Her Unforgettable Royal Lover

by Merline Lovelace

  “Then,” she said, the excitement piling up again, “I told you I was searching for a painting that had once hung in the Red Salon. You gave me a very hard look and asked why I, too, should want to know about that particular room after all these years.”

  Everything was coming at her so fast and furiously and seemingly in reverse, like a DVD rewound at superhigh speed. The encounter with Herr Müller. The drive down from Vienna. A burning curiosity to see the castle ruins. The search for the Canaletto. Sarah and Dev. The duchess and Gina and the twins and Anastazia and meeting Dom for the first time in New York.

  The rewind came to a screeching halt, stuck at that meeting with Dom. She could see his laughing eyes. His lazy grin. Hear his casual dismissal of the codicil and the title it conferred on him.

  That was one of the reasons she’d returned to Vienna! Why she’d decided to make a day trip to view the ruins of Karlenburgh Castle, and why she’d been so blasted determined to track the missing Canaletto. She’d wanted to wipe that cynical smile off Dominic St. Sebastian’s face. Prove the validity of her research. Rub his nose in it, in fact. And, oh, by the way, possibly determine what happened to a priceless work of art.

  And why, when the police tried to determine who she was and what she was doing in Budapest, the only response she could dredge from her confused mind was the Grand Duke of Karlenburgh!

  With a fierce effort of will, she sidelined those tumultuous memories and focused on the goatherd. “I asked you who else had enquired about the Red Salon. Remember? You told me someone had come some months ago. And told you his name.”

  “Ja.” His wrinkled face twisting in disgust, Müller aimed a thick wad of spittle at the ground. “Janos Lagy.”

  Dom had been listening intently without interruption to this point, but the name the goatherd spit out provoked a startled response. “Janos Lagy?”

  Natalie threw him a surprised glance but he whipped up a palm and stilled the question he saw quivering on her lips.

  “Ja,” Müller continued in his thick, accented English. “Janos Lagy, a banker, he tells me, from Budapest. He tells me, too, he is the grandson of a Hungarian who goes to the military academy in Moscow and becomes a mladshij lejtenant in the Soviet Army. And I tell him I remember this lieutenant,” the goatherd related, his voice shaking with emotion. “He commands the squad sent to destroy Karlenburgh Castle after the Grand Duke is arrested.”

  Dom mumbled something in Hungarian under his breath. Something short and terse and sounding very unnice to Natalie. She ached to ask him what he knew about Lagy but Herr Müller was just getting to the crux of the story he’d shared with her less than a week ago.

  “When I tell this to the grandson, he shrugs. He shrugs, the grandson of this traitorous lieutenant, as if it’s of no matter, and asks me if I am ever in the Red Salon!”

  The old man quivered with remembered rage. Raising his walking stick, he shook it in the air.

  “I threatened to knock his head. He leaves very quickly then.”

  “Jézus,” Dom muttered. “Janos Lagy.”

  Natalie couldn’t contain herself. “You know him?”

  “I know him.”

  “How!”

  “I’ll explain in the car, and you can tell me what you did with the information Friedrich gave you. But first…”

  He probed for more information but when it was clear the goatherd had shared all he knew, he started to take a gracious leave. To his surprise and acute embarrassment, the old man grabbed his hand and kissed it.

  “The Grand Duke and Duchess, they are still missed here,” he said with tears swimming in his eyes. “It’s good, what I read in the papers, that you are now duke. You’ll come back again? Soon?”

  “I will,” he promised. “And perhaps I can convince the duchess to come, too.”

  “Ahhhh, I pray that I live to see her again!”

  They left him clinging to that hope and picked their way through the weeds back to the car. Natalie was a quivering bundle of nerves but the deep crease between Dom’s eyes kept her silent while he keyed the ignition, maneuvered a tight turn and regained the road that snaked up and over the pass. Neither of them spoke until he pulled into a scenic turnout that gave an eagle’s-eye view of the valley below.

