Blood Royal (3 page)

She found herself more emotionally connected to the couple caressing each other across the aisle than to the man beside her. She lowered the music on her headset and snuggled back under her blanket again. Closing her eyes, she imagined herself across the aisle, in between the married couple.

His hand came to her under the blanket, warm and firm, impatiently clutching at the belt to her slacks. She undid her belt for him and unzipped her slacks, lifting up off of the seat a little so she could pull down her slacks and make it easier for his hand to slide in.

Her body trembled as his hand went between her legs and cupped her. As he began to gently stroke, her legs opened wider and her feminine juices awakened.

She sneaked her own hand across his lap and rubbed the bulge in his pants. She remembered how, when she was married, she liked to catch her husband unawares, guiding his penis out and before it became erect, feeling it grow in her mouth until it was full and hard.

Now she unzipped the man’s pants and used her fingers to open his shorts and release his organ. It sprang out of his pants, a beast of a thing, pulsating excitedly as it slipped out.

She grasped the hard stalk, surprised that he wasn’t circumcised. She had never had sex with a man who wasn’t, but it was a nice difference. A female friend had told her that the head of the penis of an uncircumcised man was extra-sensitive because it was ordinarily covered by the foreskin. Remembering that comment, she was careful as she pumped, sliding the foreskin over the head of his penis and back down again. She had an insane impulse to lean over and take his cock in her mouth and almost giggled aloud at the thought of what the flight attendant would think as she came by and saw a head job.

Enjoying the feel of his maleness in her hand, flowing with the rhythm of his fingers caressing her, she leaned back, breathing shallowly. She gasped as a hand touched her breast.

She had forgotten about the man’s wife! She was wedged in between the two of them, could feel their warm thighs pressing on the sides of her own thighs. The woman’s hand had traveled over and found her breast.

Still hidden beneath the blanket, Marlowe unbuttoned her blouse and unclipped her bra. As the bra came undone, the woman’s warm hand grasped her breast and delicately petted it. Her finger came over Marlowe’s nipple and rubbed it.

As she pumped the man’s firm stalk, squeezing the muscular tube with its load of hot blood, her own nipples grew hard under the sensation of the woman’s touch. Between her legs, a fire had erupted. Trying not to make it obvious that the woman’s husband was masturbating her while the woman caressed her breast, she began to flow with the action, her crescendo soaring.

Having sex with two people at the same time, being touched by a woman sexually, were forbidden passions. Now she rode the sensation, creaming her pants at the erotic pleasure. She turned to look at the woman and the woman smiled and leaned toward her with full red lips and—

“Ms. James.”

Marlowe almost ejected from her seat.

The flight attendant bent down and whispered, “The captain asked me to advise you that there will be a large number of newspeople waiting when we get to the gate.” She bent a little lower. “All the girls on the flight are for the princess. He done her wrong, as they say in the old movies.”

Marlowe murmured her thanks. She didn’t say anything to the flight attendant because she knew from past experience that statements from loose lips end up on the evening news.

She took a deep breath and pushed the blanket down. She was sweating.

The man seated next to her paused in putting away papers in his briefcase. “I thought I recognized you,” he said. “You’re Marlowe James, the American attorney hired to defend the princess.”

“One attorney of many,” she said. “The rest of the team is British.”

“You’re the specialist on husband killings. They call you the Burning Bed lawyer, don’t they?”

“They call me many things, especially if the sources of news are tabloids.”

She could have told the man she never actually represented a woman who burned her husband in bed, that it was just one of the appendages that had been stuck on her by a clever reporter. The “Burning Bed” expression arose from a 1970s legal case in which a wife, after suffering years of battering from her husband, poured gas on him when he was passed out and tossed a match on the heap.

Somewhere along the line, during seven high-profile trials in which she successfully defended six women and one man, all abused spouses who had finally struck back and killed, a tabloid had pinned the “Burning Bed” label on her. But the man beside her probably knew from news accounts that there was something in her own past that made her connection to the princess’s murder case even more sensational.

