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But she wouldn’t.
She wouldn’t.
She wouldn’t, she told herself, and she tore her gaze from his and marched past him, through first class, through business class, into the confines of coach where the queue ground to a halt as people ahead searched for space in the crowded overhead bins and stepped on toes as they shoehorned themselves into their designated seats.
“Excuse me,” Anna said, “sorry, coming through, if I could just get past you, sir …”
At last she found her row and found, too, with no great surprise, that there was no room in the overhead bin for her carry-on. Which was worse? That she had to go four more seats to the rear before she found a place where she could jam it into a bin, or that she had to fight her way back like a salmon swimming upstream?
Or that the guy in the window seat bore a scary resemblance to Hannibal the cannibal, and the woman on the aisle was humming. No discernible melody. Just a steady, low humming. Like a bee.
Anna took a deep breath.
“Excuse me,” she said brightly, and she squeezed past the hummer’s knees, tried not to notice that part of Hannibal’s thigh was going to be sharing her space, shoved her bulging briefcase under the seat in front of her and folded her hands in her lap.
It was going to be a very long night.
At 30,000 feet, after the usual announcement that it was okay to use electronic devices, she hoisted the briefcase into her lap, opened it, took out her laptop, put down the foldout tray, plunked the machine on it and tapped the power button.
The computer hummed.
Or maybe it was the woman on the aisle. It was hard to tell.
The computer booted. The screen came alive. Wasting no time, Anna searched for and found the file she needed. Clicked on it and, hallelujah, there it was, the most recent document, a letter from Prince Draco Marcellus Valenti to her father.
The name made her snort.
So did the letter.
It was as stiffly formal as that ridiculous name and title, wreathed in the kind of hyperbole that would have made a seventeenth-century scribe proud.
One reading, and she knew what the prince would be like.
Old. Not just old. Ancient. White hair growing from a pink scalp. Probably growing out of his ears, too. She could a
lmost envision his liver-spotted hands clutching an elaborate cane. No, not a cane. He’d never call it that. A walking stick.
In other words, a man out of touch with life, with reality, with the modern world.
Anna smiled. This might turn out to be interesting. Anna Versus the Aristocrat. Heck, it sounded like a movie—
Blip.
Her computer screen went dark.
“No,” she whispered, “no …”
“Yup,” Hannibal said cheerfully. “You’re outta juice, little lady.”
Hell. Little lady? Anna glared at him. What she was, was out of patience with the male of the species … but Hannibal was only stating the obvious.
Why dump her anger on him?
Sure, she was ticked off by what had happened in the lounge, but her mood had been sour even before that.
It had all started on Sunday, after dinner at the Orsini mansion in Little Italy. Anna’s mother had phoned the previous week to invite her.
“I can’t come, Mom,” Anna had said. “I have an appointment.”
