Captured (Gowns & Crowns #2)

by Jennifer Chance

  “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done,” she muttered as Dimitri jerked the door open and reached up a brawny hand for hers.

  “Let’s get moving, princess,” he growled.

  Dimitri checked the controls over the captain’s shoulder, nodding with satisfaction. Lauren was standing on the deck, rigid and in control, but at least she’d accepted the large, heavy blanket to ward against the shock he knew was going to hit her sometime very soon. The fact that she remained upright was in her favor. The fact that she was breathing steadily, her eyes clear, her chin high, was too.

  Then again, maybe nothing fazed the woman. He didn’t know her, not really. He didn’t want to know her.

  Not really.

  Dimitri refocused on the electronics in front of him. As expected, there’d been no communications from the party. With any luck, everyone was still in turmoil, searching the grounds. He’d covered a good three miles in the fifteen minutes they’d spent in the golf cart, and his truck had eaten up the terrain since then. Both would have been cleared away by his team already, so there was nothing there to find. Lauren would have been declared an on-foot escapee, and the search would extend to neighboring homes. The royal family would be in an outrage, her parents panicked, that slimy bastard Smithson furious.

  The boat was looking better and better all the time.

  He thanked the captain, asked a few questions. This was a good plan, a solid plan. It would give him the time he needed to ensure the safety of the woman while maintaining deniability for the family. Excellent.

  Satisfied, he moved back out on the deck with Lauren. The mini yacht was owned by Theodopolis Papalia, but he was in New Zealand right now, and he’d long since lent the craft out to the GNSF to help with the recovery of plane fragments from Ari’s fatal crash.

  Ari. As usual in the months since the crash, Dimitri cast his glance to the sky, thinking of his friend. He hadn’t forgiven the prince for leaving this earth so soon. When he finally tracked Ari down in the afterlife, he fully planned to beat the shit out of him.

  Lauren half turned as he approached. “Where are we going?”

  “Island a few miles out to sea. It’s called Miranos. I suspect you haven’t heard of it.”

  She frowned. “Fishing ports, right? Villages. Town. Whatever. Not a tourist destination.”

  Dimitri settled in beside her, trying not to smile. “Everywhere in the Aegean is a tourist destination now. Miranos has long made its money by fishing, but it’s become a popular dive location. It’s rustic, but it’s clean. Good people, good food. You’ll be safe until we figure out how to proceed.”

  “This is such a mess,” she sighed. “I don’t know whether to thank you or scream at you.”

  “Be a shame to scare the fish.”

  “I guess.” She seemed fragile suddenly, wrapped up in her blanket, and he edged toward her. He’d dealt with his share of frightened people going into shock. That was part of the work they did along the border, ensuring the safety of the villagers from marauding bands that snuck into their country. Usually, they reached those villages in time. Sometimes they didn’t.

  Fear was something he knew, understood. And it wafted off the blonde now in little fits and gasps, as if she was trying to control even this.

  Still, she didn’t move away from him. And that was progress. Without asking, he put his arms around her, pulling her back to his chest, squeezing her close through the thick woven blanket. She let him do it, which was more a testament to her frame of mind than anything. Nevertheless, something about her actions seemed wrong to him, off-putting. He couldn’t quite figure it out. It was as if she was acting the role of the exhausted celebutante, knowing she should submit and so submitting in exactly the right way, when he knew damned well that she was exhausted, wrung out. What was he missing?

  Her soft sigh recalled him. “I get the feeling this isn’t exactly how Emmaline and Kristos spent their time out of the media spotlight, huh?”

  He laughed. “Not exactly. But you’ll be safe.”

  “I was safe before.” But she said the words automatically, as if she’d been telling them to herself for so long, she wasn’t sure what else to say.

  He decided to push for more. “What exactly was in those boxes that this man sent to you when you were little?”

