Her Unforgettable Royal Lover

by Merline Lovelace

  “What do you know that you’re not telling me?” she snapped.

  “There,” he said, tipping his glass toward her in mock salute. “That’s what I know.”

  “Huh?”

  “That spark of temper. That flash of spirit. You try so hard to hide them behind the prim, proper facade you present to the world but every so often they slip out.”

  “What are you talking about? What facade?”

  He parried her questions with one of his own. “Do you see the ironmonger’s cast there, right in front of you, stamped into the balcony railing?”

  “What?”

  “The cast mark. Do you see it?”

  Frowning, she surveyed the ornate initial entwined with ivy. The mark was worn almost smooth but still legible. “You mean that N?”

  He gestured with his glass again, this time at the panorama view across the river. “What about the Liberation Monument, high on that hill?

  “Dominic…”

  “Do you see it?”

  She speared an impatient glance at the bronze statue of a woman holding a palm leaf high aloft. It dominated the hill in the far distance and could obviously be seen from anywhere in the city.

  “Yes, I see it.” The temper he’d commented on earlier sparked again. “But I’m in no mood for games or quizzes, Mr. Grand Duke. What do you know that I don’t?”

  “I know you wore glasses in New York,” he replied evenly. “Large, square glasses with thick lenses that you apparently don’t require for near or distance vision. I know you scraped your hair back most unattractively instead of letting it fall loose to your shoulders, as it does now. I know you chose loose clothes in an attempt to disguise your slender hips and—” his glance drifted south, and an appreciative gleam lit his eyes “—very delightful breasts.”

  Her mouth had started sagging at the mention of glasses. It dropped farther when he got to her hair, and snapped shut at the mention of her breasts. Fighting the urge to cross her arms over her chest, she tried to make sense of his observations.

  She couldn’t refute the part about the clothes. She’d questioned her fashion sense herself before she’d tossed the garments in the trash this morning. But the glasses? The hair?

  She scrubbed her palms over her thighs, now encased in the formfitting designer jeans she’d purchased at the boutique. The jeans, the sandals, the short-sleeve T-shirt didn’t feel strange or uncomfortable. From what Dom had said, though, they weren’t her.

  “Maybe what you saw in New York is the real me,” she said a little desperately. “Maybe I just don’t like drawing attention to myself.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed, his gaze steady on her face. “And maybe there’s a reason why you don’t.”

  She could think of several reasons, none of them particularly palatable. Some were so far out she dismissed them instantly. She just couldn’t see herself as a terrorist in training or a bank robber on the run. There was another explanation she couldn’t shrug off as easily. One Dom brought up slowly, carefully.

  “Perhaps your desire to hide the real you relates to a personal trauma, as Dr. Kovacs suggested this morning.”

  She couldn’t deny the possibility. Yet…

  She didn’t feel traumatized. And she’d evidently been doing just fine before her dive into the Danube. She had a job that must have paid very well, judging by the advance on her salary Sarah had sent. She’d traveled to Paris, to Vienna, to Hungary. She must have an apartment back in the States. Books, maybe. Framed prints on the wall or a pen-and-ink sketch or a…

  Her thoughts jerked to a stop. Rewound. Focused on a framed print. No, not a print. A painting. A canal scene with strong, hazy colors and a light so natural it looked as though the sun was shimmering on the water.

  She could see it! Every sleek black gondola, every window arch framed by mellow stone, every ripple of the green waters of the lagoon.

  “Didn’t Sarah tell you I went to Vienna to research a painting?” she asked Dom eagerly.

  “She did.”

  “A Venetian canal scene.” She clung to the mental image with a fierce effort of will. “By…by…”

  “Canaletto.”

  “Yes!” She edged off the tall chair and kept a few careful inches away from the iron railing. “Let’s go inside. I need to use your laptop.”

  Seven

  The spicy scent of paprika and simmering beef filled the loft when they went inside. Natalie sniffed appreciatively but cut a straight line for the laptop.

  “Do I need a password to power up?”

