Claimed: Gowns & Crowns, Book 3

by Jennifer Chance

  There was no way he was going to endanger her life, however, no matter what the queen commanded.

  But the queen wasn’t finished yet.

  “Give me one good reason—one—that she isn’t the ideal cover for you, and I’ll consider relenting,” she said. “Otherwise, the yacht is already being prepared, Stefan. I expect you to be on it tomorrow—with Nicki Clark.”

  Chapter Three

  “Nicki, I really don’t know about this.”

  Nicki kept her head beneath an enormous bath towel for a second more, schooling her expression. By the time she emerged, and was ready to face the three scowling women who sat around her suite, all of them girded for battle.

  Well, girded might be overstating it. Lauren, the one who spoke, was standing by a chair, as if sitting was out of the question during such an important conversation. Lauren Grant was the heiress to an international hotelier fortune, and had grown up used to running the show. She and Nicki got along because Nicki usually let her—or ignored her if her opinions were inconvenient. But Lauren was serious this morning, and Nicki knew why. She’d confided in Lauren about her possible heart condition a week ago, when Lauren had questioned her usage of beta blockers. It would have been foolish not to disclose the worst possible scenario—that Nicki might possibly have a slowly dying heart—but she’d told Lauren not to worry, that there’d be lots of notice if anything was truly wrong.

  This wasn’t exactly true of course, but Lauren hadn’t pressed before. She did now.

  She’d clearly told the others too.

  Emmaline sat with her hands earnestly folded in her lap. Earnest was what Emmaline did best. Nicki couldn’t help thawing a bit as she caught her friend’s eye and smiled, watching her brighten with the strength of the connection. Across the room, Fran also caught her attention. She tilted her head and Nicki held up a hand to forestall whatever she was going to say.

  “No need to shrink me, Fran. I know what you’re thinking—what you’re all thinking. And you’re right. This is a simple trip but it could turn crazy at any moment. And not even for any grand reason, but the simple reality of going to a foreign country and running into all the problems that could entail. But seriously, this is not that big of deal. It’s not like we’re going to have people chasing us with guns.”

  “You could,” interjected Lauren darkly.

  “I won’t,” Nicki shook her head. “Have you seen the royal yacht? It’s practically a cruise ship. We’re going to sail down to Alaçati big as life, and give our validation to the windsurfing expo they’ve got going on. It’s good PR for Garronia, a nice goodwill gesture for Turkey, and the guards they’re sending along are going to ask all the questions they need to ask while Stefan squires me around as if I’m some sort of VIP. Which is hilarious, but that’s beside the point.”

  Emmaline bit her lip. “He’s not especially happy about you going, you should be aware.”

  Nicki snorted. “I think the ‘No, absolutely not, she can’t go,’ to Jasen at lunch was a good indicator of that. But honestly, that’s for them to figure out.” She gave her best “I don’t really care” shrug, perfected after years of being denied opportunities by her hypochondriac mother, who’d perfected the art of the flop sweat before anyone in the family had actually fallen ill. Once she reached her senior year in high school she’d shed a lot of those restrictions, but then her father’s heart attack and brother’s later diagnosis had threatened to close her in once more. She couldn’t live the way her brother and father did. Wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t back down from this opportunity.

  Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t throw her friends a bone. “If they decide it’s too dangerous, then of course I’ll abide by that. With Stefan out of the country and no longer up in my grill, I’ll be able to explore some of the mountain trails he’s constantly warning me about.” She grinned. “So it’s a win either way.”

  “You know, he could be warning you about those trails because of wild animals,” Fran observed wryly. “Not simply because he wants to be a pain in the ass.”

  “Mostly though, he wants to be a pain in the ass,” Lauren said, and the tension in the room finally broke. “I heard from Dimitri that you two were totally making out on the beach. Truth?”

