Finding Chris Evans: The Royal Edition (3 page)

“I could,” she agreed, amiably enough.
How long was this lunatic staying?
He had no idea of the work his suggestions would take. And there was still that paperwork sitting on her desk, beckoning to her to face her own truths.

Cris’s enthusiasm didn’t wane as she opened the doors. “This barn! Tell me there is electricity.”

“I really don’t…”

He stepped past her and threw the switch on the wall. Sure enough, lights flickered on.

LeeAnn’s throat tightened as she blinked in the dim glow, her mind suddenly flooded with memories. She’d come up to the inn every year as a little girl. Back then the barn had been open, filled with old equipment and her grandfather’s half-completed projects. Then her grandpa had died, her parents had divorced and her dad hadn’t done much of anything but keep the inn afloat for several years, all while LeeAnn was in college getting a business degree she had no idea how to use once she graduated.

She’d never planned on returning to Haralson, Minnesota, though. Not when so much was out there waiting to be explored.

Then her dad had gotten sick the summer after her senior year, and it’d seemed natural to come home to help.

But her dad had never recovered. Instead, the inn and all its memories had been left to LeeAnn, and she’d found herself following in the family footsteps—doing as much as she could to keep it afloat, with no energy left over for anything more.

“This is outstanding!” Cris’s shout brought her back to the moment, and she squinted at him through the dust motes dancing in the air. Even his men were grinning, ranging out through the tight corridors between enormous tarp-covered mounds. “The ceilings of this room are nearly fifteen feet high.” He pointed. “What’s up there?”

One of his men spoke from the back of the chamber, and though she couldn’t translate, she heard his feet on the stairs.

“Be careful!” she shouted, but Cris merely laughed, dashing toward the sound.

“Stairs, he says. Wooden stairs leading up to a loft. Clean out this area here, refurbish the loft as an apartment, and you’d have a year-round studio for an artist or photographer. A new income stream, eh?”

LeeAnn shook her head as his laughter floated down. Granted, the place wasn’t as messy as she’d feared it would be after so many years. She pulled off a few of the tarps, smiling as Cris and his men traded comments in their native language. There was the Model-T her grandfather had never been able to part with, the antique canoe her dad had been refinishing since she’d been a little girl. The dust on the floor was easily an inch thick, but the treasures they’d carefully hidden away remained pristine, perfect. Trapping her every bit as much as the inn did, in the snow globe of her early childhood.

How could she leave this place, when everything her dad and grandpa loved was here? She’d have to find some way to re-up the lease for another five years. Maybe then she could leave and travel, as she’d always planned to do.

Maybe.

“Oh!” Cris was suddenly beside her again. He breathed another word like a benediction, but she couldn’t decipher it. “What is this you have here?”

He stood with another of the tarps in his grasp, his jaw agape. LeeAnn followed his gaze, and chuckled as she realized the object of his focus. “That’s grandpa’s old motorbike,” she said with a fond smile. “He loved that thing, but it doesn’t really handle all that well.”

“Doesn’t handle…” Cris swung around to her, his eyes wide. “This is an MV Augusta 750s! Do you have any idea how extraordinary that is?”

“Umm…” LeeAnn took the tarp he pushed at her, then it was her turn to stare as Cris knelt down almost reverentially beside the bike.

“These bikes, they’re very rare. And this one—it’s in such good condition. What year is it, a ’72?”

“I have no idea. Grandpa mostly complained about the fact that it broke down all the time.”

“It is a legend! Built in Italy, did you know? And it doesn’t have a lip on the crankcase—that is…that is unbelievable. The seat is wrong—the original MVs had no room for another passenger, but that is easily fixed. The rest…it’s perfect.” Cris’s voice had turned awed, and LeeAnn couldn’t help laughing.

“Well, it hasn’t been ridden in…” She cast her gaze toward the ceiling, trying to remember. “Ten years, maybe. So I have no idea if it even runs.”

“It runs. It must. We need gas, oil.” Cris peered beyond the bike at the collection of canisters, and LeeAnn lifted her hands.