  “Just hit the on switch.”

  “Really?” She dropped into the leather armchair and positioned the laptop on her knees. “I would have thought 007 would employ tighter security.”

  Dom didn’t bother to explain that all electronic and digital communications he received from or sent to Interpol were embedded with so many layers of encryption that no one outside the agency could decipher them. He doubted she would have heard him in any case. She was hunched forward, her fingers hovering over the keys.

  “I hope you have Wi-Fi,” she muttered as the screen brightened to display a close-up of the hound. All nose and bright eyes and floppy ears, the image won a smile from Natalie. The real thing plopped down on his haunches before Dom and let his tongue loll in eager anticipation of a libation.

  Idly, Dom tipped some lager into his dish and watched as Natalie skimmed through site after site relating to the eighteenth-century Italian painter. The cop in him kept returning to their conversation outside on the balcony. He wasn’t buying her quick dismissal of the suggestion she’d tried to downplay her natural beauty.

  She most definitely had, and the ploy hadn’t worked. Not with Dom, anyway. Despite her disdainful sniffs, daunting glasses and maiden-aunt clothes, she’d stirred his interest from the moment she’d opened the door of the duchess’s apartment. And she’d damned near tied him in knots when she’d paraded out of the shower this morning with that crew shirt skimming her thighs.

  Now…

  His fist tightened on the dew-streaked pilsner bottle. She should see herself through his eyes. The shoulder-length, honey-streaked brown hair. The fierce concentration drawing her brows into a straight line. The lips pooched into a tight rosebud.

  Jézus, Mária és József! Those lips!

  Swallowing a groan, Dom took another pull of the lager and gave the rest to the ecstatic hound.

  “You shouldn’t let him have beer.”

  He glanced over to find her looking all prudish and disapproving again. Maybe it wasn’t a disguise, he thought wryly. Maybe there was room in that sexy body for a nun, a shower scrubber and a wanton.

  God, he hoped so!

  It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. Dom was still visualizing a steamy shower encounter when she whooped.

  “This is it! This is the painting I was researching. I don’t know how I know it, but I do.”

  He crossed the room and peered over her shoulder. Her scent drifted up to him, mingling with that of the goulash to tease his senses. Hair warmed by the sun. Skin dusted from their day in the city. The faint tang of cleaning solutions. Excitement radiated from her as she read him the details she’d pulled up on the laptop.

  “It’s one of Canaletto’s early works. Commissioned by a Venetian doge and seized by Napoleon as part of the spoils of war after he invaded Venice in 1797. It reportedly hung in his study at the Tuileries Palace, then disappeared sometime before or during a fire in 1871.”

  She scrolled down the page. She was in full research mode now, inhaling every detail with the same eagerness the hound did pilsner.

  “The painting disappeared for almost a half a century, until it turned up again in the early ’30s in the private collection of a Swiss industrialist. He died in 1953 and his squabbling heirs auctioned off his entire collection. At that point… Look!”

  She stabbed a finger at the screen. Dom bent closer.

  “At that point,” she recited eage
rly, “it was purchased by an agent acting for the Grand Duke of Karlenburgh.”

  She swiveled around, almost tilting the laptop off her knees in her eagerness. Her face was alive, her eyes bright with the thrill of discovery.

  “The Grand Duke of Karlenburgh,” she repeated. “That was you, several times removed.”

  “Many times removed.”

  Despite his seeming insouciance, the connection couldn’t be denied. It wove around him like a fine, silken thread. Trapping him. Cocooning him.

  “The painting was a gift from the duke to his duchess,” he related, remembering the mischievous look in Charlotte’s eyes. “To commemorate a particularly pleasant visit to Venice.”

  Natalie’s face went blank for a moment, then lit with excitement. “I remember hearing that story! Venice is where she got pregnant, right? With her only child?”

  “Right.”

  They were so close, her mouth just a breath away from his, that Dom couldn’t help himself. He had to drop a kiss on those tantalizing lips.

  He kept it light, playful. But when he raised his head confusion and a hint of wariness had replaced the excitement. Kicking himself, he tried to coax it back.

