Ding.
I opened my eyes, the plane shaking slightly. I sat up, looking around to see that I was alone on the couch, Ava still seated where she’d been before I’d fallen asleep. My cock was stone-stiff, and I quickly grabbed a pillow, placing it over my hard-on.
“Turbulence,” she said, taking off her headphones. “Buckle up.”
I groaned, sitting up and fastening my seatbelt.
Buckle up, indeed. I had a feeling this reunion was going to be a hell of a lot more than I’d signed up for.
Chapter 7
Ava
Achime sounded through the cabin, pulling me out of my daydreaming. My body ached, and the off-and-on sleep I’d been getting throughout the flight had left me feeling dazed.
All of that left, however, when I heard what the pilot had to say.
“If you’ll turn your attention out of the northern windows, you’ll see Edoria before you. Welcome home, Princess Ava.”
My eyes flashed and I turned without thinking to see green, there was so muchgreen. The fields below were a gorgeous emerald, rolling and lush. Shimmering streams cut through them, tiny, quaint villages dotting the land here and there. Forests were everywhere, the trees packed thick all the way up to the gray of the mountains that rose high in the distance.
Edoria. This was it. My kingdom.
I turned in my seat to get Luc’s attention. He was seated in the office area, the fancy-looking silver pen in his hands moving quickly over a pad of yellow paper.
“Hey.”
He looked up. “Yes?”
“We’re here.”
“Not quite yet. Still another twenty minutes or so before we land at the royal airfield.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean, we’re over Edoria’s borders. Now, are you going to show me this place, or what?”
“You want me to be your tour guide?”
“Come on. This view is way better than poking around on Google Maps.”
He sighed, setting down his pen and coming over to me. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, his nearness was quite nice, his musky scent wrapping around me. Luc had been busy during the flight, having barely said a word to me over the last several hours since he’d woken up from his nap.
He nodded forward. “First of all, you’ll need to know the Langford River. It bisects the nation in two, moving east to west starting in the Alps and connecting to the Danube in Germany.”
I looked down. There was no needing to guess which river he was talking about—a big, curving body of water looped through the countryside, the morning light catching it and setting off a beautiful, shimmering reflection.
“There are too many towns to name,” he said. “But this river is the lifeblood of them all.”
Sure enough, little villages clustered around the river here and there, roads leading up deeper into the hills where other towns resided among pastures and farmland.
“I want to learn the names of all of them,” I said with a smile, a bit surprised by my enthusiasm. “I’m the princess, after all. Right?”
“You certainly sound like your mother’s daughter,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“She loved Edoria, and never missed a chance to get to know her kingdom better. She knew all of the towns by name. Sometimes I wondered if she knew all of the citizens by name, too.”
His words brought a smile to my face. “And my father?”