Personal Protection

by Julie Miller

  Ah, yes. Filip loved his routines. If he had any idea what Ivan was planning behind his back, he’d be livid.

  “I told you, this is personal. You do not need to be involved.”

  “But it is my responsibility—”

  “I am inside a police station. I will be fine without you hovering over me.” He grinned at Aleks, who was people watching the comings and goings of officers, detectives, visitors and staff through the lobby checkpoint and service counters. He flicked his friend’s arm to get his attention. “You should have brought a camera,” he teased.

  Aleks’s grin formed a bright crescent of white in his long black beard. “Did you see that plaque on the wall? They have created a memorial to a little girl—”

  “Aleks...” Ivan urged his friend to join them. “Business first. Sightseeing later. You know we must—”

  “Hold that elevator!”

  Ivan’s sentence trailed off and he instinctively grabbed the door as a woman with a dirty, soot-streaked blond ponytail darted onto the elevator. She pulled in an equally grimy, handcuffed man by his upper arm and guided him to the corner farthest away from Ivan and his staff, ordering her captive to face the wall. Filip cursed under his breath as he and Danya quickly positioned themselves between Ivan and their guests and allowed the doors to close.

  “Thanks.” He saw the woman wore fingerless gloves when she pushed some flyaway strands of hair off her face. He also saw the badge hanging from a chain around her neck. Ivan’s senses tingled with an alertness he had to hide. “Sorry. I didn’t relish dragging this dirtbag up the stairs or waiting for the next elevator.”

  She wore a long, dusty man’s coat over jeans and worn leather boots that were nearly as big as his own feet. Gloves? Coat? Boots?

  In August?

  No wonder there was a sheen of perspiration on her pink cheeks.

  As intrigued by her apparent toughness as he was curious about her ratty, overheated appearance, he offered her a succinct nod. “We are happy to oblige the local constabulary.”

  Her prisoner glanced over his shoulder at Ivan. “What’s that mean?”

  “Quiet.” The officer nodded toward the keypad and asked Filip to push the button for her. “Third floor, please.”

  “We should not share an elevator, Your High—”

  “This is fine,” Ivan insisted, reaching around his security chief to press the number three button himself. It was probably best not to advertise his real identity just yet. Not until all his security was in place. “We are here to make friends with the people of Kansas City, not make their lives more difficult.”

  “You talk funny,” the handcuffed man slurred, laughing at their accents.

  And he smelled funny. Dreadful, actually, as Ivan crinkled his nose up against the odors of urine, body odor and smoke filling the confined space. At least, he hoped it was the criminal and not the female officer escorting him who reeked of the streets. Ivan had been trained to keep such negative observations to himself and be a polite gentleman at all times. “English is not my first language.”

  “Your English is better than mine, pal.”

  “Dougie. Sorry about that, sir.” The woman jerked on the handcuffs, warning her prisoner to be quiet again. Apparently, standing still and keeping his mouth shut was an ongoing battle for the twitchy bum. “I am already in a mood. Don’t push it.”

  Even though the woman wasn’t terribly chatty, Ivan noted that she was extremely observant. She marked their number and position on the elevator as it began its ascent. She sized up the flak vest and guns Filip and Danya wore beneath their suit jackets and pulled back the front of her coat to keep her gun within easy reach. Although he wanted to reassure the woman that they meant her no harm, backing up that claim would mean that he’d have to identify himself and his entourage. And Ivan wasn’t ready to reveal anything when he had this much of an audience surrounding him.

  His training in the Lukin military had made him observant, too. The woman had an ordinary face. She was of average height and indeterminate shape, thanks to the bulky coat she wore. In addition to a stylist, she needed a comb and a shower and a much more cooperative prisoner. Ivan curled his fingers into his palms, fighting back the urge to push Filip and Danya aside and assist her with the recalcitrant man who muttered and fidgeted instead of obeying her authority. Maybe a good twenty years older and hundred pounds heavier than her, the man seemed familiar with handcuffs and causing trouble. No wonder she’d been anxious to get him into a jail cell or interview room and off her hands.

  He also noticed she had green eyes.

  And lips. Ivan averted his gaze as if he’d uttered that ridiculous observation out loud. Of course, she had lips. But they had drawn his attention to the middle of her flushed face. Despite her determined lack of femininity, her lips were pink and asymmetrical, sleekly defined on top and decadently full on the bottom. She had a mouth that reminded him just how delightful it was to kiss a willing woman, and just how long he’d denied himself that pleasure.

  “Y’all ain’t cops, are ya?” Her prisoner twisted around again, ignoring her order to face the wall. “With your fancy suits and fancy accents. Damn foreigners.”

  “Douglas Freeland,” she warned. “You be nice to these people.”

  “I ain’t been nothin’ but nice this morning. I got a sickness and you know it. You set me up.” He called her a crude name that fisted Ivan’s hands with the need to shut him up and make him apologize. He was embarrassed to see his bodyguards ignoring the verbal abuse and staring fixedly at the elevator doors as they slowed to a stop. “I ain’t goin’ back in.”

