Knights by Linda Lael Miller Read Free Book Online

with Edward, but she overcame the urge to fling it at her husband’s head. As Dane mounted the dais and came to stand behind her, Gloriana forced her fingers to go limp, to lie flat on the tabletop.
    She felt the warmth of his body against her back, even though they weren’t touching, and a strange, powerful sensation surged through her, wicked and primitive. His breath brushed her neck as he bent to speak quietly into her ear, and goose bumps raced down her arms and chest, hardening her nipples wherethey pressed against her chemise and fostering an ache in her most personal parts.
    “Go at once,” Kenbrook commented evenly, “and cover your hair.”
    Gloriana turned on the hard bench and looked up into his face. Although he smelled of ale, his eyes were clear and he had not slurred his words. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again, but not because she was afraid of this stranger she had wed. She simply had no wish to provide an evening’s entertainment for everyone else in the great hall.
    Edward initiated a protest, but before he’d stammered out more than a few words, one of Dane’s battlehardened hands moved from Gloriana’s shoulder, where it had come to rest lightly, to the boy’s. It was plain by Edward’s indrawn breath and pale cheeks that Dane’s hold was less than gentle.
    “Hold your tongue, pup,” Kenbrook warned. “I will not suffer your interference.”
    Gloriana felt her temper slipping. “Unhand him,” she hissed. “Now.”
    Dane chuckled and released his brother, and Gloriana imagined the bruise Edward would surely have by morning. And all because he had sought to defend her.
    Slowly, and with the regal dignity she had spent years perfecting, Gloriana rose from the bench. Cheeks burning, she nonetheless offered a slight nod to Kenbrook, that being the closest thing to the accustomed curtsy she could manage at the moment, and swept past him, holding her skirts, to descend the steps of the dais.
    Instead of taking a seat beside Gareth, Kenbrook followed Gloriana into the passageway outside the great hall, there to catch her elbow in a grasp so gentlethat she barely felt it and, at the same time, so firm that she couldn’t have escaped. Seeing no point in wasting energy only to make a fool of herself, Gloriana did not attempt to break free.
    She glared up at Dane, wishing she had never learned to love him, and waited in silence.
    In the light of the torches burning in the passage, Kenbrook looked more, like a Viking than ever. He seemed impossibly tall, and his body exuded heat and strength. Gloriana did not need to touch him to know he would feel like a statue clothed in flesh, and his eyes, as he stared down at her in seeming consternation, were cold.
    A flood of unseemly warmth rushed through her.
    “Will you be returning to the great hall?” The question was odd, and there was no expression at all in Kenbrook’s voice when he uttered it. “After you’ve covered your hair, I mean?”
    “No, my lord,” Gloriana said, staring pointedly at his hand until he released her. He need never know that he’d set her senses aflame, just by touching her. “I find the company most tedious, and in any case, I have no intention of covering my hair.”
    For a long moment, Kenbrook was silent, and plainly stunned, as though she had struck him with the flat side of a broadsword. Evidently insubordination, even in so mild a form, was almost incomprehensible to him. Or perhaps he was simply stupid.
    Gloriana knew better, of course. He was known to be brilliant, especially in matters involving strategy, but she was angry enough, hurt enough, to indulge herself in purposeful misconception for a few moments.
    When he spoke, his voice was calm, even pleasant. Gloriana sensed that, while Dane was not the sort toharm a woman physically, he was dangerous all the same, for he could break her heart in a thousand different ways. Her body throbbed with dark, primal desires she could not begin to