Royal Captive (16 page)

Her silk dress practically slipped out of the way of his hands. Her breasts arched into his palms. He’d wanted to do this all day. Her nearness, her familiar behavior with him to keep up their ruse, had gotten to him on every level. She’d smiled at him as a mistress, touched him as a mistress and tantalized him beyond endurance.

Tension had gathered all day as they were together but always in the company of others. Now they were alone. And they were like two live wires placed near each other, electricity arching between them.

His haze of need was punctured only by a sharp object drilling into his hand. “What’s—”

“Sorry.” She pulled a metal lock pick from her bra and placed it on the nightstand. Then gave him a small, embarrassed smile and went on to retrieve various other objects. A small, sharp-looking switchblade came from her panties, and he winced thinking the injury that could have caused him.

“Where did you—” He bit off the rest of the question when the answer came to him. No doubt, she’d gotten her tools either from her uncle or she’d acquired them that morning when she’d sneaked out of his cousin’s estate and left him behind.

A small pile gathered by the time she was done.

“Wearing a weapon in the presence of a royal person is against the law and carries the charge of treason,” he observed drily.

She shrugged with a grin, never one to be intimidated. “You already thought I was a born criminal.”

He didn’t like the reminder. He might have been a fool to have judged her before they even met. He didn’t play the fool often, so the thought didn’t sit well with him. “Never mind. Anything else?”

She shook her head. “You?”

“Completely unarmed. But feel free to check my pockets.” She laughed.

He slid his hands up her thighs, dragging the material of her skirt up as he went. He felt the same sensation as when he was looking at a new site, getting to know the lay of the land, anticipating peeling off the layers one by one until he found what he was looking for.

Anticipation coursed through him. He had no doubt that there was treasure in front of him, a nagging feeling that he might discover in her something more beautiful, more profound, more valuable than he’d ever expected. He took her mouth and kissed her deeply, couldn’t stop kissing her.

She didn’t protest. Instead, she arched her back so he could reach the clasp of her bra more easily. And there they were, her amazing breasts about to spill out for him to see, to touch, to taste.

His body hardened even more, if that was possible. He moved his head closer. He was beyond ready for her.

The phone rang, bringing a frustrated curse to his lips. Under other circumstances he would have ignored it—or smashed it against the wall—but it was his secured cell phone and they were in the middle of important and dangerous business.

He grabbed the cell from the nightstand with one hand, holding on to her with the other. Having to push the answer button pained him. “What is it?”

“News on the investigation,” his brother Miklos said. “The breakin had help from the inside, as we suspected.”

“Do you know who?”

“Partial recording of one of the video cameras we’ve overlooked has been restored. Chancellor Egon’s son, Zoltan, was on it, along with an unidentified male.”

He was too stunned to process his brother’s words at first. Then things slowly began to fall into place. The Chancellor’s son was a spoiled brat, a man who rose in the ranks due to his father’s merit rather than his own. Maybe he was jealous of the amount of time and effort his father spent on the princes since he’d been chosen Chancellor.

“What does the father say to this?”

“Crushed.”

He would be. Chancellor Egon took his job very seriously, to the point of being overzealous about it, which annoyed the princes on occasion, even if they appreciated his dedication for the most part. “What else?”

“Benedek said Zoltan was definitely the voice in the catacombs.”

For a moment he didn’t know what Miklos was talking about, then he remembered Benedek being trapped with Rayne in the catacombs under Palace Hill after the siege of the opera house the year before. He’d always maintained that one of the rebels he overheard had a familiar voice, but could never put a name to it. They’d suspected one of the staff and backgrounds had been checked and rechecked, two men dismissed.

“So we let people go unfairly.”

“Benedek is making retribution. He’s in a mood because he didn’t make the connection to Zoltan earlier. It clicked the second he saw the guy on the video, but—well—”

He knew what his brother wasn’t saying. If Zoltan were caught earlier, lives could have been saved. But Benedek was not at fault.