  The moment the doors slid open, the prisoner twisted out of her grasp. In the next second, he spun around and butted his fat, bald head against her more delicate skull.

  The urge to intervene jolted through Ivan’s legs as she tumbled to the floor. But Filip and Danya pushed him against the railing, blocking him from the scuffle. “Protect the prince!”

  Not that the officer apparently needed his or anyone’s help. Before the man got both feet off the elevator, her legs shot out and she tripped him. Then she was on top of the guy with a feral yell as she smushed her attacker’s face to the floor. Several other officers from the third floor had rushed to help, but they stopped in their tracks, backing up a step as she hauled the prisoner to his feet. The big man wasn’t muttering anymore. She pushed him against the seam between the wall and the elevator, using him to prop the door open while she checked his cuffs and evened out her breathing.

  Filip took Ivan by the arm to lead him off the elevator. But Ivan didn’t need to be sandwiched between his bodyguards. The woman, despite the blow to the head, seemed to have the situation under control.

  Still, he knew the toll hand-to-hand combat like that could take on a person. There would be bruises, and her head would be throbbing. He shrugged free of Filip’s grip. “Are you all right, miss?”

  “Officer. Officer Valentine.” Her green eyes widened with a message that could be understood in any language. Get off the damn elevator already and let me do my job.

  “Very well. Gentlemen.” They all exited the elevator and headed to the sergeant’s desk for directions to the captain’s office.

  With a nod to the officers who’d come to her aid, Officer Valentine pushed a long tendril of caramel-colored hair off her face and walked her prisoner through the maze of desks on the main floor. Her dialogue trailed off as they went their separate ways. “That was your big plan? Escape onto a floor filled with cops? Now I get to add a second assault charge...”

  Relief that Officer Valentine was all right, as well as admiration at how she’d handled the situation herself, eased the tension inside him. Ivan wondered at the rush of adrenaline he felt ebbing from his system and chalked it up to jet lag finally catching up with him.

  * * *

  “THIS IS EVERYTHING on my sch
edule while I am here in Kansas City.” Ivan forwarded the text from his chief of staff, Galina Honchar, to Captain Hendricks’s phone. In turn, Joe Hendricks, the captain of the Fourth Precinct, copied the list of events and locations to his administrative assistant in the adjoining office and asked her to make a printout. “Occasionally, a meeting runs long or something unexpected comes up...”

  “Last-minute changes could be handled by the liaison officer you’re asking for,” the captain finished. “She’ll be able to keep me in loop, so I can have whatever assistance is needed on standby.”

  That was part of his plan, Ivan conceded. “That would be a benefit to your department.” But he was asking for something more than a communications liaison with the local police.

  After sending Filip and Danya off to their respective meetings, the only person from Lukinburg here with Ivan on the third floor was Aleksandr Petrovic. Last he’d seen, Aleks was cooling his heels in Captain Hendricks’s outer office, chatting up the captain’s administrative assistant. Even though the woman wore a wedding ring and was obviously pregnant, flirting and having a good time seemed to be hardwired into Aleks’s DNA. He had survived the mines and poverty of Moravska, relying on hard work and sheer determination to leave his past behind him. His friend had been a city kid, raised in a modest neighborhood in St. Feodor, and had used that innate charm to impress the right people and negotiate one successful business deal after another. To look at them now, with their tailored suits and limousines, Ivan and Aleks seemed to be cut from the same cloth, but their personalities and backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Still, Aleks was the one confidant the prince had trusted with the real goal of this meeting, and, if he wasn’t too distracted by the woman out there, was keeping an eye out for when Milevski and the rest of the security team returned.

  Ivan was learning that secrecy was practically impossible for royalty. But that secrecy was necessary. The crumpled note sitting like a fishing weight in his pocket warned him that keeping his secrets was a matter of life-and-death. “I told my security chief that I have reconnected with an old flame in the US from my military days, when we did joint operations with other countries. That is why I am making this request privately. They believe I am being discreet for romance’s sake, not because I suspect a breach among the members of my entourage.”

  The black man with the weathered face and receding hairline nodded. “I can help you with your request to place an undercover operative inside your delegation for the duration of your visit. I’ve lined up a couple of candidates of the appropriate age for you to meet.”

  Ivan reminded him why he sought him out for assistance. “Finding a woman who served in the military is the only plausible way I could think of for me to have met an American and have had the time to develop a relationship with her. I worked with several American soldiers when I was in the military police.”

  “I haven’t told them why they’ve been summoned to my office yet. I have to admit, this feels a bit like I’m playing matchmaker.”

  “I assure you, that is not the case, Captain.” A tinge of awkwardness heated his skin. “I do not like that I have been forced into this situation. But I must choose a woman today, before I leave this building. My people must get used to seeing her with me. Masquerading as my...paramour...is the only way I can guarantee that we will have time alone to discuss who wants to kill me and devise strategy to unmask the traitor or traitors before they do me or anyone else harm. If I simply take on an American bodyguard, my security team will expect to be working together with that person. Since I do not know who I can trust, I require an ally who reports only to me, one who can convincingly play the role of consort to a prince, and whose qualities meet the needs of this very delicate investigation. I do not care what she looks like or if she fits some profile I would put on a dating site. She only needs to be good at her job.”

