Royal Protocol (17 page)

Lifting a white marker, he arched his eyebrow to silently ask if it was okay to move. He’d never been any good at small talk. The sooner they finished, the better.

Nodding to indicate his choice was okay, her brow pinched.

“You don’t have a child, do you?”

As small talk went, he couldn’t honestly say her question qualified. But with her focus back on the chart, which was where he kept his, she seemed simply to be making conversation, too.

“No,” he told her. “I don’t.”

“Did you ever want one?”

“I never had reason to think about it.”

The only real thought he had ever given to children was to prevent having any of his own. His idea of torture was to be trapped into a relationship he didn’t want. His idea of hell was to have a child he’d have no idea how to raise. The only experience he would have had to call on was his own, and he wouldn’t wish his childhood on anything with a soul. “I was in military school. Then the academy. Then the navy. I was never exposed to any.”

“You were never around children at all?”

“Not since I was a kid myself. My mother died when I was six. A month later, my father put me in military school.” Contemplating the lack of security near the entrance door indicated on the chart, his forehead creased in a frown. “We need four personnel at the ends of all these tables,” he muttered, indicating the problem areas. “Do you want to move everyone or just add more seatings?”

“Add more seatings,” she replied, far more interested in him than in what they were doing. “Is your father still alive?”

“He was the last I heard.” Satisfied, he scrutinized the area by the service entrances. “He retired as vice admiral ten years ago and moved to Belize.”

“I take it you have no siblings.”

“Only child.”

“Is that why you went into our special forces?”

“How did you know that I did?”

“You’re wearing the ribbon.”

She nodded to the five-inch-wide row of service ribbons on his chest. As schooled as she seemed to be with everything else, he shouldn’t be surprised that she would know what most of them represented.

“That probably had something do with it.” Bracing his hands on the table, he scanned the chart. It was getting harder by the second to ignore the old knot of resentment beginning to churn in his gut. But ignore it he would, just as he always did. After forty-six years, a man should be over the fact that nothing he did, nothing he accomplished would make his father notice him. So what if he’d been shipped off as a kid and forgotten about? At least he didn’t have to still face that indifference the way Gwen did. “Did Vancor tell you we’re putting personnel on the kitchen staff?”

Gwen blinked at the carved lines of his strong profile. Moments ago, there hadn’t been anything about him that didn’t seem focused on their task. Outwardly, he still was. But his hands had curled into fists against the table and, despite the ease of this tone, his features had turned to granite.

“No. He didn’t,” she replied, struck by the enormity of what he’d revealed with such seeming indifference. It
was no wonder he’d become as hard as he was, she thought. He hadn’t been able to help it. He’d had no mother. No sister. No softening female influence at all as a child. He had been raised by a father far more unfeeling than hers, a man who had put a grieving, undoubtedly lost little child into a system that focused on discipline and the strict rules of the military.

The thought of him as a motherless little boy nearly broke her heart.

The thought of the man he had become reminded her to be wary.

The parts of his heart that hadn’t been battered as a child would have turned to stone in his training. She’d heard that the men accepted into Penwyck’s special forces were turned into machines. They were the specialists, the men trained for covert operations. Those were the kinds of jobs given only to single men with no ties because men with ties could hesitate and jeopardize an operation if they had to think about family who depended on them.

It was so easy now for her to see why he’d appeared to express so little sensitivity toward the queen. He’d been exposed to so little of the trait himself. Yet somehow his more redeeming qualities had survived the abandonment, the indoctrination. Over the past few days she’d seen totally unexpected hints of kindness and empathy. That empathy had been there last night when he’d told her about Alex. Again today, when he’d refused to let her father belittle her.

“What about a wife?” she asked carefully. “Is that something you never thought about, either?”

Incredibly, his hands relaxed. His long blunt fingers stretched out once more on the polished mahogany. As
he turned his head toward her, she could even see the tension drain from the hard set of his face.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with a wife,” he told her, his eyes holding hers. “I’m lousy at relationships, Gwen. I always have been.”

He was warning her. She should appreciate that, she supposed. And she did. Or would, when she let herself think about it. At the moment, though, she was more drawn by his honesty than put off by it. Something about his admission had struck very close to home.

“I don’t think I’m very good at them anymore, either,” she murmured, thinking of what Marrisa had pointed out last night. With her head bent, she absently flicked her nail along the edges of the cards she held. “I’ve been out with a few men over the past ten years. Friends of friends,” she explained. “I’m a convenient single female to pair with an extra male guest at a diplomatic function, but I haven’t gotten beyond a date or two.”

A soft smile touched her mouth as she glanced up. “Now that I think about it, I was pretty lousy at them before I was married, too.”

For a moment Harrison said nothing. He’d had women. More than he could remember. And with every single one of them, he made it clear from the beginning that he wasn’t looking for anything serious. That was what he’d been doing a moment ago with her. Letting her know that if anything happened between them, it would mean nothing beyond the moment.

