She shifted in his arms and breathed his name, and he revised his conclusion.
It was probably mostly about him.
He turned her toward the shore again, stepping easily through the water as Lauren leaned against his chest, her hand braced on his shirt, fingers warm against his skin where they slipped into the button-down front. She was lithe and vital and his, at least for now. And he had been on this earth long enough, and seen enough injury and death, to understand the value of living in the moment.
He stopped briefly to swipe up his pants at the shoreline. Lauren giggled as he dipped her, making no move to stand on her own. For his part, he had no interest in letting her. They reached the blanket, and he set Lauren down on her feet, startled when she wobbled, then pitched to the side as if she was in the midst of a faint. He went down on a knee to steady her, and she laughed, pulling him farther down, until they both sprawled on the blanket.
“You’re right, this sand is very dangerous. I don’t know how I lost my footing.”
“That is only the beginning of your troubles, I’m afraid.” Dimitri stretched out alongside Lauren, reveling in the way she relaxed by his side, her face turned up to the stars, her smile easy, unforced. He smoothed out her hair by her face and turned his hand so his palm drifted along her cheek, as lightly as he could manage.
“You touch me sometimes like I’m going to break,” she chided him, and he smiled.
“Never that. I touch you like you are made of gold.”
She pouted. “That doesn’t sound very attractive.”
“On the contrary. Gold is hard—hard enough to smash something if you wield it, hard enough to stay perfect and pristine over the ages. But apply enough heat, and it melts in your hands, its brilliance undimmed though its form has completely changed. You’re gold not because of whatever money you have stashed away somewhere. You are gold because you are strength and liquid fire. And I want to stir that fire in you now, to melt you down into nothing but sensation.”
She stared at him. “They really do teach you how to talk that way in the military?”
He smiled as he reached down to his pants, freeing the condom. He wouldn’t need it, not at first. But, as he’d already learned from this woman, it paid to be ready whenever she was. “Our training is quite extensive,” he said, returning his hand to her waist. “And we learn very quickly that when it’s in our best interests to use strategic coercion, we are to move ahead with full commitment.”
“Mmm.” Lauren lifted her hand to caress his cheek. In the starlight, she looked like something out of a painting, a mermaid cast ashore for a precious night, never to return. “And what is it you’re trying to strategically coerce me into, Captain Korba? I think you’ll find that I’m a soft touch.”
“I doubt that quite sincerely.” Dimitri lowered his head to brush Lauren’s lips with his. He had his opening now, and he knew he should take it. Subtly, easily pump her for information about Henry Smithson, about the threat that he posed to the royal family, if any. About the threat that he posed to her. And yet, he found he wanted to do nothing more than stare at this woman, wanted to learn nothing more than what made her happy. He could start there, certainly. No one could fault him for beginning his interrogation with caution.
“Where did you originally plan to go on this European tour you arranged for your friends?” he asked. “Surely you did not plan to spend the whole of it in Garronia.”
Her laugh was wry. “I’ve learned that your country is bigger than I would have given it credit for,” she said with a smile. “And certainly more interesting. But no.” Her gaze shifted upward, toward the stars. “We were only supposed to spend a few days here, then we would have done the full tour—Cannes for a day or so, then Tuscany, Paris, and London. Maybe Amsterdam, if we had time. I didn’t have it all planned out. Sometimes it’s better not to do that. You can get better deals at the last minute—as long as you have enough money to get something, no matter what.”
“You paid for all of it.” It wasn’t a question, and Lauren didn’t take offense.
“Most of it,” she said, her eyes on the night sky. “I wanted to take the vacation as well. I can’t travel with a man, and I don’t enjoy traveling alone.”
Now, they were getting somewhere, but Dimitri resisted the urge to dig deeper. “Yet here you are, traveling with a man to an exotic island. It appears you have broken your own rules, princess.”
She looked at him sternly. “It’s true. Why couldn’t the royal family have assigned a woman to guard me?”
“You’re too tall,” Dimitri dismissed the idea. “For you to be guarded effectively, it was important for you to be properly swept off your feet.”
She lifted a haughty eyebrow. “And that’s what you’ve done?”
He leaned closer to her, so close that when he spoke, his lips moved against hers. “I haven’t yet begun that portion of my assignment, princess. Perhaps tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Her voice sounded fluttery to his ears. “What about tonight?”
“Tonight, it seems that you are already on your back. So I must make do with what circumstances have brought me.” He bent down and pressed his lips to hers, and just that quickly, the desire for her body beneath his surged forth. For her part, Lauren reached up and entangled her fingers in his hair, pulling him toward her, pinning him to her body, shifting him until his knees dropped between hers and she lifted her legs with the strength of a dancer to lock them behind his back, holding him in place. The movement pointed up one of the many advantages of her attire, as their bodies naturally met at the center, his shaft straining against the placket of his boxers as her wet heat beckoned to him.
He stared down at her, and she cracked another smile, at once exasperated and oddly touched. “Dimitri, if you ask me one more time if it’s okay for you to make love to me, I’ll smack you. I hereby give you ultimate permission to pound the living daylights out of me at any time that we’re together from now until the end of time. Does that clear things up for you?”
