Chapter Thirty-One
Eventually, we made it to a bed. Stumbling through the halls of the dark house, clutching our clothes like teenagers trying not to get caught. Hugh curved his body around mine and I fell asleep almost instantly, not waking again until the smell of coffee hit me the next morning.
“I love that you always know where the coffee is,” I murmured, still deliciously sore and spent from the night before.
Hugh, wearing only his jeans, which hung low in his hips, handed me a cup, and I sighed with pleasure. This was the real fantasy, I thought. Forget being a royal princess draped in couture and rare jewels. All I needed was my mostly naked man and a hot coffee.
“Do you?” he asked, as if he was amused by me.
“I love that you know a lot of things about me,” I said huskily as he sat on the edge of the bed next to me.
“I do,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “And a lot more today.”
Oh God. There it was. The fierce blush of the pale-skinned Driedish women. I felt my cheeks burn bright but tried to stay all sophisticated and worldly. I was a woman of twenty-nine, not a child of nineteen, but I couldn’t control the blood racing to my skin at the thought of all that I knew about him, too.
He reached out and stroked the back of my left hand, lying on the bed. “I also know that I can’t talk you out of what you’re trying to do.”
I looked at my still-supine body, naked under the blankets, yes, but not trying to actively seduce him at that moment. (#butfirstcoffee). “What am I trying to do?”
“Caroline.” He leveled me. Absolutely. With one even, hazel stare. “Because I know you.” He slid off the bed and picked up my handbag and set it on the foot of the bed. “You already told Christian you were coming here?”
I sighed. He really did know me so well.
“Can I get dressed first? I don’t want to talk to Christian without my clothes on.”
“Fair enough.” He chuckled. “I can’t say that I would enjoy that either.”
When I emerged from the bathroom, freshened up in a pair of jeans and a sweater, Hugh had also put his clothes back on, which was disappointing. Then I noticed my handbag was open and he was holding the Ukrainian’s phone. Wordlessly, he extended it to me.
I had never told him about it, and I didn’t know what to say now, especially after we’d taken things to the next level. Finally, I exhaled, determined to face the situation like a grown woman. “That’s—”
“The phone from the guy at the villa,” Hugh finished.
My shoulders dropped. “You knew?”
He came to me then, cupped my face and kissed me. “Cell batteries don’t last that long.”
My blush rose again. “I’m not sure I’m good at this.”
“You’re very good at keeping secrets.” He smiled. “And I’m very good at figuring yours out.”
My heart thumped hard against my ribs. I had a partner; we were a team. I understood what that was like, now, with this smart, patient asshole of a bodyguard.
I kissed him again. “Let’s do this.”
Hugh and I stared at the screen.
“He didn’t answer my last call,” I pointed out. “He might be indisposed or injured.”
“Don’t raise my hopes,” he muttered.
“He might be on his way to Australia,” I said.
Hugh’s head swiveled toward me. “Why would you say that?”
To be honest, it had popped in my head because of all the silly half-truths I had told Signore Rossi. But now I had to explain it to Hugh. “Because it’s very far. And he could blend right in,” I added, as I realized I might be on to something. “He’s Scottish; only his pasty skin would set him apart.”
Hugh regarded me with a new look in his eye. “Is that what you thought of? When you ran off to Italy? Where you might blend in?”
I had not expected a question about myself so I took a moment before answering, to give it a thought. “No. I chose a place I loved. Where I would feel…” I searched for a word. “Protected.”
“You felt protected in Italy?” Hugh’s question was tinged with disbelief but something more. Was he…hurt? By what I said?
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure I could explain it. “It’s the other end of Europe. And I didn’t feel like I would be exposed,” I continued. “Not if I put my head down and didn’t draw attention to myself.”
Hugh snorted.
“What is that for?” I demanded. “You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t believe for one moment that you, Caroline Laurent of Drieden, would ever not draw attention to yourself.”
My mouth dropped and I made a nose of indignation. “What are you saying? I’m a drama queen?”
Now he looked at me like I was crazy. “No,” he said. And when that didn’t allay my (admittedly low) outrage, he continued, “You’re not. You’re like…” He stopped, as if he couldn’t get the right words out. “You’re like. You’re so—”
Ching!
The email alert.
Our attention swooped to the computer screen.
New message.
I looked up at Hugh, who had jumped out of a chair and stood at attention just at my right hand. Ready for battle against a digital message, no doubt.
“This is good, right?” I asked. “He wants to be friends?”
Hugh’s lip curled.
“Well, obviously, I’m not going to invite him over for mani-pedis. But we can use this.”
Hugh didn’t look convinced at my positive outlook. “This is going to take forever,” he grumbled. “Playing games and kissing his ass to wheedle information out of him.”
“Your friends in the police community haven’t done any better than this,” I pointed out. “We’re going to do this my way.” Hugh was seriously underestimating my expertise in kissing ass. I had trained for this my whole life, learning the finer points of receiving and giving flattery.
I cracked my knuckles. Let’s do this.
I hit send and Hugh snorted.
“You think you could do better?”
“No,” he said with a perfectly straight face. “I know for a fact that you’re better at making jokes about Napoleon than I am.”
“At least you’re admitting I’m better at something.”
