Protecting Her Royal Baby

A knock sounded at the door, and a uniformed officer poked his head in the room. “Excuse me.”

Hunter stood and greeted the policeman. “Are you Sergeant Wallace?”

“I am. Would you be Hunter Mansfield?”

“Yours truly. I understand you need a statement about her accident.” Hunter waved the officer toward the only chair in the room, but Sergeant Wallace declined with a shake of his head.

“This shouldn’t take long. I just need your account of what happened to confirm what Ms. Coleman told us.”

“Ms. Coleman?” Hunter tipped his head. “Is that her name? Brianna Coleman?”

The policeman looked confused for a moment, then arched an eyebrow. “That’s right. You have no memory from before the accident?”

Brianna shook her head. “Nothing. Can you tell us anything? Did you run my license plate? Who is the car registered to? Where do I live?”

Sergeant Wallace flipped open a small notepad and read, “Your tag was registered to Brianna Coleman, home address 443 Cypress Creek Lane, Lagniappe.”

Wallace rattled off a phone number and Social Security number as well, and Hunter pulled a scrap of paper from his computer bag and jotted the information down.

“What did the tag registration say about my marital status? Was there anyone else listed as co-owner or my spouse?” Brianna asked, her expression full of hope.

The sergeant consulted his notes. “Not that I see.” Wallace raised his gaze to Hunter. “Want to tell me what you saw this afternoon? Did you see the car crash happen?”

Hunter flexed the fingers of one hand with the other and gave the officer a recap of what happened from the time Brianna drove toward him to the moment they left in the ambulance.

Her eyes widened as she listened. “Oh, my God. I almost hit you?”

He jerked a small nod, and seeing the guilt that crossed her face, he quickly added, “But you didn’t. That’s what counts.”

“So you didn’t see who might have fired at the car?” Sergeant Wallace asked.

“No.” Hunter rubbed his hands on his jeans. “If you find any more information that will help Brianna locate her family, will you call us? I’m planning to stay with her, help her out for a while. You can call my cell.” He gave the officer that phone number, and Sergeant Wallace jotted it in his notes.

“Will do.” As the police officer took his leave, he added, “Congratulations on the new baby, Ms. Coleman. Hope you’ll feel better soon.”

“Thanks.” Brianna flashed him a muted smile. Clearly she was anxious over the lingering questions about her family, Benjamin’s father and the lurking danger. As he was.

He eyed Brianna after the policeman left. “So...Brianna Coleman. That name ringing bells for you?”

She chewed her bottom lip and stared across the room, her nose wrinkled in thought. “Well, yes and no. It doesn’t feel wrong. It’s...comfortable. But I can’t say it’s bringing anything back or screaming, ‘That’s me!’” Her shoulders dropped, and she frowned. “If that’s my name, why don’t I just know it? It should be organic. Part of my cells. Instinctive.”

Connor shook his head and scooted toward her. “Not necessarily.” He unclipped his cell phone from the case at his hip. “Look, we have a home phone number now. I’ll call it and see if anyone is there. Okay?”

Her eyes rounded. “Yeah.” She sat taller in the bed, watching him anxiously as he dialed. The phone rang four times before an answering machine picked up. A mechanical voice repeated the number he’d dialed and told him to leave a message.

“I got a machine,” he told her, and her expression deflated. When the beep sounded, Hunter said, “Hi, my name is Hunter Mansfield, and I’m looking for the family of Brianna Coleman. Brianna is safe but needs to be in contact with her relatives. If anyone gets this message, please call me.” He left his number in case she didn’t have caller ID.

“No one answered,” she said and sighed. “Maybe I have no family.”

“We don’t know that. They could be in the shower. Or, more likely, out looking for you.” He returned his phone to the holder at his hip and rubbed the beard stubble on his chin. “Later on, I’ll drive by your house and knock on the front door. We will find your family, Brianna. Have faith.”

She flashed her a half smile and nodded. “Aye, Captain.”

An idea came to Hunter, and he flipped a page on the notepad he’d used to take down her information from Sergeant Wallace. He extended it and the pen toward her. “Let’s try something. Take these.”

She glanced down at Ben. “Okay, but you’ll have to hold him.”

He set the notepad down and held his arms out to receive the baby. Ben gave a disgruntled whine but soon settled in Hunter’s arms.

She lifted the pen and paper. “What do you want me to do with these?”

“Sign your name.”

She puckered her brow. “But...”

“You know your name now. So write it. Like you’re signing a document. Don’t think too hard about it. Just write.”

She bent her head over the pad and slowly wrote out her name. “There.” She held the pad out to him.

“Do it again. Faster.” Hunter gave Ben’s swaddled bottom a soft pat when he gurgled.

“Why?”

“An experiment. Just work with me.”

She sighed and wrote her name again. Then blinked. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“I...did that without really thinking about it. I was still thinking about how silly your experiment sounded.”

He flashed her a cocky grin. “Not so silly now, huh?”

Lifting one eyebrow, she wrote her name again, even faster. And again. “I’ll be darned.”

“Did it feel natural? Like muscle memory?”

She raised her head, and her face lit with wonder. “It did.” Taking a deep breath, she wrote her name again and again, filling the page with her loopy signature. She chuckled. “I know this. It feels right.”

“Some people learn better by hearing, others by sight, others by doing. It makes sense to me that maybe your memories will come back more with certain triggers than others. I learned that in high school. My grades were suffering, and my parents hired me a tutor. Turns out my teachers’ style of issuing reading assignments didn’t match my auditory learning style. I needed to hear it explained to me to make it stick.” Hunter walked around to the bassinet and set Ben down in the small bed. “I have something else we can try.”

Returning to the bedside chair, Hunter tapped on his laptop keys. He pulled up a satellite ground-level-view website and typed in the address Sergeant Wallace had given them. The picture of a small gray-siding-and-redbrick house with a neat yard came up. He moved the laptop so that Brianna could see the image.

“According to the address Wallace gave us, this is your house. Do you recognize it? Does it feel right?”

Brianna squinted at the screen, studying it. The eagerness and expectation in her eyes was heartbreaking, especially when that hope faded and moisture filled her eyes. “No. I don’t feel any tugs of recognition. Damn it!”

Hunter closed the top of the laptop, set it aside and moved to sit on the edge of her bed. “It was just an idea. Maybe seeing it for real will be different. Maybe seeing the inside, your furnishings and pictures, will be the trigger you need. And time.”