“How can you dawdle around Budapest with me? Don’t you have a job? An office or a brickyard or a butcher shop wondering where you are?”
“I wish I worked in a butcher shop,” he replied, laughing. “I could keep the hound in bones for the rest of his life.”
“Don’t dodge the question. Where do you work?”
“Nowhere at the moment, thanks to you.”
“Me?” A dozen wild possibilities raced through her head but none of them made any sense. “I don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do.” He hooked a hand under her elbow and steered her toward a café a short distance away. “Come, let’s have a coffee and I’ll explain.”
* * *
If Budapest’s many thermal springs and public baths had made it a favorite European spa destination since Roman times, the city owed its centuries-old café culture to the Turks. Suleyman the Magnificent first introduced coffee to Europe when he invaded Hungary in the 1500s.
Taste for the drink grew during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Meeting friends for coffee or just claiming a table to linger over a book or newspaper became a time-honored tradition. Although Vienna and other European cities developed their own thriving café cultures, Budapest remained its epicenter and at one time boasted more than six hundred kávébáz.
Hungarians still loved to gather at cafés. Most were small places with a dozen or so marble-topped tables, serving the inevitable glass of water along with a pitcher of milk and a cup of coffee on a small silver tray. But a few of the more elegant nineteenth-century cafés still remained. The one Dom escorted Natalie to featured chandeliers dripping with Bohemian crystal and a monstrous brass coffeemaker that took up almost one whole wall.
They claimed an outside table shaded by a green-and-white-striped awning. Dom placed the order, and Natalie waited only until they’d both stirred milk and sugar into their cups to pounce.
“All right. Please explain why I’m responsible for you being currently unemployed.”
“You uncovered a document in some dusty archives in Vienna. A codicil to the Edict of 1867, which granted certain rights to Hungarian nobles. The codicil specifically confirmed the title of Grand Duke of Karlenburgh to the house of St. Sebastian forever and in perpetuity. Does any of this strike a chord?”
“That name. Karlenburgh. I know I know it.”
“It was a small duchy, not much larger than Monaco, that straddled the present-day border between Austria and Hungary. The Alps cut right through it. Even today it’s a place of snow-capped peaks, fertile valleys and high mountain passes guarded by crumbling fortresses.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Several times. My grandfather was born at Karlenburgh Castle. It’s just a pile of rubble now, but Poppa took my parents, then my sister and me back to see it.”
“Your grandfather was the Grand Duke?”
“No, that was Sarah’s grandfather. Mine was his cousin.” Dom hesitated, thinking about the blood ties that had so recently and dramatically turned his life upside down. “I suppose my grandfather could have tried to claim the title when the last Grand Duke was executed.”
He stirred his coffee again and tried to imagine those long ago days of terror and chaos.
“From what he told me, that was a brutal time. The Soviet invasion leveled everyone—or elevated them, depending on how you looked at it—to the status of comrade. Wealth and titles became dangerous liabilities and made their holders targets. People tried to flee to the West. Neighbors spied on neighbors. Then, after the 1956 Uprising, the KGB rounded up thousands of nationalists. Charlotte, Sarah’s grandmother, was forced to witness her husband’s execution, and barely escaped Hungary with her life.”
The history resonated somewhere in Natalie’s mind. She’d heard this story before. She knew she had. She just didn’t know how it connected her and the broad-shouldered man sitting across from her.
“So this dusty document you say I uncovered? It links you to the title?”
“Charlotte thinks it does. So, unfortunately, do the tabloids.” His mouth twisted. “They’ve been hounding me since news of that damned document surfaced.”
“Well, excuse me for making you aware of your heritage!”
His brows soared. He stared at her with such an arrested expression that she had to ask.
“What?”
“You said almost the same thing in New York. While you were tearing off a strip of my hide.”
The revelation that she’d taken him down a peg or two did wonders for her self-confidence. “I’m sure you deserved it,” she said primly.