She would have been more comfortable being called the “Heat-of-Passion lawyer” because that was how the law defined a killing done in a moment of anger after provocation.

“What the princess did was very bad for the country,” the man said. He spoke with a soft English accent. “Very bad indeed.” He appeared to be in his late fifties, a well-to-do businessman, perhaps upper management with a London financial institution: He had the smug look of a person used to handling other people’s money—never risking his own, of course.

She mulled over his comments and tone as she removed her work materials from the tray in front of her and put them into her briefcase. He had voiced by word and inflection disapproval both for her as a lawyer and for the princess as a defendant. She had generally found that men make better jurors than women in cases involving women abused mentally or physically. Men have their sense of chivalry outraged, and are generally repulsed by a man striking a woman, considering it cowardly. On the other hand, women tended to be harder on the abused woman, sympathetic for her pain but unforgiving because she had put up with it for so long.
How come she stayed and took it? Why didn’t she walk out? Why didn’t she just get a divorce?
women asked. When it came down to selecting a juror, she almost always was inclined to believe that men were the best pick when it came to judging a battered woman who had resorted to a “Texas
dee
-vorce”—ending the marriage with a gun or kitchen knife as opposed to legal papers.

But she had never defended anyone like the princess before. The Princess of Wales was admired by women throughout the world, many of whom no doubt were rallying behind their “wronged sister” in this time of crisis. She had to consider whether this time women, especially younger women, would make the best jurors.

So far she had heard from one woman, the flight attendant, who was emotionally for the princess, and one man, the businessman, who thought they should hang her for the good of the country.

The fact that she was on her way to London to defend the Princess of Wales in the most provocative murder trial in history had still not settled comfortably in her mind. Why she had gotten the call was just one of many mysteries about her being hired—certainly there were exceptional lawyers in Britain capable of defending the princess.

The couple across the way were now relaxed.
Satisfied,
Marlowe thought, not without envy. She could have told them that she wasn’t a stranger to sex on an airplane. Her now-deceased husband and she had been sexually daring, even dangerous in terms of the potential to get caught. Once, on a flight from L.A. to Chicago, they had gotten worked up just sitting next to each other, just the rubbing and touching that comes with closeness on a flight. They had ended up together in the plane’s tiny toilet compartment, he sitting on the toilet and she pulling down her pants and spreading herself backward onto his erection, doggy-style—

The flight attendant was suddenly back at her side. “The captain has received a request from airport security that you be the last passenger to deplane. There are quite a large number of newspeople waiting for you at the gate, a whole army of them.”

“Are you sure it isn’t a lynch mob?” Marlowe asked. She had had press coverage before, but never “army”-sized. But the size of the coverage was to be expected in a legal case that made other “trials of the century” seem as unimportant as a traffic ticket. Worse than ordinary print and TV coverage would be the in-your-face tabloids. She hated and feared them, knowing it was ridiculous, but she was hurt and humiliated and often just plain angry at their unprofessional, often lying coverage. And the reputation of British tabloids was worse than that of pit bulls.

She was thrilled that her image was being beamed around the world. She had instantly gone from having a modest national reputation, mostly in the legal community, to being a celebrity. To be asked to defend the princess had been a stunning surprise. What lawyer wouldn’t have been drop-dead thrilled at the prospect of handling the trial of the century? And the trial of the century itself got an extra dose of sensationalism when she was hired.

The whole country, the whole world, had to be wondering why the princess had reached across the Atlantic and hired an attorney whose most famous case was defending herself on a charge of murdering her own husband.

Marlowe James was wondering, too.

It was a dark and stormy night …

fuckfuckfuck.
He was so damn stupid, breaking into Westminster Abbey to find a bloody damn body—only to find out
he wasn’t alone.

