She gaped. Did the man have an ounce of sense? She had a loaded gun in her hand and he insisted on provoking her.
He moved around the end of the bar. Good God, she didn’t want to shoot him. She didn’t take lives. She saved them. And until he’d betrayed her she’d liked him. Maybe she could just maim him. But where? She considered her artery-avoiding options. “Don’t even think about it.”
He stopped his advance and leaned his hip against the counter. “I can think of nothing but the softness of your skin. Your scent. Your taste. That voracious mouth. The slick clench of your body as you drove me out of my mind. I have never desired a woman as I do you, Madeline. And we could be rediscovering that passion at this moment if you would put the gun down.”
Damn him and his low-pitched seductive voice. Arousal tumbled through her. How was that possible in this situation? She briefly closed her eyes—no more than a blink—as the images of last night inundated her, and in that split second Damon lunged forward. His long fingers latched around her wrist. He shoved her gun hand toward the ceiling and slammed his body into hers, backing her against the refrigerator door and forcing the breath from her lungs. The gun exploded with a deafening sound and bits of ceiling rained down.
She struggled, but Damon had her pinned like an insect on a collector’s board with his broad chest, his muscular h*ps and rock-hard thighs grinding against hers.
“Release the gun, Madeline,” he ordered calmly.
The hatch door rattled viciously.
“Release the gun,” he repeated this time with his warm breath and prickly morning stubble against her jaw. “I promise you are in no danger.”
There was nothing remotely sexy about wrestling for a gun, and yet there wasn’t an inch of him she couldn’t feel imprinted on her skin. Her traitorous brain remembered being this close to him just hours ago with nothing but a thin sheen of sweat between them. How dare her body betray her at this moment. She stiffened her softening muscles.
“As if I’d believe anything you say,” she muttered and tried to bow her spine to earn some breathing room.
“You have no choice.” There was a hard, commanding edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before.
Her hand started to go numb from the pressure he exerted on her radial nerve. Her grip loosened at the same time as the hatch splintered open. Over Damon’s shoulder she saw Ian charge in, leading with a small pistol.
“Stand down,” Damon called out. His big body blocked hers from his henchmen. He held up his hand, displaying the weapon he’d taken from her.
The other gun lay on the counter out of reach.
Damn. Damn. Damn. She’d let her guard down. Had her father been alive he would have been disappointed in her. Determined she would never be a victim of the kind of crimes he investigated, he’d drilled self-defense techniques into her once a week from the day he’d moved out.
“Ian, Makos, retrieve your weapons. Mademoiselle Spencer will be joining me in the captain’s cabin.”
“In your dreams, prince.” She practically spat his fake title.
“Give us a few moments and then we would like breakfast.” He grasped each of her arms and then lifted his weight and yanked her forward before transferring her wrists to one big hand behind her back. His long fingers compressed like a vise.
“Don’t make me tie you up,” he murmured in her ear. “Although we might enjoy that another time.”
“Bite me.”
“I would be more than happy to in the privacy of our cabin.” He turned her and steered her toward the cabin. Try as she might she could not wriggle free. Man, the guy was strong. And then he closed the door and locked it behind them. Damon released her.
She hustled to the far side of the room, scanning the surfaces for weapons and finding none. Not even a vase to crack over his head. But even if she incapacitated him she’d still have to deal with the two armed thugs in the other room.
He reached into his luggage, withdrew something and tossed it onto the bed. His passport fell open to the picture and her breath caught. As handsome as Damon was as a brunette, he was drop-dead gorgeous as a blond with his hair slicked back to reveal his amazing bone structure and those pale blue eyes.
She inched closer and snatched up the booklet. It named him as Prince Dominic Andreas Rossi de Montagnarde. Hair: blond. Eyes: blue. Height: six feet three inches. She did the math and came up with his age: thirty-five. She flipped through the pages and read stamped ports of entry from across the globe.
But the “passport” was a fake. It had to be. Princes didn’t pretend to be tour guides. They traveled with an entourage of toadying staff, and they didn’t hang out with commoners like her. She knew that much from CNN.
Was Damon some sort of charlatan who connived his way around the globe with a false title? With his looks, charm and sexual prowess he could swindle big-time. But he should focus on women with money. Maybe he thought she was loaded because she’d told him she’d be in Monaco an entire month.
“Recognize me now?” he asked.
“No. And it doesn’t matter anyway because once we dock I don’t ever want to see you again unless it’s to ID you in a police lineup.” She flung the documentation back onto the tangled sheets and tried not to recall how the linens had become so mussed.
“I am very sorry to hear that. Because I have not had my fill of you, Madeline. I find your company quite refreshing.”
“Too bad.” She paced the length of the cabin. “Okay, here’s the deal. Put me ashore and I’ll forget this ever happened. I won’t report you or your thugs.”