  “Gifts, mostly.” She leaned against him a bit more heavily, and he welcomed the warmth of her, the light scent of her shampoo and perfume mixing with the salty air. “Jewelry, books, electronics sometimes. And about every third or fourth time, sometimes less, sometimes more, there’d be something that wasn’t a gift. The empty box trick he definitely pulled a few times. But then there were the dead scorpions. And spiders, once. Rats. Bug-infested food.” She shuddered, and Dimitri tightened his hold on her. “Ashes too. I didn’t understand that one until a week later. I was at a prep school camping trip, something stupid like that. I’d thought he was sending me a care package of some sort. It took a week for my mom to tell me that the family dog had gone missing.”

  Dimitri went very still. “He killed your dog?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. But the timing was a little eerie, you have to admit.”

  “And you spoke to him after that?”

  She laughed, the sound bitter and jarring in the breeze. “Well, I wasn’t exactly going to ignore him. Not after that. I hadn’t told him I was leaving for camp. My mother had. It never occurred to me. After that, I told him more, or made sure he knew in advance. He claimed that he worried about me, but it was a control thing. It’s always a control thing with him.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I ever thought I could escape him. But maybe…” She broke off. “Those contracts. Maybe he was simply being thorough. Maybe they were fake, a bluff. A negotiating trick. That’s something he’d do…something my dad probably taught him.”

  “Maybe,” Dimitri allowed. Do you understand what you’re saying? He didn’t speak the words out loud. He didn’t trust himself. This was a woman with more money than she knew what to do with, and she was honestly contemplating a life that none of her friends would have considered remotely acceptable: to marry a man she didn’t want, didn’t love, didn’t trust, and was afraid of. A man she suspected of crimes she couldn’t prove, based on Stefan’s report. A man who’d definitely proven himself to be a mentally unbalanced stalker. Not even Kristos’s sweet Emmaline, who’d pretty much spent her life doing things for other people, would have found the situation tolerable.

  And how was it possible that Lauren’s parents had allowed this to go on? How could they not have defended their child against this man? Perhaps at first, they might have discounted Lauren’s complaints, her fears, her panic. But surely it had continued long enough, often enough that they would have turned the bastard into the authorities at some point…Right?

  Assuming she’d ever told them. But she had to have told them, surely. She couldn’t have kept such harrowing secrets to herself.

  Then again, Lauren and her family were rich. Unreasonably, unfathomably rich. Maybe they did things differently.

  And it all still seemed somewhat false to him, a role she was playing. As if she’d given him enough information to string him along, but not the crucial piece, the piece he needed to know. What was she truly afraid of?

  Dimitri didn’t fully realize when he dropped his head toward the crown of Lauren’s hair, his lips brushing the soft strands in time with the boat as it moved out into the open sea. The trip to Miranos was not long, maybe two hours, but they would be safe there. Lauren relaxed further in his arms, and he held her tightly, his skin prickling when she reached through the blankets to clasp her fingers around his.

  His heart did an odd shimmy in his chest, but he knew this wasn’t the way this was supposed to go. He didn’t want this woman to get under his skin. He didn’t want this woman to be anything but safely stowed cargo. And if he didn’t watch it, she was going to be more than that.

  Then again…

&
nbsp; Remember who this is, here.

  Dimitri went very still as Lauren’s hand continued to stroke his. She’d moved her head precisely to the side, enough to allow him access to her ear, her neck. She’d stopped talking, but her body was tense, too tense, too straight, for all that she leaned against him, allowing him to take her weight. He had thought her mind lost to the rhythm of the open sea, but that wasn’t it at all, was it? She wasn’t wondering what the adventure ahead lay in store for her. She was trying to figure out how to manage him. To control him, the same way she thought she could control Henry Smithson, in the end.

  He should give her more credit than that, he knew, and yet…

  Lauren took the decision out of his hands.

  She chose that moment to turn in his arms, letting the blanket fall away. Snaking up her hand to his head, she pulled him toward her, and he let her do it too. Let her bring her mouth up to his, taste his lips, steal her other hand down the hard planes of his chest to rest on his rib cage, and all the while he could tell that she wasn’t really in the moment, wasn’t taken away with the desire. She was faking it.

