Claimed: Gowns & Crowns, Book 3 (15 page)

“Good,” he said tightly.

Then he kissed her.

It wasn’t an ordinary kiss, either. Stefan put both hands on either side of Nicki’s face and tilted her up to him, as if he was a drowning man in need of a cup of water. The moment their lips touched he reached around her body and hauled her close, cradling her backside with his hand as he lifted her higher against the wall.

Nicki could barely draw in a second breath when he kissed her again, hungrily, deeply, his mouth leaving hers to ravage across her face, her ear, and down into the hollow of her neck.

The short length and flirty swing of the dress was uniquely suited for back room trysts, and for a moment Nicki thought about protesting—but only for a moment. Instead she flexed her legs, locking her ankles around Stefan’s back and pulling herself tighter against him. He growled against her neck then moved to her mouth again.

“Sunshine,” he practically moaned and a nervous thrill zipped through her. She didn’t know what to say, what to do. She didn’t want to break the spell that Stefan was weaving around her, around them both—but her heart was already beginning to race.

At that moment he dragged himself away from her mouth. She smiled up at his dazed face, her hands gripping his shoulders. “So…it was a good thing that I talked to Omir? Because this feels a whole lot like a reward.”

Stefan barked with laughter and swung her around, the movement causing her to unlock her legs. She slid down until her the heels of her strappy sandals hit the floor, but Stefan held her close until she steadied herself. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “That was unnecessary of me.”

“Well, I’m not sure about the necessary thing, but I didn’t really need it to be necessary. It was all good.” Nicki spoke the words slowly and carefully, as if Stefan was a colt about to shy away. The impetuous move of feeling her up in a back room seemed totally unlike him, but he was the one leaning back from her, studying her as if she was a different species.

“You do the most incredible things to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know if you’re doing it on purpose, or if you were simply brought to me to teach me a lesson.”

Nicki lifted a brow. “Well that depends. Am I a path not taken or a horrible mistake so far?” she grinned, softening her words. “Or both?”

“Definitely not a horrible mistake,” Stefan murmured, drawing her close again. “And as to paths not taken, the night is young, and we have many paths before us.”

He dipped his head and kissed her again, but lightly this time, softly, as if she were made of fine bone china. Rather than feeling left out in the cold with the softness of his touch, Nicki’s heart turned inside out, thumping out of time despite her silent pleas for it to relax. She forced herself to remain still for as long as she could, but when Stefan shifted she slithered out of his embrace, putting a few feet between them as she made a business out of smoothing her dress.

“Do I look okay?” she asked as he watched her, for once completely fine with the blush that stained her cheeks. Let him think she was flustered—she was. As long as he didn’t think she was going to faint, she was safe.

“You do. But I took you rather precipitously from the room. Getting back might be a trick.”

She shook her head. “You go first. No one notices me the way they notice you, and if you’re in the room for a few minutes, me slipping back in won’t cause a stir. If the reverse happens, they’ll start thinking about it,” she said. “It’s never good when people start thinking.”

He scowled. “I don’t want to leave you alone in this room.”

“Okay, don’t—we’ll go back partway, then split up.”

A strange expression flickered over his face, but he nodded. He took her hand and led her back to the door, then smoothly moved out with her arm curled over his, as if they’d just returned from an evening stroll. There was no one in the corridor, but his steps were so sedate and measured, they served to slow down Nicki’s heart rate by the time they reached the first sparsely populated sitting room. He glanced down at her and she shrugged.

“You know, as long as I’m not wrecked, I don’t think anyone will notice if we walk in together.”

“You don’t look wrecked,” he said, his gaze roaming over her face, her hair. “Clearly, I’m losing my touch.”

“That’s the benefit of not wearing much makeup,” Nicki said with a wink. “I always look like me. Even if I’ve been out all night.”

He laughed and it lightened her mood further as they headed back to the party. She was right again, too: no one noticed them slip back in, precisely because it seemed like Stefan was moving in slow motion, as if by his own hand he could slow down the turning hands of time and preserve this moment.

They parted ways shortly after entering the room—him to mingle with the Turkish officials, her to meet and re-meet the remarkable number of the windsurfing community that knew or remembered her from past years.

It always surprised her, the sense of community that these athletes had. They were ferocious competitors but for the most part, they were the glue that made everything work in between the competitions. Josef had clearly made the rounds before her, because she had no fewer than three job offers before she’d returned to the food table.

With another glass of champagne to steady her fingers, she gazed out over the sparkling town of Alaçati and into the cold gray building at the top of the southern ridgeline. She wondered about the inhabitants of that building, if the stories were to be believed. Was there a lost prince out there under all that gray? And how would life change if they found him—either dead or alive?

Stefan watched Nicki mingle across the room as he made his own rounds. With everyone she met, she was bright, vivacious, engaged—and authentic, despite her almost relentless cheer. Was that due to the people who connected with her, all of them athletes or former athletes? Or would she be that way to everyone who approached her, from toddler to grandmother?

He frowned, shaking his head at the unexpected thought. Nicki Clark had so far done exactly what he needed her to do. She’d shown up and done the work, logging the video blogs, going where he told her to go, doing what he’d asked her to do. She’d not lost her nerve on the island—and she should have. She’d not balked at working long days doing articles purely for cover, not for pay—and she should have, given that she was a professional journalist. She’d endured his sarcasm and his judgment, and taken it as her due.

That last continued to bother him. There was something about Nicki that was almost fatalistic, as if she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. She was only twenty-three...too young to have come by that belief the usual way. She didn’t appear to be crushed by life’s experiences, but instead was someone who took them on full force, learning and adapting with each new challenge.