“Of course,” he scoffed. “You were born a royal princess, given four names and a polo pony for your first birthday.”
The thing was, he wasn’t joking. He looked like this was a serious argument for why I was better than him.
Which was as ridiculous as giving a baby a polo pony, but one thing gave me pause.
“Hugh. How did you know I have four names?”
“Because I do.”
“Do you know them?” Most Driedeners didn’t. Because why would they?
A slight hesitation. “Caroline Aurelia Marie Laurent.”
“You remembered that from the convent?” The speaker at the gate had spat out my names, I remembered. That must be why he knew them.
“No. I knew them from before.”
“From when you were my bodyguard.”
“Yes. It was in your file.”
“Ah.” Something still wasn’t right. “And you know Thea’s, then, from her file,” I said. “I guess, because she was oldest, they gave her the most ridiculously embarrassing family names.”
He cleared his throat but didn’t meet my eyes. “Surprised she didn’t get teased out of princess school with names like that.”
I tried very hard not to smile. Because once again, I had caught Hugh Konnor in a tiny white lie. One that completely revealed more than he wanted me to ever see.
Ching!
Saved by the bell. Hugh’s finger clicked before I could reach the keyboard.
It felt like I had dropped off a roller coaster. My stomach dipped. “We got him.” Wait. I looked at Hugh. “He thinks I’m alone because you drove. If he had a spy or something, they probably reported that it was Mother’s car and driver that left the hotel.”
I laughed gleefully. Yes! This was going to be so easy. And even Hugh had dropped his usual skeptical expression and allowed a bit of a hopeful gleam into his eyes. I knew he had different reasons for catching Christian, but he wanted to as much as me, if not more, so when he reached over and closed my laptop I didn’t understand.
“Hugh! All I have to do is toss the man a juicy bit of bait. We can reel him in anytime we want.”
“You seem to have forgotten that you are the bait.”
I rolled my eyes. “And you seem to have forgotten that you’re a badass royal guard.” I reached out and took his hand in mine. “You can end this. Today. Christian isn’t the one with power here. We are.”
He didn’t argue with me and my exceptional powers of (well-deserved, on this occasion) ass-kissing. His jaw tightened, and then he gave me one curt nod.
It was my cue. I flipped my screen open and considered exactly what type of net I should extend to catch this particular fish. A small one, meant for a trout in a stream? A large one that trawled the coast?
Hugh shook his head.
“It’s going to work,” I assured him. “I know him.”
“Then it will be the first time in history that one of the most wanted criminals was captured with a winky face.”
I caught it then: that glint that I loved—no, that I liked so much—was back. I suddenly had a hard time breathing. “We’re a good team,” I said, trying very hard to sound casual. Chill. Like I had no feelings about him, one way or another.
“A team?” He echoed my word, looking almost confused. “Sure. That sounds about right,” he said absently, before muttering something about checking the security cameras and leaving the room.
It wasn’t what I had wanted. I was a grown woman, a widow, for God’s sake, and I had no idea how to act around the hot bodyguard. Again.
We had made love last night. Or had sex. We had definitely slept together. But I had no idea how to act now.
Go.
The order came from deep inside. Always before, when I’d heard that simple word echoing through my skull, I’d obeyed by running off, doing something reckless. Marrying Stavros, for example. Leaving his funeral in a cloud of crêpe and black tulle. Deciding to hunt down Christian Fraser-Campbell for what…a newspaper story?
I saw now that it had never been about a career opportunity. Or protecting my secrets.
I was looking for more. I wanted peace and security, yes, but I also wanted sex and laughter and adventure.
A Sevine woman, through and through.
Maybe it was time to accept this side of me. Accept that this bloodline was my fate, even if Thea managed to undo a royal disinheritance. And where better to explore my Sevine genealogy than here? At the ancestral seat of Château de Dréuvar?
This room, for example. It was a beautiful drawing room, with walls painted a deep clover and set with inlaid gold panels. The windows were draped in an emerald-green satin, tied with gold rope the width of my forearm. It was a room that rivalled any chamber of the palace in the city in beauty and decadence, but somehow, it still felt like a family could live here.
A baby named Claude came to mind. Him and his cute toes and sweet, round belly.
What else did I know of the Sevines? My mother grew up here, I knew, but we never visited, even when her parents still lived here, before her father retired to their city townhouse (which officially qualified as downsizing but still took up a city block) and Grandmama to her Swiss convent. My siblings and I were heirs to the throne. Our world rotated around the palace and the grandmother that wore the Jaipur sapphire on her head.
Maybe…Maybe this was the place where I could finally be who I was.
With him.
I started walking through the room, touching and lifting little pieces here and there, as if the Sevine family DNA could be amplified through transfusion.
When this was all done, when Christian was caught and I was back on my own again, maybe I’d even return to Grandmama’s Swiss mountain convent, settle down in her library and let her teach me the ways of the better half of my family tree and that whole Vox Umbra situation. Maybe it was my Sevine blood running a little faster now, but I could see how alluring a secret organization guaranteeing the stability of the continent could be.
I heard a distant ring of a doorbell.
My stomach flipped. It was time. This was happening. Soon enough, I’d be able to start directing my own life again. Go wherever I wanted to go. Be whoever I wanted to be. With whoever I wanted.