His hair-roughened thigh rasped against hers. His breathing went fast and harsh. And his hand—his busy, diabolical hand—found her center. She was hot and wet and eager when he slid a finger in. Two. All the while his thumb played over the tight bud at her center and his teeth brought her nipples to taut, aching peaks. As the sensations piled one on top of the other, she arched under him.
“Dom! Dom, I… Ooooooh!”
The cry ripped from deep in her throat. She tried to hold back but the sensations spiraling up from her belly built to a wild, whirling vortex. Shuddering, she rode them to the last, gasping breath.
Minutes, maybe hours later, she pried up eyelids that felt as heavy as lead. Dom had propped his weight on one elbow and was watching her intently. He must be thinking of Dr. Kovacs’s hypothesis, she realized. Worrying that some repressed trauma in her past might make her wig out.
“That,” she assured him on a ragged sigh, “was wonderful.”
His face relaxed into a smile. “Good to hear, but we’re not done yet.”
Still boneless with pleasure, she stretched like a cat as he rolled to the side of the bed and groped among the clothes they’d left in a pile on the floor. Somehow she wasn’t surprised when he turned back with several foil-wrapped condoms. By the time he’d placed them close at hand on the table beside the bed, she was ready for round two.
“My turn,” she murmured, pushing up on an elbow to explore his body with the same attention to detail he’d explored hers.
God, he was beautiful! That wasn’t an adjective usually applied to males but Natalie couldn’t think of any other to categorize the long, lean torso, the roped muscle at shoulder and thigh, the flat belly and nest of thick, dark hair at his groin. His sex was flaccid but came to instant, eager attention when she stroked a finger along its length.
But it was the scar that caught and held her attention. Healed but still angry in the dim glow of the moon, it cut diagonally along his ribs. Frowning, she traced the tip of her finger along the vicious path.
“What’s this?”
“A reminder not to trust a rookie to adequately pat down a seasoned veteran of the Cosa Nostra.”
She spotted another scar higher on his chest, this one a tight, round pucker of flesh.
“And this?”
“A parting gift from an Albanian boat captain after Interpol intercepted the cargo of girls he was transporting to Algeria.”
He said it with a careless shrug, as if knife wounds and kidnappings were routine occurrences in the career of a secret agent. Which they probably were, Natalie thought with a swallow. Suddenly the whole James Bond thing didn’t seem quite so romantic.
“Your employer’s brother-in-law took part in that op,” Dom was saying. “Gina’s husband, Jack Harris.”
“He’s undercover, too?”
“No, he’s a career diplomat. He was part of a UN investigation into child prostitution at the time.”
“Have I met him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hmm.”
It was hard to work up an interest in her employer’s brother-in-law while she was stretched out hip-to-naked-hip with Dominic St. Sebastian. Aching for the insults done to his body, she kissed the puckered scar on his shoulder.
One kiss led to another, then another, as she traced a path down his chest. When she laved her tongue along the scar bisecting his stomach, his belly hollowed and his sex sprang to attention again. Natalie drew a nail lightly along its length and would have explored the smooth satin further but Dom inhaled sharply and jerked away from her touch.
“Sorry! I want you too much.”
She started to tell him there was no need for apologies, but he was already reaching for one of the condoms he’d left so conveniently close at hand. Heat coiled low in her belly and then, when he turned back to her, raced through her in quick, electric jolts. On fire for him, she took his weight and welcomed him eagerly into her body.
There was no slow climb to pleasure this time. No delicious heightening of the senses. He drove into her, and all too soon Natalie felt another climax rushing at her. She tried desperately to contain it, then sobbed with relief and sheer, undiluted pleasure when he pushed both her and himself over the edge.
* * *
She sprawled in naked abandon while the world slowly stopped spinning. Dom lay next to her, his eyes closed and one arm bent under his head. As she stared at his profile in the dim light of the moon, a dozen different emotions bounced between her heart and her head.
She acknowledged the satisfaction, the worry, the delight and just the tiniest frisson of fear. She hardly knew this man, yet she felt so close to him. Too close. How could she tell how much of that was real or the by-product of being too emotionally dependent on him?
As if to underscore her doubts, she glanced over his shoulder at the open window. Silhouetted against a midnight-blue sky were the ruins that had brought her to Hungary and to Dom.
Somehow.
The need to find the missing pieces of the puzzle put a serious dent in the sensual satisfaction of just lazing next to him. She bit her lip and shifted her attention to the desk tucked in the alcove under the eaves. Her briefcase lay atop the desk, right where she’d placed it. Anticipation tap-danced along her nerves at the thought of attacking those fat files and getting into her laptop.
Dom picked up on her quiver of impatience and opened his eyes. “Are you cold?”
“A little,” she admitted but stopped him before he could drag up the down-filled featherbed tangled at their feet. “It’s early yet. I’d like to go through my briefcase before we call it a night.”
Amusement colored his voice. “Do you think we’re done for the night?”
“Aren’t we?”
“Ah, Natushka, we’ve barely begun. But we’ll take a break while you look through your files.” He rolled out of bed with the controlled grace of a panther and pulled on his clothes. “I’ll go down and get us some coffee, yes?”