Not exactly the truth, but—
“Good try, but no.” Damon sat on the bed, stretched his legs out before him and leaned back against the headboard, looking as comfortable as he had in the middle of last night when he’d sat in the same spot and watched her shower through the open bathroom door. The memory of how he’d taken the towel from her and lapped the water from her skin afterward shortened her breath and tightened her n**ples. She turned her back and stared out the narrow window. Better that than look at his nak*d chest and remember what an idiot she’d been last night and what an idiot she was being right now by getting distracted by sex.
Wasn’t it just her luck that the best lover she’d ever had was a step lower on the slug meter than Mike? Her ex might have been a liar and a cheat, but as far as she knew he’d never broken the law or stooped to kidnapping.
Twenty tense, silent minutes later a knock on the door brought Damon to his feet. He let Ian and breakfast in and then relocked the door after the man left. Food was the last thing she wanted, but if she had to swim or run for it then she’d need whatever fuel she could get. She inched toward the tray while Damon pulled on a blue shirt with a gold crest on the pocket and traded his wrinkled pants for clean briefs and a pressed pair of khakis. He buttoned the shirt and tucked it in, adding a leather belt, and then he stepped into rubber-soled boat shoes. As a final touch he raked his hair back off his forehead with his fingers, exposing his aristocratic bone structure. In that getup he looked like one of the rich and famous. Very “yacht club” and a far cry from her tour guide-lover-kidnapper.
“You realize you have threatened the life of a monarch?” Damon asked casually as he spread cherry preserves on a croissant.
How long was he going to persist in that fairy-tale garbage? Grabbing a pastry with one hand, she flipped him a rude gesture with the other. She bit through the flaky crust and into the moist croissant, chewed, swallowed with inelegant haste until she’d consumed most of her breakfast-fuel supply.
He finished his with less speed, poured a cup of coffee and sipped. “The offense is punishable by imprisonment or death in my country.”
She nearly choked on her last bite of pastry and then gulped down the formerly butter-rich now tasteless wad. It hit her stomach like lead. His threat wasn’t funny. She’d been worried before, but this ratcheted up the tension in her muscles another ten notches. What exactly was she dealing with here? Because she didn’t believe for one second that he actually was royalty.
She eyed the coffee carafe and considered whacking him with it. Did it have enough weight to knock him out? And then what would she do? “We’re not in your country.”
“The Monaco authorities will be even less lenient.”
Other than a sick churning in her stomach she had no answer for that. She wished she’d used Ian’s cell phone to call Candace and Amelia and ask them to send the harbor police or whatever they were called.
Who would look after her mother if Madeline ended up not making it back to Charlotte? May Spencer wasn’t in fragile health yet, but she was seventy-eight. She didn’t travel well and flying made her seriously ill. Would she be able to handle a trip overseas to search for her missing daughter?
Don’t think like that. Damon hasn’t hurt you. In fact, he stepped between you and the goons’ guns twice. Surely if he intended to harm you he wouldn’t have? Or maybe she was worth more alive than dead.
“What do you want from me? I don’t have any money. My father is dead and my mother lives on a cop’s and a retired teacher’s pensions. Trust me, that’s a pittance. And I hear the U.S. doesn’t negotiate with terrorists.”
“I am neither a terrorist nor a kidnapper. I merely wish to continue our…assignations.”
Her mouth dropped open. Was he nuts? Of course he is. He thinks he’s a freaking prince. “You want to remain my tour guide?”
“I would prefer to be your companion and your lover for the remainder of your vacation and mine.”
The man had balls of steel and a pea-size brain. “I don’t do forced sex.”
His bearing snapped military straight and his aristocratic nose lifted. He had the arrogance thing down pat, and he even looked like royalty for a minute there. “I am neither a r**ist nor an extortionist. When you return to my bed, Madeline, it will be because you desire me as much as you did last night.”
How ungentlemanly of him to mention her enthusiasm. “Not going to happen.”
“Would you care to place a wager on that?” One corner of his mouth slanted upward.
Foot stomping overhead followed by the boat’s engine rumbling to life preempted her scathing reply—which was a good thing since she couldn’t think of one. She moved back to the window and saw the port of Monaco in the distance—swimmable distance if she could get out of this cabin and past the thugs who sounded like elephants overhead. She eyed the skylight in the ceiling, but there was no way she could reach it let alone get through it before Damon could grab her legs.
“We have reached the marina,” Damon stated.
Fifteen minutes later the sound of voices—more than had occupied the dock when they’d left—filtered through the closed windows. Damon looked outside and cursed. “Paparazzi. Along with the Sûreté Publique. Ian must have called for assistance.”
The police? Thank God. She pressed a palm to her chest.
He caught her shoulders and her gaze. “You will do exactly as I say when we disembark. I would not like to see you inadvertently injured.”