Blood Royal Read Online Free Page 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.

4
    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