“Coffee would be good.”
While he was gone she made a quick trip to the bathroom, then dug into her suitcase. She scrambled into clean panties but didn’t bother with a bra. Or with either of the starched blouses folded atop a beige linen jumper that had all the grace and style of a burlap sack. Frowning, she checked the tag and saw the jumper was two sizes larger than the clothes she’d bought in Budapest.
Was Dom right? Had she deliberately tried to disguise her real self in these awful clothes? Was there something in her past that made her wary of showing her true colors? If so, she might find a clue to whatever it was in the briefcase. Impatient to get to it, she stuffed the jumper back in the case and slipped on the soccer shirt she’d appropriated from Dom to use as a sleep shirt. It hung below her hips but felt soft and smooth against her thighs.
She lifted the files out of her briefcase and arranged them in neat stacks. She was flipping through one page by page when Dom returned with two mugs of foaming latte.
“Finding anything interesting?” he asked as he set a mug at her elbow.
“Tons of stuff! So far it all relates to missing works of art, like that Fabergé egg and a small Bernini bronze stolen from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I haven’t found information on the Canaletto painting yet. It’s got to be in one of these files, though.”
He nodded to the still-closed laptop. “You probably cross-indexed the paper files on your computer. Why don’t you check it?”
“I tried.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “The laptop’s password-protected.”
“And you can’t remember the password.”
“I tried a dozen different combinations, but none worked.”
“Do you want me to get into it?”
“How can you…? Oh. Another useful skill you picked up at Interpol, right?”
He merely smiled. “Do you have a USB cord in your briefcase? Good. Let me have it.”
He deposited the latte on the table beside the easy chair and settled in wit
h the computer on his lap. It booted up to a smiley face and eight blinking question marks in the password box. Dom plugged one end of the USB cord into the laptop, the other into his cell phone. He tapped a series of numbers on the phone’s keypad and waited to connect via a secure remote link to a special program developed by Interpol’s Computer Crimes Division for use by agents in the field. The handy-dandy program whizzed through hundreds of thousands of letter/number/character combinations at the speed of light.
Scant minutes later, the password popped up letter by letter. Dom made a note of it and hit Return. The smiley face on Natalie’s laptop dissolved and the home screen came up. The icons were arranged with military precision, he saw with an inner smile. God forbid his fussy archivist should keep a messy electronic filing cabinet. He was about to tell Natalie that he was in when a message painted across the screen.
D—I see you’re online. Don’t know whose computer you’re using. Contact me. I have some info for you. A.
About time! Dom erased the message and de-linked before passing the laptop to Natalie. “You’re good to go.”
She took it eagerly and wedged it onto the desk between the stacks of paper files. Fingers flying, she conducted a quick search.
“Here’s the Canaletto folder!”
A click of the mouse opened the main file. When dozens of subfolders rippled down the screen, Natalie groaned.
“It’ll take all night to go through these.”
“You don’t have all night,” Dom warned, dropping a kiss on her nape. “Just till I get back.”
“Where are you going?”
“I need to let Katya and her father know we won’t be home tonight. I’ll get a stronger signal outside.”
It wasn’t a complete lie. He did need to call his downstairs neighbors. That bit about the stronger signal shaded the truth, but the habit of communicating privately with his contacts at headquarters went too deep to compromise.
He slipped on a jacket and went downstairs. The bar was still open. Lisel waved, inviting him in for another coffee or a beer, but he shook his head and held up his phone to signal his reason for going outside.
He’d forgotten how sharp and clean and cold the nights could be here in the foothills of the Alps. And how bright the stars were without a haze of smog and city lights to blur them. Hiking up the collar of his jacket, he contacted Andre.
“What have you got for me?”
“Some interesting information about your Natalie Elizabeth Clark.”
Dom’s stomach tightened. “Interesting” to Andre could mean anything from an unpaid speeding ticket to enrollment in a witness protection program.
“It took a while, but the facial recognition program finally matched to a mug shot.”
Hell! His gut had told him Natalie was hiding her real self. He almost didn’t want to hear the reason behind the disguise now but forced himself to ask.
“What were the charges?”
“Fraud and related activities in connection with computers.”
“When?” he bit out.
“Three years ago. But it looks like the charges were dropped and the arrest record expunged. Someone missed the mug shot, though, when they wiped the slate.”
Dom wanted to be fair. The fact that the charges had been dropped could mean the arrest was a mistake, that Natalie hadn’t done whatever the authorities thought she had. Unfortunately, he’d seen too many sleazy, high-priced lawyers spring their clients on technicalities.
“Do you want me to contact the feds in the US?” Andre asked. “See what they’ve got on this?”
Dom hesitated, his gaze going to the brightly illuminated window on the second floor of the gasthaus. Had he just made love to a hacker? Had she tracked him down, devised a ploy to show up at his loft dripping wet and helpless? Was this whole amnesia scene part of some elaborate sting?
Every one of his instincts screamed no. She couldn’t have faked the panic and confusion he’d glimpsed in her eyes. Or woven a web of lies and deceit, then flamed in his arms the way she had. The question now was whether he could trust his instincts.
