Chapter Twelve

But no. It couldn’t be that simple.

Konnor pushed up from his chair in one single bound.

“Don’t throw my computer!” I cried.

He looked quizzically at the tablet he still held in his hand and then back at me. “Why would you think I would throw your computer?”

“Because I punched you…? Because, in the past few days, you keep trying to make my life more difficult than it should be? Because you enjoy being a pompous prick and we do this tit-for-tat thing—”

Konnor interrupted me. “Okay, fine, you think I’m a jerk.”

I finally felt heard. “Yes, I do.”

“I was going to keep it with me, though.”

“And there you go, proving my point.” Because he got his kicks from controlling me.

“If something else comes in from Christian tonight, I’ll need to know about it immediately.” He paused and then mumbled, with a touch of shyness, “And I thought you’d want to get some sleep.”

“Oh.” Maybe Konnor wasn’t the heartless asshole that he always was around me. Maybe he actually cared a little bit.

“Because you look like you need the rest. You look like hell.”

Strike that change of opinion. Konnor was still totally the same asshole he’d always been. Because nice, kind men don’t tell women they look like hell.

“I don’t need to sleep,” I snapped. It was a huge lie. I’d been fantasizing about that plush canopied bed the entire trip from Florence. “I want to know what you think about my idea.”

He lifted his broad shoulders. “It has merit.”

Ah. Faint praise, indeed. “Merit?” I echoed. “It’s brilliant. Christian says he wants to meet me, I show up, we talk and then I convince him to go back to Drieden to go to couples therapy with my sister…” I trailed off, because the most unlikely thing was happening.

Hugh Konnor was chuckling. At what I had said.

“Did I say something funny?”

“Well…” he hedged. “The idea of Princess Theodora going to therapy with that man is…” He shook his head. “She’d sooner shoot him.”

Okay, now he was the one who sounded like a lunatic. My sister would one day be Queen of Drieden. She was civilized and proper. There was no violent bone in her body. “Fine. Whatever.” I dismissed his distracting mirth with the palm of my hand. “The point is that setting up a meeting with Christian is the quickest way for all of us to get back to our normal lives.”

Konnor’s smile faded now, and he regarded me with very serious bodyguard eyes.

“You have to agree with me,” I said. “Clearly, my plan is the best plan.”

“One, I have sworn an oath to protect the members of the royal family with my life. Two, using a princess as bait to catch a volatile, vicious criminal would, almost always, violate that oath, and three.” Konnor held up three fingers for emphasis. Then he put them back down again and, with a short nod of his head, signaled that he was through with the conversation. He gestured toward the door. “I’ll see you to your room.”

On the walk to my bedroom, it killed me not knowing whether his third point was seeing me to my room or something else entirely. The man was so frustrating. He always had been, really. And I wasn’t going to ask him to clarify what he had been talking about. Which was also something that I had always done. Or not done.

When we arrived at my bedroom door, I turned to say one more thing to him and pulled up short. I had not realized he was so close. Here in this shadowy hallway, surrounded by centuries of antiques and art, Hugh Konnor seemed more alive by comparison. He was vital, muscular yet agile, and so very, very large.

My breath caught. I hated that it did so. Cursed whatever pheromone or esoteric science it was that made my body react to him like this. Ten years may have passed since I had made my virginal passes at him, but clearly my hormones had not outgrown a burly, cranky bodyguard who always looked at me as if he saw right through me.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I asked softly. His brows drew together at my sudden non sequitur.

“What problem?”

“You know what I’m trying to do, with this plan to meet Christian.”

His eyes reminded me of a topaz pendant my mother had passed down to me. Rich, golden. Alive. And right now, they were nearly hypnotizing me. “I don’t want you running off again.”

Curse the blasted warm feelings that immediately curled through my torso. “Why?” I had to ask.

He swallowed. “Because you make it very hard for the security staff to do their duty.”

I shouldn’t have asked why. I don’t know what I expected from him. “We’re talking about this in the morning,” I said, trying to sound like I was the one in charge.

But when I shut the bedroom door behind me I knew. Even as a princess, when it came to Hugh Konnor, I was never in charge of anything, least of all my involuntary emotional reactions.

The smell of coffee pulled me from my slumber the next morning. Even though I was still thoroughly irritated by Hugh Konnor not leaving me alone, there were benefits to traveling with someone who always seemed to know where the coffee pot was.

After visiting the same lovely Italian espresso machine that Hugh had put to work this morning, I found him in the living room, where the remnants of his overnight stay on the couch contrasted with the elegant decor. Although the apartment was a luxurious and extremely expensive piece of real estate, it wasn’t overly large. From this location, Konnor would have immediately heard me leaving the apartment during the night, should I have been brave—or stubborn—enough to try to escape Konnor’s clutches again.

“Good morning,” I said, as a way of announcing my entrance into the salon.

Konnor was studying a pad of paper he’d dug up from somewhere. He looked up distractedly. “Oh, right. You’re up.”

