Page 42 of Captured

Her laugh was wry. “I’ve learned that your country is bigger than I would have given it credit for,” she said with a smile. “And certainly more interesting. But no.” Her gaze shifted upward, toward the stars. “We were only supposed to spend a few days here, then all of us would have done the full tour—Cannes for a day or so, then Tuscany, Paris, and London. Maybe Amsterdam,if we had time. I didn’t have it all planned out. Sometimes it’s better not to do that. You can get better deals at the last minute—as long as you have enough money to getsomething, no matter what.”

“You paid for all of it.” It wasn’t a question, and Lauren didn’t take offense.

“Most of it,” she said, her eyes on the night sky. “I wanted to take the vacation as well. I can’t travel with a man, and I don’t enjoy traveling alone.”

Now, they were getting somewhere, but Dimitri resisted the urge to dig deeper. “Yet here you are, traveling with a man to an exotic island. It appears you have broken your own rules, princess.”

She looked at him sternly. “It’s true. Why couldn’t the royal family have assigned a woman to guard me?”

“You’re too tall,” Dimitri dismissed the idea. “For you to be guarded effectively, it was important for you to be properly swept off your feet.”

She lifted a haughty eyebrow. “And that’s what you’ve done?”

He leaned closer to her, so close that when he spoke, his lips moved against hers. “I haven’t yet begun that portion of my assignment, princess. Perhaps tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Her voice sounded fluttery to his ears. “What about tonight?”

“Tonight, it seems that you are already on your back. So I must make do with what circumstances have brought me.” He bent down and pressed his lips to hers, and just that quickly, the desire for her body beneath his surged forth. The waves crashed and thundered, far out to sea, and the breeze stilled around them, holding its breath. Zephyrus always was a romantic.

For her part, Lauren reached up and entangled her fingers in his hair, pulling him toward her, pinning him to her body, shifting him until his knees dropped between hers and she liftedher legs with the strength of a dancer to lock them behind his back, holding him in place. The movement pointed up one of the many advantages of her attire, as their bodies naturally met at the center, his shaft straining against the placket of his boxers as her wet heat beckoned to him.

He stared down at her, and she cracked another smile, at once exasperated and oddly touched. “Dimitri, if you ask me one more time if it’s okay for you to make love to me, I’ll smack you. I hereby give you ultimate permission to pound the living daylights out of me at any appropriate moment that we’re together from now until the end of time. Does that clear things up for you?”

Laughter spilled through him. “Your future husband may object to that. So might the church, were you to become a nun.”

“Then I’ll have to find a way to make them understand.” Lauren reached for him, bringing him close. “Now please, I beg of you. Use that condom by your side and fill me up until I don’t have to think about anything at all except you and your body and how good you feel. You think you could do that for me?”

He shuddered as he reached for the foil package. “I think I can do that for you.”

This time, they came together not with the curiosity of discovery, but as two people who needed each other at a level beyond words. Not to heal or provide comfort, but simply as a point of connection that transcended the moment. Dimitri sank into Lauren with a sigh. Her breath mingled with his, everything clicking together like puzzle pieces pulled from a hopeless jumble. They kissed, explored, laughed and poured themselves into each other as the ocean danced behind him and the stars dipped a little lower, adding their quicksilver magic to the moment. The song of the sea nymphs came later, drifting across the water as Lauren finally dozed, and Zephyrus stirred the breeze again, murmuring his whispered approval.

It was good, Dimitri thought, it was right. It was more joy than he had ever felt in his long life, and he gave thanks for this moment to every god who’d made it possible as he and Lauren lay beneath the stars, their arms wrapped around each other long into the night.

Twenty-Seven

The promontory of Miranos was more impressive than Lauren expected it would be. Because the ridge line had obscured the view from Dimitri’s villa, she’d prepared herself for a shallow half-moon of water, broken by reefs beneath the shimmering blue-green Aegean, the place almost desolate in its beauty.

Since Dimitri had spoken so much about the ocean trash that he’d seen washed up there, she also expected it to be somewhat littered with driftwood and debris, or maybe a twisted airplane propeller or the shattered bow of some long-ago ship.

Not so.

The promontory looked more like a quaint little port, with boats lined up along one side of the long narrow strip of rock that stretched out into the ocean, and a network of tiny floating ramps connecting the various slips. There were a few small buildings there as well, to process the fish and carry it by truck to the main commercial port of Miranos, and also a seaside bar that she suspected only managed to stay in business because it doubled as the owner’s home.

It was the bar where she and Dimitri started, and the moment she stepped inside, she understood why. The wallswere covered with items pulled from the sea—from large strips of metal to exotic scraps of what might have been considered buried treasure anywhere else but the middle of the Aegean Sea, where such finds were commonplace: plateware too degraded to fix a date on, broken cutlery, shattered lamps, bent and broken decking—even an anchor, which Dimitri explained had been raised with much excitement until it’d been verified as less than two hundred years old. When you lived in the waters of the ancients, an anchor two centuries old barely counted as driftwood.

She could see Dimitri’s section straight off. A small and unassuming stretch of wall space, its pieces carefully lined the shelves, and a small crown had been carved into the corner shelving, now slightly worn away.

Dimitri touched his hand to that crown now, the action so unconscious that Lauren suspected that he was the one who’d worn the design down over this past year. Could this man truly be a demigod, whatever that meant? He seemed so...human.

“It doesn’t look like much,” he said, with a grim, self-deprecating smile. “Certainly not enough to justify a year’s worth of searching.”

“But you launched quite a big campaign when Ari was first lost, didn’t you?” Lauren drifted from relic to relic. Most of it was scrap metal with some additional markings that Dimitri had identified as part of the plane, later verified by Crown experts. “I would imagine Queen Catherine moved heaven and earth to find her son.”

“She did, but the first pieces were found all the way over in Thassos. This —and these,” he said, indicating fairly intact bits of wreckage. The largest piece was an eight-inch section of a door panel, which appeared to have been sheared off from the plane.

She frowned as she examined them. “I can’t believe they let you keep these pieces here. They should be in a museum on the mainland, shouldn’t they? Or at least under study somewhere.”

“They were under study for several months, but the idea of putting them in a museum was rejected by the royal family. Despite accepting the public’s need to grieve, they didn’t want to create a memorial to Ari’s final hours that surpassed what he was as a person in real life. They didn’t want him to be remembered only as bits of twisted metal.”

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