  Or faking some of it, anyway. She couldn’t mask the shortness of her breath, or the way it passed fitfully over her lips. She couldn’t fake the tremor in her fingers, or the racing of her heart. She was using her own body to help perfect her diversion. And doing a damned fine job of it.

  Except no one—ever—had faked it with him. Not at the level of sheer desire.

  Especially not someone as into him as Lauren Grant clearly and most unequivocally was.

  How did she think she could get away with it?

  The answer came to him in a flash. Because she always had. She’d always needed to, wanted to. She’d always been in control of every situation, which could only mean that no one had ever made her feel out of control. No one had gotten her out of her own pretty, calculating head for long enough that all she could do was focus on her body, her senses, her pleasure.

  Had no one ever truly seduced her? Had set aside her money and her power, and gone after her for the sole pursuit of savoring every inch of her skin, every shattering breath? If so, that was certainly…a shame.

  Someone should really do something about that.

  Dimitri lifted his mouth away from her lips. He could sense Lauren’s confusion, but she was too smart to say anything but sigh and snuggle against him, the very image of the broken, trembling flower.

  Oh, she was trembling, all right.

  Dimitri smiled into the darkness, over the blonde’s head.

  Maybe this visit to Miranos wasn’t going to be completely useless after all.

  Chapter Eight

  Bathed in a wash of brilliant sunshine, Lauren lay awake the next morning, glaring at the whitewashed wall of the bedroom, the dark tile gleaming at the edge of a thick white rug. It wasn’t opulent, and it definitely wasn’t the palace of the crown family of Garronia. That was where she should have woken up.

  She hadn’t. Instead, she was in a world of wrong.

  She had to get out of here.

  Sitting up in bed, she swiped for her phone, which was always no more than five feet away from her—and came up with nothing. She bit out a tight curse, remembering the most infuriating part of her predicament. No phone. No money. And she knew virtually nothing about this rock where they’d landed. Hadn’t Dimitri said this island was a dive spot? There had to be some sort of Internet café here then, right?

  The smell of something obscenely good finally permeated her foul temper, and she turned her head. Bacon? The scent of grilled meat and spices filled the air, and she swiped again for her phone to check the time.

  Nope.

  No clocks either anywhere in the room, though light poured in from two sides, giving her a stunning view of the pristine white sand beach and shockingly blue waters of the Aegean far beyond. Still, none of that could compare to knowing what was actually going on in the world.

  “Neanderthals,” she muttered, throwing off the covers. She was wearing her clothes from last night, and as she padded out of her room, she realized the room opposite hers was a tiny bathroom, and there was…nothing else. Just these two rooms tucked up at the top of a narrow staircase. So, a villa, then, not some kind of bed-and-breakfast or inn, which was what she’d assumed the night before. Whose house was it, Dimitri’s? A friend’s? The questions crowded into her mind, but she had no way of answering them. After washing her face and hands in the sink—without a mirror, she noticed, so she also had no way of knowing what she looked like—her stomach insisted she head downstairs to explore the smells of breakfast.

  Seconds later, she wheeled into the kitchen, and stopped cold.

  Dimitri stood in profile at the stove, his body clad only in loose sweatpants that hung low on his waist. It was the first time she’d seen him anywhere close to partially undressed since that first day on the beach, when he’d been wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt and shorts. That had been amazing enough, but this…

  “You sleep well?” he asked without turning, and Lauren blinked, trying to get her bearings.

  “I—yes. Can I borrow your phone?”

  “No service out here.” He waved the spatula. “We’ll head into town later today, and you can make contact.”

  “No service?” she turned and looked out the windows that lined the wall. “How is that possible?”