  “Charlotte said the painting hung in the Red Salon at Karlenburgh Castle. Is there reference to that?”

  “I, uh… Let me look.”

  She ducked her head and hit the keys again. Her hair feathered against her cheek like a sparrow’s wing, shielding her face. He knew he’d lost serious ground when she shook her head and refused to look at him.

  “No mention here. All it says is that the painting was lost again in the chaos following the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.”

  “The same uprising that cost the Grand Duke his life and forced his wife to flee her homeland.”

  “How sad.” With a small sigh, Natalie slumped against the chair back. “Charlotte’s husband purchased the painting to celebrate one of the most joyous moments of their lives. And just a little more than a year later, both he and the painting were lost.”

  Her voice had gone small and quiet. She was drawing parallels, Dom guessed. Empathizing with the duchess’s tragic losses. Feeling the emptiness of her own life.

  The thought of her being a forgotten, helpless cog in a vast social welfare bureaucracy pulled at something deep inside him. He’d known her for such a short time. Had spoken to her twice in New York. Spent less than twenty-four hours with her here in Budapest. Yet he found himself wanting to erase the empty spaces in her heart. To pull her into his arms and fill the gaps in her mind with new, happy and extremely erotic memories. The urge was so powerful it yanked him up like a puppet on a twisted string.

  Christ! He was a cop. Like all cops, he knew that trust could—and too often did—shift like the sand on a wave-swept shore. Identities had to be validated, backgrounds scrubbed with a wire brush. Until he heard back from his contact at Interpol, he’d damned well better keep his hands to himself.

  “The duke was executed,” he said briskly, “but Charlotte survived. She made a new life for herself and her baby in New York. Now she has her granddaughters, her great-grandchildren. And you, Ms. Clark, have the finest goulash in all of Budapest to sample.”

  The abrupt change in direction accomplished precisely what he’d intended. Natalie raised her head. The curtain of soft, shiny hair fell back, and a tentative smile etched across her face.

  “I’m ready.”

  More than ready, she realized. They hadn’t eaten since their hurried breakfast and it was now almost seven. The aroma filling the loft had her taste buds dancing in eagerness.

  “Ha!” Dom said with a grin. “You may think you’re prepared, but Frau Kemper’s stew is in a class by itself. Prepare for a culinary tsunami.”

  While he sniffed and stirred the goulash, Natalie set the counter with the mismatched crockery and cutlery she’d found during her earlier explorations of the kitchen cupboards.

  Doing the homey little task made her feel strange. Strange and confused and nervous. Especially when her hip bumped Dominic’s in the narrow kitchen area. And when he reached for a paper towel the same time she did. And…

  Oh, for pity’s sake! Who was she kidding? It wasn’t the act of laying out bowls and spoons that had her mind and nerves jumping. It was Dominic. She couldn’t look at him without remembering the feel of his mouth on hers. Couldn’t listen to him warning the dog—Duke!—to take himself out of the kitchen without thinking about how he’d called her sweetheart in Hungarian. And not just in Hungarian. In a husky, teasing voice that seemed so intimate, so seductive.

  She didn’t really know him. Hell, she didn’t even know herself! Yet when he went to refill her glass with water she stopped him.

  “I’d like to try that wine you brought home.”

  He looked up from the spigot in surprise. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She was. She really was. Natalie had no idea what lay at the root of her aversion to alcohol. A secretive, guilt-ridden tasting as a kid? An ugly drunk as a teen? A degrading experience in college? Whatever had caused it remained shrouded in her past. Right here, though, right now, she felt safe enough enjoy a glass of wine.

  Safe?

  The word echoed in her mind as Dom worked the cork on the chilled bottle and raised his glass to eye level. “Egészségére!”

  “I’ll drink to that, whatever it means.”

  “It means ‘to your health.’ Unless you mispronounce it,” he added with a waggle of his brows. “Then it means ‘to your arse.’”

