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“You’re not the boss just because you’re a boy.”
He scowled. “I’m not trying to be the boss. I’m trying to keep you from cracking your stubborn head open. If you think you can walk, be my guest.”
With a flourish, he gestured toward the door.
Now she had to do it, if for no other reason than to prove His Highness wrong. Slowly, she wobbled upright and took excruciatingly slow steps, one in front of the other.
The door opened easily, despite her certainty that she’d find it locked. It swung open to reveal a bare hallway. “Let’s go.”
She’d almost taken an entire step across the threshold when Finn leaped in front like her own personal bulletproof vest.
She rolled her eyes. Of course. Bullets bounced off the perpetually arrogant all the time, right?
“Don’t you have any sense?” he growled in her ear. “This is a dangerous situation.”
If the kidnappers had wanted to harm them, they would have. Finn was more valuable alive than dead. “If anything dangerous is lurking in these halls, it’s going to get you first. Then who will protect me?”
“What makes you so certain I’d lose?” he whispered over his shoulder as he flowed noiselessly away from the bedroom. He’d always moved with elegant flair, but this cloak-and-dagger-style grace was sexier than she’d like to admit.
She dogged his steps, tearing her gaze from his spectacular backside with difficulty. “A hunch. If the kidnappers had tranquilizers, they probably have guns. Unless you think they’re in this for the opportunity to have afternoon tea with royalty.”
“Shh.” He halted where the hallway ended in a large room and poked his head out to scan the space with a double sweep. “All clear.”
An inviting living area with a fireplace and high-end furniture opened up around her as she stepped out of the hall. “This is not what I would have envisioned as a place to keep captives.”
A breathtaking panorama of sparkling sea unfolded beyond a wall of glass. The house perched on a low cliff overlooking the water. That particular shade of blue was etched on her heart, and her breath caught.
“We’re not in Dallas anymore,” Finn announced needlessly. “And those were some serious drugs the kidnappers used if they brought us clear across the Atlantic without me realizing it.”
“We’re on an island.”
She was home. Back on the Mediterranean, close to everything she loved. She’d sailed these waters often enough to recognize the hills rising behind the city, the coastal landscape.
Home. She never thought she’d see it again. The small ripples in the surface of the water. The wheeling birds. The sky studded with puffy clouds. All of the poetic nuances of the sea bled into her chest, squeezing it, nearly wrenching loose a sob.
“Yeah.” Finn skirted the large couch and squinted at the shoreline visible in the distance. “About two miles off the coast of Delamer. There are, I don’t know, at least four or five different islands in this quadrant. It’s hard to tell from the ground which one we’re on.”
“There can’t be more than a handful of people who own houses on these islands. It would be pretty easy to figure out who kidnapped us.” She shook her head. “We were taken by the dumbest kidnappers ever. They dumped us right in our own backyard.”
“Dumb—or really smart. Who would think to look for us here? We’re both supposed to be in Dallas.”
“Well...good point.”
So if all the search efforts were concentrated on the other side of the Atlantic, they were going to have to rescue themselves.
“And leaving us on an island means they don’t have to stick around,” she said. “Very difficult for us to escape. I assume they took both our cell phones.”
He nodded. “And I’m sure the kidnappers did a full sweep to remove all devices with access to the outside world.”
Gingerly, he gripped the handle of the sliding door and pulled. It slid open, and the swift Mediterranean breeze doused her with its unique marine-life-drenched tang.
Goodness how she’d missed it.
She followed Finn outside onto the covered flagstone patio, set with wicker outdoor furniture around a brick fire pit. The cry of gulls overhead was like hearing a favorite song for the first time in ages. There were worse places to be held captive than in a cliff-side villa in the south of France during early summer.
But they were still captives.
Finn gripped the wrought iron railing surrounding the patio and peered down the cliff to the rocky shore below. “The slip is empty.”
Sure enough, the dock was boat-free. “Maybe there’s a kayak or something in storage that the kidnappers forgot about.”
“We should definitely check around. I’m still not convinced we’re alone.” Finn grimaced. “Why would they leave us unsupervised in what’s essentially a vacation spot? None of this makes any sense.”
“Kidnapping as a whole doesn’t make any sense. How is kidnapping you, and by extension me, going to achieve changes in the king’s policies?”
Even in the midst of her lowest point of grief over Bernard’s death, she’d have never willingly put another human in harm’s way to promote her political agenda.
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