Royal Captive. Dana Marton
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to any key point on any golf course.” He was grinning like a kid at Christmas. “You should get one.”
Istvan strode for the door, his mind as far from golf as possible. “Come.” He gestured with impatience when he was forced to wait for Janos to follow. Once they were both out, he turned the key in the door, then pocketed it—he didn’t like the way Janos had been looking at that sword—then he took off down the hallway as if the devil was after him.
But the devil was ahead of him, in fact.
“It could be worse,” Janos called out with undisguised glee. “The Chancellor could have brought her here to make you marry her.”
He barely paid attention to his brother’s words. The Chancellor had given up his mad quest to see all the princes married just to gain good publicity for the royal family. The unfortunate marital consultant who’d come all the way from New York City to see Lazlo settled had eaten poison meant for the prince and nearly died of it. All worked out well at the end; Lazlo married her in a stunning turn of events. But the Chancellor lost his taste for matchmaking after that.
Which meant the remaining three Kerkay brothers who were still single could breathe easy for now. Although, to be fair, Istvan almost rather would have been forced to marry than be forced to share his treasures with that woman. Because he didn’t plan on falling in love again, an arranged marriage would have suited him fine. For certain, he wouldn’t put up such a fuss as Lazlo had when his matchmaker arrived. When the time came for Istvan to take that blow, he’d take it on the chin and be done with it.
He strode across the reception room without looking in the floor-to-ceiling Venetian mirror, a gift to one of his ancestors from a sixteenth-century doge, but made a mental note that a minor repair job of the silver backing still had to be scheduled. He pulled off his white cotton gloves and shoved them into his pocket, exited the room and ran down the long hallway that led to the treasury—to hell with decorum.
The guards at the door snapped their heels together in greeting. He went through, nodding to the next set of guards in the antechamber. Then he burst through the door to the treasury proper, a large hall with tables covered in velvet, giant bank safes lining one wall, another hosting hundreds of secured deposit boxes.
Priceless rugs, left behind by the Turkish invasion four hundred years ago, were kept in a climate-controlled chamber, along with some elaborately studded and painted war chests. Artwork that wasn’t on display at the moment in the palace was kept in a side room, exhibited there in all its splendid glory.
“Your Highness.” Chancellor Egon came forward and made the introductions.
“Your Highness.” The woman measured up Istvan as she did a rather understated curtsy. She wore white gloves meant to protect museum artifacts, identical to the ones he’d just taken off.
Probably so she wouldn’t leave fingerprints. She wasn’t fooling him. Once an art thief, always an art thief—he believed that with his whole heart. As far as he was concerned, Lauryn Steler was only one small step above a tomb raider, which had been her father’s sordid occupation, in fact.
She and her kind stood for everything he spent his life fighting against.
“Miss Steler.” Greeting her politely took effort, but good manners had been hammered into all six princes at an early age. He did stop short, however, of telling her that she was welcome at the palace.
“Chancellor Egon was about to show me the coronation vault.” She beamed, either not noticing the slight or choosing to ignore it.
Fury that had been rising inside him now bubbled dangerously close to the surface. “How kind of him.” His voice had enough edge to cut through the seven-layer titanium alloy that still stood between her and his heritage, the sacred symbols of his country and his family.
The Chancellor stiffened and took a step back, giving him a worried look. “Your Highness, I was merely—”
“I’ll take over here. You may leave.”
“Certainly, Your Highness.” The Chancellor backed out without argument. He’d lost a lot of his bluster and bossiness after the mishap with Lazlo. He wasn’t exactly malleable, but he no longer butted heads with the princes over every little thing either.
The woman was still politely smiling. Her mouth was a tad too wide to be called aristocratic, but nevertheless, some people would have found her face pleasant. She didn’t seem to have caught a single whiff of doom in the air.
“This is exciting,” she said.
Either she was beyond belief impertinent or incredibly dense. Given her reputation, Istvan didn’t think it was the latter.
“Isn’t it?” He didn’t bother forcing a smile, welcoming or otherwise. “I imagine it’s the first time you’ve seen something like this.”
“Yes, yes, it is.” Her green-gold eyes looked a little too wide with innocence.
Of course, she’d been in a treasury before. In Portugal, he seemed to remember now something he’d heard about her a while back. If half the rumors about her were true, she’d been the best art thief who had ever lived.
She certainly dressed like a cat burglar. A pair of tight-fitting black slacks covered her long legs, her black short-sleeved shirt leaving her toned arms bare. She was as perfectly proportioned as a painting by the grand masters, her eyes mesmerizing, her skin translucent, her lines magnificent. Her copper hair was pulled into a sleek ponytail to make sure it didn’t get in her way.
The closer he looked, the easier he could see how she’d bewitched many of her victims in the past, even poor Chancellor Egon who’d been taken by her enough to open the treasury doors, of all things. No fool like an old fool, his father had been fond of saying.
Good thing Istvan was always a lot more interested in what lay below the surface of things. And in her heart of hearts, Lauryn Steler was a thief, the worst kind of villain. He didn’t care if the whole world had forgotten that. He wouldn’t.
“I’ve already seen a few pieces I would like to take,” she told him as if she were at one of those abominable wholesale outlets of her country that sold mass-produced goods in batches.
“I’m sure you have.”
If she weren’t a consultant for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, one of the most respected museums in the world, his answer would have been, Over my dead body. But the board at the Getty had asked for a loan of Valtrian artifacts for a special exhibit. Then the treasure would embark on a trip, residing for three months each in the top-twenty most-prominent museums of the world.
Chancellor Egon had made cultural exchange his new quest. If he couldn’t use another row of royal weddings to cheer up the people and raise the country’s visibility abroad, then he would do it by parading Valtria’s past all over creation. A very bad idea, Istvan had been saying from the beginning, but somehow the Chancellor gained the Queen’s approval anyway.
Of course, as ill as the Queen was some days, the Chancellor could probably manipulate her into any agreement. Istvan had said as much to Arpad, but his eldest brother brushed off his concerns. The Crown Prince fully trusted the Chancellor.
Maybe he should have left the conference in Brazil and come back to the palace sooner, Istvan thought now, looking at the woman, still unsure what to do with her. She moved with sinuous grace as she considered the display cases, wandering away from him as if pulled by a magnet toward his country’s treasures.
“Magnificent,” she said with awe that didn’t seem phony.
“And protected by state-of-the-art security,” he mentioned in a note of forced nonchalance, not at all approving of that throaty, sexy voice of hers that didn’t go with her sleek, crisp appearance.
Her voice belonged to a seductress swathed in silk in a candle-lit boudoir. He blinked that ridiculous image away. He didn’t think Miss Steler spent much time reclining on satin pillows. He could, however, see her