He just couldn’t remember a single one of those women looking at him the way she was doing now, with what he could swear was understanding.

Drawn by that, by her, he forgot all about making sure
she understood that he never played for keeps. “Why haven’t you gotten beyond that second date?”

Beneath the simple lines of her suit jacket, her shrug appeared deceptively casual. It was her darkly lashed eyes that gave her away. She couldn’t meet his. “I’ve never thought about it.”

She was thinking about it right now. He was certain of that as he slowly straightened. She had as much as told him that she hadn’t been with a man in ten years. She might as well have told him, too, that before and since her husband she simply hadn’t been attracted to any of the men she’d met.

Yet, with him, he could swear he’d seen her eyes darken at his touch and heard the telltale hitch of her breath.

“You know, Harrison,” she murmured, her weary smile turning rueful as she turned to face the table again, “this isn’t getting the job done. You said you want four at the end of each table?”

Clearly evading, she pondered the chart once more, trying to recall where they’d left off.

Taunted by what he’d just realized, he couldn’t help thinking that getting the job done could wait.

“Both ends if possible. I want all the exits covered.”

“Maybe it would be easiest if you put your markers where you need them and I’ll just work around those.”

Reaching in front of her, his hand closed over the cards she held. Without a word he slipped them from between her fingers.

Had she stepped back or seemed at all uncomfortable that he was so close, he would have moved away.

She didn’t do anything but glance up.

“All you had to do was ask for them,” she said, her tone faintly chiding.

The markers landed on the table. “Maybe they’re not what I want.”

Gwen’s heart jerked against her ribs as she felt Harrison’s big hand slip around the back of her neck. His eyes dark on hers, he tugged her forward slowly, as if giving her time to pull away if that was what she wanted to do.

It never even occurred to her to try.

She touched her fingertips to the hard wall of his chest. Before she could even begin to question the wisdom of what she was doing, he lowered his head and covered her mouth with his.

She felt herself go still. Warmth shimmered through her, little shocks of electricity darting to her breasts. His lips were far softer than anything that looked so hard had a right to be. His hands, big and strong as they were, felt incredibly gentle on her skin when he turned her toward him and his thumb traced the side of her jaw.

The warmth enlivened every nerve in her body. The gentleness of his touch disarmed her completely.

With a sigh that felt far too much like longing, she opened to him.

His taste filled her, hot and flavored faintly of spearmint as a groan sounded deep in his throat. The guttural sound rumbled through her, drawing her closer as his hands slipped down her back to coax her nearer himself.

Somewhere in the back of her suddenly befuddled brain, common sense battled with her senses for priority. The skirmish was embarrassingly quick. Before she could begin to warn herself of all the reasons she should be protecting herself from this man, her senses won. Inside, she could feel parts of herself melting. Parts that had nearly withered away from neglect. Parts he’d teased be
fore, but now brought completely to life with the touch of his hand to her side, to the curve of her breast.

Need shot through her, liquid and desperate, weakening her knees, silencing defenses.

Fisting the wool of his lapels in her grip, she pulled up, meeting the blatantly sensual thrust of his tongue, encouraging the way his hands roamed her body. The moment she did, his hands drifted lower to press her to the hardness straining against her belly.

For an instant his body didn’t move. A heartbeat later, gentleness turned insistent, and she was holding on for dear life because the raw hunger she felt in him was feeding a need inside her that she hadn’t even known existed.

That hunger clawed at Harrison, digging its tentacles deep. He wasn’t sure if he’d been testing himself when he’d reached out, or if he was testing her. All he’d known when he’d seen the question slip into her luminous eyes and he’d heard her shuddery intake of breath was that he needed to feel her, to taste her. He wanted to know what it was about her that kept drawing him to her when everything about her should have told him to back away.

That was what he thought he wanted, anyway. Now all he wanted was more.

And more was exactly what he shouldn’t take.

The knowledge jerked hard.

So did the fact that torturing himself any longer with the feel of her would only make it harder to let her go.

Gritting his teeth against the demand of his body, he slowly lifted his head. As he did, she pulled back far enough to see his eyes.

She was even more beautiful when her skin was flushed. “I wasn’t going to do that,” he said.

Beneath his palms, he felt the quick tension enter her supple muscles.

“When you put it that way, I rather wish you hadn’t.”

“Gwen.”

“Why did you?”

She watched him search her face, his eyes glittering on hers.

“Because I can’t seem to keep my hands off you,” he admitted. “Because I want you,” he continued, with that amazing blunt honesty of his.

He skimmed his fingers down the smooth skin at the side of her neck, coming to rest at the hollow at the base of her throat. Beneath his fingers, her pulse leaped.

“I want you in bed,” he said, making sure she had no doubt about his meaning. “I want to feel you. All of you. I want to taste every inch of you,” he murmured, certain she understood. “I want to be inside you.”

Her breath shuddered a moment before her glance fell.

