Читать книгу Matched to a Prince - Kat Cantrell - Страница 10

Four

Grit scraped at Juliet’s eyeballs. She tried to lift a hand to rub them. And couldn’t.

Heavy fog weighed down her brain. Something was wrong. She couldn’t see and her hands weren’t working. Or her arms.

Rapid blinking didn’t improve her eyesight. It was so dark.

She never drank enough alcohol to be this fuzzy about her current whereabouts...and how she’d gotten there...and what had happened prior to.

“Juliet. Can you hear me?” Finn’s voice. It washed over her, tripping a hodgepodge of memories, most of them X-rated.

Finn’s voice in the dark equaled one activity and one activity only. Pleasure, the feel of his skin on hers, urgency of the highest order to fly into the heavens with him—

Wait. What was Finn doing here?

“Yeah,” she mumbled thickly. “I hear you.”

Pain split through her brain the moment her jaw moved, cutting off her speech, her thoughts, even her breath. Inhaling sharply, she rolled to shift positions—or tried to.

Her muscles refused to cooperate. “What’s...going on?”

“Tranquilizer,” Finn explained grimly and spit out a nasty curse in French. “I think they must have used the same dose on both of us.”

The sinister-looking men. An unmarked van. The date with so much promise that ended badly. And then got worse.

Juliet groaned. “What? Why did they give us tranquilizers?”

“So they could snatch us without a fight,” Finn growled. “And they should be thanking their lucky stars they did. Otherwise I would have removed their spleens with a tire iron.”

Snippets of dinner with Finn flashed through her mind. Okay, good. So she hadn’t lost her memory and she wasn’t suffering from the effects of a hangover. “We were kidnapped? Stuff like that only happens in the movies.”

“Welcome to reality.” The heavy sarcasm meant he was frustrated. And maybe a little worried. That didn’t bode well. Finn always knew what to do.

Shifting along her right side indicated his general vicinity. Not too far away. “Can you move? Are we tied up?”

It was hard for her to tell. Everything was numb. That’s why she couldn’t move. She’d been drugged. And blinded, maybe forever.

What sort of scheme had she stumbled into simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong companion?

A strong, masculine hand smoothed hair from her face, throwing her back to another time and place where that happened with frequency.

“Nah,” Finn said. “They shot us up with enough narcotics that they didn’t need to tie us up. I’m okay. The cocktail didn’t affect me nearly as long as it did you.”

Gray invaded her vision and got lighter and lighter with each passing moment. Thank goodness. “Where are we?”

“Not sure. In a house of some sort. I was afraid to leave you alone in case you needed CPR, or the welcoming committee showed up, so I didn’t do more than look out the window.”

A fuzzy Finn swam through her eyesight, along with a few background details. White walls. Bed.

Finn held her hand. She squeezed, gratified that her fingers had actually responded, and then licked dry lips. “Guards?”

“Not that I can tell. I haven’t seen anyone since I regained consciousness.” Finn nodded to a door. “As soon as you can walk, we’ll see what’s what.”

“Help me sit up,” she implored him.

Finn’s arm came around her waist and she slumped against him. Two tries later, her legs swung off the bed and thumped to the floor.

Barefoot. Had they taken her shoes? She wasn’t even completely over the sticker shock at the price of those ivory alligator sandals and now they were probably in a Dumpster somewhere. And she’d actually kind of liked them.

“Now help me stand,” she said. Their captors might return at any moment and they both needed to be prepared. Sure Finn was stronger and better trained, but she was mad enough to take out at least one.

Finn shook his head. “There’s no prize for Fastest Recovery After Being Tranquilized. Take your time.”

“I want to get out of here. The faster we figure out what that’s going to take, the better.” Throbbing behind her eyes distracted her for a moment, but she ignored it as best she could. “How far do you think they took us from your hotel?”

Elise would be worried. Maybe she’d already called the police and even now, SWAT teams were tearing apart Dallas in search of Prince Alain.

Or...Elise might be smugly certain she’d staged the match of the century and assume they’d gotten so wrapped up in each other, Juliet had forgotten to call. The matchmaker probably didn’t realize they were missing yet.

“There’s only one way to find out where we are. Come on.” Finn took one step and her knees buckled.

Without missing a beat, he swept her up in his strong arms and she almost sighed at the shamefully romantic gesture.

Except he was still the Prince of Pigheadedness. Why had she ever thought she could marry him—even under the guise of changing Delamer policy from the inside?

Finn deposited her easily on the pale blue counterpane and kept a light but firm hand on her shoulder so she couldn’t sit up. “It’s early afternoon, if the daylight outside the window is any indication. We’ve probably been captives for about eighteen hours. The entire Delamer armed forces are likely already on their way to assist the local authorities. Stay here and I’ll go figure out the lay of the land.”

“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.