  “We were not making out.” Nicki hesitated. “Well, okay. I was. But I honest to God think Stefan was trying to seduce me to keep from running down the beach. Like this was some sort of super new diplomacy technique he wanted to practice on me.”

  “And how did that practice go?” Emmaline asked. Her expression had also lightened, brimming with curiosity and the possibility of new romance. She among all of them was the most in love with being in love.

  “For me—pretty damn well,” Nicki said. “I think he might have been going through the motions, but trust me, it’s been so long since I’ve been anywhere close to those kind of motions, I’ll take it.”

  “I keep trying to fix you up, and you keep rejecting me.” Lauren protested. “How are you supposed to date if you never go out?”

  “I’m too busy to mess with all of that.” Somewhat true, actually. She’d been a one-woman unstoppable force in college. Too small to play in most organized sports at any sort of elite level, and too worried about her possible heart condition, she knew needed to find something she could do solo. To give herself a competitive chance, she’d set her heart on the outlier sports—windsurfing, adventure running, climbing. There she’d met an entirely new group of friends who knew nothing about her past, nothing about her possible heart disease. They only knew she sometimes got a little dizzy if she didn’t stay hydrated…and that despite said dizziness, she was usually the first to jump off the cliff into the water below, no matter how deep that water was.

  But though there were plenty of men in that group who Nicki could have pursued—she hadn’t. Because despite the fact that she truly believed that she was okay, it was one thing to get your heart broken by a relationship.

  It was something else to walk into a relationship with your heart already broken.

  “Okay, well, let’s be smart about this.” Lauren recalled Nicki’s thoughts to the present into focus as she settled into a chair. “What are the risks here? Let’s say you get stuck somewhere and you can’t take your meds.”

  “What, my beta blockers? Those aren’t that critical, really.” Nicki shook her head. “They’re for my migraines, and there’s some evidence they help with high blood pressure and all of that, so that’s a bonus. But if my heart is really going to go…” she shrugged. “It’s going to go.”

  “And you never got tested for this?” Fran’s voice was incredulous. “That seems really reckless to me, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, I did once—twice, even, I think,” Nicki said, trying to keep her cool. She’d had this fight with her mother too many times. “The odds aren’t in my favor, and I know that. But I…couldn’t keep going back. Not in the end. I’d rather live with my heart condition as a maybe and actually live—than change my whole life because of some stupid test. I’ve seen what it’s done to my brother. He’s become as bad as my mom, sure that every cold is going to kill him. And my dad…” Nicki sighed. “I’m not going to get tested only to find out the worst. I’m not. As long as I don’t put anyone else in danger…”

  “But what about putting yourself in danger?” Emmaline’s voice was soft. “We don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “It won’t,” Nicki said. “Especially if Stefan is on the boat.” She smiled. “If he had to rescue me, I’d never live it down.”

  Lauren snorted. “Okay, but let’s say you have a dizzy spell or your heart starts to react to something scary or intense. Your pulse goes up, right? What happens then?”

  “I faint,” Nicki shrugged. “That’s it, so far. If anything worse ever happened, I’d get tested—really, I would. But it’s never gone beyond a momentary blackout, I swear. No one’s even cracked out an AED around me.”

  “That might not work anyway,”
Fran put in. “A defibrillator is meant to re-start a malfunctioning heart, not a dying one.”

  Nicki let the shiver roll through her at the idea that her heart muscle could possibly be dying, but kept her expression strong and steady—like she needed to be. “There you go. So there’s no point in worrying about it. Besides, if Stefan gets a hint that I might not be a hundred percent physically fit, there’s no way he’d let me go along on this mission. None.”

  Emmaline sighed. “And it’s that important for you to go?” Her question was quiet, but it drew the attention of all the girls to her.

  Nicki hesitated. They couldn’t understand, she knew. They’d never had a fear that they were…fundamentally different. Fundamentally unreliable. Nicki’d overcome that fear with a college life and new career filled with solo adventures and living on people’s couches, never attaching, never committing. But this…

  “It is,” she finally said, and was surprised to find her words equally soft. “I just…I really want to be a part of this.” To be a part of something that mattered. Something that her body couldn’t hold her back from.

