She Owns the Knight by Diane Darcy

face.
    “Oooh!” She hit him in his large chest with both fists. Again, other than his eyebrows raising, no real reaction on his part. The guy didn’t so much as step back. With a scream of frustration, she shoved past him.
    She gulped in air. Her face reheated every time she thought about what had just happened. Granted she hadn’t been hurt, but the humiliation kept replaying itself in her mind, and she wanted out of there. She gasped in another breath.
    Two men stepped forward and one bowed at the waist. “Lady Corbett, please allow me to introduce myself, I am—”
    Gillian looked beyond them and disbelief had her jaw dropping. “You’ve been in my backpack! You’ve looked at my passport! You guys are so dead!” Feeling lightheaded, she strode over, grabbed up her pack and started stuffing her things inside it. “This is my stuff. Mine. My pencils, my camera, my candy, my iPod, my umbrella, and my pepper spray. Snoopy, invasive, nosy, prying, weird,” . . . she glanced at the knight again . . . cute, confused . . . Gillian groaned. Could a person get Stockholm Syndrome in less than an hour?
    She finished loading her pack, then slung it over one shoulder. She needed to get out of there. Apparently she was just not equipped to handle this situation. She needed to find an officer to deal with these cretins. And since she still found the guy attractive, she obviously needed to find a therapist, too.
    Spotting a few of the maids peering down at her from above had fresh mortification heating her face, and, unable to help the pressure building up within her, she turned back to the knight and started to rant. Again.

    ***

    Kellen tried to hide his bewilderment. She’d pushed him. Struck him. Some might even say she’d thought to attack him. Without a doubt, the girl was in no wise like her sister. And her speech was odd, but leastways she was talking to him. Shrieking, mayhap, but communicating nonetheless.
    He had questions he wanted answered. He needed to find how she came to be there and what her father’s purpose in sending her in such a way might be.
    But she babbled on, and Kellen was having a difficult time understanding her words. She talked very fast, alternately pacing, and pointing her finger at him, at his men, and at the servants peering down from above. He did not understand her meaning, and some of her words were strange to him.
    Had she been hit on the head? Had she been injured in some way? She was a beauty, no doubt, her cheeks pink and her eyes flashing with anger. Even the shorter hair fluttering about her face was attractive, but her speech was very odd.
    Kellen reached out a hand to pat the top of her head, to feel for bumps and search for bruises, but the girl knocked his hand away and continued to blather.
    Kellen tried not to feel disappointed. First an unfaithful wife and now a violent and broken one? Was he to have no luck in begetting a healthy heir?
    He would take this up with Corbett. The man had seven daughters. Their original agreement promised his best and instead they’d sent him a murderer, and now a mental deficient? Kellen would hold Corbett to his promise.
    But perchance all Corbett’s daughters were so afflicted? Mayhap Kellen was given the best of the lot. Again, he wondered why her father sent her to him in such a manner. Was Corbett really so afraid of him? Perhaps afraid that when Kellen met this daughter he’d be angered by her deficiencies?
    Kellen moved toward the girl and tried to keep his tone gentle so as not to upset her further. “Mayhap I could take your father’s ring into safekeeping until your family arrives?”
    The girl jerked her hand away as if he were a thief.
    Kellen’s impatience grew. “Where are your guards? Your ladies? Your personal maid? Why do you arrive five weeks early?”
    She did not answer, did not seem to understand. He was saddened that such a beauty was so damaged.
    “You are a jerk!” The girl took a deep breath, swallowed, and