one better.”
“Course there isn’t! I’m the bleedin’ messiah of fabric. But in twelve hours? And wifout an assistant?”
“Don’t tell me you’re losing your touch, old friend.” Joseph gave Allan’s arm a squeeze.
“I don’t know what’s sadder,” Allan sighed. “That you’re stiww using ‘ose crap lines on me, or ‘at they stiww bloody work.”
“That’s the spirit!” Joseph clapped Allan on the back hard enough to make him cough out a mint.
Allan took a few steps back and eyed me like one of the gallery’s spectators, thumb and forefinger pinching his dimpled chin. His gaze traveled the length of my neck, past my chest, and snagged on my hips for a moment before sliding down my legs. “Right,” he said. “Sleeveless corset bodice, fuww skirt. Satin, not silk.”
“Nothing too low cut,” was Mark’s first and only offering in this conversation.
“And why not?” I asked.
“The guests at the state dinner will either want to eat you, fuck you, or murder you. Some of them will want to do all three, and in an order that wouldn’t please you.”
“Oh, lighten up,” Allan said. “Been at least twen’y years since someone snuffed it at one of ‘ese dinners.”
“Why am I not wildly comforted by this statistic?” I asked.
Allan laced his arm through mine and urged me toward the door. “Don’t worry, love. You’re more likely to be killed from boredom dan disemboweling.”
Just what I had been hoping to hear.
Chapter 13
The gray dawn broke over Mark’s face through the private jet’s small porthole window. Shadows lingered in some of my favorite places: the underside of his stubbled jaw, the crease where his shapely lips met, the expanse of smooth skin where his silky, dark-chocolate colored hair fell across his forehead. Dark lashes rested against his cheekbones. His broad chest rose and fell beneath his tailored button-up shirt in time with the slow breaths of deep sleep. Considering his impossible beauty as he slept made all that had transpired between us seem like something out of a Surrealist painting. Events that might have occurred in a parallel universe.
Those lips had kissed me. His teeth had been bared at me, and for me. I knew what the body beneath those clothes looked like naked, covered in the sweat of passion. And blood.
I’d been watching him for the better part of an hour, courtesy of seats that faced each other, yet another aspect of this journey I’d have to get used to.
That, and being called My Lady. Hearing Mark addressed as Your Highness by the flight crew had been one thing. To have them fall at my feet and wash my stiletto boots with their tears was something else entirely.
An heir, they’d said. Alive. A miracle!
Me? A miracle? A mess seemed far more accurate.
Mark’s long fingers began to twitch, peddling in the air. His eyelids fluttered. His shoes scuffled along the jet’s deep blue carpet.
My mouth broadened into a smile. Wolf dreams.
“My Lady, we’ll be touching down in Edinburgh in a half hour.” An attendant with a crisp white shirt and navy skirt leaned into view.
“Valerie,” I said, glancing at her nametag, “please, call me Hanna.”
Panic creased her pretty features. “Oh, Your Highness, I couldn’t possibly—”
“You really can, I promise.”
Her young, pink cheeks lifted into a smile. “Lady Hanna, can I bring you anything? A hot towel? Coffee? Tea?”
“Oh my gawd. I’d kiww for a cuppa, love.” Across the aisle, Allan pushed his glasses up on his head and rubbed at his eyes. “And troof be towd, I’d give you me firstborn for a hot towel.”
Valerie straightened and tucked a few stray hairs back into her chignon. “Lord Ede, that won’t be necessary.”
“Good. Cause I ain’t got a firstborn and ain’t likely to sire any pups any time soon.”
“Back in a moment.” Valerie bustled up the aisle with the steadiness of a woman used to remaining steadfastly upright even in the worst of turbulence.
Would that I could do the same.
“Did you get some sleep?” I asked, stretching my legs as best I could while still buckled into my seat.
“Not enough,” Allan answered, yawning widely. “How you howdin’ up?”
I arched my back and reached for the jet’s ceiling releasing a totally unsexy series of pops and cracks. “Not too bad.”
“Wiww you look ‘ese two?” Allan asked, glancing at Joseph and Mark in their matching reclining satyr sprawls. “Sleep like the dead, they do. And the snoring!”
“I know, right? Joseph too?” I asked.
“I’d rather sleep next to a jet engine turbine,” Allan said, shaking his head.
“Mark too!” I said. “When we