  “Well, then you should go,” Fran said, her calm voice easing the tension again. “You’ll just have to be smart.”

  “They’re meeting now, you know,” Emmaline said, pursing her lips as she glanced at her phone. “I’m sure they’ll be talking about you, Nicki. Making their final decisions.”

  Nicki stood, eager for any reason to move again. “Well, then maybe I should go listen in,” she said.

  “There is absolutely no chance I’m going to let her come with us.” Stefan placed the dossier on the table in front of him. He didn’t lean forward; he didn’t lean back. This was not a negotiation; it was a simple point of fact. A point he’d made six times already, by his count.

  Cyril turned from scanning the monitors. They were in the palace’s main conference room. He addressed Dimitri, the last person to deal with an American targeted by outside forces. “Had you to do it over again, would you have taken Lauren to Miranos?”

  “No,” Dimitri rumbled. “We went there because we did not understand the lengths to which her insane ex would go. Had I known he was so deadly, and deranged, we would not have left the mainland. I would have put her in a safe house and sat on it.” He grimaced. “I agree with Stefan. It is too dangerous to take an American into Turkey. Even one with a reason to be there.”

  “A very good reason,” Cyril observed blandly. “Unlike any of us.” He pointed to the screens. “Nicole Clark was actually bylined last year at the Alaçati competition. She competed deep into the tournament before falling out of the running, then continued on in her journalistic role.”

  “Adventure blogging is not journalism,” Stefan snapped. “She has none of the training of an international correspondent, she simply has a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection.” Stefan scowled. “It is not her credentials, though they are nonexistent. I will grant you her experience in windsurfing and her presence at last year’s tournament are worthwhile considerations. But she is an American, a guest in our country. She is also untrained. We will be taking her into unmonitored territory, where the Turkish military will be the least of our concerns. She has already demonstrated that she does not follow orders well, and that is of paramount importance. Make no mistake—this is a military mission. I’m being asked to secure information or possibly recover Ari’s remains from a potentially hostile environment, with nationals who may not be willing to give up those remains. It could get ugly very quickly, and an American would be at minimum a liability, and at worse collateral damage from which we would not recover.”

  His statement caused everyone to pause, and he regarded them impassively. In his mind’s eye, he saw Nicki’s distant form windsurfing on the wide ocean, imagined her smile, her laugh, the sun warming her as the wind whipped the waves around her to a frenzy. He could not—he would not be weighed down with someone who made him this protective. He couldn’t put it quite that way to the others, of course, but—

  “Stefan raises a good point,” Jasen said. He seemed more tired suddenly, and something in Stefan’s chest tightened. “We need to weigh the costs against what we may or may not achieve.”

  “Ari is there though—you know he’s there.” Kristos spoke up, his attention swinging from Dimitri to Jasen—neatly skipping over Stefan’s icy glare. “And the location couldn’t be better for a simple op.”

  The prince stood, moving quickly to one of the larger screens and with a few deft taps of the inset keyboard, pulled up a map of coastal Turkey.

  Alaçati was nearly as far south as Athens, and perched on a strip of countryside that stuck out into the Aegean before the land broke away to form several small islands. “We’re talking maybe two days by boat, going slowly—one long day if you’re focused. Slow would probably be better for this mission, to convey the tourist nature of it. Then you stop here.” He jabbed a thumb at a non-descript island. “That’s where the scavenger gang dealt their goods.”

  “That’s an unusual stop. Explain how we would make that a reasonable detour, so close to the city?”

  Kristos shrugged. “Diving. Nicki dives, right?”

  Stefan thinned his lips. “It would not surprise me.”

