Knights by Linda Lael Miller Page A

desperate effort to hide some of her turmoil, and she felt him standing close behind her.
    To his credit, he did not venture to touch her. “It won’t be so bad,” Dane reassured her quietly. “There are fine convents all over England, where a woman of your gifts might pass her days pleasantly—”
    Gloriana spun on him. “Convents?” she repeated, disbelieving. “You think to put me into a nunnery as if I were mad, like Elaina, or an adulteress?”
    Dane stood his ground, his arms folded. He was, after all, a fighting man, Gloriana reminded herself, more content in conflict than in peace. The faintest hint of temper flashed in his glacial eyes. “You make it sound as though I would cast you into gaol. Conventsare not such terrible places. Mariette herself was raised and educated in one—”
    “Then let
her
go and spend her days weaving and praying and stitching—I, sir, shall not!”
    “You are my responsibility, if not my true wife, and you will be properly looked after, whether you wish it so or not!”
    An angry laugh escaped Gloriana, and she waved both arms in wild exclamation. “Your
responsibility
, am I? Well, I’m something more than that, as it happens—I am a flesh-and-blood woman, with a heart that beats and lungs that draw air, and I shall not be trundled off to the convent for the convenience of your conscience. I have gold, I have houses of my own, here and in London Town. I require no ’help’ from you!”
    Dane closed his eyes for a moment, and Gloriana knew he was struggling to control himself. Care for him though she did, that being her private and eternal curse, she wished just then that the top of his head would blow off. “You will not live alone,” he decreed, when he spoke at long last, his voice low and even and somehow dangerous.
    “I wouldn’t be alone,” Gloriana replied, with stubborn reasoning. “I should have my servants to attend me.”
    “That is not the same,” Dane said carefully. “A woman cannot be left unprotected, unsupervised—”
    Gloriana muttered a word she might have learned in that other life, the one she dreamed about so rarely, the one Edwenna had warned her not to speak of except in her prayers. “Widows,” she pointed out, “live in just such a situation, all over England, perhaps all over the world.”
    “You are not a widow.”
    “Pray, do not compound my tribulations by reminding me, good sir,” Gloriana replied sweetly, with a little curtsy, “I shall instead bear the name of harlot, a woman spurned for no other reason than the fecklessness of her husband and shuttled off to a convent the way a lazy servant might use his toe to nudge a dead mouse under the rushes of the great-room floor.”
    Even in that dim light, Gloriana saw Dane go pale and then vividly red. “You would be named harlot,” he said, breathing the words in the way dragons breathed fire, “only if you persisted upon this foolish and fanciful course you would set for yourself. Fortunately, you will be spared this mistake, and taken in hand!”
    For Gloriana, the interview was over. Leaving her mantle in a pool at Dane’s feet, she moved, hem and slippers rustling, over the fresh rushes toward the outside door. In its latticed light, she turned to look back at her husband. “You are without honor,” she said, in dulcet tones, “and have no honest claim to knighthood. You may go straight to hell, for all I care, and roast there on a spit.”
    With those rash words, which probably endangered her own soul, Gloriana left Elaina’s solar and fled gracefully down the outer stairway.
    Dane stood alone in the room where, as a green and besotted boy, he had once sat at his sister-in-law’s feet, listening as she played the harp or sang merry songs or told marvelous stories of wizardry. How he had loved those tales of hers—full of magic and mischief they’d been—and he remembered them now, not word for word, but dream for dream. He felt a compelling need to be near