“Dom? What do you want me to do?”
He went with his gut. “Hang loose, Andre. If I need more, I’ll get back to you.”
He disconnected, hoping to hell he wasn’t thinking with the wrong head, and made a quick call to his downstairs neighbors.
Ten
Natalie was still hard at it when Dom went back upstairs. Her operation had spread from the desk to the armchair and the bed, which was now neatly remade. With pillows fluffed and the corners of the counterpane squared, he noted wryly. He also couldn’t help noticing how her fingers flew over the laptop’s keyboard.
“How’s it coming?” he asked.
“So-so. The good news is I’m now remembering many of these details. The bad news is that I went through the Canaletto folder page by page. I also searched its corresponding computer file. I didn’t find an entry that would explain why I drove down from Vienna, nor any reference to Gyür or Budapest. Nothing to tell me why I hopped on a riverboat and ended up in the Danube.” Sighing, she flapped a hand at the stacks now spread throughout the room. “I hope I find something in one of those.”
Dom eyed the neat array of files. “How have you separated them?”
“The ones on the chair contain paper copies of documents and reports of lost art from roughly the same period as the Canaletto. The ones on the bed detail the last known locations of various missing pieces from other periods.”
“Sorted alphabetically by continent and country, I see.”
She looked slightly offended. “Of course. I thought I might have stumbled across something in reports from a gallery or museum or private collection that gained a new acquisition at approximately the same time the Canaletto disappeared from Karlenburgh Castle.”
“What about information unrelated to missing art treasures? Any personal data in the files or on the computer that triggered memories?”
“Plenty,” she said with a small sigh. “Apparently I’m as anal about my personal life as I am about professional matters. I’ve got everything on spreadsheets. The service record for my car. The books I’ve read and want to read. Checking and savings accounts. A household inventory with purchase dates, cost, serial numbers where appropriate. Restaurants I’ve tried, sorted by type of food and my rating. In short,” she finished glumly, “my entire existence. Precise, well-organized and soulless.”
She looked so frustrated, so dejected and lost, that Dom had to fight the urge to take her in his arms. He’d get into the computer later, when she was asleep, and check out the household inventory and bank accounts. Right now he was more interested in her responses to his careful probing.
“How about your email? Find anything there?”
“Other than some innocuous correspondence from people I’ve tagged in my address book as ‘acquaintances,’ everything relates to work.” Her shoulders slumped. “Is my life pathetic, or what?”
If she was acting, she was the best he’d ever seen. To hell with fighting the urge. She needed comforting. Clearing the armchair, he caught her hand and tugged her into his lap.
“There’s more to you than spreadsheets and color-coded files, Ms. Clark.”
With another sigh, she laid her head on his shoulder. “You’d think so.”
“There are all your little quirks,” he said with a smile, stroking her hair. “The lip thing, the fussiness, the questionable fashion sense.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Then there’s your rapport with the Agár.”
“Ha! I suspect he bonds instantly with everyone.”
“And there’s tonight,” he reminded her. “You, me, this gasthaus.”
She tipped her head back to search his face. He supported her head, careful of the still-tender spot at the base of her skull.
“About tonight… You, me, this place…”
“Don’t look so worried. We don’t have to analyze or dissect what ha
ppened here.”
“I’m thinking more along the lines of what happens after we leave. Next week. Next month.”
“We let them take care of themselves.”
As soon as he said it, he knew it was a lie. Despite the mystery surrounding this woman—or maybe because of it—he had no intention of letting her drop out of his life the same way she’d dropped into it. She was under his skin now.
That last thought made him stop. Rewind. Take a breath. Think about the other women he’d been with. The hard, inescapable fact was that none of them had ever stirred this particular mix of lust, tenderness, worry, suspicion and fierce protectiveness.
He might have to change his tactics if and when Natalie’s memory fully returned, Dom acknowledged. At the moment she considered him an anchor in a sea of uncertainty. He couldn’t add to that uncertainty by demanding more than she was ready to give.
“For now,” he said with a lazy smile, “this is good, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.”
She leaned in, brought her mouth to his, gave him a promise of things to come. He was ready to take her up on that promise when she made a brisk announcement.
“Okay, I’m done wallowing in self-pity. Time to get back to work.”
“What do you want me to do?”
She glanced at the files on the bed and caught her lower lip between her teeth. Dom waited, remembering how antsy she’d been about letting him see her research when he’d shown up unannounced at her New York hotel room. He’d chalked that up to a proprietary desire to protect her work. With Andre’s call still fresh in his mind, he couldn’t help wondering if there was something else in those fat folders she wanted to protect.
“I guess you could start on those,” she said with obvious reluctance. “There’s an index and a chronology inside each file. The sections are tabbed, the documents in each section numbered. That’s how I cross-reference the contents on the computer. So keep everything in order, okay?”
Dom’s little bubble of suspicion popped. The woman wasn’t nervous about him digging into her private files, just worried that he’d mess them up. Grinning, he pushed out of the chair with her still in his arms and deposited her back at the desk.
Her Unforgettable Royal Lover Page 11