THEIR_VIRGIN_PRINCESS (14 page)

“She should never, ever be left alone,” Landon said,
frowning.

Coop didn’t even want to think about it, but he had to. “If
her abduction wasn’t a random act and this is someone who knows Alea, then the
question becomes who and why would anyone want to do this to her?”

This.
God, he
couldn’t verbalize the idea of someone torturing Alea or selling her into
sexual slavery, sending her into a hell most people couldn’t imagine. It made
him somewhere between panicked and violent.

But she hadn’t actually been raped, not in the most
technical sense of the word. She’d been horrifically abused, and he didn’t know
the full extent of what she’d been forced to witness or endure. It made no
sense that her virginity had been left intact. That had been a deliberate
choice on someone’s part. But why?

“I can’t imagine forcing this on anyone,” Lan said, looking
through the file. “Much less someone like Alea. She was just going to school.”

“And she was working with a charity organization that helped
battered women,” Dane murmured. “Why didn’t I know that?”

Cooper wasn’t sure either. From the beginning of the
investigation, she’d very likely kept lots of information to herself. “She sure
hadn’t let her cousins in on it.”

“Why would she keep something as kind as charity work a
secret?” Lan asked.

“If I hadn’t, my cousins would have come in and made a big
production of it,” Alea said, startling them all. “I just wanted to do
something good. I had some free time, and I like charity work. I’ve done it all
my life. If word had reached the palace that I was working at a women’s
shelter, someone would have decided to use it as good press.” She was still
sitting in her chair, but she’d turned it. She clutched the blanket he’d
settled over her close. “I want to talk to you guys about whatever danger is
still lurking out there. Don’t leave me out of the conversation when it’s my
life. I get that you thought you were protecting me, but I have to know.”

Dane nodded slowly. “All right. From now on, I’ll include
you. We have a conference call in a few days, baby. I’ll try to be better.”

“Good. Will you stop calling me baby?” she asked hopefully.

“Not on your life, baby,” Dane shot back without a hint of
guilt. “Now according to the Anders brothers, you started working at the
shelter the same week you moved to Manhattan. Why did you pick a shelter in the
Bronx?”

Alea huffed a little. “Because that’s where the most help
was needed. My roommate’s mom was a social worker there. I got very close to
her.”

“To your roommate?” Dane asked.

Alea laughed, a bitter little sound. “No. Heather was a
righteous bitch. She couldn’t be bothered to help anyone. She was far too busy
trying to set herself up as the queen of NYU. She was furious when I wouldn’t
put on a tiara and go to parties with her. So self-centered… But her mother was
quite lovely. She invited me to come down and visit the shelter when she found
out I was interested in social work. I met some of the women, heard their
stories. My heart broke for them. I knew I had to go back.”

That was his Alea. She couldn’t turn away a person in need.
Now she could completely reject her own needs, but when she was faced with
someone else’s, her natural compassion shined through.

“Did you have any run-ins with anyone there?” Dane asked.

“We helped women and their children escape abusive partners,
so there were always threats. They kept their address a secret, but even so,
the determined jerks found the place and showed up to rant. But no single
incident stands out.”

They should have included her in on the case sooner. Cooper
saw that now. Some information only Alea could give.

Dane stared down at the folder. “You called the police on
the fifteenth of October about a man who threatened to shoot you.”

Cooper felt his blood start to boil. “Shoot you?”

Alea shrugged, an animated grin crossing her face. “It’s the
Bronx. I could have gotten shot just walking down the street. I disarmed him
and called the police. He was crying and telling me his tale of woe by the time
they got there. I don’t think he had me kidnapped. He had no idea who I was or
that I was a student at NYU, much less a princess from Bezakistan. How would he
have had access to stationary from the embassy? To him, I was a random ‘bitch’
keeping him from his punching bag.”

“But there were potentially a whole bunch of men who came to
that shelter with a reason to hate you,” Lan argued.

She shrugged slightly. “I guess that’s one way to look at
it. But, guys, I dealt almost exclusively with very poor people. Didn’t I read
something about the person behind my abduction paying for my upkeep? Like five
grand every ten days? By the way, that was not five grand worth of upkeep. The
accommodations sucked ass, as they would have said back in New York.”

