Johan’s stomach knotted with trepidation as Tracy rushed through the door and into Marina’s private quarters.

“Hold on.” He reached for her arm, stopping her from charging into potential danger.

Tracy twisted to face him with a look of excitement—and a touch of frustration—in her eyes. “What? It’s just some middle-aged woman’s apartment.”

Johan pressed his lips into a line, reaching for the light switch as he entered the apartment behind here. “I thought investigative journalists were supposed to be cautious.”

Tracy laughed, stepping deeper into the front room and looking around. “Definitely not. Inquisitive and restless is more like it.” She headed off to the kitchen on the left.

In spite of himself, Johan’s mouth twitched into a grin. “Well, be a little more cautious for me.”

“Okay,” she called back. He had the feeling she hadn’t really heard him. “Hey, look at this.”

There would be time later to lecture Tracy on being less reckless. Johan marched into the kitchen, where he found Tracy standing next to an impeccably clean counter with a few state-of-the-art appliances in perfect order, holding a cell phone. He frowned as she handed it to him, the screen already lit, asking for a thumbprint ID to open.

“It’s Aunt Marina’s phone,” he said.

“It explains why no one could get in touch with her, but why would she leave it here?” Tracy asked. “What sane person in the twenty-first century goes anywhere without their cell phone?”

“Maybe she forgot it?” Johan asked, not believing it himself.

Tracy shifted her weight to one hip, planted her hands on her hips, and scanned the kitchen. “I don’t think she was kidnapped. There don’t seem to be any signs of struggle.”

“I think we’ve had enough of kidnapping to last a lifetime,” Johan drawled, setting the phone back on the counter. “There must be some other clue to where she’s gone, though.”

Tracy’s gaze met his. “Could she still be here?”

Johan rolled his shoulders uneasily, then called, “Aunt Marina?” He headed out of the kitchen, Tracy following him, and crossed from the front room to the large living room with giant windows that looked out on a picturesque view of Solrighavn and the bay beyond. “Aunt Marina?”

“She doesn’t entertain much,” Tracy said behind him.

Johan made it to the back of a custom-designed, modern sofa before turning to her with a slight frown. “What makes you say that?”

Tracy nodded around the room. “It looks like a show home. Fancy furniture, books, art. But no coasters, nothing that would invite people to sit on the furniture. And everything is in precise places.”

“Huh.” Johan scanned the room with new eyes. “I think you might be right.” In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d visited Marina at home. He didn’t think any of his other brothers had either, except maybe Arne. They socialized as a family in other parts of the palace.

Tracy moved to one of the bookshelves to check out the titles, but the itch that was beginning to form between Johan’s shoulder blades kept him moving. He left the living room and headed down the hall. Marina’s apartment had three bedrooms, but one was set up as an office. He walked right past that to her bedroom. There was an outside chance his aunt was taking a nap.

But when he knocked on the half-open door, then pushed it all the way open, the bedroom was as empty and well-kept as the living room. The scent of Marina’s perfume lingered in the air, though, giving the bedroom a greater sense of being lived in than the other rooms. Through the open door to the en suite bathroom, he could see a towel draped over a rack, looking like it’d been recently used. But the bed was neatly made, and the items on the dresser were perfectly arranged.

Items on the dresser. Johan frowned and moved closer to investigate. Rather than keeping it in a jewelry box, the majority of Marina’s necklaces, bracelets, and rings were displayed on stands and hooks. He’d seen her wear most of it before, but since things like that had never interested him, it’d barely registered. Seeing it now, looking like highlights from a jewelry store, piqued his curiosity. His aunt liked gold, but it was more than that. Almost every piece was set with a precious stone of some sort. A few of the larger necklaces were the sort of thing women wore to galas, but even the stuff he’d seen her wear every day had rubies, sapphires, emeralds, or diamonds worked into them.

