Claiming His Princess. Kate Walker
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glanced at her reflection and smoothed her messy ponytail. She hadn’t done her hair properly in days, but her father had requested her presence and she would not let him see her as anything less than perfect.
‘You don’t like my choices, ma’am?’
‘I love your choices.’ She gave Lucy what she hoped was an appreciative smile. ‘But it’s hot. In fact, why don’t you take the afternoon off? Go and see your boyfriend.’
The girl bobbed her head deferentially and Ava sighed heavily and headed out.
She hated being home.
Hated the cold stone walls of the palace that felt more like a prison. She had barely seen her father since she’d returned, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing—except she had barely seen anyone other than staff, and it had given her far too much time to dwell on her grief.
Glimpsing bright summer sunshine through the long row of Gothic windows as she moved from one hallway to the next made Ava feel bleak. It just felt wrong. The sky should be grey, not blue.
Her brother was dead. The royal duties she had always shied away from were upon her, and there was no escape.
As her father had said, the people needed hope in these black times and she was it. They looked upon her to lift them out of the bleak mood caused by the loss of her brother—and, more than that, Ava now knew that her father was ill. One day, sooner than she had expected, she would be Queen—and the thought was completely overwhelming.
What did she know about running a country? Having all those people depend on her? It was criminal how little she knew, and even though that was mainly due to her father’s chauvinistic views that women were trophies, not leaders, it gave her no pleasure that he now had to rely on her to preserve Anders’ future as an economically viable entity.
And what of her gallery? It was closed for the whole of August, but she had dithered about what to do with it. Although of course she knew in her heart that she would most likely have to close it. It was devastating to think that the life she had built for herself could be so easily dissolved. As if nothing she had done in Paris mattered.
Steadying her breath, she hid her pangs of dismay and a gnawing sense of foreboding behind a smile as she stepped inside her father’s plush outer office and greeted his personal assistant.
‘He’s waiting, Your Royal Highness.’
‘Thank you, Matthieu.’
She tried to relax her face as Matthieu opened an inner door and Ava saw her father, as always, behind his enormous rosewood desk. He looked pale and more drawn than usual, and Ava tried to keep her immediate concern from showing in her voice. ‘You wished to see me?’
‘Yes, Ava. Take a seat.’
‘You’re starting to worry me, sir,’ she said, sitting in one of the leather-bound chairs opposite, wondering why he had greeted her in English. ‘Have you received bad news from your physician?’
‘No.’ Her father’s response was clipped. ‘I’ve received disturbing news from the security expert who brought you home from France.’
Wolfe?
Ava’s heart leapt behind her rib cage as an image of him that seemed all too close to the surface of her mind clouded her vision. For two weeks he had filled her thoughts right before sleep took her, and he was the first thing she thought of when she woke up. Even on the morning of Frédéric’s funeral, when she had felt at Her lowest.
Ava sighed. She really needed to stop thinking about those hours they’d spent in bed together. Her dreams of him left her feeling weak and needy, and the man probably couldn’t even remember her name, let alone conjure up her image in his head.
Unlike her good self, who could not only conjure up his image oh, so easily, but his scent as well—woodsy and masculine. It was so vivid that he might as well have been in the room with her right now.
‘What does Wolfe have to do with anything?’
She had tried to keep the query light, but a sudden fear that her father knew that she had slept with him came at her from left field. Surely Wolfe hadn’t told anyone? The tabloids? Could her father’s health withstand a salacious story about her at this time?
‘I have to do with a lot of things, Your Royal Highness.’
The deep, familiar drawl from the man filling her head space had her twisting around in her seat to where he stood across the room, his body half turned away, as if he’d been doing nothing more than studying the scenery outside the high arched windows.
‘But in this case it’s about your safety.’
Her eyes drank in his beautifully cut black trousers and white dress shirt that pulled tight across his wide shoulders. He’d had a haircut, the shorter style drawing even more attention to the roguish quality of his perfect bone structure.
Those remembered toffee eyes were fixed on her face, touching her mouth ever so briefly, and Ava felt singed all the way through.
‘What about my safety?’ She hated that she sounded as breathless as she felt.
‘Monsieur Wolfe has some news concerning your car crash at Gilles’s château.’
She heard the underlying censure in her father’s tone and guessed that he was angry she hadn’t told him about the accident herself, but she had no time to ponder that as Wolfe prowled towards her, his loose-limbed gait impossibly graceful for a man his size.
He effortlessly dominated the large room and as he drew closer she realised that her heart was racing. He, of course, could have been a mummy for all the emotion he displayed.
Using years of practice to keep her expression from revealing any of her inner turmoil at having this man—her one-night lover—in the same room as her father, Ava forced herself to maintain eye contact with him. ‘Such as?’
‘Yesterday I spoke to the mechanic who repaired your car,’ he informed her, a touch of fierceness lining his words.
‘Why would you do that?’
‘A hunch.’
‘A hunch?’
‘Yes. One that paid off. You didn’t crash because of a loss of concentration. You crashed because a vial of potassium permanganate mixed with glycerine had been dropped into your brake master cylinder.’
Ava’s brow furrowed. ‘Is there a layperson’s version of that?’
‘Your brakes were tampered with.’
Did he mean deliberately? ‘Maybe they were worn.’
‘Yes. With a special chemical compound that, when it got hot enough, rendered your brakes useless.’
Ava struggled to digest what he was saying. ‘You think my car was deliberately sabotaged?’ The very idea was ludicrous. It was true that Anders had once experienced conflict with the neighbouring country of Triole, but that had died down years ago. Her brother had even been set to marry the young Princess of Triole when she came of age.
‘Not only that,’ her father interjected. ‘We now know that Frédéric’s helicopter crash was not an accident either.’
‘What?’ Ava’s startled gaze flew to her father. ‘I…How is that possible?’
Wolfe’s voice was hard when he answered. ‘A section of the rotor was altered in such a way that the pilot had no chance of detecting it.’
‘You’re suggesting Freddie was murdered?’
‘Not suggesting. Stating. And whoever did it went after you, too.’
Ava reflexively pressed her hand into her stomach. This was too much to take in. ‘But that is absurd. Who would do such a thing?’
‘Enemies. Freaks. Stalkers. Shall I go