Page 16 of Claimed
He shrugged and she watched as the muscles rippled across his sun-bronzed skin. She wouldn’t have expected his tan to be so deep, given his role in the royal family. She pictured him wearing tuxedos and sipping martinis, not diving off the side of boats. Then again, demigod. Maybe gorgeously perma-tanned skin came with the package. “You, um, dive a lot?”
“Not diving, usually. But snorkeling, yes. It would be difficult to live someplace like Oûros and not take advantage of all the ocean had to offer.” He picked up a snorkeling mask and proffered it to her. “Unless you think we’ll need the tanks?”
“No—not for this first outing, and probably not at all. How deep is the water?”
The conversation steered easily onto safer topics, and Nicki followed Stefan across the deck, inhaling and exhaling slowly and carefully as she watched his muscles stretch and work beneath his skin. Even his trousers seemed tailor-made to make her stare, the fabric stretching over the thick muscles of his legs. She’d seen the guy practically naked already, but…
“One thing,” Stefan turned to her, then waited as she jerked her eyes up from his ass to meet his gaze. His smirk told her that he knew exactly what she’d been staring at. “Tamas, one of the men, will be going with us as well. It should appear as if it’s only the two of you down there. I should not be in any of the video feeds. You should be in the water with a single subject, not surrounded by guards. And I shouldn’t be in the water at all, merely tapped for this assignment as a political representative of Oûros. You understand?”
Nicki nodded. “I’ll keep you out of the frames, or we’ll catch it in the editing pass before I push the videos live.” Inside, however, her spirits deflated a little. Stefan’s warnings reminded her that this wasn’t the joy ride it was being touted as. Moreimportantly, however, she’d thought she could capture some video of the man in the water. He truly had the most amazing body, and if she could have some souvenir video clips, it’d make all of this last a little while longer.
Oh well.
Within minutes, they were in the water, the sudden shock of it a balm to her senses and a needed distraction for both her body and mind. As promised, Tamas proved to be a willing subject, and they spent the morning coasting over an honest-to-God sunken ship that was clearly visible through the water, shallow caves filled with brilliantly colored fish, and rock formations that glinted and burned with the reflection of the sun.
To the absolute shock of no one, Stefan’s swimming abilities in the open sea were every bit as graceful as when he’d been in the palace lap pool, and she longed to capture him on video. With great effort she resisted—Herculeaneffort, she thought, which made her grin again. For his part, Stefan swam out and around, circling them in a wide arc, and some of the equipment he carried on his own weight belt looked suspiciously lethal. Another reminder that despite all appearances, this wasn’t really a lazy afternoon in the Aegean.
Nicki was legitimately tired by the time they pulled themselves out of the water, gratefully accepting Stefan’s help as he took her equipment and stacked it on the deck.
“Stay here,” he said when she cleared the ladder. He was already stripping out of his wet suit, and she followed his lead. “There’s food, and we can see what you recorded. It’ll save time.”
She watched him as he took the camera and popped the drive, transferring it to a large-screened laptop that had been brought to a shaded alcove of the deck. She grabbed a handful of grapes and a towel, then flopped down on a teak bench to dry herself off as Stefan reviewed the footage.
It was as spectacular as she’d hoped it would be when viewing it under water. The fish were large and exotic. The centuries-old boat—while no bastion of lost treasure—was charmingly authentic, and the Oûrois guard Tamas was handsome and fit and truly at home in the water. There were shots of Nicki, too, taken by Tamas to continue the illusion that they were the only two down there, as she glided over a thick coral bed, then pointed the camera toward the glittering, glinting surface of the rocks.
Abruptly, Stefan’s hand shot out and froze the screen. “What is that?” he asked, the impassive calm of his voice at odds with the urgency of his fingers on the trackpad.
Nicki stopped toweling her hair.
“That’s great, isn’t it?” she asked. “Something bright stuck into the coral. I assumed it was debris, but the way it’s wedged in there is cool. It’s obsidian, maybe—or some sort of thick glass. Something cut with facets to reflect all that sunlight.” She pointed to two bright spots.
“Tamas.” Stefan turned and spoke rapid Oûrois to the other man, who stared from him to the screen, then stood and crossed the deck to scoop up his discarded snorkeling mask.
Nicki frowned. “What?” she asked. “What do you see?”
“The chunk of glass you’re pointing out could be simply glass, nothing more. Rock. Debris. But it also could be glass that has been shattered into specific facets, such as the glass monitors of aircraft tracking equipment.”
Her eyes widened. “You don’t think it’s part of Ari’s plane?”
“I don’t.” he shook his head definitively. “It could be anything. If it’s debris, it could be from any plane that has flown over this space and crashed in the last five years. It’s unreasonable that it belongs to Ari’s craft. But it’s at least evidence that planes have crashed here—potentially recent planes. And that’s a start.”
He stood abruptly. “Go get dressed. I want you to go with us ashore after Tamas recovers a chunk of that glass.”
Ten
Stefan scowled as he faced into the wind, their small speedboat cutting across the water at a rapid clip, bisecting the azure waters as they approached the shoreline of the small island. His men had located the scavenger band’s leader, who’d been more than willing to talk to them. The previous night’s storm had yielded more gifts from the sea, and he had much to sell.
Stefan had much to sell, too. And now so did Nicki, unwittingly. The information she had on her video cam, if proven to be a connection to Prince Ari’s airplane, was both good and bad news. Good, if Ari was found alive or dead, without foul play involved. Bad, if the king and queen had indisputable cause to do a full-scale search in this area—an area which wasn’t Oûrois territory, but Turkish. The nightmare of navigating the politics of those permissions, and the inherent insinuation that the Turkish government hadn’t done all they could to find Ari’s plane or the remains of the son of one of its neighbors and supposed allies, wasn’t a possibility he relished.
Worse, Nicki knew where that wreckage was. So if someone wanted that information buried, she’d be the first person in line to be buried as well.
He grimaced. There were a lot of ifs in that statement, and he more than most knew the danger of getting too caught up in ifs. Part of what made him successful for the past century and a half was his ability to focus only on what mattered to the job at hand.
And what mattered at this moment was keeping Nicki out of access to anyone but him, until they returned her safely home to Oûros.
Home.His lips twisted at the word. The palace wasn’t really his home, but it was the closest he’d probably get in all his long lifetime—an institution so entrenched in Oûros, it would outlive even him. His father had been a distant cousin to the king, but Stefan hadn’t known the royal family well until after the accident that had taken his parents’ lives. The reigning monarch at that time, King Orlof, had taken him in when he’d been barely fourteen years old, an idiot teen by any standard, and one who was perpetually angry at the world.
King Orlof and Queen Ida, King Jasen’s great-great-great grandparents, had welcomed Stefan into the palace without question or conversation. They’d showered him with faith and understanding, and they’d asked for nothing in return but his unstinting service. He had given them that, and when his demigod nature had surfaced at age eighteen and he’d been given the opportunity to extend his service to god, Crown, and country at the age of twenty, he’d agreed to it with all his heart. He could do no less, and from generation to generation, monarch to monarch, he’d never regretted the decision. One of the high counselors to King Orlof had told him, sagely, that “after the first death, there is no other,” and he’d found that to be true. He didn’t consider himself heartless, but…witnessing the passage of time and even deathhadgotten easier, over time.