Impressed but still a little doubtful, Natalie accompanied him into a gloriously ornate lobby, then to a seemingly mile-long hall with windows offering an unimpeded view of a sparkling swimming pool. Swimmers of all ages, shapes and sizes floated, dog-paddled or cut through the water with serious strokes.
“Here’s where we temporarily part ways,” Dom told her, extracting one of the towels from her tote. “The men’s changing area is on the right, the women’s on the left. Just show the attendant your wristband and she’ll fix you up with a suit. Then hold the band up to the electronic pad and it’ll assign you a changing cabin and locker. Once you’ve changed, flash the band again to enter the thermal baths. I’ll meet you there.”
That sounded simple enough—until Natalie walked through the entrance to the women’s area. It was huge, with marble everywhere, stairs leading up and down, and seemingly endless rows of massage rooms, saunas, showers and changing rooms. A friendly local helped her locate the alcove containing the suit rental desk.
She still harbored distinct doubts about shimmying into a used bathing suit. But when she slid the chit Dom had given her across the desk, the attendant returned with a sealed package containing what looked like a brand-new one-piece. She held her wristband up to the electronic pad as Dom had instructed and got the number of a changing room. Faced with long, daunting rows of cubicles, she had to ask another local for help locating hers. Once they’d found it, the smiling woman took Natalie’s wrist and aimed the band at the electronic lock.
“Here, here. Like this.”
The door popped open, and her helpful guide added further instructions.
“It locks behind you, yes? You leave your clothes and towels in the cabin, then go through to the thermal pool.”
“Thank you.”
“Szívesen.”
The room was larger than Natalie had expected, with a bench running along one wall and a locker for her clothes and tote. She was still leery of the rented bathing suit but a close inspection showed it to be clean and fresh-smelling.
And at least one size too small!
Cut high on the thighs and low in the front, the sleek black Spandex revealed far more skin than Natalie wanted to display. She tried yanking up the neck but that only pulled the Spandex into an all-too-suggestive V at her crotch. She tugged it down again, determined not to give Dom a peep show.
Not that he would object. The man was nothing if not appreciative of the opposite sex. Kiss Kiss Arabella and lushly endowed Lisel were proof of that. And, Natalie now remembered, his sister Zia and Sarah’s sister Gina had both joked about how women fell all over him. And why not? With that sexy grin and too-handsome face, Dominic St. Sebastian could have his pick of…
She froze, her fingers still tugging at the bottom of the suit, as another handsome face flashed into her mind.
Oh, God!
She dropped onto the bench. Blood drained from her heart and gathered like a cold, dead pool in her belly.
Oh God, oh God, oh God!
Wrapping her arms around her middle, she rocked back and forth on the bench. She remembered now the “traumatic” event she’d tried to desperately to suppress. The ugly incident that had caused her to lose her sense of self.
How could she have forgotten for a day—an hour!—the vicious truth she’d kept buried for more than three years? Tears stung her eyes, raked her throat. Furiously, she fought them back. She’d cried all the tears she had in her three years ago. She was damned if she’d shed any more for the bastard who destroyed her life then. And would now destroy it again, she acknowledged on a wave of despair.
How could she have let herself believe last night could lead to something more between her and Dominic St. Sebastian? When she told him about her past, he’d be so disappointed, so disgusted. She sat there, aching for what might have been, until the urge to howl like a wounded animal released its death grip on her throat. Then she got off the bench and pushed through the door at the other end of the changing room.
The temperature in the marble hall shot up as she approached the first of the thermal pools. Dom was there, waiting for her as promised. Yesterday, even this morning, she would have drooled at the sight of his tall, muscled torso sporting a scant few inches of electric-blue Speedo. Now all she could do was gulp when he got a look at her face and stiffened.
“What’s wrong?”
“I…I…”
“Natalie, what is it? What’s happened?”
“I have to tell you something.” She threw a wild look around the busy spa. “But not here. I’ll…I’ll meet you at the car.”
Whirling, she fled back to her changing room.
Twelve
Her mind drowning in a cesspool of memories, Natalie scrambled into her clothes and had to ask for directions several times before she emerged from the maze of saunas and massage rooms.
Dom waited at the entrance to the women’s changing rooms instead of at the car. His face was tight with concern and unspoken questions when she emerged. He swept a sharp glance around the hall, as though checking to see if anyone lingered nearby or appeared to be waiting or watching for Natalie, then cut his gaze back to her.
“What happened in the changing area to turn your face so pale?”
“I remembered something.”
“About Janos Lagy?”
“No.” She gnawed on her lower lip. “An incident in my past. I need to tell you about it.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Surprise? Caution? Wariness? It came and went so quickly she couldn’t have pinned a label on it even if her thoughts weren’t skittering all over the place.
“There’s a café across the street. We can talk there.”
“A café? I don’t think… I don’t know…”
“We haven’t eaten since breakfast. Whatever you have to tell me will go down easier with a bowl of goulash.”
Natalie knew nothing could make it go down easier, but she accompanied him out of the hotel and into the fall dusk. Lights had begun to glow on the Pest side of the Danube. She barely registered the glorious panorama of gold and indigo as Dom took her arm and steered her to the brightly lit café.
