Royal Protocol (7 page)

His hand was slipping down the double row of brass buttons on his jacket. It seemed he’d scarcely flicked open the last one when the lapels parted and he shrugged it off.

She barely caught the impression of a massive chest, a crisp white shirt and precisely knotted black tie before she felt the weight of that jacket around her shoulders.

His body heat still clung to the lining. That warmth enveloped her an instant before she pulled the finely woven wool over her head and his hand splayed at the small of her back.

“The colonnade,” he muttered. “It’s closest.”

The cloudburst blurred the landscape around them, making the distant palace walls appear even farther away and bouncing rain back up to her ankles. As absorbed as she’d been in their discussion, she hadn’t realized how far around the curve they had walked.

Her slim skirt and heels weren’t conducive to running, but by hiking up her hem Gwen managed to match his long strides as they jogged toward the enclosed walkway with its marble columns, arched windows and vaulted ceiling. By the time he pulled open the nearest door and pushed her inside, her stockings and feet were soaked.

So was his shirt. She noticed it the instant she lowered his jacket to her shoulders and turned to face him. The fine white cotton clung to his broad shoulders and muscular arms as he lifted his hand, pulled off his beret and slapped it, water flying, against his thigh.

The heavy beat of boots doing double-time on marble spun them both around. Two guards, their lethal rifles braced and ready, suddenly slammed to a halt.

“Sir,” they said in unison. Rifle butts hit the floor as they jerked to attention. Both snapped a salute. “Sorry, sir,” the stockier of the two immediately said. “We didn’t…I mean, from back there you did look…without your jacket—We didn’t recognize you, sir,” he finally admitted.

Security remained at its highest level. Considering that she and Harrison had just burst through a doorway into an area used by the royal family to enter their private quarters, the young men’s response was exactly what it should have been.

“No apology necessary, Corporal.”

The soldier’s glance darted to Gwen, then to his superior’s wet shirt.

“Ma’am,” he said, by way of acknowledgment, but clearly didn’t know if he should address his superior’s…dress.

“May we do anything for you, sir?” he decided to ask.

Harrison had followed the guard’s glance. To Gwen’s quiet surprise, he seemed totally unfazed to be all but dripping on the floor.

“You can call my driver at the main guard gate. I’ll be leaving for the Admiralty in five minutes.”

The young man hesitated. “Will that be all, sir?”

“That will be all,” he confirmed, and dismissed them both.

The even cadence of their retreat was echoing through the wide corridor when she saw him staring at her hands. Suddenly realizing that she was strangling his lapels, thinking he wouldn’t appreciate the wrinkles, she
smoothed the fabric, slipped off the heavy jacket and held it out to him.

“Thank you,” she murmured, totally disarmed by what he’d done. Never would she have anticipated that bit of chivalry. He couldn’t have thought about his actions. There had been no time.

Caution crept through her. His first instinct had been to shelter and protect.

“You’re soaked,” she murmured.

“So it would seem.”

His easy command with the soldiers gave way to distance as he folded his jacket over his arm, then stuffed his hands in the pockets of his trousers.

That distance increased with each passing second. Moments before the rain had damped their discussion, she’d been busy letting him know that she didn’t appreciate his lack of trust—and that she fully comprehended his methods. At the moment she didn’t much care if he’d grasped her message or not. She felt more dismayed with the way she’d gone off about the man she’d married. She hadn’t intended to share anything so personal.

“Admiral—”

“Lady Gwendolyn—”

He watched her eyes meet his as they both spoke. Mercifully, the sadness that had slipped into them as she’d spoken of her husband was no longer there. Neither was the bewilderment. Or the defense. But it was clear from the uneasy way her glance fell to the scarf she threaded through her fingers that their interrupted discussion remained on both of their minds.

The topic of that discussion had his defenses locked firmly into place.

There were things he knew about her husband that she couldn’t. Whether she realized that or not, he didn’t
know. He just knew he didn’t trust the tug of empathy he’d felt for her. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling empathy with any woman.

A peculiar sense of self-protection had him seeking more familiar ground.

“Is there anything else I can answer for Her Majesty?”

