—”
    “Save it,” he said. “I damn well know who you are.” He had no idea why she was denying her identity to him, though. But that wasn’t his most pressing concern at the moment.
    He leaned over to