  “That’s what I needed to hear.” Hendricks pressed a sturdy index finger into the blotter on his desk, the gesture making Ivan think that warning finger would be pressed against his chest—royalty or not—if he dared to misuse one of Hendricks’s officers. “If I hear that anything freaky happens to my officer while she’s working with you, I promise I will bring the full force of this department down on your head.”

  “Understood. A good officer protects his troops. I respect that. And I will respect her.”

  Hendricks nodded. “Then let’s do this, Your Highness.”

  Ignoring the urge to rub at the tension cording the back of his neck, Ivan nodded his appreciation. He was still getting used to answering to prince and Your Highness, although the proud posture and cautious, controlled movements that had been drilled into him during his stint in the military and on a UN coalition team in Bosnia served him well in conveying the air of authority he needed to project. The suit and tie he wore were better fitted and more expensive than the clothes he’d worn when he’d been a happy, anonymous commoner. He’d put on the hand-me-downs he’d worn growing up in the poor mountain village where his aunt and uncle had raised him if it meant he could go back to being an ordinary guy without the death threats and suspicions about the people closest to him churning inside his brain. He’d trade his penthouse suite for his old studio apartment in Moravska if it meant he’d no longer have the future of an entire country resting on his shoulders.

  But those shoulders were broad and strong from the years he’d worked in the mines. The military had disciplined him, and a technology degree had given him a better life. He would do whatever was necessary to save the fledgling monarchy and put the discontents who would bring their country to its knees again out of business forever. Saving his own skin would be an added bonus.

  He adjusted the glasses that pinched his nose and looked across the desk into Joe Hendricks’s golden-brown eyes. “You understand my need for secrecy?”

  “I do.” The man with the salt-and-pepper hair that receded into twin points atop his coffee-colored skin leaned back in his chair. “The fewer people who know about this charade, the better. Only you, me and the officer you select will know exactly what’s going on. I’ll serve as her undercover handler on this assignment.” He rose from his chair and crossed to a set of blinds and opened them, revealing a bank of windows that overlooked a hallway and a beehive of desks and cubicle walls beyond that where uniformed officers, detectives, administrative staff and even a couple of criminals handcuffed to their chairs—including the lowlife who had attacked Officer Valentine—worked or waited. “If there’s any chance the threat is legit, and one of those people—what did you call them?”

  “They call themselves Lukin Loyalists. I call them the remnants of the mafia thugs who used to control our government. Lukin is a nickname we gave the citizens who were part of the underground resistance during World War II. These people are nothing like those brave souls.”

  “I thought I heard on the news a while back that the Loyalist situation had been resolved.”

  “So we thought.” Ivan inhaled a deep breath and slowly released his frustration with the entire situation. “There are still some philosophical disagreements, but we’ve given them a voice in the new government. The minority whip in our Parliament is a Loyalist. He denounced the assassination attempt in the capital.”

  “There could be some fringe members of the party who feel their leadership has sold them out.”

  “Seven people died in that blast in St. Feodor, including a friend of mine. Whoever these people are, I take their threats seriously.”

  Hendricks agreed. “If one or more of these Loyalists are in Kansas City, planning an assassination attempt, then I want to know about it. I want to prevent any attack if possible and minimalize casualties—including you and my officer.”

  He pointed through the blinds to two female officers, one wearing a crisp blue uniform. She was engaged in an animated conversation with Aleks. Ivan grinned. Leave it to his friend to find someone new to practice
his charms on. It was hard to remember a time when he’d been that carefree and able to stay squarely in a happy moment to enjoy it to the fullest.

  The two of them looked very much alike, both with jet-black hair and blue eyes behind the glasses they each wore. Although Ivan stood half an inch taller, Aleks packed more muscle onto his frame. As the prince, he wore his hair cropped military short and kept his beard trimmed close to the angles of his jawline while his friend took his curly facial hair to a shaggy professor look. They’d done their requisite two-year stint in the army after university, where they’d met and become friends. After that, their paths had diverged—one remaining in the military, and the other going back to graduate school—until they’d come together again in service to the new government. They shared looks, history, pride in their country. And yet, the prince’s world was vastly different from that of Aleksandr Petrovic. The orphan and the prince. The charmer and the disciplined soldier. Ivan’s jaw clenched as his smile faded. Had he sentenced himself to a life of loneliness by answering the call of duty and giving himself over to the needs of his country and its people?

  Ivan studied the female officer as she laughed at something Aleks said, and he felt a stab of envy at the normalcy of their interaction. But he reminded himself of the reason why he was here—to find a bodyguard he could trust without question, and an investigator who could help him identify the traitor in his inner circle. Knowing Filip Milevski and the rest of his security detail would be returning in the next fifteen to twenty minutes, Ivan rose, buttoned his jacket and joined Captain Hendricks at the window. He needed to evaluate the officers’ suitability for the assignment before selecting his undercover partner.