“Ooh, that’s pretty.” Tracy stepped up beside him, reaching for a necklace made of emeralds that were set to look like leaves. “This must have cost a fortune.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Johan said, sounding far grimmer than he’d intended.

Tracy sent him a curious look, letting go of the necklace. “Your family is royalty. Don’t you have a fortune?”

His frown deepened, and he turned to survey the rest of the room. “We’re not hurting for cash,” he began slowly. “But most of our toys actually belong to the state—the yacht, the palace, half the cars. We all have income from our jobs, but it’s not enough to splurge on a treasure trove like this.”

Understanding dawned in Tracy’s eyes. “So where do you think Marina got all this jewelry? Does her job pay that much?”

A small, framed photograph on the bedside table caught Johan’s eye. “I doubt it,” he said, crossing to the table to get a better look.

“Does she have a boyfriend or someone who would give all this to her?”

The question came at an oddly precise time. He was about to answer that no, Marina hadn’t dated anyone since breaking up with Earl Herman Lindqvist years ago, when he realized what the photograph was. He picked it up and stared at it to be sure. It was a casual, candid shot of Marina in a sleek bathing suit on a tropical beach, smiling, a sunset in the background, and she had her arms around none other than Herman Lindqvist—who should never have been caught on film wearing a banana hammock. But there he was.

“So she does have a boyfriend,” Tracy said, looking at the picture over his shoulder.

“No.” Johan ran his free hand through his hair. “Marina and Earl Lindqvist broke up years ago.”

“Uh, no they didn’t.” Tracy reached around his arm to point at something in the background of the photograph. In the distance, a row of boardwalk buildings displayed signs in French. A banner was hanging in front of one of them that announced a fête and included the year. The current year. “This picture was taken recently.”

The knot in Johan’s stomach tightened. He stared at the picture for a few seconds more before handing it to Tracy. His thoughts roiled, but the only one that made it through his lips was, “They’re still together?”

He walked back to the dresser, scanning the jewelry before pulling open the top drawer and rifling through the underwear. A deep unease filled him, and with it, his suspicions rose. He wasn’t simply searching for clues to where his aunt had gone anymore. Something else was going on, and he needed to figure out what it was. There had to be more connecting Marina to Lindqvist, and he needed to find it.

“I think you’d look good in one of these,” Tracy said, an incongruous note of teasing in her voice.

“In what?” He glanced distractedly over his shoulder to her.

“One of those Speedos.” She put the photo down and swayed across the room to him. Her eyes flashed with mischief. Johan barely had time to turn around and face her before she had him pinned to the dresser, her hands brushing his lapels, then traveling lower.

Investigation? What investigation? He stretched into a lazy grin, resting his arms around her waist. “I’ll put on a suit like that, but I’m not going out in public with it.”

“Oh, I don’t need you in public.” She flickered her eyebrow.

“Yeah, the public has never really helped things between us,” he flirted right back.

“We do much better on our own.” She giggled—not a girlish sound, but a low, deep vibration that hinted at much more—and pressed in to kiss him….

Six weeks earlier….

Johan paced the airport lounge with quick, impatient steps. How long did it take a plane to land, taxi, and connect at the gate anyhow? He hadn’t received a text or phone call from Tracy in more than eight hours, and he was going into withdrawal.

“Calm down, will you?” Viggo laughed at him from the leather chair that faced out to the runway, flipping through a magazine. “You’re not going to speed the process along by wearing a hole in the carpet.”

“Spoken like a man who has never been in love,” Johan shot back to him. A second later, he caught the odd, pinched expression on Viggo’s face. “Sorry. That was stupid. Of course you’ve been in love.” Viggo’s relationship with Rebecca might have been a childish fling, even though they had a son together, but his brother had to have had some sort of feelings for the other women he’d dated, however briefly.

Rather than getting his nose out of joint, Viggo grinned. “I’m more surprised that you’re saying you’re in love.” He tossed his magazine aside and stood. “Didn’t you just meet this woman once?”

