Page 3 of Trapped with the Undercover Prince

“That’s good,” she said as they went through a door dented enough that it would never close again. They veered to the right. “Because we’re going to need it.”

Other people stumbled past them in a rush to get out, their cries mixing with the alarm clang to create a cacophony of unintelligible babble and noise. Their guide suddenly turned left and disappeared through a partially open narrow door. She barely managed to slide through sideways and noted problem number one. There was no way a pregnant woman could get through.

The man bent over a woman who was crying and straining to move a metal bar, probably part of the train station structure, that lay across her legs.

Anna approached and took in the situation from several angles, while Zar spoke to the woman in a calming tone nearly every cop she’d ever met used with people who were in a panic. She tried to see where the bar had come from and if there was any obvious way to lift it off her. It looked like it had been bent by something and shoved from the outside through the outer skin of the train and into the interior.

She knelt next to the woman and asked in broken French where the pain was.

The response was too fast to understand the words, but Zar translated for her. “Her right leg hurts, and there’s pain in her lower back and abdomen. She says she’s thirty-six weeks pregnant.”

Anna put her hands on the woman’s abdomen, feeling for the position of the baby, and felt the child kick. She smiled at the woman and said good in French. A closer look at the woman’s leg wiped the smile off Anna’s face. It was twisted oddly, her foot pointing in a much different direction than it should have been.

Using her hands to mime a scale, she made a question of the word pain in French.

The woman responded with her hands in a medium position.

A cold spear shot through Anna’s stomach. A leg that dislocated should hurt worse. The lack of pain could be an indicator of several things, none of them good.

She tried to see the woman’s leg from a different angle, but it didn’t add to what she already knew. “Zar,” she said to him. “We’re going to need a few things in order to get this lady out of her safely.”

“Her leg is...” He cut himself off.

“Yes. She’s not experiencing enough pain, which indicates other serious injuries. We’re going to need to get her out of here as soon as possible, and she will likely need advanced medical care. We’ll need a medical team waiting to remove her as soon as she’s free. Getting her out is another problem.” She looked at the metal bar. “I don’t suppose you know any structural engineers?”

The woman groaned, her hands around her belly, and Anna realized there was fluid on the floor. She knelt and put her hands on the woman’s abdomen and felt the tightening of a contraction.

“Her water just broke,” she called over her shoulder. “We need all the help you can find right now.”

Zar was already yelling at someone on his phone.

***

Prince Zarius Valentinof Lerasia wasn’t in the mood for excuses. Not after the bomb he and his team had been looking for had exploded, destroying a train full of people.

Their intelligence had arrived too late. Again.

“We need advanced medical help for a large number of accident victims, including ambulances, fire suppression teams, and volunteers to move fallen debris,” Zar said to the operator at the local SAMU—Service d'Aide Médicale Urgente (Urgent Medical Aid Service). “I’m assisting a woman who is pregnant, trapped by debris, and has just gone into labor.”

The woman on the other end of the call went silent, but he could hear the clicking of someone typing fast on a keyboard.

“Assistance is on the way,” she said, her tone no different than when she’d answered his call. “Highest priority. Do you need verbal medical advice to help the accident victim?”

“No, a doctor who happened to be on the scene is caring for her.” A doctor like none he’d ever met before. This one had auburn hair pulled back in a messy bun on the top of her head, leaving only a few long, curling strands to hint at the riot it would become if she let it fall loose. She wore jeans, a plain blue T-shirt, and hiking boots and had the kind of curves a man wanted to explore slowly and with great attention to detail.

It was her smile that caught his attention first. He’d looked up from the briefing his second in command was making as she’d entered his peripheral vision at a trot. Her gaze had been direct and filled with amusement. Once their eyes connected, she’d blushed and looked away.

She looked so damned fresh and innocent. Something he hadn’t seen outside of small children, yet there were no hidden emotions on her face. None of the avarice, calculation, or lust he often saw on the faces of women who knew who he was.

He ended the call as two of his men slid through the crumpled doorway.

“Sir,” Jean Paul Travers, his chief of security, said. His gaze went to Anna as she knelt beside the trapped woman, and he frowned.

Anna pulled a stethoscope out of a side pocket of her pack and used it to listen to the pregnant woman’s heart.

“Anna—”

She put up a hand, the gesture certain and confident, and Zar stopped talking. No naivete now. She’d just turned into a field marshal directing her troops.

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