So why was she so hesitant? Timid wasn’t the right word—no one would ever accuse her of timidity. But there was almost an expectation that she would somehow do the wrong thing, say the wrong words, react the wrong way. It didn’t make sense.

At that moment, Nicki caught him staring at her across the room. Another woman would have acted coy, or as if she didn’t notice. Nicki merely grinned and raised her champagne flute, appearing for all the world like she was exactly who she was pretending to be: an adventure blogger thrilled to be rubbing elbows with the glitterati and her home crowd alike.

Only this
was
who Nicki could be, if she truly wanted to be. He wasn’t unaware of the attention she was receiving. He overheard or intuited the job offers. That Nicki responded to each with gracious, non-committal answers once again left him wondering why. She was here as cover, yes, but these offers were for the life she would lead after the need for cover was through. This little jaunt to Turkey was three inconsequential days out of her life. Would she follow up on those opportunities later then, if one truly caught her interest?

He shouldn’t care. He knew he shouldn’t care. Nicki Clark was not his mission here, Aristotle Andris was. And Nicki was doing everything she could to ease their way so they could find Ari sooner—whether it was the prince himself, or simply his remains. She was working hard, sacrificing. The least he could do was the same.

If only every time she glanced over at him, his resolve to treat her with polite indifference didn’t shatter into a million pieces.

That…was an issue.

By the time they left the party, Nicki glowed like an incandescent bulb, attracting a stream of admiring glances—none more so than from Omir. She knew it too.

“Is he still watching?” she asked with a sunny smile, her words unusually biting despite her carefree expression.

“I think he will stare a hole in the elevator door.”

“Then let’s take the stairs,” she said. “Anything to move us more quickly out of here is all right by me.”

The stairs didn’t take them down to the front of the lobby, however, but to the sitting room in the back—a sitting room that opened on to another wide veranda that led down to the water. They exited the hotel that way.

“Our hotel is on the waterfront. We might as well walk,” he said, and Nicki quickly nodded.

“It couldn’t be a more beautiful night.” Within minutes they were walking down the paved sidewalk to the waterside, Stefan with his jacket slung over his shoulder, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows. They looked like what they supposedly were—two visitors to the resort city with nothing on their mind but surf and sun and whatever the next day’s adventure would bring.

Except the next day’s adventure would probably bring challenges that would at a minimum darken the mood between them. The prince could be behind those walls at the asylum. He could be dead or injured, or damaged beyond recognition. It was unlikely that even if he was alive, he would be the same man who had taken off in that plane nearly a year ago. He might have survived the accident, but he would be irrevocably changed.

“So Omir is warming to the idea of a tour, aided in no small part by Josef’s glowing accounts of his student’s recon trip up there, despite the fact the kid was peeking over the walls.” Nicki said the words casually, gently easing Stefan out of his dark thoughts, as she always did. “He’s thinking about ten a.m. That to me is interesting. If the workers up there are truly scrubs from the asylum next door, I’d think that would be high work time for them.”

Stefan considered that. “It’s possible he doesn’t know the details of the work camp, not intimately,” he said. “He may know that work is getting completed, but not how, specifically.”

She blew out a breath. “Yeah, agreed. The more I think about it, the less realistic I think it would be that he’d be talking about the site at all if there was something hinky going on. Speed is fine. But using prisoners and drunks to build walls for a tourist destination seems like something
someone
would oppose, no matter what country you’re in.”

Without thinking, Stefan reached for her hand, smoothing over the action by helping her up onto a flight of stairs that led to their hotel. But he didn’t let go when he could have—when he should have, for anyone watching. He didn’t want to let go.

Nicki, being Nicki, rolled with it. “Josef has wrangled me into the expo tomorrow, you should know,” she said, keeping her words light. “It won’t be a big deal, a few runs demonstrating more advanced moves. The wind is always perfect here, and the water shallow, so if I wipe out I won’t ding myself up too much.”

Her phrasing struck him as odd, and then he remembered—she didn’t want to be a liability. He smiled, shaking his head.

“Nicki, you’ve done everything I’ve asked. If it strengthens your cover—and our purpose here—for you to show off your windsurfing skills, then that’s only to the good. You can’t derail the mission.”

Her hand stiffened a little in his grasp, and she pulled herself free, moving ahead to the railing of the hotel’s wide landing. She rapped on the sturdy wooden crossbar. “Don’t jinx us, when this is all going so well,” she said, offering him a lopsided grin.

He stared down at her for a moment, half-caught between light and shadows. He didn’t plan to kiss her, not in the open. It wasn’t part of his cover, or hers. It didn’t move the mission forward.

And he strangely didn’t give a damn about any of that.

She seemed to know it too, opening her mouth to warn him away and then her face was transfixed, her eyes blinking rapidly as he leaned down. He slid one arm around her, his hand finding her warm skin beneath the silky folds of her dress, and his body responded immediately to the intimate touch. When his lips met hers, the kiss galvanized him, sending all his nerves alight with need—the need to draw her closer, the need to touch every inch of her body, the need to make her his.

Nicki swayed in his grasp and pressed closer, her back arching so she could deepen the kiss, her arms up and around his shoulders cradling his head. She gave as good as she got, as with all things, straining toward him on her toes as if she could add another few inches to her already ridiculous shoes.

Stefan’s hands dropped, skimming her waist before curving to her backside. Without thinking, he dragged her against his groin until he could feel his shaft stiffen unbearably. Nicki gave a small, feminine moan and wriggled closer still.