Johan could feel the flush coming to his cheeks and hated it. His twin would never let him live down losing his head over a girl, especially one who had been an ocean and a continent away for the past two weeks.

“We’ve kept in touch,” he said. “Texts, Skype, you know.”

“Skype, eh?” Viggo’s smirked. “You two, uh, do anything, you know, digitally.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

The heat rushing to Johan’s face was like fire. The same sort of fire that’d kept him up for most of the night after his last video chat with Tracy before her return. Because yeah, things had gotten a little…interesting in their Skype session.

He was spared having to confess to webcam shenanigans when the door that led from the skywalk to the VIP lounge slid open. Suddenly, everything was forgotten. There she was, looking disheveled, bleary-eyed, jet-lagged, and even more beautiful than she’d looked backstage at the concert weeks before. Johan instantly ignored Viggo and rushed to pull her into his arms.

It didn’t matter that they’d only spent less than an hour physically in each other’s presence. He felt as though he’d known her his entire life. They’d been in each other’s pockets—literally, if you counted cell phones, and virtually—for more than two weeks now. Holding her at last was magical.

“Hello to you too,” she laughed, hugging him back.

The way she rested her weight against him hinted at how tired she was, but that only made Johan want her more. She was here now. He could look out for her. He could help her start the new life she’d been talking about, a new life that might just include him. He didn’t care who else was in the lounge, without hesitation, he kissed her deeply and thoroughly, molding her body against his and sighing with relief as their tongues twined.

It was the sound of a camera clicking that brought him back to his senses. They weren’t alone after all. A pack of American businessmen had poured through the sliding door behind Tracy, and even more travelers were watching them from the other side of the glass wall separating the lounge from the skywalk. And there he was, his arms wrapped around Tracy, their lips locked, and her leg hiked up over his hip…although when that had happened he couldn’t quite remember.

“Uh, maybe the two of you should wait for all that until we’re back at the house,” Viggo said, laughter clear in his voice.

Slowly, Johan and Tracy disentangled themselves and stepped back to stand on their own power.

“I’m happy to see you too,” Tracy laughed. “But your brother’s right.” She nodded to the crowd now watching them. “We don’t need to do this in public.”

Face red, he took Tracy’s hand and headed toward the door on the other side of the lounge that led to passport control and customs. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t share that pic with the press,” he told the man who’d snapped their pic with his camera.

“Press?” The man blinked. “Why would the press be interested?”

Beside him, Tracy burst into a snorting giggle. Apparently, the businessman didn’t know much about Aegirian royalty. And that was just fine with him.

“Let’s get you home,” he said to Tracy with a wink.

Present day….

Johan broke the kiss and leaned away from Tracy. It took far more effort to move his hand off her ass, but they were in the middle of an investigation.

“The only thing stopping me from picking you up and tossing you on that bed over there is the fact that this is my aunt’s room,” he said, humor creeping into his voice.

“Yeesh.” Tracy made a grossed-out noise and backed away from him. She followed that with a laugh. “But hey, at least we wouldn’t have an audience.”

“How do you know I don’t perform better in front of a crowd?” he teased. They had work to do. He shouldn’t let himself get distracted. But being with Tracy made it hard to concentrate on anything but the electricity that had sizzled between them from day one.

“Believe me.” She sent him a sideways look as they left the bedroom. “I don’t want to do things like that in front of anyone.”

His heart felt light, which helped the knots in his stomach, as they walked back down the hall. But his mood shifted back to investigative mode as they passed the door to Marina’s office. On instinct, he stopped and backtracked to peer into the room.

“Something in there?” Tracy asked, taking a few backward steps to look with him.

“There might be.” He walked in, flicking on the light.