“No—no way. That gasoline is as old as the dust in this place and you do not want to use it. Trust me.”

Cris apparently agreed with her, because he turned to one of his men, rattling off instructions in his native tongue. The man left at a run, and his shout drew two of the others down, their faces lighting up with surprise as they drew near the bike.

“What language are you speaking, Greek?” she asked, and Cris was so distracted that he muttered under his breath.

“Garronois,” he said, then leaned forward before she could ask anything further, speaking rapidly to his men.

Garronois?
She’d never heard of that language. Was it some sort of Greek dialect? Maybe a little province inside the country? Making a mental note to check later, she turned with a sigh toward the rest of the barn. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to pull Cris away from the bike, but no sooner had she taken a step deeper into the gloom than he popped up again.

“It will take awhile for Rico to return with supplies, but in the meantime, we work! You’ve given us an easy task with so many treasures to uncover. First we must clean these floors though, then the walls.” He glanced around. “Then the windows. It’s so dark in here.”

“They’re covered over.” LeeAnn showed him how to pull down the tarps with a minimum of effort, and Cris grinned as light flooded into the barn.

“Direct us!” he commanded. “We’re at your service.”

Rico returned an hour later with the oil and gas, and by then his men had cleared maybe a quarter of the large stone room with a combination of shop vacs and push brooms, all under LeeAnn’s bemused direction. She clearly had no idea what she had in this place, Cristopoulis thought. He had no understanding of anything but the MV, but he suspected the other pieces were worth something as well.

LeeAnn seemed unfazed by it, but then, wherever she looked, he suspected she only saw more work. Even his suggestions of renovating the barn into a living quarters drew a weary nod from her, and her eyes were sad. How could she not see the beauty in every stone and turned rail? The barn had been crafted back when building had mattered, its craftsmanship a rarity during his sojourn through the US thus far, at least outside of major cities.

Now she was frowning at him as Rico walked through the large barn doors with his box of supplies. “Cris, that bike should be overhauled by a mechanic.”

“A mechanic,” he scoffed. “Did your grandfather trust it to a mechanic?”

“Well, no. He didn’t trust it with anyone.”

“And neither should you.” He winked. “Except me. And I will take exceptional care of it.”

She shook her head and left him, grabbing one of the brooms and retreating as his men crowded around.

“My father contacted you, I assume?” Cristopoulis asked Rico, his voice low, though of course LeeAnn couldn’t understand what he was saying.

Rico nodded as he handed Cristopoulis the oil. “The season is well underway, and most of the outrage has passed. He thinks you can leave the US, but perhaps not travel directly to Garronia for awhile yet. Another month, maybe two and you can be seen again without causing a public outcry.”

“Comforting,” Cristopoulis said. “How quickly they forget.”

“Not so quickly as all that,” another of his men put in. “They’re losing without you.”

Cristopoulis snorted. “I noticed.”

Rico grinned. “But it’s nothing that they are not used to, the Greeks. Losing comes naturally to them.”

The wry comment provoked laughter and more off-color comments, but their focus was on the bike, and within another half-hour, they’d turned over the engine, the deep, throaty roar of it filling the barn as a thick puff of smoke poured out the back.

“Enough—enough!” LeeAnn returned, pointing urgently toward the door of the barn. “Don’t start it inside!”

“Agreed!” Cristopoulis was already wheezing from the smoke, but in truth he hadn’t known if the antique would even start, despite his bold claim to LeeAnn. He cut the engine and pushed the bike outside, then pointed at her. “You have work to do at the cottages, no?”

“Always,” she said, her tone a little wary.

“Then come, we should go together.”

“Sir,” Rico said in Garronois. “You know the rules.”

Cristopoulis grinned back at him but his words were pointed. “I’m on a motorcycle with a woman driving up a deserted road. I’m pretty sure no one will disturb me—or even know I’m here. Relax, Rico. We’re leaving soon enough.”

