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.
Tonight’s visitors were no exception. All three gawked at the floodlit spires, towering dome, flying buttresses and stained-glass windows of the Parliament Building across the river. Equally elaborate structures flanked the massive building, while the usual complement of river barges and brightly lit tour boats cruised by almost at its steps.
Ruthlessly, Dom cut into their viewing time. “Please sit down, all of you, then someone needs to tell me what this is all about.”
“It’s about this woman,” Gradjnic said in heavily accented English when everyone had found a place to perch. He tugged a small black notebook from his shirt pocket. “What did you say her name was?”
Dom’s glance shot to Natalie. “You didn’t tell them your name?”
“I…I don’t remember it.”
“What?”
Her frown deepened. “I don’t remember anything.”
“Except the Grand Duke,” Officer Gradjnic put in drily.
“Wait,” Dom ordered. “Back up and start at the beginning.”
Nodding, the policeman flipped through his notebook. “The beginning for us was 10:32 a.m. today, when dispatch called to report bystanders had fished a woman out of the Danube. We responded, found this young lady sitting on the bank with her rescuers. She had no shoes, no purse, no cell phone, no ID of any kind and no memory of how she ended up in the river. When we asked her name or the name of a friend or relative here in Budapest, all she could tell us was ‘the Grand Duke.’”
“Jesus!”
“She has a lump the size of a goose egg at the base of her skull, under her hair.”
When Dom’s gaze shot to Natalie again, she raised a tentative hand to the back of her neck. “More like a pigeon’s egg,” she corrected with a frown.
“Yes, well, the lump suggests she may have fallen off a bridge or a tour boat and hit her head on the way down, although none of the tour companies have reported a missing passenger. We had the EMTs take her to the hospital. The doctors found no sign of serious injury or concussion.”
“No blurred vision?” Dom asked sharply. He’d taken—and delivered—enough blows to the head to know the warning signs. “No nausea or vomiting or balance problems?”
“Only the memory loss. The doctor said it’s not all that unusual with that kind of trauma. Since we had no other place to take her, it was either leave her at the hospital or bring her to the only person she seems to know in Budapest—the Grand Duke.”
Hit by a wicked sense of irony, Dom remembered those quivering nostrils and flickers of disdain. He suspected Ms. Clark would rather have been left at a dog pound than delivered to him.
“I’ll take care of her,” he promised, “but she must have a hotel room somewhere in the city.”
“If she does, we’ll let you know.” Gradjnic flipped to an empty page and poised his pen. “Now what did you say her name was?”
“Natalie. Natalie Clark.”
“American, we guessed from her accent.”
“That’s
