“Alex is the only one who has any hope of surviving your father’s reign, especially after marrying Ines. I think he knows this as well as you and I do.”
Evelyne let out a shaky sigh. Gabriel took it as agreement and turned to leave, but Evelyne reached out, her slim hand curling around his hand.
“What if Father punishes Alexandre? What if…?”
“He won’t,” Gabriel said with more force than he actually believed, but she needed reassurance, and he supposed he did as well. “First, your father needs his son, his heir. If he didn’t, Alex would have been punished with much worse long ago. Second, Alex will not know where you are, just that I have taken you somewhere safe. There will be no evidence connecting you to him, so while your father coulddecideto blame him, he can’t prove it. He won’t want to prove it. He’ll probably make up some boogeyman who stole you. Send General Vinyes on a wild-goose chase.”
“I suppose you’re right.” She chewed on her bottom lip, a distracting and brain-draining move that distracted him enough to meet her golden gaze. “What if he punishesyou?” she asked, eyes worried, voice soft. “What if the chase is General Vinyes to us?”
“Do you underestimate me, Evelyne?” he quipped, but her eyes were wide and shiny as she studied him.
He had never seen Evelyne look vulnerable. He knew, from Alex, that the king was especially hard on her, but Alex had always been vague about what that meant. And Evelyne never seemed to be troubled. Sociable, confident, cheeky even.
He saw the troubled in her now.
“Everything will be all right,” he assured her, with an odd gentleness from himself he did not quite recognize. “You have my word.”
So he left her there, determined to see his word through.
CHAPTER THREE
Evelyne waited forGabriel’s return, trying not to fret and failing. Her fatherwasa vindictive man, and even if Gabriel somehow managed to pull this off, Father would look for someone to blame.
Who would be harmed because of it? Perhaps it had been vindictive and petty to want to name Jordi. Maybe she was more like her father than she’d want to admit. She almost hoped Gabriel would ignore her there.
Almost.
Unfortunately, the only other option to this one would be to return to the castle and marry a man as evil as her father.
Impossible. She had to take the freedom Alexandre had arranged for her.
That Gabriel would put himself in the line of fire for her—no, nother, for Alex—was a surprise. And now she was curious just what would indebt the man to her brother so much. She was quite sure Gabriel had built his own wealth and success with no help from Alex.
But surely just being good friends wouldn’t be enough for Gabriel to risk life and limb to do allthis. And surely her brother would not have asked it of Gabriel if there was not something…more to this.
But what? She couldn’t even come up with an idea.
She did not have her phone. She did not have a jacket. She had nothing except this dress suitable for a princess at a royal wedding, heels that felt too tight and painful to put back on and the sloshing feeling of nothing but champagne being in her stomach.
And Gabriel was going to be gone for at least an hour.
She dozed. Probably ill-advisedly considering she was alone in a strange plane in a deserted hangar, but the events of the day had just completely sapped her energy, and the low-level nausea wasn’t helping. So she reclined back in the comfortable plane seat and slept.
When she opened her eyes, not quite remembering that she’d fallen asleep and certainly not sure how long she’d been out, she was not alone anymore.
She might have startled at direct hazel eyes clearly having been watching her, but there was something very centering about Gabriel. Like an anchor amid this very strange and unexpected storm.
He moved toward her. “Here.” He handed her a bag. “Just things I could pick up along the way. Some guests of the palace will wonder where their things went, but I’m certain they’ll get over it.”
Evelyne shook her sleep- and champagne-foggy mind and unzipped the bag. She pulled out a man’s coat—too small to be Gabriel’s. Some kind of faux fur shawl. A pair of slippers—she was so excited about those she immediately shoved them onto her feet.
She let out a sigh of relief.
“Now, eat while I prepare to take off.” This time, he set a kind of bakery box in her lap. She opened it, saw an array of bits and pieces from the wedding meal and reception food.
Her stomach sloshed in protest. “I don’t feel so well.”
“Eat,” he insisted. “That will help.” He turned, walking up the aisle toward the cockpit of the plane.
