Her Unforgettable Royal Lover

“The best guess is she fell off a bridge or a cruise boat. They fished her out of the river early this morning.”

“Is she…? Is she dead?”

“No, but she’s got a good-size lump at the base of her skull and she doesn’t remember anything. Not even her name.”

“Good Lord!” The sheets rustled again. “Natalie’s been hurt, Dev. Would you contact your crew and have them prep the Gulfstream? I need to fly back to Paris right away.”

“She’s not in Paris,” Dom interjected. “She’s with me, in Budapest.”

“In Budapest? But…how? Why?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“She didn’t say anything about Hungary when we got together in Paris last week. Only that she might drive down to Vienna again, to do more research on the Canaletto.” A note of accusation slipped through Sarah’s concern. “She was also going to dig a little more on the codicil. Something you said about it seemed to have bothered her.”

He’d said a lot about it, none of which he intended to go into at the moment. “So you don’t know why she’s here in Hungary?”

“I have no clue. Is she there with you now? Let me speak to her.”

He flicked a glance at the woman sprawled across his bed. “She’s zoned out, Sarah. Said she was tired and just flopped into bed.”

“This memory thing? Will she be all right?”

“Like you, I have no clue. But you’d better contact her family just in case.”

“She doesn’t have any family.”

“She’s got to have someone. Grandparents? An uncle or aunt stashed away somewhere?”

“She doesn’t,” Sarah insisted. “Dev ran a detailed background check before I hired her. Natalie doesn’t know who her parents are or why she was abandoned as an infant. She lived with a series of foster families until she checked herself out of the system at age eighteen and entered the University of Michigan on full scholarship.”

That certainly put a different spin on the basic age-height-DOB info he’d gathered.

“I’ll fly to Budapest immediately,” Sarah was saying, “and take Natalie home with me until she recovers her memory.”

Dom speared another glance at the researcher. His gut told him he’d live to regret the suggestion he was about to make.

“Why don’t you hang loose for now? Could be she’ll be fine when she wakes up tomorrow. I’ll call you then.”

“I don’t know…”

“I’ll call you, Sarah. As soon as she wakes up.”

When she reluctantly agreed, he cut the connection and stood with the phone in hand for several moments. He’d worked undercover too long to take anything at face value…especially a woman fished out of the Danube who had no reason to be in Budapest that anyone knew. Thumbing the phone, he tapped in a number. His contact at Interpol answered on the second ring.

“Oui?”

“It’s Dom,” he replied in swift, idiomatic French. “Remember the query you ran for me two weeks ago on Natalie Clark?”

“Oui.”

“I need you to dig deeper.”

“Oui.”

The call completed, he contemplated his unexpected houseguest for a few moments. Her rumpled skirt had twisted around her calves and her buttoned-to-the-neck blouse looked as though it was choking her. After a brief inner debate, Dom rolled her over. He had the blouse unfastened and was easing it off when she opened her eyes to a groggy squint and mumbled at him.

“Whatryoudoin?”

“Making you comfortable.”

“Mmm.”

She was asleep again before he got her out of her blouse and skirt. Her panties were plain, unadorned white cotton but, Dom discovered, covered slender hips and a nice, trim butt. Nobly, he resisted the urge to remove her underwear and merely tucked the sheets around her. That done, he popped the cap on a bottle of a pilsner for himself, opened another for the hound and settled in for an all-night vigil.

* * *

He rolled her over again just after midnight and pried up a lid. She gave a bad-tempered grunt and batted his hand away, but not before he saw her pupil dilate and refract with reassuring swiftness.

He woke her again two hours later. “Natalie. Can you hear me?”

“Go away.”

He did a final check just before dawn. Then he stretched out on the leather sofa and watched the dark night shade to gold and pink.

* * *

Something wet and cold prodded her elbow. Her shoulder. Her chin. She didn’t come awake, though, until a strap of rough leather rasped across her cheek. She blinked fuzzily, registered the hazy thought that she was in bed, and opened her eyes.

“Yikes!”

A glistening pink mouth loomed only inches from her eyes. Its black gums were pulled back and a long tongue dangled through a set of nasty-looking incisors. As if in answer to her startled yip, the gaping mouth emitted a blast of powerful breath and an ear-ringing bark.

She scurried back like a poked crab, heart thumping and sheets tangling. A few feet of separation gave her a better perspective. Enough to see the merry eyes above an elongated muzzle, a broad forehead topped with one brown ear and one white, and a long, lean body with a wildly whipping tail.

Evidently the dog mistook her retreat for the notion that she was making space for him in the bed. With another loud woof, he landed on the mattress. The tongue went to work again, slathering her cheeks and chin before she could hold him off.

“Whoa! Stop!” His joy was contagious and as impossible to contain as his ecstatically wriggling body. Laughing now, she finally got him by the shoulders. “Okay, okay, I like you, too! But enough with the tongue.”

He got in another slurp before he let her roll him onto his back, where he promptly stuck all four legs into the air and begged for a tickle. She complied and raised quivers of ecstasy on his short-haired ribs and speckled pink-and-brown belly.

“You’re a handsome fellow,” she murmured, admiring his sleek lines as her busy fingers set his legs to pumping. “Wonder what your name is?”

“He doesn’t have one.”

The response came from behind her. Twisting on the bed, she swept her startled gaze across a huge, sparsely furnished area. A series of overhead beams topped with A-frame wooden trusses suggested it was an attic. A stunningly renovated attic, with gleaming oak floors and modern lighting.

There were no interior walls, only a curved, waist-high counter made of glass blocks that partitioned off a kitchen area. The male behind the counter looked at home there. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, he wore a soccer shirt of brilliant red-and-black stripes with some team logo she didn’t recognize emblazoned on one breast. The stretchy fabric molded his broad, muscular shoulders. The wavy glass blocks gave an indistinct view of equally muscular thighs encased in running shorts.