Knights by Linda Lael Miller Page B

“And all your pompous plans for tucking me away in some genteel and luxurious prison.”
    Kenbrook gave a long and ragged sigh. “I truly think you are my punishment for forgotten sins,” he said.
    “Mayhap,” Gloriana agreed cheerfully. “I’m not surprised that they’ve slipped your mind—your misdeeds, I mean—for their number is surely beyond counting, like the stars in the heavens.”
    “It is a happy thing for you, milady,” Kenbrook said, beaming upon the hallful of happy breakfasters as he spoke, “that I do not believe in raising my hand to a woman. Oh, to absent my own principles just long enough to take you across my knee and whack some sense into you.”
    “While that may be where you keep what sense you have been blessed with,” Gloriana countered, “my own resides in my head and heart.” She sighed in a deep and worldly fashion. “Alas, I confess that I suffer from a similar scruple to yours, my lord. Were murder not a mortal sin, I should put an arrow through your treacherous heart and dance for joy before all Creation.”
    Gareth, who had apparently been listening to the conversation from its inception, interceded at last. “Stop this sparring at once, or I swear I shall have you both clapped in irons and carted off to the dungeons, leaving the rest of us in peace.”
    Dane started to protest, but Gloriana, who remembered that she loved Kenbrook, touched his arm to prevent him. Beneath the green-and-white-checked silk of his sleeve, his muscles felt like tempered steel.
    “This is Edward’s day,” she said quietly. “I would not spoil it with our discord.”
    Dane hesitated, and she thought she saw pain in his eyes as he regarded her, along with barely suppressed annoyance. “Nor would I,” he agreed. “Shall we call a truce, Lady Kenbrook?”
    She nodded, her mouth curved into a smile. “Until the morrow,” she said,
    Kenbrook laughed and raised his wine goblet. “Until the morrow,” he replied.
    “How fleeting,” Gareth remarked dryly, “is this sweet harmony.”
    Neither Gloriana nor Dane offered a comment.
    Once the friends and family of Edward and his fellow aspirants had taken their breakfast, a trumpet sounded from the courtyard. Dane rose and offered his arm to Gloriana, who took it in a suitably meek and docile manner.
    Just the touch of her fingers on the swell of his forearm sent unsettling tremors through his muscles and along his bones. Kenbrook wanted, at one and the same time, to thrust her away from him and to draw her close. The thought of bedding her, assiduously avoided these many years since their sham of a wedding, thundered in his mind and lay like a molten weight in his groin.
    Dane was many things, but he was not a liar. From the moment he had seen Gloriana that first day, reclining in her tub, blanketed in yellow rose petals, he had desired her with an ardor no amount of reason or bad English wine could assuage. The night before, after Edward and the others had staggered off to the chapel to keep the required vigil, Dane had taken himself to the lake’s edge, there to swim naked in moon-dappled waters. Even the chill had not relieved him—only one thing could do that.
    He watched Gloriana out of the corner of his eye as he escorted her with some ceremony from the great hall and into the sunny courtyard, with its fluttering banners of every color. Gloriana was pure, Dane reminded himself, for all her saucy tongue and improper ideas, and he did not intend to despoil her—no matter what her attractions.
    The decision was not entirely noble, for if Dane bedded this fiery woman, their marriage could not rightly be broken, and a divorce would become necessary. The little chit might even be trying to entice him, despise him though she surely did, just to ruin his plans and delay her own consignment to a nunnery.
    Grimly, Dane set his mind to ignoring his virgin wife. His body was considerably less obliging; it knew Gloriana’s slender, agile frame for a