“Nobody would have suspected Zoltan. He’s like a distant cousin. His father has become a pillar—”

Lauryn slipped away to lie on the bed next to him, distracting him momentarily. He focused back on the latest developments in the investigation with effort.

“So if Zoltan was involved in both the attack on the opera house and in this heist that links the theft of the crown jewels to the Freedom Council.” The clandestine group of unidentified business tycoons had been working to bring down the monarchy for ages, planning to carve the small kingdom up and divide it among themselves.

Not if he and his brothers had anything to do with it, Istvan thought and said, “This explains so many things. If there’s no crown, a new king cannot be crowned and confirmed.” And their mother was ill enough that Arpad becoming king someday soon was a very distinct possibility.

As Lauryn had said, taking one-of-a-kind, easily recognizable artifacts like the crown jewels made little sense for their gold and gem value alone. But the theft made a world of sense if the purpose was to disrupt the monarchy.

And the crown held other power, too. Like the key to the Brotherhood’s treasure, a find of historical significance, which he didn’t want to go into over the phone. He didn’t even want to think about the kind of war that it could finance if it fell into the wrong hands.

“Any developments there?” his brother asked.

Istvan filled him in, getting up to pace the room as he did so.

“And how is the princess of thieves?” Miklos asked at the end, after all his other questions had been answered.

Istvan walked from the bedroom to the living room and closed the door behind him. “Don’t call her that.”

“What would you like to call her, plain
princess?
”

He shook his head silently. The one drawback about having a close-knit family was that they felt free to stick their noses into his business anywhere, anytime. “It’s not like that between me and Miss Steler.”

The connection was purely physical. And intellectual. But that was it. Nothing he couldn’t walk away from at the end. Not that he’d told his brothers about the physical part even. None of their meddling business.

“Because of Amalia?” Miklos asked. “Still?”

He said nothing. Because the truth was, he thought about Amalia less and less.

“You were never in love with Amalia. You know that, right?”

“I was. You go too far. Being married doesn’t make you an expert on the subject,” Istvan responded with some heat.

“Why didn’t you marry her?”

Why didn’t he, indeed. He’d thought about that many times in the aftermath of her death. “The time wasn’t right.” Among many other things. “And there were obstacles. She was a commoner. Divorced. There would have been a bloody fight at the palace over it. The Chancellor would have had a stroke. Mother would have had a heart attack.” The reasons that seemed to have had all kinds of power in the past, suddenly sounded weak, even to his own ears.

“Here is a piece of unsolicited advice from your big brother—the time is always right with the right woman.”

“If there’s nothing else you have for me on the investigation, I’m signing off here.” Istvan closed the phone before his brother could have pushed further.

He longed for the days when they used to share hunting stories and sword-fighting tips. Now that Miklos and Benedek and Lazlo were married and more in touch with their emotions, whatever that meant, God help the rest of them.

Janos and Miklos had met Lauryn when they’d come and taken the ship’s crew back to Valtria with them. Both liked her, which made no sense at all. Janos, maybe, but Miklos ran palace security—he’d lost several of his men to the heist. He should not approve of an ex-thief so thoroughly.

Not that his disapproval would have been better. Istvan felt defensive just thinking about anyone disapproving of her. She scrambled his brain like no other, he thought as he walked back to her.

She stood next to the bed, her dress back in place, looking as if she, too, had sobered in the few minutes that had passed. She glanced at the bedside clock. “It’s time for us to leave.”

For the next meeting with the next criminal. And the stakes were higher than ever. “You should stay.”

She gave him a stubborn look. “We’ve already done that song and dance.”

“These people are more dangerous than I thought.” He told her what he’d found out from Miklos, told her a little about the Freedom Council. “We’re not facing a simple gang of thieves with a wealthy buyer behind them. The Freedom Council’s sole purpose is the defeat of the monarchy and the destruction of the royal family.”

“By that you mean they’ll try to kill you given half a chance?”

He nodded.

For a second she held his gaze without a word, a thoughtful look in her eyes. Then she squared her slim shoulders. “All the more reason for me to be there.”