His head bodyguard didn’t look happy, but he stood down. “We’ll track you, then,” he said. “If you leave the road too far, we’ll follow.”

“Very well.”

In truth, Cristopoulis didn’t want to be obnoxious to his men. His bodyguard contingent had accepted this exile in Nowhere, Minnesota without so much as a murmur of complaint. He tried not to make their lives any more difficult, though he knew they made regular reports to his father, Count Matretti, brother to Queen Catherine. As the US ambassador from Garronia, the count hadn’t wanted anyone to know he’d stashed his trouble-making son in the heart of America’s wilderness.

It had been a good plan, too. Until the blonde had shown up in the garden of the Werth Inn yesterday morning, Cristopoulis hadn’t thought anyone had noticed him. Nothing like being a football star in a country who played an entirely different type of football.

And, it
did
appear that tempers were cooling on the home front, though he didn’t expect he’d be welcomed back in Greece anytime soon.

Maybe Turkey needed a walk-on? He chuckled to himself. That would go over well.

Rico handed him a leather jacket they’d also found in the barn, and gave one to LeeAnn as well. Cristopoulis reseated himself on the bike as she looked at him dubiously. “I have a car for making the cabin checks,” she said. “I should probably take that.”

“I insist,” he said with a grin. “This will be far more of an adventure.”

“But I have no helmets.” She held up the jacket. “This won’t protect your head.”

“We won’t be going fast, I promise,” he said. “And the road is isolated, yes? A dead end?”

She grimaced. “I hate that expression.” Still, she stepped forward and looked around at his men. “Thank you so much for your work, but you don’t need to do anymore. I’m sure it’s exhausting.”

“You’re good to continue?” Cristopoulis asked in Garronois as Rico glanced to him.

Rico shrugged. “It’s not so bad as she makes it seem. Another hour and we’ll be done, perhaps two if there’s a second bike.”

“Excellent. Finish up, I’ll make sure you’re compensated.”

Rico rolled his eyes. The men were being paid a king’s ransom to babysit him this summer, more than three times what they earned in the Garronia National Security Force. Captain Dimitri Korba hadn’t been happy to see them go, but he’d understood that the wishes of the royal family were an unstoppable force in their tiny seaside kingdom. “I think we’ll find some way to manage,” Rico said drily.

LeeAnn slid onto the seat behind Cristopoulis—the seat was an abomination, to be frank, not at all the original spec for the bike. He glanced down, then back to Rico.

“I bet the right seat is in the garage somewhere,” he said, this time in English. “Find it if you can?”

Rico nodded and Cristopoulis started the bike again with a throaty roar. LeeAnn squeaked, crowding closer on the back of the bike. As she threw her arms around him, Cristopoulis began to understand her grandfather’s rationale in swapping out the MV’s original iconic but definitely one-person seat.

The tour of the mountain road was more enjoyable than anything he’d done in the past few months, with LeeAnn pointing out the tiny lanes that stretched back to where each cottage stood. Most of the cottages were occupied for multi-week rentals, so she did little more than survey the exteriors and double check the license plates of the cars parked in the tidy drives. The last house, though, far up on the ridge, was different.

“Stop for a minute?” she shouted, and he nodded, cutting the MV’s engine. It gave a funny little hiss, and he frowned down at the machine as she hopped off the back. Her hands went immediately to her hair, shaking it out of its top knot and untangling the wind-whipped ends.

“I need to check inside. The renters left yesterday and it looks like the cleaning people have been here. I’ll be only a minute.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said, dismounting the bike and pushing it to a nearby tree.

She lifted her brows as he turned back to her. “I’ve been doing this alone for five years. There’s no danger.”

“Then I won’t need you to protect me,” he said amiably, but he still fell into step with her. “What is this one called?” he asked.

“Swan Cottage.” Her voice carried a strange timbre, but she moved up the stairs so quickly, he couldn’t see her face. “There’s a little pond out back where some of the trumpeter swans like to swim. We use it for honeymooning couples, people looking for a romantic getaway, that sort of thing.”