His laughter swelled inside him. “Your future husband may object to that. So might the church, were you to become a nun.”
“Then I’ll have to find a way to make them understand.” Lauren reached for him, bringing him close. “Now please, I beg of you. Use that condom by your side and fill me up until I don’t have to think about anything at all except you and your body and how good you feel. You think you could do that for me?”
He shuddered as he reached for the foil package. “I think I can do that for you.”
This time, they came together not with the curiosity of discovery, but as two people who needed each other at a level beyond words. Not to heal or provide comfort, but simply as a point of connection that transcended the moment. Dimitri sank into Lauren on a sigh, and her breath mingled with his, everything clicking together like puzzle pieces pulled from a hopeless jumble, all in the blink of an eye. The sky stretched out above them and time seemed to hold its breath as they lay under the stars, their arms wrapped around each other long into the night.
Chapter Fourteen
The promontory of Miranos was more impressive than Lauren expected it would be. Because the ridge line had obscured the view from Dimitri’s villa, she’d prepared herself for a shallow half-moon of water, broken by reefs beneath the shimmering blue-green Aegean, the place almost desolate in its beauty. Since Dimitri had spoken so much about the ocean trash that he’d seen washed up there, she also expected it to be somewhat littered with driftwood and debris, or maybe a twisted airplane propeller or the shattered bow of some long-ago ship.
Not so.
The promontory looked more like a quaint little port, with boats lined up along one side of the long narrow strip of rock that stretched out into the ocean, and a network of tiny floating ramps connecting the various slips. There were a few small buildings there as well, to process the fish and carry it by truck to the main commercial port of Miranos, and also a seaside bar that she suspected
only managed to stay in business because it doubled as the owner’s home.
It was the bar where she and Dimitri started, and the moment she stepped inside, she understood why. The walls were covered with items pulled from the sea—from large strips of metal to exotic scraps of what might have been considered buried treasure anywhere else but the middle of the Aegean Sea, where such finds were commonplace: plate ware too degraded to fix a date on, broken cutlery, shattered lamps, bent and broken decking—even an anchor, which Dimitri explained had been raised with much excitement until it’d been verified as less than two hundred years old. When you lived in the waters of the ancients, an anchor two centuries old barely counted as driftwood.
She could see Dimitri’s section straight off. A small and unassuming stretch of wall space, its pieces carefully lined the shelves, and a small crown had been carved into the corner shelving, now slightly worn away.
Dimitri touched his hand to that crown now, the action so unconscious that Lauren suspected that he was the one who’d worn the design down over this past year. “It doesn’t look like much,” he said, with a grim, self-deprecating smile. “Certainly not enough to justify a year’s worth of searching.”
“But you launched quite a big campaign when Ari was first lost, didn’t you?” Lauren drifted from relic to relic. Most of it was scrap metal with some additional markings that Dimitri had identified as part of the plane, later verified by Crown experts. “I would imagine Queen Catherine moved heaven and earth to find her son.”
“She did, but the first pieces were found all the way over in Thassos. This—and these,” he said, indicating fairly intact bits of wreckage. The largest piece was an eight-inch section of a door panel, which appeared to have been sheared off from the plane.
She frowned as she examined them. “I can’t believe they let you keep these pieces here. They should be in a museum on the mainland, shouldn’t they? Or at least under study somewhere.”
“They were under study for several months, but the idea of putting them in a museum was rejected by the royal family. Despite accepting the public’s need to grieve, they didn’t want to create a memorial to Ari’s final hours that surpassed what he was as a person in real life. They didn’t want him to be remembered only as bits of twisted metal.”
“That’s fair.” Still, she shook her head, looking over the assemblage. “And they never found a body, or anything remotely like a body?”
“No. The storm that blew up the night he left Garronia was fierce. He was testing equipment, and I knew he was excited about putting the airplane through its paces. He had equipment in the cockpit not attached to the controls that he was testing—a watch, specialized phones. All that was immediately washed away, and his body would not have survived long in the open water. I never expected to find his body, his clothes…but the electronics should have washed up eventually. That was my hope.”
“Electronics like the black box.”
“Any sort of recording devices, yes,” Dimitri said, nodding. “Something that could give us some insights into what he was doing, why he was where he was, what went wrong.”
Lauren watched him as he spoke, the bleakness of his expression making her heart hurt. All the platitudes that crowded into her mind seemed pointless, ineffectual. She had never loved any of her friends with the deep force of will that Dimitri seemed to have for Ari. She had never been loved so much.
She reached out a hand and touched his arm. “He was lucky to have you as a friend,” she murmured.
His lips twisted. “Not lucky enough, in the end. If I’d had any idea that he would fly that night, I would have broken ranks to stop him—or at least warned Cyril of his plans.”
She nodded, but she didn’t believe him. No, she suspected Dimitri would not have stopped Ari. Not that night. Not if his friend had truly wanted to go exploring. He would simply have entered the plane with Ari, and then the two of them would have been lost: the crown prince and his faithful friend and bodyguard. Double the tragedy, double the pain—two families bereft instead of one.