A pure gesture of courage and loyalty.

He felt an unfamiliar sensation in the middle of his chest. For now, he decided to ignore it.

B
ELLINGHAM WAS AN AGENT,
a go-between man. Berk, the guy they were meeting tonight, was a crew boss, a different animal altogether. Bellingham was a gentleman, using his high standing in society to gain connections, to wheel and deal. He had people for protection and intimidation when necessary. He wasn’t the type to get his hands dirty.

Berk was the man in the trenches. He went out on heists and put his neck on the line every time. Lauryn knew his kind only too well. He had a team of rough-and-tough criminals to keep in line, keep from going rogue or trying to take over. Any one of his men could plea-bargain his name if caught, any one could slit his throat to get a bigger share of the loot.

Berk didn’t invite them into his home. He insisted on meeting at a neutral location on the Turkish side of the island, at a café near a famous bazaar where he had enough of his armed men watching to make minced meat out of them at the first wrong move. Caution was Berk’s middle name. That and shooting first, apologizing later was what kept him alive.

“Does your buyer have a price range?” he asked, drawing from a water pipe. They were sitting over a plate of sweets and strong, unfiltered coffee.

The man had watery brown eyes and a sparse beard that covered only the tip of his chin, the scraggly hairs a few inches long, coming together at the end in a spike. Tattoos of Turkish script covered his lower arms. He wore an eggplant-colored suit and leather loafers that had pointy toes.

“For the right piece, he’d pay the right price,” Istvan said as Fernando.

“And the right piece would be something extravagant.”

Istvan nodded. “Something truly one-of-a-kind. For a private collection that’s never been seen by outside eyes.”

“Maybe he has something in mind and would like to commission a job?”

“He’s heard about a recent job with several items he might be interested in.”

“Commissioned by another collector?”

Istvan shrugged.

“The original buyer would be disappointed if he didn’t get what he paid for. Bad business all around.”

The two had been talking like that for an hour, hinting much, saying little as Lauryn patiently sat by. The market buzzed around them, people coming and going, shopping, drinking, making deals. Women, too. Some in Western outfits, others veiled. Coming from Turkey, Muslim conservatives were gaining ground on the north side of the island. Only a small foothold, though. Nobody gave her any trouble for her clothes or for sitting with two men, although, knowing what it would be like here, she had added a large, dark blue silk shawl to her outfit. She had draped it loosely over her head and shoulders when they’d arrived.

Directly next to the café was a spice stand, a perfume stand on the other side where scents were mixed on the spot, one-of-a-kind for each customer’s taste. Clothing shops took up one full row, silks and damasks in every color of the rainbow. Another alley was dominated by carpet dealers, selling everything from four-hundred-year-old museum-quality pieces to the latest designs. Copper dishes were sold yet in another place. And leather, and everything that can be made from the material, in several shops within sight.

She’d been pretending to pay a great deal of attention to the shopping, leaving the men to talk. But it seemed the talk was going in circles at this stage. She turned her attention to them and snuggled up to Istvan. He ignored her for a while, then pushed her away.

She put on a hurt look, then shrugged and cozied up to Berk, linking one arm through his, smoothing a hand down his lapel. “Can I offer you more coffee?”

He cast an amused look at Fernando/Istvan. Then nodded.

She served him, but didn’t pull away when she was done. The thunder in Istvan’s eyes looked award-worthy as he pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and tossed the bills at her. “Go shopping.”

She bumped into Berk as she slid off her chair, flashed him an apologetic smile. To Istvan she gave a look of defiance, but then took the money and walked away to explore the bazaar.

On her way, she passed a table where Istvan’s two bodyguards sat incognito, although she was sure Berk had picked them out as soon as they’d arrived, which was fine.

She went to the candle maker first and bought a chunk of beeswax. Then a length of silk the color of her eyes. Next she visited the leather shop where she selected a supple bodice that laced up in the front, a risqué piece made for tourists. This she took into the dressing room.