Willing herself to stick to their task, she quickly shook her head. “I believe you’ve covered everything,” she replied, looking from his shirt. “I’ll tell her what you said…about how you need the captors to contact you again.” Sounding as distracted as she suddenly looked, a faint frown pinched her brow.

“What?” he prompted, recognizing disagreement when he saw it.

Thinking he did, anyway.

The frown deepened as if she were considering whether or not to reply. “You’re going to catch pneumonia as wet as you are,” she finally said. Her glance skimmed his shoulders and chest, then promptly jerked back up when it slipped to his thighs. “Duke Logan is about your size. Would you like me to send someone to borrow a shirt from him?”

She looked a little damp herself. Not bedraggled, the way she could have. She had suffered most from her shapely calves down. But she didn’t seem to care at all that she was standing in wet shoes and stockings. She actually seemed more concerned about him.

That she would feel concern for him at all threw him completely. Not wanting it to matter, he drew a breath—and felt it stall in his chest. Her delicate scent drifted from his jacket.

“It’s only five minutes to the Admiralty,” he finally said, unwillingly touched, anyway. “I have another in my office.”

Gwen gave a restrained little nod. The Admiralty was the navy’s headquarters at the base of the hill. His car would be heated. He could take his shirt off in it, she supposed, only to call her thoughts to a halt before they could go any further.

He was a big boy. He could take care of himself. Aside from that, thinking of him without a shirt didn’t seem terribly wise with him staring at her mouth.

The thought remained, anyway. “Good,” she murmured, repeating her vow to get out more when this was over. The last she’d heard, Sir Michael Tynley was still available. She’d served with him on the queen’s library restoration council and they’d gotten along quite well.

He also had a clammy handshake, she remembered, and stifled a shiver at the thought of him touching her as Harrison had.

“I’ll…ah…I’ll let you know what she says.”

Refusing to meet his glance again, on the off chance that he could read her thoughts, she turned away.

She’d taken a single step when his deep voice stopped her cold.

“Make sure she says yes, Gwen. That dinner is the best thing we have going for us right now.”

With her back still to him, she turned her head, looking at him over her shoulder. He’d never called her by her first name before. Aware of the odd way her heart had skipped at the deep sound of it, she murmured, “I understand.”

Harrison watched her turn away from him then, her bearing unconsciously graceful, her smile ready when she passed the guards who had intercepted them a while ago.

For a moment he simply stared after her.

He’d forgotten about her husband. Rather, he hadn’t connected the loss of that unsung hero to the woman he’d
thought of only as an attendant to the queen. He knew of Major Corbin. Everyone on the RET did. As he recalled, Pierce Prescott had even served with him on that fateful night.

Neither he nor Pierce had been members of the RET at the time. It hadn’t even existed then. The group had been formed afterward by the king as a direct result of the event. But the major’s sacrifice was well-known to a privileged few. And those few knew that the major had stopped the last man anyone would have suspected from assassinating the entire royal family.

Harrison had compartmentalized the incident. Just as he’d done with countless other sensitive situations and nightmarishly close calls he’d been told about, or had to deal with himself over the years. He’d analyzed those events, learned from them as commanders throughout history had done. But he never dwelled on them. He couldn’t, and still survive himself. Contrary to what Gwen obviously thought, he constantly weighed the human factor in his actions. Everything he did was about people and protecting their rights, their freedoms. It was just that emotion clouded issues best handled by cool logic. Aside from that, the sense of idealism that had carried him through the first promotions of his career had died long ago. Without it, he wondered why he’d ever wanted that career at all.

His jaw locked at his last thought. He knew exactly why he did what he did. It was only because of the way Gwen seemed to constantly challenge him that he was even thinking about this.

Ignoring the cold seeping into his skin, he headed opposite the direction she had gone. He was an analytical man. A practical, pragmatic man. He knew how to deal with men like himself who understood duty, strategy and
acceptable risk…not with cultured and stubborn females. Especially one particularly stubborn female who wasn’t proving nearly as unexposed to his realities as he’d thought her to be. A woman who had the disturbing habit of reminding him every time he was with her of just how long it had been since he’d had a woman in bed.