He really had a way of making a girl feel treasured and important.

“Yes, I’m up. And I’m ready.”

“For what?”

“To pick up the pieces of my life again. So if you’ll just let me write Christian a quick email, then we can get started with my plan to convince him to turn himself in.”

But he didn’t immediately hand over my tablet. And he barely acknowledged my presence, let alone that I’d suggested that we take prompt, concrete action.

“Konnor?” I fought the impulse to go over and wave my hand in front of his eyes. Maybe he’d lost his vision and his hearing overnight. Poor thing. Maybe I wasn’t being ignored, he just couldn’t hear or see me.

Yes, I made a lot of excuses for people. It was a problem, I know.

He glanced back and forth between two pieces of paper. “No,” he suddenly said, in that decisive, authoritative way that bodyguards had. “We won’t be contacting Christian just yet.”

“Yet?” I echoed that one, key word. “What are you waiting for? Let’s do this!”

Now I had his full, alert attention. “Do you know what he wants to speak with you about?”

“No, but I’ll ask when I email him back.” I tried to sound breezy and confident about it. Oh yes, it was so straightforward. What do I have to lie about? Not pretty little, innocent Caroline.

Hugh stood, and stretched out his neck as he did so. The movement did nice things to his arms and shoulders, too, not that I was noticing or anything. “Do you know why he came to Varenna to find you?” Now he rolled his shoulders. Like a man who had been stuck on a couch all night long. Poor thing. “Or, for that matter, how he found you?”

“No…” I said carefully. “But again, these are all things I can ask when I have a conversation with the man.” I emphasized the word. Conversation. Simple. Safe. Benign, really.

Konnor shook his head. “There are too many unknowns. I don’t like unknowns.”

I tried not to let my frustration show. “You don’t like me either, but you’re putting up with me because it’s your job.” He furrowed his brow and opened his mouth as if he was going to protest. “Don’t. I get it, okay? The point I’m trying to make is that sometimes we don’t like something but we suck it up and get it done.” I held out my hand, intending for him to place the tablet into my fingers so that I could do the thing that needed to be done.

But no. Because why would Konnor do anything that I wanted him to do? Instead, he handed over one of the pieces of paper he’d been glaring at when I’d walked in.

It was a drawing of the symbol that was tattooed on Christian’s chest. He’d copied the one I’d inked on his palm the day before.

A horizontal diamond with rays extending from the top. I flipped it around. Now the rays were extending from the bottom.

Konnor frowned at the flip. “It goes that way?”

I held it up to my chest, over my right breast, to demonstrate. “On Christian, yes.”

“Does it matter?” Konnor asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Depends on what it is, I guess.”

He eyed the paper, which I was still holding with a very serious frown. Most men don’t stare at my right breast with that vague disapproving look. It was discomfiting that Hugh Konnor was doing it, but, I supposed, par for the course with him. Finally, he nodded. “Yes, it matters.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know the man. He’s not a tattoo guy,” Konnor explained with a decided disdain in his voice. “He likes custom-made suits and, back in Drieden, he had someone iron his boxer shorts.”

“People change,” I said, thinking of my life and all the fashion stages I had gone through.

“Sure. One day we’re buttoned-up dukes with law degrees, the next we’re homicidal rebels without a cause.” Konnor lifted a wry brow. “People are who they are. We don’t change. And someone like Christian Fraser-Campbell doesn’t get a tattoo that no one can interpret and that no one can see while he’s running from Interpol.” He gestured toward the paper I had now lowered from my breast. “So what the hell is that and what does it mean?”

I looked at the symbol for a moment and then back at Konnor’s pushed-up sleeves and the tattoos that were visible on his corded forearms. “What do yours mean?”

He twisted his arms and flexed so he could examine his ink. I was sure he wasn’t doing it for my benefit, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the view. “This one’s Latin,” he said, shaking his left arm a little. “And this one’s just numbers,” he muttered about his other arm.

“And presumably they mean something to you as well,” I observed, ignoring the little flutter in my stomach while I gazed at Konnor’s tattoos. It was strangely intimate. When he was on the official job back in Drieden, he was always properly dressed. Cuffs buttoned, jacket on. But here in Italy, he was fitted for comfort and stealth. I kept talking to distract myself from checking out the rest of Konnor’s muscular body—and wondering what else he hid underneath his nearly skin-tight thermal shirt. “I mean, what are tattoos? They’re usually a symbol of something meaningful to a person. A name, a flower…”

Konnor wrinkled his nose at the drawing. “That’s a horrible flower.”

“Or it’s a symbol of some kind.”

“It could be anything. How could we ever know?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a painting over the fireplace that I’d looked at fifty, a hundred times. The Roman—or was she Greek?—goddess Persephone holding a pomegranate as a peace offering to a wolf, while frightened soldiers stood behind her. The painting was by Giulpione, from the sixteenth century. An example of Renaissance art.

Of course. “As a matter of fact, I know someone who could possibly help us.”