Page 13 of Stranded with His Runaway Bride

‘What’s this?’

‘A French Army Parachute qualification.’

She glanced up. ‘An honorary award, I presume?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘You actually took the course? Isn’t it extremely tough?’

‘Yes. Achieving that nearly broke me.’

She flashed him a look that suggested she wished it had.

‘And this?’ She trailed a finger across a second badge that had sat just left of his heart, and a frisson of something skittered through him. He shifted his shoulders.

‘Helicopter pilot’s badge.’

He waited for her to be impressed.

She tapped at the pilot’s badge. ‘I wonder how good you are at this...’ her fingers turned back to the parachute wings ‘...if you also need these.’

The little madam.

‘The altitude is often too low for a parachute to have worked.’

That wasn’t true but she wouldn’t know that and for some reason he wanted her to be impressed with him.

She wasn’t.

‘So you don’t have a head for heights?’

‘Flinging myself from a perfectly good aeroplane with essentially a large tablecloth strapped to my back would suggest otherwise.’

But he noticed her lips curling into a smile. She’d been teasing him and suddenly he wasn’t half as annoyed about that as he might have been.

Flirting? This was progress.

If his littlegrand duchessawanted to play, bring it on. He was a master.

‘And what, might I ask, have you ever done to drive terror into your bones?’ he teased right back.

Instantly her face fell and the good humour evaporated. ‘Allow myself to be put in this dress with no idea how I was going to get out of it. Out of any of it.’

He cursed himself. Not so masterful after all.

‘Well, then, let’s at least get you out of the dress.’

Her brow rose.

‘And put on what? A dust sheet? I’m not parading around in front of you in nothing but my underwear.’

‘While that is an enticing thought, I was assuming there’d be something in this house for you to wear.’

‘Apart from the furniture the house looks pretty empty.’

When he’d inherited this place he’d ordered it cleared of all his grandmother’s personal effects. He’d wanted nothing to do with any of them, the memories were too painful. Everything was in storage now. But there might be something they could use, and it would give them something to do and distract her, while he tried her to persuade her to change her mind about the marriage.

He sent her a smile. ‘We’ll find something for you, Violetta, I promise,’ he said, in his most seductive Italian.

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