Chapter 14

Dimitri checked the controls over the captain’s shoulder, nodding with satisfaction. Lauren was standing on the deck, rigid and in control, but at least she’d accepted a large, heavy blanket to ward against the shock he knew was going to hit her sometime very soon. The fact that she remained upright was in her favor. The fact that she was breathing steadily, her eyes clear, her chin high, was too.

Then again, maybe nothing fazed the woman. He didn’t know her, not really. He didn’t want to know her.

Not really.

Dimitri refocused on the electronics in front of him. As expected, there’d been no communications from the party. With any luck, everyone was still in turmoil, searching the grounds. He’d covered a good three miles in the fifteen minutes they’d spent in the golf cart, and his truck had eaten up the terrain since then.

Both would have been cleared away by his team already, so there was nothing there to find. Lauren would have been declared an on-foot escapee, and the search would extend to neighboring homes. The royal family would be in an outrage, her parents panicked, that slimy bastard Smithson furious.

The boat was looking better and better all the time.

He thanked the captain, asked a few questions. This was a good plan, a solid plan. It would give him the time he needed to ensure the safety of the woman while maintaining deniability for the family. Excellent.

Satisfied, he moved back out on the deck with Lauren. The mini yacht was owned by Theodopolis Papalia, but he was in New Zealand right now, and he’d long since lent the craft out to the ONSF to help with the recovery of plane fragments from Ari’s fatal crash.

Ari. As usual in the months since the crash, Dimitri cast his glance to the sky, thinking of his friend. He hadn’t forgiven the prince for flying off so foolishly into a storm. He still couldn’t quite accept that Ari was dead. If he was, though, then when Dimitri finally tracked Ari down amid the mists of Olympus, he fully planned to beat the shit out of him.

Lauren half turned as he approached. “Where are we going?”

“Island a few miles out to sea. It’s called Miranos. I suspect you haven’t heard of it.”

She frowned. “Fishing ports, right? Villages. Town. Whatever. Not a tourist destination.”

Dimitri settled in beside her, trying not to smile. “Everywhere in the Aegean is a tourist destination these days. Miranos has long made its money by fishing, but it’s become a popular location for divers. It’s rustic, but it’s clean. Good people, good food. You’ll be safe until we figure out how to proceed.”

“This is such a mess,” she sighed. “I don’t know whether to thank you or scream at you.”

“Be a shame to scare the fish.”

“I guess.” She seemed fragile suddenly, wrapped up in her blanket, and he edged toward her. He’d dealt with his share of frightened people going into shock. That was part of the work they did along the border, ensuring the safety of the villagers from marauding bands that snuck into their country. Usually, they reached those villages in time. Sometimes they didn’t.

Fear was something he knew, understood. And it wafted off the blonde now in little fits and gasps, as if she was trying to control even this.

Still, she didn’t move away from him. And that was progress. Without asking, he put his arms around her, pulling her back to his chest, squeezing her close through the thick woven blanket. She let him do it, which was more a testament to her frame of mind than anything.

Nevertheless, something about her actions seemed wrong to him, off-putting. He couldn’t quite figure it out. It was as if she was acting the role of the exhausted celebutante, knowing she should submit and so submitting in exactly the right way, when he knew damned well that she legitimately was exhausted, wrung out. What was he missing?

Her soft sigh recalled him. “I get the feeling this isn’t exactly how Emmaline and Kristos spent their time out of the media spotlight, huh?”

He laughed. “Not exactly. But you’ll be safe.”

“I was safe before.” But she said the words automatically, as if she’d been telling them to herself for so long, she wasn’t sure what else to say.

He decided to push for more. “What exactly was in the boxes this man sent to you when you were younger?”

“Gifts, mostly.” She leaned against him a bit more heavily, and he welcomed the warmth of her, the light scent of her shampoo and perfume mixing with the salty air. “Jewelry, books, electronics sometimes. And about every third or fourth time, sometimes less, sometimes more, there’d be something that wasn’t a gift. The empty box trick he definitely pulled a few times. But then there were...dead things, too.”

“Dead things.”

“Yeah. Dead scorpions, a couple of times. And spiders, once. Beetles. All of them dead, thank God.” She shuddered, and Dimitri tightened his hold on her. “Ashes too. I didn’t understand that one until a week later. I was at a prep school camping trip, something stupid like that. I’d thought he was sending me a care package of some sort. It took a week for my mom to tell me that the family dog had gone missing.”

Dimitri was glad she couldn’t see his face. “He killed your dog?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. But the timing was a little eerie, you have to admit.”

“And you spoke to him after that?”

