Claimed: Gowns & Crowns, Book 3 (4 page)

“You know, he could be warning you about those trails because of wild animals,” Fran observed wryly. “Not simply because he wants to be a pain in the ass.”

“Mostly though, he wants to be a pain in the ass,” Lauren said, and the tension in the room finally broke. “I heard from Dimitri that you two were totally making out on the beach. Truth?”

“We were not making out.” Nicki hesitated. “Well, okay. I was. But I honest to God think Stefan was trying to seduce me to keep from running down the beach. Like this was some sort of super new diplomacy technique he wanted to practice on me.”

“And how did that practice go?” Emmaline asked. Her expression had also lightened, brimming with curiosity and the possibility of new romance. She among all of them was the most in love with being in love.

“For me—pretty damn well,” Nicki said. “I think he might have been going through the motions, but trust me, it’s been so long since I’ve been anywhere close to those kind of motions, I’ll take it.”

“I keep trying to fix you up, and you keep rejecting me.” Lauren protested. “How are you supposed to date if you never go out?”

“I’m too busy to mess with all of that.” Somewhat true, actually. She’d been a one-woman unstoppable force in college. Too small to play in most organized sports at any sort of elite level, and too worried about her possible heart condition, she knew needed to find something she could do solo. To give herself a competitive chance, she’d set her heart on the outlier sports—windsurfing, adventure running, climbing. There she’d met an entirely new group of friends who knew nothing about her past, nothing about her possible heart disease. They only knew she sometimes got a little dizzy if she didn’t stay hydrated…and that despite said dizziness, she was usually the first to jump off the cliff into the water below, no matter how deep that water was.

But though there were plenty of men in that group who Nicki could have pursued—she hadn’t. Because despite the fact that she truly believed that she was okay, it was one thing to get your heart broken by a relationship.

It was something else to walk into a relationship with your heart already broken.

“Okay, well, let’s be smart about this.” Lauren recalled Nicki’s thoughts to the present into focus as she settled into a chair. “What are the risks here? Let’s say you get stuck somewhere and you can’t take your meds.”

“What, my beta blockers? Those aren’t that critical, really.” Nicki shook her head. “They’re for my migraines, and there’s some evidence they help with high blood pressure and all of that, so that’s a bonus. But if my heart is really going to go…” she shrugged. “It’s going to go.”

“And you never got tested for this?” Fran’s voice was incredulous. “That seems really reckless to me, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I did once—twice, even, I think,” Nicki said, trying to keep her cool. She’d had this fight with her mother too many times. “The odds aren’t in my favor, and I know that. But I…couldn’t keep going back. Not in the end. I’d rather live with my heart condition as a maybe and actually live—than change my whole life because of some stupid test. I’ve seen what it’s done to my brother. He’s become as bad as my mom, sure that every cold is going to kill him. And my dad…” Nicki sighed. “I’m not going to get tested only to find out the worst. I’m not. As long as I don’t put anyone else in danger…”

“But what about putting yourself in danger?” Emmaline’s voice was soft. “We don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“It won’t,” Nicki said. “Especially if Stefan is on the boat.” She smiled. “If he had to rescue me, I’d never live it down.”

Lauren snorted. “Okay, but let’s say you have a dizzy spell or your heart starts to react to something scary or intense. Your pulse goes up, right? What happens then?”

“I faint,” Nicki shrugged. “That’s it, so far. If anything worse ever happened, I’d get tested—really, I would. But it’s never gone beyond a momentary blackout, I swear. No one’s even cracked out an AED around me.”

“That might not work anyway,” Fran put in. “A defibrillator is meant to re-start a malfunctioning heart, not a dying one.”

Nicki let the shiver roll through her at the idea that her heart muscle could possibly be dying, but kept her expression strong and steady—like she needed to be. “There you go. So there’s no point in worrying about it. Besides, if Stefan gets a hint that I might not be a hundred percent physically fit, there’s no way he’d let me go along on this mission. None.”

Emmaline sighed. “And it’s that important for you to go?” Her question was quiet, but it drew the attention of all the girls to her.

Nicki hesitated. They couldn’t understand, she knew. They’d never had a fear that they were…fundamentally different. Fundamentally unreliable. Nicki’d overcome that fear with a college life and new career filled with solo adventures and living on people’s couches, never attaching, never committing. But this…

“It is,” she finally said, and was surprised to find her words equally soft. “I just…I really want to be a part of this.” To be a part of something that mattered. Something that her body couldn’t hold her back from.

“Well, then you should go,” Fran said, her calm voice easing the tension again. “You’ll just have to be smart.”

“They’re meeting now, you know,” Emmaline said, pursing her lips as she glanced at her phone. “I’m sure they’ll be talking about you, Nicki. Making their final decisions.”

Nicki stood, eager for any reason to move again. “Well, then maybe I should go listen in,” she said.

“There is absolutely no chance I’m going to let her come with us.” Stefan placed the dossier on the table in front of him. He didn’t lean forward; he didn’t lean back. This was not a negotiation; it was a simple point of fact. A point he’d made six times already, by his count.

Cyril turned from scanning the monitors. They were in the palace’s main conference room. He addressed Dimitri, the last person to deal with an American targeted by outside forces. “Had you to do it over again, would you have taken Lauren to Miranos?”

“No,” Dimitri rumbled. “We went there because we did not understand the lengths to which her insane ex would go. Had I known he was so deadly, and deranged, we would not have left the mainland. I would have put her in a safe house and sat on it.” He grimaced. “I agree with Stefan. It is too dangerous to take an American into Turkey. Even one with a reason to be there.”

