He stopped at the door but didn’t turn.
“I…I will do what you want,” she whispered. She kept her back straight, her muscles tight. She felt that if she loosened one little bit, she would dissolve into a heap of tears.
“Lieutenant Montgomery has already been sent for,” Congressman Smith said with a smirk before he left the room.
“Bastard,” the WAC behind Aria muttered. She took Aria’s arm. “Honey, what you need is a good cry. Come with me. I’ll take you to General Gilchrist’s office. He’s away right now and you can be private in there. Is this Montgomery a real jerk?”
Aria allowed herself to be pulled along and the lump in her throat prevented her from talking. She managed to nod.
“Brother!” the WAC replied. “Am I glad I’m an American. Nobody tells an American what to do. I can marry whoever I want.” She unlocked a door. “Now, you stay in here. Leave the lights off and nobody’ll know you’re here. I’ll come pick you up at five. Until then I won’t have any idea where you went.” She winked at Aria and shut the door.
Aria sat down on a little leather-covered sofa and clasped her hands together tightly. If she started to cry, she was afraid she would never stop. She forced herself to visualize her country under attack, then she thought how she was saving it from destruction by this selfless, noble act of hers. Unfortunately, she also kept remembering Lieutenant Montgomery sneering at her, his rudeness, the way he pulled her about, tossed her into boats.
How could such a man be trained to be a prince consort?
The more she thought, the worse she felt. She prayed that her grandfather would understand that she had had to do this.
Chapter Six
TWENTY-FOUR hours later the six men who were working on what had become known as the Lanconia Project had dwindled to four. Two men pleaded that they had more pressing matters to attend to and left the conference room. The truth was that if they had found the princess difficult, they weren’t prepared for the muleheaded stubbornness of Lieutenant Montgomery.
General Brooks’s eyes were red and his throat raw from talking. “The son of a gun still laughing?”
Congressman Smith was too angry to do more than nod.
“What’s the latest?” General Brooks asked the pretty young WAC. They had tried using men to talk some sense into Montgomery and that hadn’t worked, so they had started using women. So far that had met with no success either.
“J.T.…er, ah, Lieutenant Montgomery says he’ll stand a court-martial before he marries the princess. When I told him he was wanted because of his family history, he did, however, suggest that we offer Her Royal Highness to one of his brothers. He said that they might be tempted since they hadn’t met the—” She looked up. “Expletive delted.”
“His brothers?” General Brooks’s face showed a little hope.
“I checked, sir,” said a young captain. “The eldest brother is in intelligence, so far underground that only
the president and two others know where he is. The second brother is now in a hospital. Last week his leg was nearly blown off by machine-gun fire. The third brother married an English girl last month. The family doesn’t know of it yet.”
General Brooks’s face fell. “Any cousins?”
“We don’t have time!” Congressman Smith said, slamming his fist on the table. “This Montgomery is perfect. He’s about as American as a human can get, and he has the looks of a prince.” He raised an eyebrow at the fervent agreement from the WAC. “His IQ tested out at one hundred forty-three and he’s rich. According to our reports, Lanconia is barely surviving. The Montgomery family’s money could put it on its feet.”
“And spread American goodwill throughout the country,” General Brooks added.
Congressman Smith stacked the papers in front of him. “We can’t threaten him and risk losing the support of Warbrooke Shipping—”
“Or Tynan Mills or Fenton-Taggert Steel,” the captain added.
“So we’ll lie to him.”
That succeeded in quieting the room.
Congressman Smith continued. “He can’t stand the princess, right? He laughs at the idea of being king so we tell him the marriage is a sham, that he’s to think of this as a temporary intelligence operation. He’s to live with her, teach her to be an American, take her to Lanconia, then, when she’s on the throne again, he can walk away.”
“But in Lanconia he finds out the marriage is permanent and he’s to be king?” General Brooks asked.
“Something of the sort. We do what we can now to get them married and America’s foot in the door. We worry about the consequences later.”
“Won’t the princess give it away?” the captain asked.
Congressman Smith snorted. “She’d sell her soul for her country. She’ll lie to him or do anything else to keep her country. I have a feeling that she has no plans to make Montgomery king. We shall see what he says about that. Well, shall we go? I don’t want to give him time to think about this. How long has he been without sleep now?”