By His Majesty's Grace Read Free Page A

distance.
    She was wary of him, Rand thought. It could not be helped. He was not a superstitious man, put little credence in curses, prophecies and other such foretelling, yet neither did he leave things to chance. It was important that he take and hold Lady Isabel. He would do what was necessary to be sure of her and make his amends later.
    And if holding her promised to be far more a pleasure than a duty, that was his secret.
    “You will need to quench your thirst, I expect,” he said gravely. “I will send wine and bread to sustain you until the feasting.”
    “That’s very kind. Thank you,” she said, speaking over her shoulder as she turned her back on him, moving farther away. “You may leave me now.”
    Her tone was that of a princess dismissing a lackey. It grated, but he refused to take offense. No doubt she feared his attack at any moment, not that she lacked cause. It happened often enough with these alliances of great fortune, wherein to bed the lady was to take her virginity and her wealth in the same act. He thought briefly of living up to her expectations, of sweeping her into his arms and tossing her on the bed before joining her there. The surge of heat in the lower part of his body was a fine indication of what his more base self thought of the idea.
    He could not do it. For one thing, being closeted with her for any length of time would expose her to more of the ribald, lip-smacking comment she had endured already. For another, forcing her was not a precedent he wanted to set for their life together.
    Let her have her pride, then. She was in his power whether she accepted it or not. There would be time enough and more to see that she understood that fact.
    “I regret that you were embarrassed just now,” he said abruptly.
    “Embarrassed?” She turned to give him a quick glance from under her lashes. “Why should I be?”
    “What may take place between us is not a matter for rough talk. I would not have you think I view it that way.”
    Color as tender and fresh as a wild rose invaded her features. “Certainly not.”
    “It’s only that there is bound to be speculation, considering the misfortune met with by your previous suitors.”
    Between them lay the knowledge that he made the fifth in a line that had begun when she was in her cradle. The first was to a baron her father’s age who had expired of the colic. Afterward, the honor had descended to his son, a youth of less than six years who did not survive the childhood scourge of measles. A match had been arranged then with James, Marquess Trowbridge, a battle-scarred veteran of almost fifty. Trowbridge had been killed in a fall while hunting when Isabel was nine, after which she was pledged, at age eleven, to Lord Kneesall, merely seventeen years her senior and afflicted with a harelip. When he was executed after choosing the wrong side in the quarrel between Plantagenet factions, the betrothals halted.
    This was in part, Rand knew, because the lady carried a reputation for being one of the accursed Three Graces of Graydon, sisters who could only be joined in wedlock to men who loved them. A more pertinent reason was the constant warfare of the past years which made selecting a groom problematical, given that the man chosen could be hale and hearty one day and headless the next.
    The lady began to remove her gloves with meticulous attention to the loosening of each finger. Rand watched the unveiling of her pale hands with a drawing sensation in his lower body, his thoughts running rampant concerning other portions of her body that would soon be revealed to him. It was an effort to attend as she finally made reply.
    “You can hardly be blamed for the vulgarity of others. My stepbrother, like his father before him, takes pleasure in his lack of refinement. Being accustomed to Graydon’s ways, I am unlikely to blush for yours.”
    “Yet you flushed just now.”
    She kept her gaze on what she was doing, carefully inching the leather off her