Royal Wedding Threat Read Online Free

this street?”
    “I arrived to meet with the princess shortly before eight, then stopped by your office to get your approval on the wedding plans. You kept me waiting.”
    Jason didn’t apologize. “The explosion happened shortly afterten. That’s more than a two-hour window. Any number of vehicles may have come and gone in that time.”
    Though she was tempted to point out to the captain that he might have narrowed the window by agreeing to see her when she’d first arrived at headquarters, another thought made her heart beat with apprehension. “A car pulled away from this spot right after the explosion.”
    Both the captainand the members of the bomb squad looked surprised.
    “You mean you saw a car drive off?” Jason clarified.
    Ava nodded, the memory rushing back clearly now. She was certain of what she’d seen. Everything had happened so quickly, and yet she distinctly recalled seeing a car pull away—in the back of her dazed mind, she’d thought to herself the driver was fortunate to have parked ahead ofher on the street. Otherwise the vehicle would have had to drive past her smoldering car to leave.
    The bomb tech scowled at the captain. “The person witnessed an explosion, but instead of checking to see if everyone was all right, he fled?”
    “Maybe he was scared?” Ava suggested, her voice betraying that same emotion.
    “Or guilty.” Jason ran a frustrated hand through his hair, exposingthe silvery flecks that framed his close-cropped ebony hair. “We need to look at that footage. Can you describe the car you saw?”
    “It was a car,” Ava told him, recalling all she could.
    “Make or model?”
    Ava bit her lip. She hadn’t looked closely enough to see any details—most of her attention had been on the pain in her legs and all the confusion around her. The ringing in her earshadn’t helped her focus at all, either.
    “Color?” Jason prompted.
    Ava pinched her eyes shut, replaying the memory. “Dark?” She couldn’t say anything more certain than that.
    To his credit, Captain Selini neither laughed nor rolled his eyes. “We’ll have to look at the footage. Are we done here?” he asked the bomb tech.
    The squad member nodded. “We’ll give you a call when we getthe results on those samples.”
    Ava walked alongside the captain as he headed back toward the pedestrian gate in the palace wall, to the royal-guard headquarters building that lay inside the palace grounds. They passed the smoldering remains of her car, and she glanced at it, her steps wavering as she considered what might have happened if she hadn’t stopped and turned back to face the captain.
    She could have been killed. At the very least, it would have been her face that was disfigured, instead of her ankles.
    Suddenly the captain took hold of her arm. “Are you okay?”
    Ava wanted to dismiss his question with a laugh, but she had to struggle to catch her breath, and she felt uncharacteristically unsteady on her feet. Attempting to straighten, to pull away from the supportof his hand on her arm, she instead stumbled forward unsteadily, her high heels catching in the gaps between the cobblestones.
    Jason clasped one hand around her waist. For an instant, she feared he was going to hoist her over his shoulder and trundle her off as before, but instead he met her eyes with surprising concern. “Don’t look at the car,” he told her in a soothing voice. “Just walkslowly. One foot in front of the other.”
    In any other situation, Ava would have snapped at him. But it was all she could do to lean on his arm and step slowly forward as instructed. She glanced at his face and found his eyes on hers, concerned, reassuring. His eyes, which had only ever seemed cold and steel-gray before, now held a hint of compassion she hadn’t expected.
    “I am not aninvalid,” she told him sharply as soon as she found her voice. She needed to push him away. It was her personal policy not to trust anyone. She’d learned that lesson