  “So do the research, I bet someone somewhere has written about the diving off that island. Have her blog about the story—”

  “You can’t be serious—”

  “Blog about the story using Wi-Fi via a satellite uplink, take a few pictures showing how beautiful the scenery is, and done. Meanwhile, your men go ashore, maybe you go ashore and see what’s what.”

  “We don’t know if the encampment is still there.”

  Kristos shrugged. “Where would they go? Mainland is too crowded, and that place is desolate. Easy to get to by boat, but no reason anyone would be looking there. And it’s an island.”

  He stared at the map a moment longer. When he spoke, his voice sounded strangled. “Ari could be there, Stefan. Dead or—whatever. Eleven months is a long time, but not so long that he couldn’t still be alive.”

  Alive. Stefan didn’t say the words, but all of them were thinking the same thing. If Ari was still on that island, he was dead. He’d been disoriented when he’d sold the watch to the scavenger—for food and a boat. But even the fisherman had shaken his head at that story, relayed to him by the scavenger leader himself. Ari had asked for a boat, but he’d accepted a leaky-hulled wreck. For a watch that fine on the open sea, he should have known its value. He should have asked for something more, perhaps safe passage aboard a real boat.

  So what had happened to him?

  Cyril grunted and began arguing with Kristos about the logistics of the trip—no matter who was on the boat. Stefan swung toward Jasen, then stopped for a moment as his gaze swept past the blank screens lining the opposite wall. There’d been a shift in the doorway, the barest movements, but his hands instantly tensed on the table. Normally it would be the queen listening in on their private conferences; that he had allowed more than once.

  This wasn’t the queen, though her assistance was all over this intrusion he had no doubt. This was Nicki. He knew it as sure as he was sitting there.

  How much had she heard? He had to assume all of it.

  Well, that was too bad. It had only been the truth.

  He grimaced and was about to end the conversation when another movement caught his eye—this one closer to him. King Jasen. The king was watching Cyril, but more importantly, he was watching Kristos with Cyril. Kristos, his younger son, who had wanted nothing more than to serve out his life in the military, protecting and defending the country of Garronia while Ari, the older son, took up the mantle of power. Those boys—both of them—were supposed to grow old as Jasen watched, maturing to the fullness of their abilities. Instead, one was tilting at windmills, hoping desperately to bring back the brother he could not let rest, and the other might be buried in a shallow grave in hostile land—or worse.

  Far worse.

&nb
sp; Stefan scowled at the screen again. Alaçati was twelve hours away by boat, give or take. If they made the trip in one long day and then a short couple of hops, it could work the way Kristos envisioned. Nicki with her…laptop, or whatever she would use, would be surrounded by Garronia’s guards, hand-picked by Stefan. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight. Further, he was not unaware of the need for diplomatic overtures to the country. This sojourn would accomplish that and more.

  And it would accomplish something more. Something the entire country needed: a king who could finally mourn the death of his first son and the celebrate the life of his second.

  His eyes trained on Jasen, Stefan drew in a breath.

  “Very well,” he said. “This is how this is going to work.”

  Chapter Four

  Nicki almost swallowed her own tongue. Stefan had said “Very well.” Not another “no,” not another sneer. She’d not realized how much she’d been braced for more snubs when silence filled the room.

  “We will leave tomorrow morning. King Jasen, if you can personally reach out to the appropriate officials to communicate our intentions, that will help smooth the way. We’ll dock off the coast of Turkey as Kristos suggests if we can create a credible reason to do so.”

  “I’m on it,” Kristos chimed in, and Nicki smiled. There wasn’t much of an age difference between Stefan and the young prince but Stefan seemed so much more…reserved. Far older than his twenty-six years. Of course, he hadn’t been reserved today on the beach, and as the conversation ranged on she found her mind returning to that scene again. He’d wanted to kiss her, she was certain of it. It wasn’t merely to keep her in place. He’d been genuinely startled at the arrival of Cyril and his men, and he wouldn’t have been if he’d been running some sort of game.