Excerpt of Royal Captive by Dana Marton

The guards at the door snapped their heels together in greeting. Istvan Kerkay 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.

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 allow 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 sacks 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 beneath 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 has 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 came 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 rappelling from high ceilings, or jumping roofs and disappearing with her latest loot strapped to her back, nearly invisible in the night.

He had a feeling that if quizzed, she could tell him the exact number and location of every security camera in the room, in addition to the content and worth of each display. The Getty sending her was a stunning oversight.

Their excuse was that none of her past transgressions could be proven. That they couldn’t punish her for her father’s sins. That even if she had a shady past once, she was reformed now, one-hundred- percent trustworthy and the best in the business.

"Shall we?" she was asking with unbridled optimism, nodding toward the safe door that protected the crown jewels.

He wished he could say, When hell freezes over. Instead, he stepped up to the iris scanner. "Istvan Kerkay," he said for the voice recognition software. And with a soft hiss, the hydraulic lock opened.

The lights inside came on automatically. He motioned for her to proceed first. As outraged as he was, he was still a gentleman.

She gave a soft gasp.

He didn’t blame her. The sight had the same effect on him, and he’d been in here hundreds of times. In glass cases that lined the small chamber were the most important treasures of the kingdom. The crown without which there could be no coronation and no knew king. The specter. The Queen’s tiaras. A ceremonial sword with a gold-and- diamond handle that he remembered his father wearing when he’d been a kid. A robe woven from threads of gold, once worn at coronation but now put away for all prosperity as it had become too fragile even to touch.

There were other treasures. The most important of the Queen’s jewels took up one long case. Another held the signet rings of all the old kings.

She moved in front of the main case.

"None of those will be going anywhere, you understand," he told her. "There’s a law forbidding any of the coronation jewels to leave the country." If the Queen traveled to visit other heads of state, she usually took one of the lesser crowns or a simple tiara.

She nodded, but seemed distracted, as if she’d barely heard him. From the corner of his eye, he caught her fingers twitching. She was flexing her hands inside her gloves.

Probably thinking that he’d open one of the cases and let her take something out for closer examination. The temerity of her—He stepped back, ready to get her out of the vault. Everything about her being in there shouted wrong and went against his most basic instincts. "So now that we’re done here…"

That green-gold gaze flew to him, still filled with awe. Her delicate nostrils were trembling. "One more minute, please." She wasn’t exactly begging, but she was close to it. There was a luminous quality to her all of a sudden, as if what she was seeing was lighting her up from the inside.

He understood exactly how she felt and resented having even this small thing in common with her. But he couldn’t deny that he had felt like this dozens of times in the past when he stood over a new discovery. No amount of time would have been enough. And he wasn’t about to indulge her, in any case.

"Maybe another time," he said, but thought, Not as long as I live and breathe.

She walked out as if leaving physically hurt her, moving as slowly as possible, glancing back frequently.

He sealed the door behind them and made a show of setting the locks, then pointed toward the back of the treasury. "I was thinking a few paintings and dresses." A number of those had been severely damaged over the centuries and had to be extensively restored. Save a few square centimeters here and there, little of them was original.

She looked back toward the vault and drew a deep breath before turning her attention to him. "I understand that you’re reluctant to let anything go. But we have to keep in mind that whatever I take to the Getty will also be going around the world to represent your country."

She was making a play on his pride. Smart, but she wasn’t going to trap him as easily as that. "Be that as it may, the safety of the artifacts is my first concern."

"And mine as well." Her chin came up, her eyes challenging him to bring up her past.

Of course, she could easily dismiss anything he said as malicious rumor. A prince did not stoop to repeating rumors in any case. He said nothing.

"I was thinking some of the artifacts left behind by the Brotherhood of the Crown," she told him after a moment, wiping the small, triumphant smile off her face so fast he might have imagined it. "They make a compelling story. Eight brothers, princes, coming together to save their country. They were brave and dashing. It’s very romantic. I think their story is perfect to introduce Valtria to an American audience."

Definitely not artifacts of the Brotherhood. She was beginning to give him a headache...