The Princess Predicament. Lisa Childs

life, and she possessed the scars to prove it. Both physical and emotional.

      Gabby only had the emotional scars until now.

      She wouldn’t be able to use her simulated fight moves to fend off this muscular man—probably not even if she wasn’t six months pregnant. But because she was six months pregnant, she couldn’t risk the baby getting hurt.

      So instead she reached for the gun and pulled it from beneath the man’s sweat-dampened shirt. The weapon was heavier than she remembered. She hadn’t held one in the past six months. But before that she’d held one several times. With both hands, using one to hold and balance the gun while she focused on flicking off the safety and pulling the trigger with the other.

      But the man held one of her hands. When he felt her grab the gun, he jerked her around and reached for the gun. So she fumbled with it quickly, sliding the safety and squeezing the trigger.

      Because she hadn’t wanted to hit anyone else in the crowded airport, she’d aimed the barrel up and fired the bullet into the metal ceiling. Birds, living in the rafters, flew into a frenzy. And so did the people as the bullet ricocheted back into the cement. She breathed a sigh of relief that it struck no one. But the cement chipped, kicking up pieces of it with dust.

      The man jumped, as if he’d felt the whiz of the bullet near his foot. And he lurched back. When he did, he released her arm. Now she had two hands, which she used to steady the gun and aim the barrel—this time at the man’s chest.

      People screamed and ran toward the exits. They thought she was dangerous. The man didn’t seem to share their sentiment because he stepped forward again, advancing on her.

      “I will shoot!” she warned him.

      He chuckled. Then, his voice full of condescension, said, “You are a princess. What do you know of shooting guns?”

      “More than enough to kill you …” Like the simulated fights, she hadn’t shot a weapon with the intent of hurting anyone … except for all the targets she had killed. She was good at head shots. Even better at the heart-kill shot.

      Of course those targets hadn’t been moving. And the man was—advancing on her with no regard for the weapon. He was mad, too, his eyes dark with rage. If he got his hands on her again, he wasn’t just going to kidnap her. He was going to hurt her. And hurting her would hurt her unborn child.

      So when he lunged toward her, she fired again.

      ANOTHER SHOT RANG out. But it didn’t echo off metal as the earlier shot had. It was muffled—as if it had struck something. Or someone …

       Gabriella …

      Whit held back the shout that burned his lungs. Yelling her name might only put her in danger—if she wasn’t already—or increase the danger if she was. Maybe that hadn’t been Gabby he’d glimpsed getting off the bus. Maybe she was still back at the orphanage. If she’d known someone was coming for her, wouldn’t she have stayed and waited?

      Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to be found. If the shooting involved her, she had been found, but the wrong person had done the finding. The person who’d written that threatening note?

      Whit shoved through the screaming people who were nearly stampeding in their haste to escape the building. There was no sign of the pregnant woman he’d glimpsed getting off the bus. She wasn’t with the others running away.

      And then he saw her and realized that she was the one they were all running from—she was the one with the gun. She gripped it in both hands.

      As Whit neared her, he noticed the blood spattered on her face, and his heart slammed into his ribs with fear for her safety.

      “Gabby,” he spoke softly, so as to not startle her, but she still jumped and swung toward him with her body and with the barrel of her gun.

      He barely glanced at it, focusing instead on her face—on her incredibly beautiful face but for those droplets of blood.

      Anxiously he asked, “Are you hurt?”

      A groan—low and pain-filled—cut through the clamor of running people. Gabriella’s lips had parted, but she was not the one who uttered the sound. Whit lowered his gaze to the man who had dropped to his knees in front of Gabby. The burly man clutched his shoulder and blood oozed between his fingers.

      Whit flinched, his own shoulder wound stinging in reaction. “What the hell’s going on?”

      Gabby took one hand from the gun to tug down the brim of her hat—as if her weak disguise could fool him twice.

      The man took advantage of her distraction and looser grip and reached for the gun. But he could only grab at it with one hand, as his other arm hung limply from his bleeding shoulder. He had the element of surprise though and snapped it free of her grasp.

      She lunged back for it, her swollen belly on the same level as the barrel of the gun. But Whit moved faster than she did and stepped between them. Before the man could move his finger to the trigger of the gun, Whit slammed his fist into the wounded man’s jaw. The guy’s eyes rolled back into his head as his consciousness fled, and he fell back onto the cement floor of the airport, blood pooling beneath his gunshot wound.

      Whit’s shoulder ached from delivering the knockout punch, and he growled a curse. But his pain was nothing in comparison to the fear overwhelming him. He’d only just learned where Gabby was and he’d nearly lost her again.

      Maybe forever this time—if the man had managed to pull the trigger before Whit had knocked him out.

      “What the hell were you thinking?” he shouted the question at Princess Gabriella.

      His fear wasn’t for himself but for her, and he hadn’t felt an emotion that intense since the night before she disappeared. The night she’d begged him to stay with her. At first he’d thought she’d only wanted protection but then he’d realized that she’d wanted more.

      She’d wanted him. But then the next morning she’d left him without a backward glance. So he’d probably just been her way of rebelling against her father’s attempts to control her life. That was what that night had been about, but what about today?

      “I—I was defending myself,” she stammered in a strangely hoarse tone, as if she’d lost her voice or was trying to disguise it. She ducked down and reached for the gun that had dropped to the floor with the man.

      But Whit beat her to the weapon, clutching it tightly in his fist. “No more shooting for you, Princess.”

      “I’m not a princess—”

      “Save it,” he said. “I damn well know who you are.” He had no idea why she was denying her identity to him, though. But that wasn’t his most pressing concern at the moment.

      He leaned over to check the man for a pulse. He was alive, just unconscious. And that might not last long. “Who is this? And why did you shoot him?”

      “He tried to kidnap me,” she said, apparently willing to admit that much even though she wouldn’t admit to who she was. “So I grabbed his gun.”

      Whit uttered a low whistle of appreciation. Even without a weapon, the guy would have been intimidating, yet she’d managed to disarm him, too. Maybe she wasn’t Princess Gabriella. “How do you know he was going to kidnap you?”

      “He tried to drag me out there,” she gestured toward the big open doors in one of the metal walls, “to a plane.”

      As Whit glanced up to follow the direction she pointed, he noticed men—about four of them—rushing in from the airfield. They must have heard the shots, too. And they were armed.

      “We have to get the hell out of here,” he said.

      Or the man’s friends were liable to finish what he’d started—abducting Gabriella. And Whit with his shoulder wound and his borrowed gun were hardly going to be enough protection to save her.

      She