Seven
The spicy scent of paprika and simmering beef filled the loft when they went inside. Natalie sniffed appreciatively but cut a straight line for the laptop.
“Do I need a password to power up?”
“Just hit the on switch.”
“Really?” She dropped into the leather armchair and positioned the laptop on her knees. “I would have thought 007 would employ tighter security.”
Dom didn’t bother to explain that all electronic and digital communications he received from or sent to Interpol were embedded with so many layers of encryption that no one outside the agency could decipher them. He doubted she would have heard him in any case. She was hunched forward, her fingers hovering over the keys.
“I hope you have Wi-Fi,” she muttered as the screen brightened to display a close-up of the hound. All nose and bright eyes and floppy ears, the image won a smile from Natalie. The real thing plopped down on his haunches before Dom and let his tongue loll in eager anticipation of a libation.
Idly, Dom tipped some lager into his dish and watched as Natalie skimmed through site after site relating to the eighteenth-century Italian painter. The cop in him kept returning to their conversation outside on the balcony. He wasn’t buying her quick dismissal of the suggestion she’d tried to downplay her natural beauty.
She most definitely had, and the ploy hadn’t worked. Not with Dom, anyway. Despite her disdainful sniffs, daunting glasses and maiden-aunt clothes, she’d stirred his interest from the moment she’d opened the door of the duchess’s apartment. And she’d damned near tied him in knots when she’d paraded out of the shower this morning with that crew shirt skimming her thighs.
Now…
His fist tightened on the dew-streaked pilsner bottle. She should see herself through his eyes. The shoulder-length, honey-streaked brown hair. The fierce concentration drawing her brows into a straight line. The lips pooched into a tight rosebud.
Jézus, Mária és József! Those lips!
Swallowing a groan, Dom took another pull of the lager and gave the rest to the ecstatic hound.
“You shouldn’t let him have beer.”
He glanced over to find her looking all prudish and disapproving again. Maybe it wasn’t a disguise, he thought wryly. Maybe there was room in that sexy body for a nun, a shower scrubber and a wanton.
God, he hoped so!
It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. Dom was still visualizing a steamy shower encounter when she whooped.
“This is it! This is the painting I was researching. I don’t know how I know it, but I do.”
He crossed the room and peered over her shoulder. Her scent drifted up to him, mingling with that of the goulash to tease his senses. Hair warmed by the sun. Skin dusted from their day in the city. The faint tang of cleaning solutions. Excitement radiated from her as she read him the details she’d pulled up on the laptop.
“It’s one of Canaletto’s early works. Commissioned by a Venetian doge and seized by Napoleon as part of the spoils of war after he invaded Venice in 1797. It reportedly hung in his study at the Tuileries Palace, then disappeared sometime before or during a fire in 1871.”
She scrolled down the page. She was in full research mode now, inhaling every detail with the same eagerness the hound did pilsner.
“The painting disappeared for almost a half a century, until it turned up again in the early ’30s in the private collection of a Swiss industrialist. He died in 1953 and his squabbling heirs auctioned off his entire collection. At that point… Look!”
She stabbed a finger at the screen. Dom bent closer.
“At that point,” she recited eagerly, “it was purchased by an agent acting for the Grand Duke of Karlenburgh.”
She swiveled around, almost tilting the laptop off her knees in her eagerness. Her face was alive, her eyes bright with the thrill of discovery.
“The Grand Duke of Karlenburgh,” she repeated. “That was you, several times removed.”
“Many times removed.”
Despite his seeming insouciance, the connection couldn’t be denied. It wove around him like a fine, silken thread. Trapping him. Cocooning him.
“The painting was a gift from the duke to his duchess,” he related, remembering the mischievous look in Charlotte’s eyes. “To commemorate a particularly pleasant visit to Venice.”
Natalie’s face went blank for a moment, then lit with excitement. “I remember hearing that story! Venice is where she got pregnant, right? With her only child?”
“Right.”
They were so close, her mouth just a breath away from his, that Dom couldn’t help himself. He had to drop a kiss on those tantalizing lips.