Page 8 of Claimed
“And you don’t know that it wasn’t!” she retorted. “There are windsurfers currently in the city of Alaçati for some exhibition, and we should be there too, finding out whatever we can.”
A cheer went up from the crowd gathered at the edge of the beach. The queen glanced up—and her excited exclamation made Stefan turn as well. The reason behind that exclamation, however, made him groan.
Out on the open waters of the Aegean, Nicki Clark stood balanced on a thin board, her arms locked on the cross beams of a brightly colored sail. Flipping and twirling, she was doing an impressively acrobatic job of angling the sail to capture the most wind it could, resulting in her leaping over the small whitecaps offered up by the gusting winds over the azure water.
“Emmaline tells me that Nicki is a champion windsurfer, and her work as an adventure influencer makes it perfectly reasonable that she would take a side trip to Alaçati while she is so close,” the queen said triumphantly. “And of course, we wouldn’t want her to travel alone in a foreign country with such rapidly changing safety concerns. A small group of ONSF soldiers and you, Stefan, will go with her.”
“We have already discussed this, Your Highness—” Stefan began, but the queen barreled on.
“Look at her! This is not an idle queen creating a fit where none exists. Nicki is clearly skilled, and if her reputation in the windsurfing community checks out as Emmaline indicates, she’s the perfect choice to travel with you, and the perfect excuse for us to encroach on our neighbor despite the fact that we don’t agree on much of anything these days.”
“It’s not safe, and she could be placed in danger. She isn’t trained.”
“No, but you are,” the queen said. “And I would trust you with my life, Stefan. Can you really tell me that Nicki Clark couldn’t?”
Stefan followed her gaze, tracking the tiny form of Nicki as she crested one wave and swooped into the curl of another, drawing more applause and cheers as a line of tourists formed at the vendor’s stand to try the windsurfing boards for themselves. Nicki, oblivious to all of it, watched the wind and the water, her body taut, her energy focused. She was in her element, and she took his breath away.
There was no way he was going to endanger her life, however, no matter what the queen commanded.
But the queen wasn’t finished.
“Give me one good reason—one—that she isn’t the ideal cover for you, and I’ll consider relenting,” she said. “Otherwise,the royal yacht is already being prepared, Stefan. I expect you to be on it tomorrow. With Nicki Clark.”
Five
“Nicki, I really don’t know about this.”
Nicki kept her head beneath an enormous bath towel for a second more, schooling her expression. By the time she emerged, she was ready to face the three scowling women who sat around her suite, all of them girded for battle.
Well, girded might be overstating it. Lauren, the one who spoke, was standing by a chair, as if sitting was out of the question during such an important conversation. Lauren Grant was the heiress to an international hotelier fortune, and had grown up used to running the show. She and Nicki got along because Nicki usually let her—or ignored her if her opinions were inconvenient.
But Lauren was serious this morning, and Nicki knew why. She’d confided in Lauren about her possible heart condition a week ago, when Lauren had questioned her usage of beta-blockers. It would have been foolish not to disclose the worst possible scenario—that Nicki might possibly have a slowly dying heart—but she’d told Lauren not to worry, that there’d be lots of notice if anything was truly wrong.
This wasn’t exactly true of course, but Lauren hadn’t pressed before. She did now.
She’d clearly told the others too.
Emmaline sat with her hands earnestly folded in her lap. Earnest was what Emmaline did best. Nicki couldn’t help thawing a bit as she caught her best friend’s eye and smiled, watching her brighten with the strength of the connection. Across the room, Fran also caught her attention. She tilted her head and Nicki held up a hand to forestall whatever she was going to say.
“No need to shrink me, Fran. I know what you’re thinking—what you’re all thinking. And you’re right. This is a simple trip but it could turn crazy at any moment. And not even for any grand reason, but the simple reality of going to a foreign country and running into all the problems that could entail. But seriously, this is not that big of a deal. It’s not like we’re going to have people chasing us with guns.”
“You could,” interjected Lauren darkly.
“I won’t,” Nicki shook her head. “Have you seen the royal yacht? It’s practically a cruise ship. We’re going to sail down to Alaçati big as life, and give our validation to the windsurfing expo they’ve got going on. It’s good PR for Oûros, a nice goodwill gesture for Turkey, and the guards they’re sending along are going to ask all the questions they need to ask while Stefan squires me around as if I’m some sort of VIP. Which is hilarious, but that’s beside the point.”
Emmaline bit her lip. “He’s not especially happy about you going, you should know.”
Nicki snorted. “I think the ‘No, absolutely not, she can’t go,’ to Jasen at lunch was a good indicator of that. But honestly, that’s for them to figure out.” She gave her best “I don’t really care” shrug, honed to a fine point after years of being denied opportunities by her hypochondriac mother, who’d perfected the art of the flop sweat years before anyone in the family had actually fallen ill.
Once Nicki had reached her senior year in high school, she’d shed a lot of those restrictions, but then her father’s heart attack and brother’s later diagnosis had threatened to close her in once more. She couldn’t live the way her brother and father did. Wouldn’t. And she wouldn’t back down from this opportunity.
Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t throw her friends a bone. “If they decide it’s too dangerous, then of course I’ll abide by that. With Stefan out of the country and no longer up in my grill, I’ll be able to explore some of the mountain trails he’s constantly warning me about.” She grinned. “So it’s a win for me either way.”
“You know, he could be warning you about those trails because of wild animals,” Fran observed wryly. “Not simply because he wants to be a pain in the ass.”
“Mostly, though, he wants to be a pain in the ass,” Lauren said, and the tension in the room finally broke as everyone laughed. “I heard from Dimitri that you two were totally making out on the beach. Truth?”
“We were not making out.” Nicki hesitated. “Well, okay. I was. But I honest to God think Stefan was trying to seduce me to keep from running down the beach. Like this was some sort of super new diplomacy technique he wanted to practice on me.”