  He chuckled, apparently unconcerned. As if a lack of cell coverage weren’t grounds for immediate meltdown. “The island has always been pretty sketchy with phones and Wi-Fi, but tourists don’t seem to mind. We have sat phones for safety, should we need them.”

  “Oh—well, give me that, then.”

  “That’ll have to wait for town as well, I’m afraid. Phone’s dead, and I don’t have a charging unit here. We left too quickly for me to round up supplies. It’s only us this morning.” He brought the pan over to the table, which she saw had been set for two. “You hungry?”

  “No. Yes. Sure.”

  His warm laugh rolled through her, setting off whorls of panic within her that she couldn’t quite process. Dimitri wasn’t the threat here. Sure, he was half-naked, but that was not a threat. Really.

  She sat at the table, and he served the meal, meat and roasted vegetables and hummus and bread and olives. As he padded back to the sink, she couldn’t help but stare at his back. Muscles rippled on top of other muscles, and his powerful shoulders tapered down to narrow hips before flaring out again to thighs the size of Thor’s. There was a strange mix of scars as well—nothing terrible, nothing horrifying, but she got the impression that Dimitri’s body had been used, and used well.

  He’d used it last night to help protect her.

  An unexpected wave of emotion swept through Lauren, startling in its intensity. Dimitri had moved quickly and decisively at the Raptis mansion, pulling her out of danger without any concern for Henry and his money or power. He’d whisked her away to safety, and when they’d stood together on the boat, he’d held her. Simply held her, surrounding her with his strength and solidity, as if trying to show her that nothing and no one could harm her, not while he was on the job.

  She’d let him hold her too. She’d done it to stoke his attraction, to try to control him, but…but if she was honest, a part of her had simply wanted to be held. A part of her had simply wanted someone strong to stand in the breach with her, to offer a united front against a terror she’d carried around so long that it was like a second skin.

  But she couldn’t afford to be weak and needy. Not now. Not ever.

  No one else could get hurt because of her.

  Lauren managed to return her gaze to her food again before Dimitri turned around and caught her staring, but it was a near thing. And then he sat next to her again, all skin and heat and strength. She opened her mouth to protest, but he was already focusing on the enormous platter in front of him, digging in as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

  She picked up a fork and eyed the food, spearing a few vegetables that l
ooked at least reasonably familiar. Since Dimitri was wolfing down his food, she occupied her time with eating as well.

  It was…heavenly. Apparently, Dimitri could cook too.

  What else is he good at?

  Lauren gripped her fork a little more tightly, determined to stab herself if she didn’t straighten up. “So, what are we going to do today?” she asked. She could have kicked herself for not demanding more details from Emmaline about her own idyll, but her escape with Dimitri already seemed vitally different. Kristos was far less…dangerous than the rough, uncivilized captain of the GNSF.

  “Eat. You’ll need your strength.” He grinned at her and nodded at the plate. “Unless it tastes bad?”

  “Oh—oh, of course not. It’s delicious.” Sudden awkwardness engulfed her, and she glanced at her plate. Food, at least, she could manage. “Thank you.”

  He snorted. “Delicious, it is not. But it is local fare, and good, you will see.”

  He continued on in an animated description of the island’s cuisine, clearly trying to put her at ease. Unfortunately, she found herself focusing less on the food and more on his face, his mouth, his eyes…anything to stop looking at his naked chest. She flushed as she realized what she was doing, and she reconsidered her idea of stabbing herself with a fork. It was as if she’d never seen a man before.

  Dimitri, fortunately, didn’t seem to notice. At least he didn’t until she realized he’d stopped talking, while she sat there with her fork poised over her plate, her focus on his pecs. Gently, he reached over and took the fork out of her hand, laying it on the table. The touch of his hand galvanized her, her entire body quivering with anticipation, but he didn’t do anything further. Merely sort of patted her fingers, then stood.

  It wasn’t until he turned away that she got it. She narrowed her eyes, pushing out from the table.

  “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?” she snapped.

  He looked at her innocently. “Doing what?”