Page 38 of Stranded with His Runaway Bride

Or apparently not.

‘There,’ she wailed, pointing to a small spider sitting in the bath.

‘For God’s sake, woman, I thought you were being attacked.’

‘Never mind that now,’ she said, hopping from foot to foot. ‘Do something, please. I hate spiders!’

This was not how he’d imagined his honeymoon would be. He sighed heavily and bent down to take off a shoe, getting ready to flatten the offending creature.

‘You’re not going to kill it?’

‘I thought you wanted it gone.’

‘But you used to catch them in your hands.’

‘I was thirteen and less fastidious than I am now.’

She snatched up a glass sitting on the washbasin and thrust it at him. ‘Here. Use this.’

‘And keep it in there how?’

She looked about her frantically, then shot out of the door. Leo heard her running from room to room.

Violetta’s footsteps returned along the landing and she burst back in.

‘There,’ she said, handing over a piece of card. ‘You can trap it in the glass with that.’

One glance at what she’d given him and his gaze shot back to hers.

‘Seriously?Thiswas all you could find?’

She shrugged. ‘There was a pile of them sitting on a bedside table. I think someone must have had a bit of a crush.’

In his hand Leo held a postcard, the kind on sale in any principality gift shop. A photograph of him, this one had him in military uniform, looking his most pompous and austere.

With a deliberate flourish he flipped it over so his image would not be in contact with the spider. There followed a minute of undignified scrabbling about at as the intruder scuttled back and forth out of his reach. But a small arachnid was no match for a fully grown human and eventually it was caught.

Leo turned, with glass in hand, to see Violetta—the brave young woman who’d had the guts to flee her wedding yesterday—cowering against a wall, and something in him railed at the sight.

‘You stand over there and Antonio and I will stand over here.’ He smiled reassuringly at her.

‘What?Who?’

‘This is the famed Antonio.’ He held the spider aloft. ‘He needs to go back to his wife.’

She snorted. ‘Spiders don’t have wives.’

‘Then where do little girl and boy spiders come from?’

Her lips twitched. ‘So what’s she called? This wife of the famed Antonio?’

‘Hildegard.’

‘Hildegard?’She laughed.

‘Shh... He adores her and won’t have anyone make fun of her.’

Violetta eased away from the wall. ‘Well, that’s an honourable thing, I suppose.’

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