He was actually taking her sarcasm as a positive sign.
“She’s got a point, Dane. I don’t think it was a person she encountered during
her charity work. Seriously, if it had been one of those douchebags, he would
have either fucked her himself to show Alea that he was all big and bad, or
he’d have made sure she was ‘learning her place.’”

“Nice way to put it,” Alea said.

He held his hands up. “Baby, I’m just telling you the way
that kind of man would think.”

Alea’s eyes narrowed on him, and it was all he could do not
to shrink back. She had a damn fine evil eye. “Not you, too.”

It was his turn to shrug. He wouldn’t take it back. “Yeah,
you’re my baby. Deal with it.”

Her gorgeous eyes rolled. “I have a name, you know.”

“I’m going to call you darlin’,” Lan offered.

“That’s not better,” Alea said, shaking her head.

“Okay, how about snuggle bear?” Lan returned. “Or puddin’?
That’s another real popular choice down South.”

Alea sighed. “Darlin’ it is, then.”

Lan just smiled.

Score one for the guys. It was good to know she could be
cornered. Why hadn’t they tried this tactic earlier? Now that they had her alone
and were establishing rules, everything seemed so much simpler. It was as if
her stress level had plummeted, and she seemed more willing to compromise.
Maybe being away from her cousins and the pomp of the palace would be a good
thing.

“Could we sort out the endearments later?” Dane asked,
obviously annoyed. “Just to be sure, I want you to write down the names of
every man you came in contact with at that shelter. I want Anthony Anders to
check them all out.”

Alea groaned. “Dane, I didn’t catch most of their names. I
tended to call them things like ‘Overly Hairy Guy’ and ‘Dude Who Needs
Deodorant.’ I had a very fluid role there. I doubt that most of those men knew
my name, either. It wasn’t like I wore a nametag or distributed my bio. I’m not
trying to be difficult. I’m just telling you all the reasons I’m pretty sure
this is a dead end.”

The curtain to the back of the cabin opened, and a heavenly
smell wafted through. Coop’s stomach rumbled. The rich really did know how to
travel.

The hostess walked out with a smile on her face, like she
was genuinely happy to be serving them. “May I serve the first course of lunch
now? It’s a lovely French onion soup, which will be followed with an herb salad
with goat cheese croustades. The main course, a beef burgundy, should pair
perfectly with the wine from the captain.”

“Please,” Alea said, sitting up. “It smells wonderful. I
hope you try it yourself.”

The hostess inclined her head in a show of deference. Staff
tended to love Alea. “I would be thrilled to try it, Your Highness. You’re so
kind. If you would gather around the table, I will serve.”

Dane frowned and closed the folder. “We’re going to get back
to this. I’m not going to stop until we know who did this to you.”

“I’m sure you won’t,” Alea conceded. “But it can wait until
after lunch. Poor Landon is practically fainting.”

Lan did look a little piqued. He stood up. “There was no
meat with breakfast. It was all bread and stuff. I’m a carnivore.”

The hostess returned and set glasses before them, each
filled with a deep, ruby red wine. “The pilot says that this vintage comes from
the region of France in which he was born. Enjoy.”

Cooper took a long sip of the wine. It was rich and tasted
just slightly sweet, with a hint of tartness. Like Alea. But he wasn’t much of
a wine drinker. Give him a good beer any day. But so far, the flight attendant
hadn’t given them water or anything else to drink. So he took another sip.

They sat down around the table, getting ready to partake of
their first full meal as a family—whether Alea wanted to acknowledge that fact
or not. They drank and talked, the minutes speeding by.

The first course was served, and Cooper felt his every
muscle relax. He laughed at something Dane said, but suddenly sounds were
strangely far away. So was everyone in his field of vision. Even his muscles
felt heavy. In fact, he couldn’t quite lift the spoon.

Alea looked so happy, relaxed. And he felt so…weird.

He tried to push the glass away because something was so
wrong, but his hands wouldn’t work. They kind of flopped around like fish out
of water.

