Merline Lovelace - Her Unforgettable Royal Lover

Gina hooted in delight. “Way to go, Grandmama!”

Sarah laughed, and her husband issued a joking curse. “Damn! My wife suggested we hit the carnival in Venice this spring but I talked her into an African photo safari instead.”

“You’ll know to listen to her next time,” the duchess sniffed, although Dom would bet she knew the moment could strike as hot and heavy in the African savannah as it had in Venice.

“I don’t understand,” Gina put in from her perch on the floor. “What’s the big deal about telling Alexis about the codicil?”

“Well…” Red crept into Sarah’s cheeks. “I’m afraid I mentioned Dominic, too.”

The subject of the conversation muttered a curse, and Gina let out another whoop. “Ooh, boy! Your barracuda of an editor is gonna latch on to that with both jaws. I foresee another top-ten edition, this one listing the sexiest single royals of the male persuasion.”

“I know,” her sister said miserably. “It’ll be as bad as what Dev went through after he came out on Beguile ’s top-ten list. When you see Dominic tell him I’m so, so sorry.”

“He’s right here.” Hooking a hand, Gina motioned him over. “Tell him yourself.”

When Dominic positioned himself in front of the iPad’s camera, Sarah sent him a look of heartfelt apology. “I’m so sorry, Dom. I made Alexis promise she wouldn’t go crazy with this, but…”

“But you’d better brace yourself, buddy,” her husband put in from behind her shoulder. “Your life’s about to get really, really complicated.”

“I can handle it,” Dom replied with more confidence than he was feeling at the moment.

“You think so, huh?” Dev returned with a snort. “Wait till women start trying to stuff their phone number in your pants pocket and reporters shove mics and cameras in your face.”

* * *

The first prospect hadn’t sounded all that repulsive to Dom. The second he deemed highly unlikely…right up until he stepped out of a cab for his scheduled meeting at Washington’s Interpol office the following afternoon and was blindsided by the pack of reporters, salivating at the scent of fresh blood.

“Your Highness! Over here!”

“Grand Duke!”

“Hey! Your lordship!”

Shaking his head at Americans’ fixation on any and all things royal, he shielded his face with his hands like some damned criminal and pushed through the ravenous newshounds.

Three

Two weeks later Dominic was in a vicious mood. He had been since a dozen different American and European tabloids had splashed his face across their front pages, trumpeting the emergence of a long-lost Grand Duke.

When the stories hit, he’d expected the summons to Interpol Headquarters. He’d even anticipated his boss’s suggestion that he take some of the unused vacation time he’d piled up over the years and lie low until the hoopla died down. He’d anticipated it, yes, but did not like being yanked off undercover duty and sent home to Budapest to twiddle his thumbs. And every time he thought the noise was finally dying down, his face popped up in another rag.

The firestorm of publicity had impacted his personal life, as well. Although Sarah’s husband had tried to warn him, Dom had underestimated the reaction to his supposed royalty among the females of his acquaintance. The phone number he gave out to non-Interpol contacts had suddenly become very busy. Some of the callers were friends, some were former lovers. But many were strangers who’d wrangled the number out of their friends and weren’t shy about wanting to get to know the new duke on a very personal level.

He’d turned most of them off with a laugh, a few of the more obnoxious with a curt suggestion they get a life. But one had sounded so funny and sexy over the phone that he’d arranged to meet her at a coffee bar. She turned out to be a tall, luscious brunette, as bright and engaging in person as she was over the phone. Dom was more than ready to agree with her suggestion they get a second cup to go and down it at her apartment or his loft. Before he could put in the order, though, she asked the waiter to take their picture with her cell phone. Damned if she hadn’t zinged it off by email right there at the table. Just to a few friends, she explained with a smile. One, he discovered when yet another story hit the newsstands, just happened to be a reporter for a local tabloid.

In addition to the attention from strangers, the barrage of unwanted publicity seemed to make even his friends and associates view him through a different prism. To most of them he wasn’t Dominic St. Sebastian anymore. He was Dominic, Grand Duke of a duchy that had ceased to exist a half century ago, for God’s sake.

So he wasn’t real happy when someone hammered on the door of his loft apartment on a cool September evening. Especially when the hammering spurred a chorus of ferocious barking from the hound who’d followed Dom home a year ago and decided to take up residence.

“Quiet!”

A useless command, since the dog considered announcing his presence to any and all visitors a sacred duty. Bred originally to chase down swiftly moving prey like deer and wolves, the Magyar Agár was as lean and fast as a greyhound. Dom had negotiated an agreement with his downstairs neighbors to dog-sit while he was on assignment, but man and beast had rebonded during this enforced vacation. Or at least the hound had. Dom had yet to reconcile himself to sharing his Gold Fassl with the pilsner-guzzling pooch.

“This better not be some damned reporter,” he muttered as he kneed the still-barking hound aside and checked the spy hole. The special lens he’d had installed gave a 180-­degree view of the landing outside his loft. The small area was occupied by two uniformed police officers and a bedraggled female Dom didn’t recognize until he opened the door.

“Mi a fene!” he swore in Hungarian, then switched quickly to English. “Natalie! What happened to you?”

She didn’t answer, being too preoccupied at the moment with the dog trying to shove his nose into her crotch. Dom swore again, got a grip on its collar and dislodged the nose, but he still didn’t get a reply. She merely stared at him with a frown creasing her forehead and her hair straggling in limp tangles around her face.

“Are you Dominic St. Sebastian?” one of the police officers asked.

“Yes.”

“Aka the Grand Duke?”

He made an impatient noise and kept his grip on the dog’s collar. “Yes.”

The second officer, whose nametag identified him as Gradjnic, glanced down at a newspaper folded to a grainy picture of Dom and the brunette at the coffee shop. “Looks like him,” he volunteered.

His partner gestured to Natalie. “And you know this woman?”

“I do.” Dom’s glance raked the researcher, from her tangled hair to her torn jacket to what looked like a pair of men’s sneakers several sizes too large for her. “What the devil happened to you?”

“Maybe we’d better come in,” Gradjnic suggested.

“Yes, yes, of course.”

The officers escorted Natalie inside, and Dom shut the dog in the bathroom before joining them. The Agár whined and scratched at the door but soon nosed out the giant chew-bones Dom stored in the hamper for emergencies like this.

Aside from the small bathroom, the loft consisted of a single, barn-like attic area that had once stored artifacts belonging to the Ethnological Museum. When the museum moved to new digs, their old building was converted to condos. Zia had just nailed a full scholarship to medical school, so Dom had decided to sink his savings into this loft apartment in the pricy Castle Hill district on the Buda side of the river. He’d then proceeded to sand and varnish the oak-plank floors to a high gloss. He’d also knocked out a section of the sloping roof and opened up a view of the Danube that usually had guests gasping.