Her Unforgettable Royal Lover(45)

“Then we sat there, on that wall, and you told me about the castle before the Soviets came. About the balls and the hunting parties and the tree-lighting ceremony in the great hall. Everyone from the surrounding villages was invited, you said. On Christmas Eve. Uh…Heiliger Abend.”

“Ja, ja, Heiliger Abend.”

“When I mentioned that I’d met the duchess in New York, you told me that you remember when she came to Karlenburgh Castle as a bride. So young and beautiful and gracious to everyone, even the knock-kneed boy who helped tend the goats.”

She had to stop and catch her breath again. She could see the scene from last week so clearly now, every detail as though etched in glass. The weeds poking from the cracks in the road. The goats wandering through the rubble. This hunched-shouldered man in his gray felt hat, his gnarled hands folded atop the head of his walking stick, describing Karlenburgh Castle in its glory days.

“Then,” she said, the excitement piling up again, “I told you I was searching for a painting that had once hung in the Red Salon. You gave me a very hard look and asked why I, too, should want to know about that particular room after all these years.”

Everything was coming at her so fast and furiously and seemingly in reverse, like a DVD rewound at superhigh speed. The encounter with Herr Müller. The drive down from Vienna. A burning curiosity to see the castle ruins. The search for the Canaletto. Sarah and Dev. The duchess and Gina and the twins and Anastazia and meeting Dom for the first time in New York.

The rewind came to a screeching halt, stuck at that meeting with Dom. She could see his laughing eyes. His lazy grin. Hear his casual dismissal of the codicil and the title it conferred on him.

That was one of the reasons she’d returned to Vienna! Why she’d decided to make a day trip to view the ruins of Karlenburgh Castle, and why she’d been so blasted determined to track the missing Canaletto. She’d wanted to wipe that cynical smile off Dominic St. Sebastian’s face. Prove the validity of her research. Rub his nose in it, in fact. And, oh, by the way, possibly determine what happened to a priceless work of art.

And why, when the police tried to determine who she was and what she was doing in Budapest, the only response she could dredge from her confused mind was the Grand Duke of Karlenburgh!

With a fierce effort of will, she sidelined those tumultuous memories and focused on the goatherd. “I asked you who else had enquired about the Red Salon. Remember? You told me someone had come some months ago. And told you his name.”

“Ja.” His wrinkled face twisting in disgust, Müller aimed a thick wad of spittle at the ground. “Janos Lagy.”

Dom had been listening intently without interruption to this point, but the name the goatherd spit out provoked a startled response. “Janos Lagy?”

Natalie threw him a surprised glance but he whipped up a palm and stilled the question he saw quivering on her lips.

“Ja,” Müller continued in his thick, accented English. “Janos Lagy, a banker, he tells me, from Budapest. He tells me, too, he is the grandson of a Hungarian who goes to the military academy in Moscow and becomes a mladshij lejtenant in the Soviet Army. And I tell him I remember this lieutenant,” the goatherd related, his voice shaking with emotion. “He commands the squad sent to destroy Karlenburgh Castle after the Grand Duke is arrested.”

Dom mumbled something in Hungarian under his breath. Something short and terse and sounding very unnice to Natalie. She ached to ask him what he knew about Lagy but Herr Müller was just getting to the crux of the story he’d shared with her less than a week ago.

“When I tell this to the grandson, he shrugs. He shrugs, the grandson of this traitorous lieutenant, as if it’s of no matter, and asks me if I am ever in the Red Salon!”

The old man quivered with remembered rage. Raising his walking stick, he shook it in the air.

“I threatened to knock his head. He leaves very quickly then.”

“Jézus,” Dom muttered. “Janos Lagy.”

Natalie couldn’t contain herself. “You know him?”

“I know him.”

“How!”

“I’ll explain in the car, and you can tell me what you did with the information Friedrich gave you. But first…”

He probed for more information but when it was clear the goatherd had shared all he knew, he started to take a gracious leave. To his surprise and acute embarrassment, the old man grabbed his hand and kissed it.

“The Grand Duke and Duchess, they are still missed here,” he said with tears swimming in his eyes. “It’s good, what I read in the papers, that you are now duke. You’ll come back again? Soon?”