The advantage of living in the palace for most members of the royal family was that they could have their business offices inside of their personal quarters. It meant less daily interference and more security. It also meant that they didn’t have to be careful about leaving stuff lying around. Marina’s office looked like any other on the surface. As with the rest of her apartment, she was neat and organized. Her bookshelves were arranged precisely, and the papers that sat out on her desktop were in perfect stacks. In lieu of a larger computer, a sleek laptop sat on the center of the desk. Johan walked around to open it.

“Password protected,” he said when the screen lit.

“Any idea what the password would be?” Tracy asked.

He shrugged. “Not a clue.”

Tracy hummed in disappointment. There was a brief pause, then she picked up the topmost paper on the stack beside the laptop. “What exactly does your aunt do again?”

“She’s my mother’s chief advisor,” he said. “Or at least she has been. Now that job will fall to Dr. Hayes. But Marina will still have a lot of influence on policy and governance. She was a governmental minister before Father died, and I’m sure she’ll go back to that. She worked in the same department I work in, actually, Trade and Commerce.”

He’d rambled far longer than he should have, but only because Tracy had remained silent as she stared at the paper. Finally, she said, “A government job.”

“Yes,” Johan answered slowly.

“Marina works in the government.” Tracy still stared at the paper.

“That’s what I said.” He wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

Until she turned the paper to face him. “Then what’s Storm Holdings, Ltd.?”

Johan frowned as he took the paper from her. It wasn’t so much the company name that grabbed his attention as what the paper actually contained. It was a financial statement. A financial statement that showed a massive profit. Not just a massive profit, but one that had been gained by sales of crude oil.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “There isn’t a Storm Holdings that’s licensed to trade oil in Aegiria.”

“There isn’t?” Tracy picked up another paper from the desk. “For a company that doesn’t exist, they’re turning quite a profit.”

Johan put his paper down and glanced at the one Tracy had, as well as the rest in the stack. There weren’t just financial statements there. As he sifted through the papers that had been left out, he found projections, bank statements, and receipts. Whatever Storm Holdings was, they were engaged in a thriving trade with several African nations.

“Why does Marina have all this?” he wondered aloud.

“Could she have been investigating these guys?” Tracy suggested. “I mean, you said she used to work in Trade and Commerce before she became your mother’s chief advisor. Maybe she’s gearing up to go back to that job.”

“Possibly,” Johan said, rubbing his chin. But something still didn’t feel right. “She hasn’t said anything to me about it at all. You’d think if she was returning to a job where the two of us would be working together, she’d want my input on all this.”

“Do you investigate companies and stuff?”

“Not exactly. I may be a prince, but I’m extremely junior in the ranks of the T&C Department. I know more than the average Aegirian about national companies, foreign investment in Aegiria, and who our trading partners are.” He touched the pile of papers. “I wasn’t aware any of us were trading with Côte D’Ivoire, though.”

“Huh. Weird.” Tracy crossed her arms, studying the rest of the desktop as though looking for more clues. “I wonder why your aunt would have all this stuff then.”

“I don’t know,” Johan answered with a sigh. He was beginning to have his suspicions, though. People didn’t keep financial records of companies they had no stake in lying around on their desk. His mind instantly jumped back to all the jewelry he’d seen on Marina’s dresser. It was too easy to link the two in his mind, to assume that the income from the company he’d never heard of was the source of the money Marina had used to buy her jewelry. But as far as he knew, that was pure speculation brought on because he’d discovered two things within such a short amount of time.

“Well,” Tracy said when they’d both been silent for several seconds. “Do you want to keep poking around here or do you want to go back to the reception and tell your brothers what we’ve found?”

He winced, rubbing a hand over his face. In truth, he wanted to turn Marina’s apartment upside down looking for more information about Storm Holdings or Earl Lindqvist. Lindqvist was a whole other facet to the problem that might or might not fit. It felt as though everything had to be connected somehow, even though he couldn’t imagine what the connection could be.

“We’d better tell the others Marina isn’t here, at least,” he said, pushing away from the desk and starting toward the door. “But now more than ever, I think it’s important that we figure out where she is.”