  When Dom swung toward her, his face was still tight. “Start at the beginning. Tell what you remember.”

  She rewound the DVD again. She focused her growing absorption with both the codicil and Canaletto but glossed over the ignoble desire to rub a certain someone’s nose in her research.

  “I was there in Vienna, only a little over an hour away. I wanted to see the castle the duchess had told me about during our interviews, perhaps talk to some locals who might remember her.”

  “Like Friedrich Müller.”

  “Like Friedrich Müller,” she confirmed. “I’d done a review of census records and knew he was one of only a handful of people old enough to have lived through the 1956 Uprising. I intended to go to the address listed as his current residence, but met him by chance there at the ruins instead.”

  “What a string of coincidences,” Dom muttered, shaking his head. “Incredible.”

  “Not really,” she countered, defensive on behalf of her research. “Pretty much everything one needs to know is documented somewhere. You just have to look for it.”

  He conceded the point. “So you met Friedrich, and he told you about Lagy. What did you do then?”

  “I researched him on Google as soon as I got back to my hotel in Vienna. Took me a while to find the right Lagy. It’s a fairly common name in Hungary. But I finally tracked him to his office at his bank. His secretary wouldn’t put me through until I identified myself as Sarah St. Sebastian Hunter’s research assistant and said I was helping with her book dealing with lost works of art. Evidently Janos is something of a collector. He came on the line a few minutes later.”

  “Did you tell him you were trying to track the Canaletto?”

  “Yes, and he asked why I’d contacted him about it. I didn’t want to go into detail over the phone, just said I thought I’d found a possible link through his grandfather that I’d like to pursue with him. He asked if I’d discussed this link with anyone else and I told him no, that I wanted to verify it first. I offered to drive to Budapest but he generously offered to meet me halfway.”

  “In Gyür.”

  “On the tour boat,” she confirmed. “He said cruising the Danube was one of his favorite ways to relax, that if I hadn’t taken a day trip on the river before I would most certainly enjoy it. I knew I wouldn’t. I hate boats, loathe being on the water. But I was so eager to talk to him I agreed. I drove down to Gyür the next day.”

  “And you met Lagy aboard?”

  “No. He called after the damned boat had left the dock and said he’d been unavoidably detained. He apologized profusely and said he would meet me when it docked in Budapest instead.”

  She made a moue of distaste, remembering the long, queasy hours trying not to fixate on the slap of the current against the hull or the constant engine vibration under her feet.

  “We didn’t approach Budapest until late afternoon. By then I was huddled at the rail near the back of the boat, praying I wouldn’t be sick. I remember getting another call. Remember reaching too fast for my phone and feeling really dizzy. I leaned over the rail, thinking I was going to puke.” Frowning, she slid her hand under her hair and fingered the still tender spot at the base of her skull. “I must have banged my head on one of the support poles because there was pain. Nasty, nasty pain. And the next thing I know someone’s leaning on my chest, pumping water out of my lungs!”

  “You never saw Janos Lagy? Never connected with him?”

  “Not unless he was one of the guys who fished me out of the river. Who is he, Dom? How do you know him?”

  “We went to school together.”

  “You’re friends with him?” she asked incredulously.

  “Acquaintances. My grandfather was not
one to forgive or forget old wrongs. He knew Jan’s grandfather had served in the Soviet Army and didn’t want me to have anything to do with the Lagy family. He didn’t know the bastard had commanded the squad that leveled Karlenburgh Castle, though. I didn’t either, until today.”

  Natalie had been certain that once she regained her memory, every blank space would fill and every question would have an answer. Instead, all new questions were piling up.

  “This is so frustrating.” She shook her head. “Like a circle that doesn’t quite close. You, me, the duchess, the castle, the painting, this guy Lagy. They’re all connected, but I can’t see how they come together.”

  “Nor do I,” he said, digging his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, “but I intend to find out.”

  She watched wide-eyed as he pressed a single key and was instantly connected. She understood just enough of his fluid French to grasp that he was asking someone named Andre to run a check on Janos Lagy.