Soon—too soon for her mounting dread—they were enclosed in a high-backed booth that afforded both privacy and an unimpeded view of the illuminated majesty across the river. Dom ordered and signaled for her to wait until the server had brought them both coffee and a basket of thick black bread. He cut Natalie’s coffee with a generous helping of milk to suit her American taste buds, then nudged the cup across the table.
“Take a drink, take a breath and tell me what has you so upset.”
She complied with the first two instructions but couldn’t find a way to broach the third. She stirred more milk into her coffee, fiddled with her spoon, gnawed on her lower lip again.
“Natalie. Tell me.”
Her eyes lifted to his. “The scum you hunt down? The thieves and con artists and other criminals?” Misery choked her voice. “I’m one of them.”
She’d dreaded his reaction. Anticipated his disgust or icy withdrawal. The fact that he didn’t even blink at the anguished confession threw her off for a moment. But only a moment.
“Oh, my God! You know?” Shame coursed through her, followed almost immediately by a scorching realization. “Of course you do! You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
“Not all along, and not the details.” His calm, even tone countered the near hysteria in hers. “Only that you were arrested, the charges were later dropped and the record wiped clean.”
Her laugh was short and bitter. “Not clean enough, apparently.”
The server arrived then with their goulash. The brief interruption didn’t give her nearly enough time to swallow the fact that Dom had been privy to her deepest, darkest, most mortifying secret. The server departed, but the steaming soup sat untouched while Natalie related the rest of her sorry tale.
“I’m not sure how much you know about me, but before Sarah hired me I
worked for the State of Illinois. Specifically, for the state’s Civil Service Board. I was part of an ongoing project to digitize more than a hundred years’ worth of paper files and merge them with current electronic records. I enjoyed the work. It was such a challenge putting all those old records into a sortable database.”
She really had loved her job, she remembered as she plucked a slice of coarse black bread from the basket and played with it. Not just the digitizing and merging and sorting, but the picture those old personnel records painted of previous generations. Their work ethic, their frugal saving habits, their large numbers of dependents and generous contributions to church and charity. For someone like Natalie with no parents or grandparents or any known family, these glimpses into the quintessential American working family were fascinating.
“Then,” she said with a long, slow, thoroughly disgusted sigh, “I fell in love.”
She tore a thick piece off the bread, squeezed it into a wad, rolled it around and around between her fingers.
“He was so good-looking,” she said miserably. “Tall, athletic, blue-eyed, always smiling.”
“Always smiling? Sounds like a jerk.”
Her lips twisted. “I was the jerk. I bought his line about wanting to settle down and start a family. Actually started weaving fantasies about a nursery, a minivan with car seats, the whole baby scene. I should’ve known I wasn’t the type to interest someone as smooth and sophisticated as Jason DeWitt for longer than it took for him to hack into my computer.”
Dom reached out and put his palm over the fingers still nervously rolling the bread. His grip was strong and warm, his eyes glinting with undisguised anger.
“We’ll discuss what type you are later. Right now, I can pretty well guess what came next. Mr. Smooth used your computer to access state records and mine thousands of addresses, dates of birth and social security numbers.”
“Try hundreds of thousands.”
“Then he sold them, right? I’m guessing to the Russians, although the marketplace is pretty well wide-open these days. And when the crap hit the fan, the feds tracked the breach to you.”
“He hadn’t sold them yet. They caught him with his hand still in my cookie jar.”
Shame and misery engulfed her again. Tears burned as the images from that horrible day played through her head.
“Oh, Dom, it was so awful! The police came to my office! Said they’d been after Jason—the man I knew as Jason DeWitt—for over a year. They’d decoded his electronic signature and knew he’d hacked into several major databases. They’d finally penetrated his shields and not only pinpointed his exact location, they kicked in the door to my apartment and nailed him in the act. Then they charged me with being an accomplice to unauthorized access to public records with intent to commit fraud. They arrested me right there in front of all my coworkers and…and…”
She had to stop and gulp back the stinging tears. “Then they hauled me downtown in handcuffs.”
“At which point they discovered you weren’t a party to the hacking and released you.”
Dom’s unquestioned acceptance of her innocence should have soothed her raw nerves. Instead, it made it even tougher to finish the sordid tale.
“Not quite.”
Writhing inside, she tried to pull her hand away but he kept it caged.
“Jason tried to convince the police it was all my idea. He said I’d teased and taunted him with sex. That would have been laughable,” she said, heat surging into her cheeks, “if the police hadn’t found a closet full of crotch-high leather skirts, low-cut blouses and peek-a-boo lingerie. Jason kept pestering me to wear that kind of…of slut stuff when we went out. It was enough to make the investigators wring me inside out before they finally released me.”
Dom played his thumb over the back of her hand and fought to keep his fury in check. It wasn’t enough that the hacker had played on Natalie’s lonely childhood and craving for a family. The bastard had also cajoled her into decking herself out like a whore. No wonder she’d swung to the opposite extreme and started dressing like a refugee from a war zone.