Tony Dutton saw the movement when he crept out of his hiding place in Henry III’s tomb after midnight. He had spent a cramped and uncomfortable half dozen hours waiting for the cleaning crew to finish and leave. Westminster wasn’t just a cathedral where they crowned kings and queens, it was a damn indoor cemetery, with tombs and crypts and wherever else they stick dead people. No, those had not been pleasant hours, lying there, side by side with
God knows who.
There was a bronze likeness of the king, but Dutton didn’t know if that was old Harry himself dipped in bronze like a baby shoe or if it was an effigy of him. If nothing else he had just spent hours within kissing distance of King Henry’s death mask only to climb down and spot someone moving in the shadows.

It was just a shadow—but a
shadow that moved.
Someone else was creeping around the Abbey at the witching hour and it scared the hell out of him. His heart and lungs suspended with pure shock as he stared into the darkness and tried to find the shadow that had moved.

Was it a trap? Was I lured here to be killed? fuckfuckfuck. How stupid can I be, creeping around a place full of dead people for a story? Fuck my arse—I might end up the handiwork of a killer just to get a goddamn story.

No self-respecting tabloid reporter expected to get hurt covering a story—it was part and parcel of a dishonorable profession that cowardice went along with the lying ink and personality assassination the reporters specialized in.

That bastard Howler had told him he would find “the body of a crime” in the Abbey. He didn’t know exactly what the hell that meant, some sort of legal phrase,
corpus delicti
or some other Latin mumbo jumbo used by attorneys. It hadn’t occurred to him that “body” might mean there was a killer—
and that he himself might be the victim.

When he’d seen the movement, Dutton put his back to the wall and froze. He had been making his way along the aisle that ran along Edward the Confessor’s chapel. That was creepy, too. Edward might have been a saint who died in bed, but didn’t Shakespeare claim that Richard II was murdered in the chapel by an assassin, one hired by the next in line to the throne?

He didn’t know where the “body of a crime” was—hell, he didn’t know
who
the body was or even
what
Howler had meant by his cryptic statement. Not that it would be unusual to have bodies in a graveyard. That’s what Westminster was, a big church with an indoor graveyard where Britain had dumped the remains of the high and mighty since before the Magna Carta.

He stared into the darkness, but the other side of the cathedral was just a black pool.
Did I see something?
His heart had come alive, pounding against his chest wall, as pure fright made room for adrenaline.

It had to be a fuckin’ graveyard that bastard lured me to.

He hated graveyards. Even though he was well past the forty mark, he still held his breath every time he drove by one, still playing that game about not breathing in ghosts he learned as a kid. He didn’t really think he would breathe in ghosts, but … what the hell, he
hated
graveyards.

Nothing moved in the dark pool. But he couldn’t have seen a movement if there had been one, it was too dark. In a moment the moon would pop out from behind clouds and bring a little light to the midnight interior. It had been a wet and nasty late afternoon, London gray and drizzling, when he came into the Abbey with the last of the tourists and stayed behind and hid. Now the rain had stopped but the north wind was pushing dark clouds past the moon, letting it peek out every couple minutes. Intermittent moon glow was the only light in the crown jewel of England’s religious past, the enormous Church of England cathedral where British sovereigns were still crowned. When the moon slipped out from under the cloud cover, it shone faintly through the cathedral’s mullion and colored glass windows high in the vaulted ceiling.

Something moved.

Or had it?

He couldn’t see a damn thing.
Just my imagination,
he thought.
The only thing moving in this place are the creatures instilled in my head when I was a kid and learned about the bogeyman.
That was his damn problem, too much imagination. He should have been writing fiction instead of news stories. Maybe that’s what made him a good tabloid reporter—most of what he wrote was
fiction,
junk fiction at that. And, as he boasted over a pint or two—or three or four or more—it took a truly junk mind to write stories that were so outrageous, they had to be true. But tabloid reporting wasn’t just all about farm girls giving birth to two-headed lambs after being raped by aliens. Sometimes there was real news to be reported.