Capturing the Crown Bundle. Nina Bruhns
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now.”
“Stick with me, Princess,” he murmured. “The best is yet to be.”
But the knock on the outer suite door, at first respectful, then louder, told them that whatever was to follow would have to wait. At least until they sent whoever was at the door away.
“Princess, are you in there?” There was no mistaking the urgency in Madeline’s voice. It rang out, loud and clear. Her friend’s tone gave no indication that she was about to go away.
Amelia exchanged glances with Russell. “Your lady-in-waiting apparently doesn’t seem to want to live up to her title,” he quipped.
Feeling protective of her friend, as well as somewhat frustrated, Amelia said, “Madeline has always had a mind of her own,” just before she raised her voice so that Madeline could hear her through the door. “Yes, what is it, Madeline?” She glanced at Russell and smiled. He pressed a kiss to her throat, making her pulse jump. Oh, but she loved this man. “I’m…a little…busy…right now.”
“Princess, the king is looking for your husband. I thought maybe he’d be in there with you.” The smile that was in Madeline’s voice said she knew exactly what was going on behind the closed doors. “King Weston requests that both of you meet with him at the royal clinic as soon as humanly possible.”
At the mention of the clinic, Russell sat bolt upright, concerned. Thoughts of sharing another round of pleasure with Amelia were temporarily shelved. He reached for his clothing.
“Is the king ill?” he asked, raising his voice.
“I wouldn’t know, Your Grace,” Madeline answered. “He does not appear to be. But I’m just the messenger. One of several he requested look for you,” she added.
Amelia scrambled out of bed. Russell paused a moment to let his eyes drift over her appreciatively. Rousing himself, he cleared his throat.
“Tell His Majesty that we’ll be right there,” he instructed. He allowed himself only a moment to fleetingly brush his lips over hers. “To be continued,” he promised in a whisper.
“I will hold you to that,” Amelia responded as she hurried into her clothes.
They lost no time in getting to the clinic. When they arrived, they found the king sitting in the corridor right before the entrance. The expression on his face was grave.
His complexion was far from viable, Russell noted. And the monarch’s hands were clutching the chair’s arms, his knuckles almost white from the effort.
“Is everything all right, Your Majesty?” Russell asked before Amelia had a chance to.
Apparently lost in thought, Weston raised his head like one coming out of a deep trance. The monarch looked at him as if surprised to see that there was anyone else there. When he became aware of Amelia, he attempted a dignified smile to greet her.
“Hello, my dear.” Weston shifted his eyes toward Russell. “And no, everything is not all right.” A sigh escaped his lips. “My only son is being cut up.” He struggled for strength to continue, to face the pain that seemed to be looming everywhere, waiting to ensnare him, to take him captive. “I’ve finally given permission for the autopsy to be done. You were right, of course,” he told Russell without preamble. “We need to move forward, to get answers if we can. And to finally bury Prince Reginald the way he deserves to be buried.”
Relief whispered through Russell. He was seriously beginning to worry about the king’s mental state, afraid that the monarch was withdrawing more and more into himself. Since Reginald’s death, he’d caught the king talking to himself on more than one occasion. In addition, he was concerned that the monarch might just decide to go ahead and hold the funeral, burying the prince without having the autopsy performed.
He knew that, from the king’s standpoint, Reginald was dead and that discovering that his death had occurred naturally or at his own or another man’s hand did not change the end result. Reginald was gone. He had feared that Weston would be overwhelmed with that glaring reality and that it would cause him to lose sight of the fact that they needed to know how.
“When did it begin? The autopsy,” Amelia added gently, kneeling down beside the man who, even a few days earlier, had looked so dynamic, so bold, and who now seemed to be a shadow of his former self.
Grief had done that, she thought. Grief had hollowed him out until he appeared brittle and frail.
“Less than half an hour ago. I thought you should be here for the outcome,” he murmured to Russell.
“We’ll stay with you.” Russell’s eyes met Amelia’s and she gave him a small, imperceptible nod in response. “Until it’s over.”
Gratitude came over the monarch’s features. “I would be in debt to you for that,” he told them, looking from one to the other. A little of his former self was restored, at least for the moment. “I know I should be strong enough to remain here, waiting to be told the results. But the image.” His eyes looked haunted as he envisioned what was going on a few short feet from where he sat. “I can’t get the image out of my head—” He swept his long fingers along his temples, as if trying to banish what he saw in his mind’s eye, as if he felt an almost unbearable pounding. The king was suffering from headaches that were growing greater in number and more intense each time.
“We have nowhere else to be, Your Majesty,” Amelia assured him gently. Smiling into his eyes, she laced her fingers through his. Weston looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. The gratitude in his eyes was all the thanks she needed.
The hands on the antique grandfather clock that stood a little way down the lavishly decorated corridor seemed to move at an inordinately slow pace. Russell wanted this to be over with, to have the autopsy completed and the king’s son sewn back together again, to be a whole person again rather than the sum of parts that had been weighed, calibrated and measured.
Granted, he had been the one to lobby the king the hardest to have the autopsy performed, and they needed the answers that the autopsy would provide, but he had no idea he would be here, only a few feet away from the actual autopsy room, while the royal medical examiner performed her duties. Somehow, that seemed rather ghoulish to him.
A necessary evil, he told himself, glancing over toward the princess. He didn’t have the right to complain, even silently. Just look at the hand that fate had dealt him.
Amelia had been carrying on a steady stream of conversation the entire time they’d been waiting, bless her, he thought. She seemed to know a little about everything. Right now, he and the king were being given a verbal tour of the factory where the Gaston, the car that had firmly placed Gastonia on the map as something other than just another collection of casinos, was manufactured. The king actually seemed mildly distracted, which he knew was Amelia’s main, most likely only, goal.
And then, after what seemed like hours, the door opened and Dr. Abby Burnett came out. There was a grim expression on the physician’s usually amiable, plain face.
Weston was on his feet immediately. The chair almost fell backwards from his momentum. “Well?” he asked eagerly. “Is the prince…?”
“Yes,” Dr. Burnett told him. “I’ve just now finished stitching him back up.” She pressed her lips together, obviously wrestling with something. She nodded at the chair behind him. “Your Majesty, perhaps you’d like to sit down.”
Weston frowned, dismissing the suggestion. “I have been sitting down. Sitting down so long that I’m fairly certain I have permanently flattened your cushions.” He drew his shoulders back, momentarily looking like the formidable ruler he had always been. “Now, out with it. What have you discovered?”
There was a wealth of information to dispense. The doctor picked her way through it carefully. “That your son did not die a natural death. That he didn’t even die accidentally by his own hand.”
“There was no drug