  * * *

  Their return sent the hound into a paroxysm of delight. When Natalie laughed and bent to accept his joyous adulation, he got several quick, slurpy kisses past her guard before she could dodge them.

  As a thank-you to the dog-sitters, Dom gave Katya the green light to purchase the latest Justin Bieber CD on his iTunes account and download it to her iPod—with her father’s permission, he added. The indulgent papa received the ten-pound Westphalia ham that Dom had picked up at the butcher’s on the way home. The hound got a bag of bones, which tantalized him all the way up to the loft.

  When Dom unlocked the front door and stood aside for Natalie to precede him, she was hit with a sudden attack of nerves. Now that she’d remembered her past, would it overshadow the present? Would the weight of all those months and years in her “real” life smother the brief days she’d spent here, with Dom?

  Her heart thumping, she stepped inside and felt instant relief. And instantly at home…despite the dust motes dancing on a stray sunbeam and the rumpled bedcovers she’d straightened so meticulously before the hound had pounced on them. She knew she was just a guest, yet the most ridiculous sense of belonging enveloped her. The big fat question mark now was how long she’d stay camped out here. At least until she and Dom explored this business with Lagy, surely.

  Or not. Doubt raised its ugly head when she glanced over her shoulder and saw him standing just inside the still-open door.

  “Aren’t you coming in?”

  He gave himself a little shake, as if dragging his thoughts together, and dredged up a crooked smile.

  “We left your case in the car. I’ll go get it.”

  She used his absence to open the drapes and windows to let in the crisp fall air. Conscious of how Dom had teased her about her neat streak, she tried to ignore the rumpled bed but the damned thing pulled her like a magnet. She was guiltily smoothing the cover when he returned.

  Propping her roller case next to the wardrobe, he made for the fridge. “I’m going to have a beer. Would you like one? Or wine, or tea?”

  “Tea sounds good. Why don’t I brew a fresh pitcher while you check with your friend to see what he’s turned up on Lagy?”

  Dom took the dew-streaked pilsner and cell phone out to the balcony. Not because he wanted privacy to make the call to Andre. He’d decided last night to trust Natalie in spite of that unexplained arrest and nothing had happened since to change his mind. Unless whatever he learned about Lagy was classified “eyes only,” he intended to share it with her. No, he just needed a few moments to sort through everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours.

  Oh hell, who was he kidding?

  What he needed was, first, a deep gulp of air. Second, a long swallow of Gold Fassl. And third, a little more time to recover from the mule kick that’d slammed into his midsection when he’d opened the door to the loft and Natalie waltzed in with the Agár frisking around her legs.

  He liked having her here. Oddly, she didn’t crowd him or shrink his loft to minuscule proportions the way Zia did whenever she blew into Budapest on one of her whirlwind visits, leaving a trail of clothes and scarves and medical books and electronic gadgets in her wake. In fact, Natalie might lean a bit too far in the opposite direction. She would alphabetize and color-code his life if he didn’t keep a close eye on her.

  He would have to loosen her up. Ratchet her passion for order and neatness down to human levels. He suspected that might take some work but he could manage it. All he had to do was take her to bed often enough—and keep her there long enough—to burn up any surplus energy.

  As he gazed at the ornate facades on the Pest side of the river, he could easily envision fall rolling into winter while he lazed under the blankets with Natalie and viewed these same buildings dusted with snow. Or the two of them exercising the hound when the park below was tender and green with spring.

  The problem was that he wasn’t sure how Natalie felt about resuming her real life now that she’d remembered it. He suspected she wasn’t sure, either. Not yet, anyway. His conscience said he should stick to the suggestion he’d made last night to take things between them slowly, step-by-step. But his conscience couldn’t stand up to the homey sounds of Natalie moving around inside the loft, brewing her tea, laughing at the hound’s antics.

  He wanted her here, with him. Wanted to show her more of the city he loved. Wanted to explore that precise, fascinating mind, hear her breathy gasps and groans when they made love.