Even worse, she’d had no one to turn to for help during what had to be one of the most humiliating moments of her life. No parents to rush downtown and bail her out. No sister to descend like an avenging angel, as Zia would have done. No brother to pulverize the man who’d set her up.
She wasn’t alone now, though. Nor would she be alone in the future. Not as long as Dominic had a say in the matter. The absolute certainty of that settled around his heart like a glove as he quietly prompted her to continue.
“What did you do then?”
“I hired a lawyer and got the arrest expunged. Or so I thought,” she amended with a frown. “Then I had the lawyer negotiate a deal with my boss. Since the state records hadn’t actually been compromised, I said I would quietly disappear if he agreed that my employment record would contain no reference to the whole sorry mess. After some weeks of wrangling with the state attorney general’s office, I packed up and left town. I worked at odd jobs for a while until…”
“Until you went to work for Sarah,” he finished when she didn’t.
Guilt flooded her face. “I didn’t lie to her, Dom. I filled out my employment history truthfully. I knew she would check my references, knew my chances were iffy at best. But my former boss stuck to his end of the deal, and my performance reports before…before that big mess were so glowing and complimentary that Sarah hired me after only one interview.”
She turned away, shamefaced.
“I know you think I should have told her. I wanted to. I really did. And I intended to. I just thought…maybe if I tracked down the Canaletto first…helped return it to its rightful owner…Sarah and Dev and the duchess would know I wasn’t a thief.”
“You’re not a thief. Natalie, look at me. You’re not a thief or a con artist or a criminal. Trust me, I’ve been around the breed enough to know. Now I have two questions for you before we eat the soup that’s been sitting here for so long.”
“Only two?”
Her voice was wobbly, her eyes still tear-bright and drenched with a humiliation that made Dom vow to pulverize the scum who’d put it there.
“Where is this Jason character now?”
“Serving five to ten at the Danville Correctional Facility.”
“Well, that takes him off my hit list. For now.”
An almost smile worked through her embarrassment. “What’s question two?”
“How long are you going to keep mashing that piece of bread?”
She blinked and looked down in surprise at the pulpy glob squishing through her fingers.
“Here.” He passed her a napkin. “Eat your soup, drágám. Then we’ll go home and get back to work on finding your painting.”
* * *
Home. The word reverberated in Natalie’s mind when Dom opened the door to the loft and Duke treated them to an ecstatic welcome. She clung to the sound of it, the thought of it, like a lifeline while man and dog took a quick trip downstairs and she went to unpack the roller suitcase still propped next to the wardrobe.
Her toiletries went into the bathroom, her underwear onto the corner of a shelf in the wardrobe. When she lifted the neatly folded blouses, her mouth twisted.
Natalie knew she’d never been a Princess Kate. She wasn’t tall or glamorous or as poised as a supermodel. But she’d possessed her own sense of style. She’d preferred a layered look, she now remembered. Mostly slim slacks or jeans with belted tunics or cardigans over tanks…until Jason.
He’d wanted sexier, flashier. She cringed, remembering how she’d suppressed her inner qualms and let him talk her into those thigh-hugging skirts and lace-up bustiers. She’d burned them. The leather skirts, the bustiers, the stilettos and boob tubes and garter belts and push-up bras. Carted the whole lot down to the incinerator in her building, along with every other item in her apartment that carried even a whiff of Jason’s scent or a faint trace of his imprint.
<
br /> Then she’d gone out and purchased an entire new wardrobe of maiden aunt blouses and shapeless linen dresses. She’d also stopped using makeup and began scraping her hair back in a bun. She’d even resorted to wearing glasses she didn’t need. Paying penance, she now realized, for her sins.
She was still staring at the folded blouses when Dom and the hound returned. When he saw what she was holding, he dropped the dog’s lead on the kitchen counter and crossed the room.
“You don’t need these anymore.” He took the blouses and dumped them back in the case. “You don’t need any of this.”
When he zipped the case and propped it next to the wardrobe again, Natalie experienced a heady sense of freedom. As though she’d just shed an outer skin that’d felt as unnatural and uncomfortable as the one she’d tried to squeeze into for Jason.
Buoyed by the feeling, she flashed Dom a smile. “If you don’t want me to continue raiding your closet, you’ll have to take me shopping again.”
“You’re welcome to wear anything of mine you wish. Although,” he confessed with a quick grin, “I must admit I prefer when you wear nothing at all.”
The need that splintered through her was swift and clean and joyous. The shame she’d tried to bury for three long years was still there, just below the surface. She suspected traces of it would linger there for a long while. But for now, for this moment, she could give herself completely to Dom and her aching hunger for his touch.
She looped her arms around his neck and let the smile in his eyes begin healing the scars. “I must admit I prefer you that way, too.”
“Then I suggest we both shed some clothes.”
They made it to the bed. Barely. A stern command prevented Duke from jumping in with them, but Natalie had to force herself not to look at the hound’s reproachful face until Dom’s mouth and teeth and busy, busy hands made her forget everything but him.
She was boneless with pleasure and half-asleep when he tucked her into the curve of his body and murmured something in Hungarian.
Her Unforgettable Royal Lover Page 14
