Right. Because he wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.

She hadn’t been the ditzy American tourist she’d led him to believe when they’d met. She’d been a newly trained operative, working for the United States government on her first assignment. In the words of James Bond, she had been a spy.

Not a very good one, she could admit now. She’d botched the assignment from the beginning. Fortunately, the only items of value on the line had been Calandrian artifacts, not lives. Not until she’d thought she’d seen her lover die.

“Allow me to start at the beginning,” he said, his voice low and slightly accented.

She was willing to admit she remembered that voice. If she closed her eyes and simply listened to the words, it would be easy to believe, to get lost in a confusing mist of past and present. She almost wanted to-because back then her choices had been the relatively simple right and wrong. Now everything was complicated.

“My cousin Diego never accepted the fact that due to an ancient rule and a quirk of birth order, he would not rule Calandria. As he grew older, he vowed his revenge, on whom I do not know. Perhaps on the country herself. No one could reason with him, not even me, but we were, until our early twenties, close.”

“But if you’re the heir”-a fact she wanted confirmed by a reliable outside source, because thinking about it was just too crazy-“wouldn’t he have resented you the most?”

“In a way he did. Yet we were friends. No matter how I tried to make Diego feel welcome, to give him something to do in our government, he remained bitter. He turned his energy to researching our ancient past and discovered a treasure trove of antiquities just beyond the waves. That discovery itself could have made him a very famous and wealthy man, but for Diego, it wasn’t enough. Instead of announcing his find, he kept the knowledge secret and sold the jewels and artifacts on the black market.”