“A very good reason,” Cyril observed blandly. “Unlike any of us.” He pointed to the screens. “Nicole Clark was actually bylined last year at the Alaçati competition. She competed deep into the tournament before falling out of the running, then continued on in her journalistic role.”

“Adventure blogging is not journalism,” Stefan snapped. “She has none of the training of an international correspondent, she simply has a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection.” Stefan scowled. “It is not her credentials, though they are nonexistent. I will grant you her experience in windsurfing and her presence at last year’s tournament are worthwhile considerations. But she is an American, a guest in our country. She is also untrained. We will be taking her into unmonitored territory, where the Turkish military will be the least of our concerns. She has already demonstrated that she does not follow orders well, and that is of paramount importance. Make no mistake—this is a military mission. I’m being asked to secure information or possibly recover Ari’s remains from a potentially hostile environment, with nationals who may not be willing to give up those remains. It could get ugly very quickly, and an American would be at minimum a liability, and at worse collateral damage from which we would not recover.”

His statement caused everyone to pause, and he regarded them impassively. In his mind’s eye, he saw Nicki’s distant form windsurfing on the wide ocean, imagined her smile, her laugh, the sun warming her as the wind whipped the waves around her to a frenzy. He could not—he
would
not be weighed down with someone who made him this protective. He couldn’t put it quite that way to the others, of course, but—

“Stefan raises a good point,” Jasen said. He seemed more tired suddenly, and something in Stefan’s chest tightened. “We need to weigh the costs against what we may or may not achieve.”

“Ari is there though—you know he’s there.” Kristos spoke up, his attention swinging from Dimitri to Jasen—neatly skipping over Stefan’s icy glare. “And the location couldn’t be better for a simple op.”

The prince stood, moving quickly to one of the larger screens and with a few deft taps of the inset keyboard, pulled up a map of coastal Turkey.

Alaçati was nearly as far south as Athens, and perched on a strip of countryside that stuck out into the Aegean before the land broke away to form several small islands. “We’re talking maybe two days by boat, going slowly—one long day if you’re focused. Slow would probably be better for this mission, to convey the tourist nature of it. Then you stop here.” He jabbed a thumb at a non-descript island. “That’s where the scavenger gang dealt their goods.”

“That’s an unusual stop. Explain how we would make that a reasonable detour, so close to the city?”

Kristos shrugged. “Diving. Nicki dives, right?”

Stefan thinned his lips. “It would not surprise me.”

“So do the research, I bet someone somewhere has written about the diving off that island. Have her blog about the story—”

“You can’t be serious—”

“Blog about the story using Wi-Fi via a satellite uplink, take a few pictures showing how beautiful the scenery is, and done. Meanwhile, your men go ashore, maybe you go ashore and see what’s what.”

“We don’t know if the encampment is still there.”

Kristos shrugged. “Where would they go? Mainland is too crowded, and that place is desolate. Easy to get to by boat, but no reason anyone would be looking there. And it’s an island.”

He stared at the map a moment longer. When he spoke, his voice sounded strangled. “Ari could be there, Stefan. Dead or—whatever. Eleven months is a long time, but not so long that he couldn’t still be alive.”

Alive.
Stefan didn’t say the words, but all of them were thinking the same thing. If Ari was still on that island, he was dead. He’d been disoriented when he’d sold the watch to the scavenger—for food and a boat. But even the fisherman had shaken his head at that story, relayed to him by the scavenger leader himself. Ari had asked for a boat, but he’d accepted a leaky-hulled wreck. For a watch that fine on the open sea, he should have known its value. He should have asked for something more, perhaps safe passage aboard a real boat.

So what had happened to him?

Cyril grunted and began arguing with Kristos about the logistics of the trip—no matter who was on the boat. Stefan swung toward Jasen, then stopped for a moment as his gaze swept past the blank screens lining the opposite wall. There’d been a shift in the doorway, the barest movements, but his hands instantly tensed on the table. Normally it would be the queen listening in on their private conferences; that he had allowed more than once.

This wasn’t the queen, though her assistance was all over this intrusion he had no doubt. This was Nicki. He knew it as sure as he was sitting there.

How much had she heard? He had to assume all of it.

Well, that was too bad. It had only been the truth.

He grimaced and was about to end the conversation when another movement caught his eye—this one closer to him. King Jasen. The king was watching Cyril, but more importantly, he was watching Kristos with Cyril. Kristos, his younger son, who had wanted nothing more than to serve out his life in the military, protecting and defending the country of Garronia while Ari, the older son, took up the mantle of power. Those boys—both of them—were supposed to grow old as Jasen watched, maturing to the fullness of their abilities. Instead, one was tilting at windmills, hoping desperately to bring back the brother he could not let rest, and the other might be buried in a shallow grave in hostile land—or worse.

Far worse.

Stefan scowled at the screen again. Alaçati was twelve hours away by boat, give or take. If they made the trip in one long day and then a short couple of hops, it could work the way Kristos envisioned. Nicki with her…laptop, or whatever she would use, would be surrounded by Garronia’s guards, hand-picked by Stefan. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight. Further, he was not unaware of the need for diplomatic overtures to the country. This sojourn would accomplish that and more.

And it would accomplish something more. Something the entire country needed: a king who could finally mourn the death of his first son and the celebrate the life of his second.

His eyes trained on Jasen, Stefan drew in a breath.

“Very well,” he said. “This is how this is going to work.”

Chapter Four

Nicki almost swallowed her own tongue. Stefan had said “Very well.” Not another “no,” not another sneer. She’d not realized how much she’d been braced for more snubs when silence filled the room.

“We will leave tomorrow morning. King Jasen, if you can personally reach out to the appropriate officials to communicate our intentions, that will help smooth the way. We’ll dock off the coast of Turkey as Kristos suggests if we can create a credible reason to do so.”