“But enough of looking at what we know is of no use. The men will start returning with their nets in a few hours. In the meantime, we should go see what the ocean has brought us.
They didn’t go down to the port, however, but along a rocky trail that skirted the wide crescent bay and dove into the forest, heading to where a smaller point jutted out into the ocean. “The reefs are not so bad leading into the cove,” Dimitri explained as at length they left the higher ground, weaving down through a tight jungle of trees and rocks as they made their way to sea level. “More wreckage washes ashore here.”
“How did you find this trail to begin with?” Lauren asked. “It’s barely visible.”
“Those who comb the beaches have always known where it was. They were kind enough to show me when I came to them for help.” Dimitri said this as if it were commonplace, the giving up of secrets to help someone in pain. She shook her head at his back, now lined with sweat at the collar as he pushed through branches and tested the rock-strewn pathway. In her experience, no one gave up an advantage unless they needed to gain greater status or safety. But what status or safety was there to be gained on this desolate island? Only a hundred or so families lived here. There was no status in being the top of a few hundred people, not when you all had to pull together in times of crisis or need.
“Ah, here we are.” Dimitri held back a final branch and Lauren saw open sky, heard the crash of water. She moved forward gladly but paused beyond the break in the trees, her jaw dropping open.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Quite the place, isn’t it?”
The grotto was a trash monger’s paradise. Metal, tubing, lights, even strings of coins hung from the trees in swaying glory, mute testimony to the rich treasure that lay beyond the water’s edge. Lauren half expected to find a crazed old man muttering among the sheets of metal, looking for treasures amid all the junk. “Who put all this up?”
“The scavengers and beachcombers. Anything that was too big or too common to fetch any sort of decent price, they simply started to hang, and over the years and decades, it’s become a tradition. You’d think the junk would make the place too crowded, chaotic, but there’s a sort of peace that comes from seeing it all together like this. As if the sea will one day give up all her mysteries, if we wait long enough.”
“Any of this from Ari’s plane?” she asked, touching one of the relics.
“Not a scrap. Which was Cyril’s number-one reason for the wreck to have obviously been near Thassos to the west of us, versus out to the east. But the storm wasn’t in Thassos. It was blowing up the coast of Turkey. That’s where Ari would have gone.”
Lauren frowned. “Turkey? That seems unwise, doesn’t it? A small, single-manned plane soaring into a storm over the border of an unfriendly neighbor?”
“As I said, Ari was a master of leaping first, thinking second. He’d never found a situation that he couldn’t get himself out of.” Dimitri smiled ruefully. “I suspect that’s why I’ve had such a difficult time accepting his death.”
He looked so forlorn there, staring out at the sea junk suspended from the trees that Lauren reached out and grasped his hand with both of hers, tugging him forward. “Show me,” she said. “Show me where all this…stuff washes up.”
Dimitri tried to keep his heart from expanding beyond the confines of his chest as he walked with Lauren through the hanging gallery of sea gifts to the open beach. She was dressed simply today, in long, loose pants and tank top, her hair drawn back in a simple ponytail, and only the most basic of makeup on her face beyond sunscreen. Even that he noticed only because she smelled like coconut, instead of whatever expensive designer fragrance she would normally be wearing, if she was in her own world.
A world he couldn’t share. Would never share.
He tamped down his mutinous thoughts. Last night with Lauren had been a gift, and he should honor it as such. As the night had
turned to morning, he’d awakened to realize they’d spent hours wrapped in each other’s arms, their positions as comfortable as breathing and every bit as unconscious. He’d watched her as she slept, memorizing her face, the curve of her lips, the soft brush of eyelashes against her cheeks. He’d not wanted to wake her, but the birds accomplished that soon enough, their chatter bringing her upright with a rush, dazed and bewildered until she’d seen him. Then the smile she’d offered him, radiant and full of light, had made him feel like he’d slain a thousand dragons for her, all before breakfast.
He was a sap. Ari would be laughing his ass off at him right now.
The thought of his friend brought a lightness to his face, where so often it had brought sadness, and he stepped out onto the bright white sand beach with a lighter spirit. It helped too that Lauren gasped in wonder as she looked out over the beach. “My God, it’s beautiful,” she breathed.
Dimitri looked around. The beach was much similar to any other strip of sand on Miranos, but with no signs of civilization now that they’d moved beyond the sculpture garden. Then again, he got the idea that Lauren was probably never truly alone. Even her carefully constructed getaways probably came with a legion of employees and attendants, stylists and planners, cooks and maids and guides. Seeing an open stretch of beach untraveled by any other human most days was probably the equivalent of the Hope Diamond to her.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing out to the reef.
Dimitri squinted into the sunlight and went still. Then he was striding forward all the way to the water’s edge and beyond, his shoes sinking easily into the shifting sands. “Dimitri, what is it? Are you okay?”
“Scrap,” he said, turning back to her as he pulled off his tank top. “Probably nothing.”
She caught his shirt easily, worry and a little excitement plain in her face. “You don’t look like it’s nothing.”
Captured (Gowns & Crowns #2) Page 14
