Royal Protocol by Christine Flynn Read Free Book Online Page A

king himself. But as far as she was concerned, protocol had taken a royal hike about the time she had allowed him to button her jacket instead of pulling back to do it herself.
    Her only excuse for not having done just that was because he’d caught her so completely off guard.
    Her only excuse for not letting him know, even subtly, that she didn’t appreciate his boldness was that she didn’twant him to know she was still thinking about it. She didn’t even want to consider how he’d react if he knew he’d caused her to feel sensations she hadn’t felt in so long she’d forgotten they existed.
    His eyes darkened as he took a step closer, causing the quiver to catch.
    “If you won’t take orders from anyone but the queen,” he murmured, his voice deceptively, dangerously civil, “then it is up to you to convince her that the show must go on. If you don’t,” he warned softly, “the prince’s life will be worth less than this island’s dead coal mines.”
    He was close enough that she could see the individual spikes of his dark eyelashes. Close enough that she could see the small white scar just under the hard line of his jaw and the carved lines of his sinfully sensual mouth.
    He had just placed the prince’s life squarely in her hands.
    Realizing that, she swallowed a hint of alarm.
    “You’re not going to put that sort of responsibility on me.”
    He leaned farther into her space, turning alarm to panic. “I just did,” he told her, and reached for the handle of the door. “Make sure she’s ready in an hour.”
    Gwen wasn’t sure if it was fury or fear pumping through her veins as he walked out and left her staring at a carved medallion on the door. All she knew for certain was that she felt totally disconcerted by the events of the last twenty minutes—and that the man responsible for most of that unease possessed all the finesse of a tank.
    Make that a battleship, she mentally amended, making herself breathe deeply. Or a destroyer, or whatever those big hulking masses of steel were that left the sea so turbulent in their wake.
    She needed air.
    She needed an hour in the palace gym.
    She needed tea.
    The thought that the queen needed tea, too, had her moving immediately toward the phone. Gwen had always known her priorities, and those priorities took precedence over her own needs now.
    After ordering tea and toast from the cook, she placed three more quick calls, took a small bottle of analgesic from Mrs. Ferth’s desk and quietly opened the door to the queen’s salon. The anteroom was decorated much as the receiving room, only there were more family pictures here, and the desk was the queen’s.
    Passing the damask-draped windows overlooking the cove with its sheer rock cliffs and sweeping view of the city and sea, she knocked on the door on the other side and nudged it open.
    Queen Marissa sat on the edge of her huge powder-blue-draped canopy bed.
    “Please tell me this is all simply a nightmare, Gwen. Tell me I’m going to wake up now and the only thing I need to do is have breakfast with my children before their nanny comes to take them to school.”
    She wanted her children to be babies again. She wanted to be able to control the influences around them, to ensure their safety, to protect them from the very real and adult world they all lived in now.
    With a daughter she’d cherished and protected all her life, Gwen understood that desire completely.
    “I wish I could.” Opening the bottle, she shook two tablets into the queen’s palm and handed her a glass of water she poured from a crystal carafe.
    As the older woman murmured her thanks, Gwen smoothed the edge of the watered-silk comforter and sat down beside her friend. The queen was ten years olderthan she, and at fifty-three Her Majesty had certainly suffered and seen more. But Gwen knew heartache, too. The loss of her husband was why she was there now. The handsome young officer she had been married to for eleven wonderful years