What the hell was happening?

“Sir? Sir? Are you all right?” He could halfway hear the
hostess. She sounded like she was talking through a funnel.

Cooper tried to get up. His vision was narrowing, focusing
in on one thing. Alea was asleep again. She looked so sweet, but…hadn’t she
just napped? Why was her head at that unnatural angle?

He tried to fight, tried to stay awake, but he failed.

The last thing he saw as he fell asleep was an unfamiliar
man in a white shirt standing over them, wearing a triumphant smile.

Dane fought the darkness in his head as though his
subconscious knew his sleep was unnatural.

He heard a low groan to his left before something rolled
closer and closer, but he couldn’t open his eyes to see or move in time to
prevent it from smacking his head. Pain flared.

What the hell had happened?

Using all his concentration, Dane shoved his lethargy aside
and forced himself upright. His head throbbed as he reached up and wiped away a
trickle of blood. He looked down at the wine bottle that had spun down the
aisle and struck him. And now his head pounded. His tongue felt double its
normal size and a bit furry.

Fuck, they’d been drugged. How long had he been out? He held
up the bottle before it rolled down and hit anyone else. And he stared at it.
Someone—the flight attendant?—had drugged them with this wine. The hostess had
served the soup, but none of them had eaten a single bite of it before passing
out. The good news was, Dane didn’t think any of them had imbibed more than a
half a glass. He glanced at his watch. About an hour since he’d last looked.
What the hell was going on?

“What the hell?” Lan moaned. “Did someone run me over?”

“Where’s Alea?” Coop asked, his words slurring.

Alea.
Panic
threatened to take over. They were on a fucking plane. Who would abduct her on
a goddamn plane? And how?

They all looked around, groaning as they rose to their feet
and stumbled around the cabin, searching for her. Shit, he felt like he was in
a fun house that wasn’t a whole lot of fun. His vision was like looking through
a tunnel, and the floor seemed to tilt down just slightly. He lurched forward
and saw Alea, grabbing onto her seat for balance. Relief flooded his system,
and his heart started beating again.

“Huh? I need to sleep,” she protested, all cuddled up in her
chair, safe and sound and still in the drug’s happy place.

Dane started to relax. She was safe. Then, as his own head
cleared, he realized something was really wrong. It wasn’t just his perception
leading him to think the floor was tilting a bit downward. It actually was. The
whole nose of the plane was, in fact. He had to get her—and all of them—out of
here fucking fast.

“No sleep for you, baby.” He turned to Coop and Lan, who
staggered behind him. “We’ve got to get her up. We’ve all been drugged. I don’t
think we got much of it, but I have no idea how she’ll react to it. She weighs
less than we do, so she won’t metabolize it as fast. I need you two to figure
out how fucked we are. There’s no way we aren’t. So find out how far we’re
about to take it up the ass.”

Coop shuddered, obviously feeling the effects, but he
rallied. “It had to be the pilot or the flight attendant.”

Since one had brought the wine and the other had served it…
“Yeah. Where the hell are they? I think the plane is diving, and if someone’s
going to try to kill us before we deal with that, I’d like to know.”

He looked around the cabin, but he encountered nothing but
the eerie white noise made by the engines.

Lan staggered, then forced himself to stand tall. He looked
out the window. “Diving? Is the pilot trying to crash the plane? There’s
nothing but ocean. Where the hell are we?”

Coop ran a hand over his head. “It’s been a while since I’ve
flown and I’m not familiar with planes like this, but I’ll figure it out. If
the pilot doesn’t shoot me first.”

“Both of you gear up,” Dane said, looking down at Alea. Her
color was good, her lips curving up in sleep.

“My gun is still in its holster,” Lan said, pulling his SIG
Sauer from underneath his jacket. “Why would the person who drugged us leave us
with guns? Why wouldn’t they just kill us in our sleep?”

It didn’t make a lick of sense. If whoever had poisoned the
wine wanted them unconscious, why wouldn’t they have used that time to disarm
the three big bad soldiers? Or kill everyone since there’d be hell to pay once
the drug wore off. What the fuck was going on here?