  And, he thought, his eyes going cold and flat, he wanted to flatten whoever’d hurt her. He didn’t believe for a moment she’d hit her head on a support pole and tumbled into the Danube. Janos Lagy had lured her onto that tour boat and Dom was damned well going to find out why.

  For once Andre didn’t have the inside scoop. Instead, he referred Dom back to the Hungarian agency that conducted internal investigations. The individual Dom spoke to there was cautious and closemouthed and unwilling to share sensitive information with someone she didn’t know. She did, however, agree to meet with him and Natalie in the morning.

  That made two appointments for tomorrow—one at the US Embassy to obtain a replacement passport and one at the National Tax and Customs Administration.

  “Tax and Customs?” Natalie echoed when he told her about the appointments. “Is that like the Internal Revenue Service in the US?”

  “More like your IRS and Department of the Treasury combined. The NTCA is our focus for all financial matters, including criminal activities like money laundering and financing terrorist activities.”

  Her eyes rounded. “And they have something on Lagy?”

  “They wouldn’t say, but they’re interested in talking to you.”

  “I can’t tell them any more than I told you.”

  “No, but they can tell us what, if anything, Lagy’s involved in.”

  “Well, this has been an amazing day. Two days, actually.” Her eyes met his in a smile. “And a pretty amazing night.”

  The smile clinched it. No way was he letting this woman waltz out of his life the same way she’d waltzed in. Dom thought seriously about plucking the glass out of her hand and carrying her to the bed. Which he would, he promised himself. Later. Right now, he’d initiate a blitz-style campaign to make her develop a passion for all things Hungarian—himself included.

  “Did you bring a bathing suit?”

  She blinked at the abrupt change of topic. “A bathing suit?”

  “Do you have one in your suitcase?”

  “I packed for business, not splashing around in hotel pools.”

  “No matter. We can rent one.”

  “Rent a bathing suit?” Her fastidious little nose wrinkled. “I don’t think so.”

  “They’re sanitized and steam-cleaned. Trust me on this. Stuff a couple of towels in your tote while I feed the hound and we’ll go.”

  “Dom, I don’t think public bathing is really my thing.”

  “You can’t leave Budapest without experiencing what gives this city its most di
stinctive character. Why do you think the Romans called their settlement here Aquincum?”

  “Meaning water something?”

  “Meaning abundant waters. All they had to do was poke a stick in the ground and a hot spring bubbled up. Get the towels.”

  * * *

  Natalie was even less sure about the whole communal spa thing when they arrived at the elegant Gellért Hotel. The massive complex sat at the base of Gellért Hill, named, Dom informed her, for the unfortunate bishop who came from Venice at the request of King Istivan in 1000 A.D.

  “My rebellious Magyar ancestors took exception to the king’s conversion to Christianity,” Dom related as he escorted her to the columned and colonnaded entrance. “They put the bishop in a barrel, drove long spikes in it and rolled him down the hill.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Here we go.”

  He ushered her into a grand entry hall two or three stories high. A long row of ticket windows lining one side of the hall offered a bewildering smorgasbord of options. Dom translated a menu that included swimming pools, thermal baths with temperatures ranging from a comfortable 86 degrees to a scorching 108 degrees, whirlpools, wave pools, saunas and steam rooms. And massages! Every sort of massage. Natalie gave up trying to pick out options and left the choice to him.

  “Don’t you need to know what bathing suit size I need?” she asked as they approached a ticket booth.

  He cut her an amused glance. “I was with you when you bought those jeans, remember? You’re a size forty-two.”

  Ugh! She hated European sizing. She stood beside him while he purchased their entry and noted that a good number of people passed through the turnstiles with just a flash of a blue card.

  “They don’t have to pay?”

  “They have a medical pass,” he explained as he fastened a band around her wrist. “The government operates all spas in Hungary. They’re actually part of our health care system. Doctors regularly send patients here for massage or hot soaks or swimming laps.”