Operation: Monarch. Valerie Parv

my informant, only the man who took it to the group knew precisely what it contained. He was ordered to deliver it to a prearranged drop-off point so their leader could retrieve it and put it to use.”

      “Our old friend, the Hand,” Lorne said heavily.

      Serena heard Princess Alison catch her breath. “The Hand” was the only name by which they knew the leader of Carramer First. The other group members were basically harmless hotheads, but according to R.P.D. intelligence, the Hand was a professional criminal, skilled at covering his tracks. Only a handful of the group’s elite were said to know his identity, hampering efforts to pin him down. Through phone calls and taped instructions, he controlled the group’s activities with an iron hand, hence his code name. Everything else about him remained a frustrating mystery.

      “What will the Hand do when he discovers you’ve intercepted the package?” Princess Alison asked.

      Serena turned to her. “He shouldn’t find out for some time. I arranged a special show for him while arresting my contact.”

      “I hope you’ve provided protection for your contact,” Lorne observed dryly. “From what we know of the Hand, he’ll be more interested in getting this back than in rescuing his man.”

      “Woman. We flew her to a safe location on Isle des Anges this morning,” Serena supplied. “I searched her very publicly, making it obvious she didn’t have the package on her, so anyone watching us would think she’d passed it to someone else minutes before I got to her. The Hand’s people should be kept busy for some time trying to find out where it is now.”

      The prince’s obsidian eyes clouded. “I doubt it will take them long to figure out they’ve been duped and that we have what they’re looking for.”

      She lifted her hands, palms upward. “With respect, Your Highness, I don’t see what harm a fake royal birth certificate can do to the monarchy.”

      “It isn’t a fake.”

      This time she couldn’t control her reaction. If the certificate was genuine…

      The prince gestured toward a straight-backed chair in front of the desk. “Sit down, Serena. I take it you examined the contents of the package?”

      She perched on the edge of the chair. “Following procedure, I checked everything for explosives and contaminants before bringing them to you.”

      He stabbed the package with a finger. “Were there any letters or other clues to the origins of the material.”

      She shook her head. “Nothing we can trace. I found only the birth certificate, a plaster cast of a baby’s footprints and the photos you have there, sir.”

      The prince shuffled through the items, retrieving two black-and-white photos. One showed a superbly fit dark-haired man clad in tight shorts, working out in a gymnasium, plainly oblivious of the camera trained on him. The second showed the same man in a changing room, clad only in a towel. The first time she opened the package and saw the photo, Serena had felt herself go hot and cold by turns. Now she cleared her throat. “Your Highnesses, I think I know that man.”

      The prince’s gaze shone with interest. “Go ahead.”

      She felt reluctant to admit the truth, but duty demanded it. “I haven’t seen him for a long time, but his name is Garth Remy. We went to the same high school.”

      Her slight hesitation wasn’t lost on the prince. She was glad he didn’t ask how well she had known Garth.

      Princess Alison’s sharp look told Serena her feelings toward Garth had been read like a book. The princess’s tumultuous romance with Prince Lorne had begun a little over a year ago, when a riptide dumped the Australian tourist at his feet on his private beach. Her affection for Lorne’s little boy had won the prince’s attention, then the woman himself had claimed his heart. Now it was rumored that Alison might be pregnant. It was well-known that they wanted a brother or sister for Nori. The princess certainly looked blooming. The sudden softening in her expression suggested that she suspected exactly how things had been between Serena and Garth.

      Serena held her breath, but the princess shifted her attention to her husband. “I still can’t believe the likeness, Lorne.”

      “At school he was known as Duke because of his resemblance to Prince Lorne,” Serena explained. She didn’t add that Garth had hated the nickname. He had come from a poor family, and the name only rubbed it in.

      Lorne indicated the photo. “What else do you know about him?”

      Her thoughts spun. Even Alison, for all her experience of being swept off her feet by love, couldn’t know how attracted Serena had been to Garth when they were teenagers, or how badly he had hurt her when he dismissed her as being no more than a pretty face. He had made no allowance for her parents pushing her into modeling from the time she could walk, primping and pampering her until she had felt like a doll instead of their child. Nor did he care that she hated modeling but hadn’t had the courage to give it up because her success meant so much to her parents.

      It was hardly her fault that her figure had ripened to model proportions in her early teens, or that the camera had loved her vivid blue eyes and blond coloring. At nineteen to her sixteen, he’d believed her looks were all that mattered to her, when they had meant far more to her parents than to Serena herself.

      She had told herself she didn’t care what Garth thought of her, yet his censure had rankled for a long time. She told herself he wasn’t the reason she had joined the Carramer Police Force, but she knew his comments had planted the seed. She had chosen crime fighting because it was as far away from modeling as she could get, then had found she thrived on the work. When she was invited to join the elite Royal Protection Detail, she had jumped at it. She loved being a royal insider, doing police work at the highest possible level. Not just a pretty face now, she told Garth’s photo silently.

      He would be thirty-two to her twenty-nine now. The midnight gaze seemed to mock her, although she knew she was imagining that. It was obvious he hadn’t known he was being photographed. There was nothing posed about the way he stood with one bare leg on the floor and the other propped on a bench as he dried himself off.

      Her throat felt dry as she handed the photo back to the monarch. “Garth and I lost touch after we finished school. Friends told me he’d joined the navy as a diver. Since his parents were in the commercial fishing business, that would seem logical. But I’m afraid I don’t know any more. I have no idea why his photo was in the package.”

      Prince Lorne massaged his chin with one hand as he seemed to weigh how much to tell her. After a long interval he said, “Whoever put this together intended to reveal Garth to the world as the rightful heir to the throne of Carramer.”

      Princess Alison’s hand went to her mouth although she made no sound. Naturally she would already be aware of the possibility.

      Serena had no such forewarning, and shock ricocheted through her. “Surely that’s impossible, Your Highness?”

      The prince looked less perturbed by her outburst than by the possibility he’d just voiced. “I wish it were. Unfortunately, my family history makes it all too possible.”

      “Since she’s already involved, perhaps Serena should know the story,” Alison suggested.

      A faint glimmer of agreement crossed Lorne’s features as he looked at Serena. “The family has always known that my parents had a child before they were married. He was named Louis but was stillborn, or so we believed. I think the certificate, the footprints and the photos are meant to suggest otherwise.”

      Serena could hardly deal with the thought that Garth’s resemblance to Lorne might be because Garth was really Lorne’s older brother. Far less that Garth could be the true ruler of Carramer. How was Lorne managing to face the possibility, when he had so much at stake? An entire kingdom, in fact. No wonder his usual composure had been shattered in a way she had never expected to see.

      “The footprints could belong to any baby,”