Page 96 of In Shining Armor

Down the aisle, the flight attendants jiggled their steel cart into the aisle and began asking people for drink orders.

“I thought about you all the time, Flicka,” he whispered near her shoulder. Her real name on his lips jarred her. “When you first kissed me, it was like you as a woman walked in the door. Everything changed. You changed. I changed. You were everything to me. You still are.”

“You never said that,” she said, “and I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t want you to be trapped with me.”

“But you marriedher.You trappedher.Just notme.”

“She was pregnant, and I wanted to do the right thing for the child.”

Flicka whispered back to him, lest someone hear her over the roar of the airplane engines just outside the walls. “So I should have gotten pregnant,” her voice was a little stupidly squeaky, “and then you wouldn’t have left me. Because I was theresponsibleone, because Ididn’tlet myself fall pregnant, because Imanagedour relationship and everything else and didn’t get drunk off myassand getknocked up,you leftme,and you marriedher.”

His fingers firmed around hers. “That’s not how I meant it to happen.”

“But that is how it happened. That isexactlyhow it happened. You married her, and you didn’t marry me.”

“Did you want to marry me?” he asked.

She wouldn’t burst into tears on an airplane filled with hundreds of people. Shewouldn’t.She was Her Serene Highness Friederike Marie Louise Victoria Caroline Amalie Alexandra Augusta,Prinzessin vonHannoverundCumberland, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, etc. She needed to maintain her dignity and decorum. Wulfie had raised her to be more refined than that.

A hot thing dripped down her face.

Dieter’s gray eyes widened, and his lips opened. He whispered,“Flicka?”

She sucked in a shuddering breath and removed her fingers from his. “It doesn’t matter. It was over between us a long time ago.”

“You would have married me?” he asked.

“You neverasked,”she told him, trying to turn her hurt to anger. It was easier to do than she had thought.

“Durchlauchtig—”His parted lips made him look far too surprised that an infatuated twenty-one-year-old would have accepted a marriage proposal.

“It doesn’t matter. You never asked. It’s a life that didn’t happen.”

She turned and looked out the window at the sun sparkling off the ocean waves far below the plane.

Dieter’s seatbelt clicked beside her.

He shifted in his seat, and he reached over to take her hand again.

She didn’t look at him.

He tugged her hand, turning her.

Flicka acquiesced because she didn’t want to make a scene on an airplane.

He was kneeling on one knee out in the aisle and reaching across his seat for her hand.

She whispered, “What the hell are you doing? You’re not impulsive. You would never do this. What is wrong with you?”

“Durchlauchtig,I was wrong to leave while we were in London. It was the most stupid mistake I have ever made in my life. Will you marry me?”

Flicka’s jaw dropped.

When she looked around, no one around them was talking. A dozen cell phones aimed over the seatbacks in their direction.

She had to stop this public displayimmediately.