She laughed, the sound bitter and jarring in the breeze. “Well, I wasn’t exactly going to ignore him. Not after that. I hadn’t told him I was leaving for camp. My mother had. It never occurred to me. After that, I told him more, or made sure he knew in advance. He claimed that he worried about me, but it was a control thing. It’s always a control thing with him.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I ever thought I could escape him. But maybe...” She broke off. “Those contracts. Maybe he was simply being thorough. Maybe they were fake, a bluff. A negotiating trick. That’s something he’d do...something my dad probably taught him.”

“Maybe,” Dimitri allowed. Do you understand what you’re saying? He didn’t speak the words out loud. He didn’t trust himself. This was a woman with more money than she knew what to do with, and she was honestly contemplating a life that none of her friends would have considered remotely acceptable: to marry a man she didn’t want, didn’t love, didn’t trust, and was afraid of. A man who’d—maybe—called her a name that sounded familiar to Dimitri, the barest snatch of a word but...something he recognized. Echo? Ekti? Something.

Either way, and regardless of his potential affiliation with Typhon—which was looking more likely all the time—Henry Smithson had definitely proven himself to be a mentally unbalanced stalker. Not even Kristos’s sweet Emmaline, who’d pretty much spent her life doing things for other people, would have found the situation tolerable.

And how was it possible that Lauren’s parents had allowed this to go on? How could they not have defended their child against this man? Perhaps at first, they might have discounted Lauren’s complaints, her fears, her panic. But surely it had continued long enough, often enough that they would have turned the bastard into the authorities at some point…Right?

Assuming she’d ever told them. But she had to have told them, surely. She couldn’t have kept such harrowing secrets to herself.

Then again, Lauren and her family were rich. Unreasonably, unfathomably rich. Maybe they did things differently.

And it all still seemed somewhat false to him, a role she was playing. As if she’d given him enough information to string him along, but not the crucial piece, the piece he needed to know. What was she truly afraid of?

Dimitri didn’t fully realize when he dropped his head toward the crown of Lauren’s hair, his lips brushing the soft strands in time with the boat as it moved out into the open sea. The trip to Miranos wasn’t long, maybe two hours, but they would be safe there. Lauren relaxed further in his arms, and he held her tightly, his skin prickling when she reached through the blankets to clasp her fingers around his.

His heart did an odd shimmy in his chest, but he knew this wasn’t the way this was supposed to go. He didn’t want this woman to get under his skin. He didn’t want this woman to be anything but safely stowed cargo. And if he didn’t watch it, she was going to be more than that.

Then again…

Remember who this is, here.

Dimitri went very still as Lauren’s hand continued to stroke his. She’d moved her head precisely to the side, enough to allow him access to her ear, her neck. She’d stopped talking, but her body was tense, too tense, too straight, for all that she leaned against him, allowing him to take her weight. He had thought her mind lost to the rhythm of the open sea, but that wasn’t it at all, was it? She wasn’t wondering what the adventure ahead lay in store for her. She was trying to figure out how to manage him. To control him, the same way she thought she could control Henry Smithson, in the end.

He should give her more credit than that, he knew, and yet…

Lauren took the decision out of his hands.

She chose that moment to turn in his arms, letting the blanket fall away. Snaking up her hand to his head, she pulled him toward her, and he let her do it too. Let her bring her mouth up to his, taste his lips, steal her other hand down the hard planes of his chest to rest on his rib cage, and all the while he could tell that she wasn’t truly in the moment, wasn’t taken away with the desire. She was faking it.

Or faking some of it, anyway. She couldn’t mask the shortness of her breath, or the way it passed fitfully over her lips. She couldn’t fake the tremor in her fingers, or the racing of her heart. She was using her own body to help hone her diversion. And doing a damned fine job of it.

Except no one—ever—had faked it with him. Not at the level of sheer desire.

Especially not someone as into him as Lauren Grant clearly and most definitely was.

How did she think she could get away with it?

The answer came to him in a flash. Because she always had. She’d always needed to, wanted to. She’d always been in control of every situation, which could only mean that no one had ever made her feel out of control. No one had gotten her out of her own pretty, calculating head for long enough that all she could do was focus on her body, her senses, her pleasure.

Had no one ever truly seduced her? Had set aside her money and her power, and gone after her for the sole pursuit of savoring every inch of her skin, every shattering breath? If so, that was certainly a shame.

Someone should do something about that.

Dimitri lifted his mouth away from her lips. He could sense Lauren’s confusion, but she was too smart to say anything but sigh and snuggle against him, the very image of the broken, trembling flower.

Oh, she was trembling, all right. Because of him. And he’d only hit her with the barest fraction of the full demigod package.

Dimitri smiled into the darkness, over the blonde’s head.

Maybe this visit to Miranos wasn’t going to be completely useless after all.