The Boleyn King by Laura Andersen Read Free Book Online Page B

wrenched her eyes back to William. “I know that I can’t marry without permission. But I should at least like to respect my husband. Promise me, William, that you won’t force me to marry against my wishes.”
    His right hand came up to cup her chin. “I promise.”
    Dominic refused to let Minuette out of his sight—he insisted on escorting her until she was safe behind the thick door of her quarters. But William would not let them leave until Dominic gave his word that he would not go looking for Giles Howard afterward.
    “A beating is too simple,” William had said softly before sending Dominic off with Minuette. “I’ve much better ways of making a man pay.”
    Dominic didn’t doubt it, though part of him still ached to smash Howard’s face. As he walked beside Minuette, he considered that he had only promised not to go looking for him. If he should happen to come across him by chance …
    Had William not stopped him earlier, Dominic was in little doubt that he would have killed Giles Howard. He was less disturbed by that than he would have liked, for he was not an especially violent or impulsive man. But when he had seen Howard with hands and mouth on Minuette, Dominic had given in to a red rush of fury.
    He would have been displeased to find Howard assaulting any young woman, and he tried to convince himself that his reaction would have been the same even if the woman involved had been a stranger. But he was too honest to believe it. From the moment Minuette had jumped into his arms this afternoon, a trembling, half-formed suspicion had hovered in the back of his mind.
    When he had come upon her in the gardens with William, he had not known her. And in those few seconds of nonrecognition, he had found himself appraising her as if she were a stranger—tall, lithe, and with a touch of joy in her movements that was very pleasing.
    And then, like a shifting prism, it was Minuette on that wall, jumping to him as if she were still ten years old. But it had been the body of a woman he’d caught and held for longer than he’d meant to. And in that brief embrace, he’d heard a voice in his mind that had thrown him out of all countenance: Giles Howard’s crude but accurate assessment— rather like a colt, all eyes and legs and spirit .
    He’d almost forgotten that Minuette walked next to him until she said softly, “I’m sorry, Dominic.”
    Startled, he said, “What on earth for?”
    “You should not have had to see me like … I should never have been there. I should have known what to do. It’s so humiliating.…”
    That stopped him in his tracks, horrified at how he had been brooding on his own injuries and completely ignoring Minuette’s. She would not look at him, and he wanted desperately to make her do so.
    “Your only sin is too great kindness,” he said firmly, “and who can fault you for that? You would not be Minuette without it. I only hope that tonight has not driven kindness from you.”
    Finally she looked at him, a liquid glance that rearranged his insides. “You are not angry with me?”
    “Never with you.”
    “This was not how I imagined it would be when you came back to court.”
    “What did you imagine?”
    He told himself that he was wrong about the hitch in her breathing, that he was tired and fanciful and the whole day was becoming increasingly unreal. He needed to sleep, he told himself firmly. And when he woke up, the world would right itself and Minuette would be—
    A scream knifed through the air, abruptly cut off with a sickening thud. Some things Dominic could do by instinct; he was moving toward the sound before he knew it, Minuette on his heels. He almost told her sharply to stay behind, but he didn’t want to abandon her in an empty corridor.
    A woman lay in a fatally unnatural sprawl at the bottom of a staircase, the rich red of her dress pooled around her; in the torchlight he could not tell where the blood began and the fabric ended. Dominic threw out his arm