“Oh, Lady Gwendolyn, I’m so glad you’re here. The main switchboard has been absolutely jammed with calls about the king’s health. And Princess Anne and the archbishop got disconnected while I was talking with them because every call is being monitored and there aren’t enough tapes or whatever it is they’re monitoring calls with to get them all and I don’t know what to tell anyone about the dinner.”

Mrs. Anne Ferth ran out of air. Wringing her hands, which wasn’t like her at all, she peered at Gwen over the top of her half-rimmed glasses, took a deep breath and started to plunge in again.

Gwen beat her to it. “Princess Anne and His Eminence called Her Majesty?”

Mrs. Ferth’s gray bob bounced as she nodded. “And both were disconnected while I was telling them that she was resting. I pray they’ll realize things are a bit confused here at the moment,” she hurried on, her ruddy complexion even more so in her distress, “but I’m truly at a loss as to what to say about the dinner. Five hundred guests have been invited and everyone from secretaries of dignitaries to the royal pastry chef wants to know if it’s being postponed because of the king’s illness. The queen has given me no instruction. All she has said is that the only calls she’ll take are those regarding her husband and her children and that she wants to see you as soon as you return.”

“Do you know if she actually is resting right now?”

“I doubt it. Mrs. McDougal was in a bit ago to make up her room and said she was sitting on the settee in her salon staring out her window.”

“Did she say anything else?” Gwen asked, speaking of the middle-aged chambermaid.

“No,” Mrs. Ferth murmured. The woman favored cardigan sets and tweeds. Always with a silver chain and a single pearl. Today’s set was mud brown. “But I took it upon myself to cancel her appearance at the Children’s Hospital this afternoon. Oh, and she refused lunch.”

The older woman’s pale-blue eyes suddenly narrowed on Gwen’s somewhat flattened French roll. “You got caught without an umbrella.”

“I did,” Gwen murmured, not bothering to share how that had come to be. Before she’d come into the drawing room, she had hurried upstairs, changed her stockings and shoes and retucked her scarf. There had been little to do with Roberto’s handiwork other than smooth the slightly damp strands back into place.

Had it not been for Harrison, she might well have been soaked to the skin.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said, grateful when the quiet ring of the telephone drew Mrs. Ferth’s attention. “I’ll try to get some answers for you.”

The queen’s private secretary gave her a relieved nod as she headed for her desk.

The beleaguered woman was still there, explaining to whomever she was speaking with that she would have to get back to them, when Gwen returned from the queen’s salon five minutes later.

Expectation lit Mrs. Ferth’s face as she hung up and added the phone memo she’d written to the three-inch high stack of pink slips piled on her desk.

“The dinner will be held. That means we need to continue with the preparations,” Gwen told her, as concerned about the queen as she was the decision she had finally, reluctantly made. “Rather than have Lady Brigham and Lady Galbraith answering Her Majesty’s mail today,” which was the usual task of those particular ladies-in-waiting, “you might ask them to assist you in returning calls. With so many guests, it might also be a good idea to have the press secretary mention to the media that the preparations are continuing. That should cut down on inquiries from those who haven’t called yet.”

Mrs. Ferth never questioned her instructions, never hesitated to follow through. She simply, efficiently, did what the queen needed to be done.

Sitting as straight as a pillar, she pulled her note pad toward her. “How does Her Majesty wish the statement handled? Will she be drafting it herself or does she wish to have it drafted by someone else for her approval?”

“I believe it will be best to let the RET handle it. I’ll speak with Admiral Monteque.”

The impact of the morning’s news about the king appeared to finally hit the sixty-something grandmother of four as she blinked down at her pad. Despite the assurances made to the world that morning that it was business as usual at the palace, it most definitely was not. “Yes. Of course,” she murmured. “And what of Her Majesty’s schedule?”

“That will have to be changed. I think all she had today was the luncheon at the Children’s Hospital. There was nothing this evening.” Mentally envisioning her photocopy of Mrs. Ferth’s calendar, Gwen paced toward the window. “Tomorrow morning is the opening of the new Queen Marissa Library in Sterling. We could ask Princess Meredith to represent her mother, but she is as
distressed about her father and brother as the queen. It might be best to ask Lady Colwood if she will represent Her Majesty. The speech is already written. All she has to do is read it.”