  She didn’t bother to ask which pronunciation he’d used, just took a sip and waited for some unseen ax to fall. When the cool, refreshing white went down smoothly, she started to relax.

  The goulash sped that process considerably. The first spoonful had her gasping and reaching desperately for the wineglass. The second, more cautious spoonful went down with less of an assault by the paprika and garlic. By the third, she’d recovered enough to appreciate the subtle flavors of caraway seed, marjoram and sautéed onions. By the fourth, she was spearing the beef, pork and potatoes with avid enthusiasm and sopping up gravy with chunks of dark bread torn from the loaf Frau Kemper had thoughtfully included with her stew.

  She limited her wine intake to a single glass but readily agreed to a second helping of goulash. The Agár sat on his haunches beside her stool as she spooned it down. When she didn’t share, his liquid brown eyes filled with such reproach that she was forced to sneak him several dripping morsels. Dom pretended not to notice, although he did mention drily that he’d have to take the hound for an extralong run before bed to flush the spicy stew out of his system.

  As casual as it was, the comment started Natalie’s nerves jumping again. The loft boasted only one bed. She’d occupied it last night. She felt guilty claiming it again.

  “Speaking of bed…”

  Dom’s spoon paused in midair. “Yes?”

  Her cheeks heating, she stirred the last of her stew. He had to be wondering why she hadn’t taken Sarah up on her offer of a hotel room. At the moment, she couldn’t help wondering the same thing.

  “I don’t like ousting you out of yours.”

  “Oh?” His spoon lowered. “Are you suggesting we share?”

  She was becoming familiar with that slow, provocative grin.

  “I’m suggesting,” she said with a disdainful sniff, “I sleep on the sofa tonight and you take the bed.”

  She hadn’t intended her retort as a challenge, but she should have known Dom would view it that way. Laughter leaped into his face, along with something that started Natalie’s breath humming in her throat.

  “Ah, sweetheart,” he murmured, his eyes on her mouth. “You make it very difficult for me to ignore the instincts bred into me by my wild, marauding ancestors.”

  Even Duke seemed to sense the sudden tension that arced through her. The dog wedged closer to Natalie and propped his head on her knee. She knuckled his forehead and tried de
sperately to blank any and all thought of Dom tossing her over his shoulder. Carrying her to his bed. Pillaging her mouth. Ravishing her body. Demanding a surrender she was all too willing to…

  “Don’t look so worried.”

  The wry command jolted her back to the here and now. Blinking, she watched Dom push off his stool.

  “My blood may run as hot as my ancestors’, but I draw the line at seducing a woman who can’t remember her name. Come, Dog.”

  Still racked by the erotic images, Natalie bent her head to avoid looking at Dom as he snapped the Agár’s lead to his collar. She couldn’t avoid the knuckle he curved under her chin, however, or the real regret in his eyes when he tipped her face to his.

  “I’m sorry, Natushka. I shouldn’t tease you. I know this is a frightening time for you.”

  Oh, sure. Like she was going to tell him that fright was not what she was feeling right now? Easing her chin from his hold, she slid off her stool and gathered the used utensils.

  “I’ll wash the dishes while you’re gone.”

  “No need. Just stick them in the dishwasher.”

  “Go!” She needed to do something with her hands and her overactive, overheated mind. “I’ll take care of the kitchen.”

  * * *

  She did the dishes. Spritzed the sink and countertop. Drew the drapes. Fussed with paperbacks she’d stacked earlier that afternoon. Curled up in the chair and reached for the laptop. And grew more annoyed with each passing moment.

  Her glance kept darting from the wide sofa with its worn leather cushions to the bed tucked under the eaves at the far end of the loft. She didn’t understand why she was so irritated by Dom’s assurance that he wouldn’t seduce her. Those brief moments of fantasy involving marauding Magyars aside, she didn’t really want him to. Did she?

  Lips compressed, she tried to balance her contradictory emotions. On the one hand, Dominic St. Sebastian constituted the only island in the empty sea of her mind. It was natural that she would cling to him. Not want to antagonize him or turn him away.