Royal Captive by Dana Marton Page A

folded under his head.
    He could still taste her on his lips.
    He had a couple of hours left until dawn, but sleep didn’t come easily. It didn’t come at all, in fact. So he got up at five, washed and called for a car and armed escort, then left for Porto Paphos without breakfast. He would wait for his brothers on the ship. It would take hours before he had the whole thing searched anyway. Beyond recovering the royal treasure, he also wanted to find some clues as to who was behind the heist. He wanted the man who’d ordered it.
    He called the estate just as his car rolled into the harbor. Port Authority was already there, waiting for him. He could make out the Turkish ship by one of the loading docks.
    On the phone, he talked to the guard in front of Lauryn’s room, asking him to check on her. He could hear knocking. Knocking again. “Miss Steler?”
    He heard the key being turned in the lock and the door opening. Then silence for a moment.
    “I’m sorry, Your Highness. She doesn’t seem to be here. I can’t find her,” came the worried, embarrassed reply from the other end.
    Pretty much what he had expected.

Chapter Seven
    He hated to be right about her. Right in some ways, in any case. Wrong in others. She’d turned out to be an exceptional woman, possessing a lot more than the criminal brilliance he’d first attributed to her. For a second, as he walked across the shipyard, Istvan imagined what it would be like to work with her on a dig, deciphering ancient messages carved in stone. Her mind would be flying a mile a minute, that rapture of discovery on her face…
    To work with her like that would be nothing short of exhilarating, he thought, and felt guilty. He’d used to do fieldwork with Amalia and he’d never once thought of her in those terms. He appreciated the warm companion ship Amalia had provided, but his head had never been as full of her as it was with Lauryn. Even now, steps from reclaiming Valtria’s royal treasures, she was the only thing he could think of, the way she’d come to his room in the middle of the night, the way her face lit up at the sight of the Maltmore diary.
    The things that could have happened between them under different circumstances…
    He could still feel her lithe body under his, taste her mouth, hear her laugh, hear her repeat some lines of the text. “The wealth of the nation is on the head of the ruler,” she’d said.
    His mind ground to a screeching halt, as did his feet. His guards nearly ran into him because they’d been following so closely, but he paid little attention to the puzzled looks they gave him.
    On the head of the ruler.
    He’d corrected her last night, but now as he heard her say the words in his head again, he got stuck on that small difference. On, as opposed to in. What if she’d been right the first time around? What if the Royal Brotherhood left clues to their treasure right on the royal crown?
    What better place to hide that message? The crown was always well-protected. No one but the royal family had access. Until now.
    At the moment, the royal crown was on the ship ahead of him. He broke out running, everyone following behind.
    “The crew?” he asked the Port Authority official who came to greet him. Suddenly he felt as if he didn’t have a second to waste.
    “Held in the canteen on the ship, under armed guard, Your Highness.”
    He strode across the plank onto the ship, then straight to the containers in the general area where he believed the one they were looking for was located. “You and you—” He pointed at two of the guards behind him.
    “Climb this stack, get as high as you can. We’re looking for a container that has one of its top corners peeled back.” The small explosion Lauryn had created to get them out of there also marked the container, making his job easier now.
    They couldn’t just look for a door with two bullet holes in it. Most of the containers were crammed too closely together to squeeze in and check