With the tips of his fingers, he tilt her chin back up. “You asked why, Gwen. And I told you. But just because I want something doesn’t mean I take it. I’m not sure either one of us needs any more complications right now.”

It might not have sounded like it to her, but he was being the voice of reason. If she had any idea how tired he was of that role, she might have realized how easy it would be at that moment for her to tell him reason didn’t matter and he would believe her. She had a way of making him abandon the ruthless control he’d always maintained over himself. She made him question why it was even necessary. But more than anything, she made him need.

That wasn’t a feeling he was terribly comfortable with.

His hands fell from her arms. As they did, she stepped back and picked up the markers scattered on the table.

“How much longer will this take?” he asked, picking out red ones himself.

Gwen kept her focus on the table, trembling inside. He’d left her totally rattled by that kiss. But she’d never been so shaken by a man’s words in her entire life. She wasn’t entirely sure how she felt at that moment.
Unsettled
was high on the list. So was
confused.
He wanted her but he didn’t. He pulled her close only to push her away again.

“Not long,” she murmured.

“Let’s get it finished, then. Your daughter will be calling soon.”

“What if the general wants to make changes?”

“I’ll take care of the general,” he promised. “You just get your call.”

Y
esterday Harrison had watched the sunrise from his desk. Tonight the late-August sun was setting as he stood at the window, taking the first break he’d allowed himself all day.

He’d been in meetings since seven o’clock that morning. At the Admiralty, with the RET, with Penwyck’s ministers, with the royal physician.

The king’s condition remained critical but stable.

The prince still hadn’t been found.

Clamping his hand over the muscles knotting in the back of his neck, he pulled a deep breath and slowly blew it out.

On his massive desk behind him were piles of reports from the various battleships, submarines and aircraft carriers for which he was ultimately responsible. He had to review an operating budget that rivaled the national debt of some small nations. There were UN communiqués to
read about cooperative maneuvers coming up next month and a stack of correspondence to sign that Lieutenant Sotheby had put in his in-box before she’d gone home two hours ago—after reminding him of an early breakfast for one of his most trusted commanders, who was deserting him by retiring next month.

The man was entitled to retirement. He was pushing sixty-five.

Harrison felt as if he, himself, were pushing a hundred.

Being tired to the bone wasn’t what had him frowning at the slit of pink below the gray evening clouds. It was the conversation he’d had with the reporter who ruined his morning three days ago. He’d spoken with the man the day the story had broken. He’d spoken with him again a few hours ago.

The reporter, a seasoned veteran of the press named Cartwright Alger, had given the same report both times. He said that he’d received an anonymous call to meet someone who claimed to have intimate knowledge of an illness within the royal family. When he’d met with the caller near a secluded bench in Penleigh Park, he had been given the details he’d put in the paper about the king’s illness and resulting coma.

During both calls, Alger had insisted that his source was irrefutable. He’d also maintained that he couldn’t name him because he feared what would happen to him if he did.

His editor stood behind the decision to protect his source.

Behind his editor was Penwyck’s own law that guaranteed a free press.

Watching a sailing sloop navigate the breakwater in the dimming light, Harrison conceded that the reporter had, at least, eliminated females as possible leads since
he’d consistently referred to his source as masculine. But the fact that the man sounded genuinely fearful of the threat was what interested Harrison the most. That and the way the headline had been worded. The reporter claimed that his source had insisted on the particular wording to be used: King in Coma; Prince Broderick in Power.

To Harrison, the caption sounded like something Broderick himself would want—which was why Harrison couldn’t help but wonder if the king’s twin hadn’t called the reporter himself. Broderick was certainly vain enough to want everyone to know he was there. Yet he’d had far more perceived power when he’d been playing the king than he did now.

The puzzle had him shoving his fingers through his hair, frustration piling on top of fatigue and a growing sense that there was no end in sight.

“Harrison?”

At the hesitant sound of his name, he dropped his hand as he turned around. Gwen stood in the open doorway, that same uncertainty on her face as she studied him across the wide expanse of navy-blue carpet.

“The door was open and your secretary is gone,” she explained, motioning to the empty office behind her. “The guard at the main door said I could come up.”

“It’s fine.” He’d known she was coming. His assistant had said she’d called that afternoon needing to see him.

Seeing her now, aware of the quiet concern in her eyes, he wasn’t sure being alone with her was especially wise.

Having no choice, given the nature of their meeting, he motioned her inside. “Come on in.”

“Am I interrupting?”

“No. No,” he repeated, because his thoughts hadn’t
been getting anywhere, anyway. “I just didn’t realize how late it was.”

Puzzled by his claim, Gwen crossed her arms over the jacket of her cobalt-blue suit and ventured into his official domain. He’d been staring out the window, the last gasp of the sunset clearly visible, and he hadn’t realized the time?

The question only added to the sense of uncertainty she’d felt when she’d first seen him standing there, his white-shirted back to her, his neck bent. Never before had she seen him looking anything less than his confident, capable self. But as he’d stood, framed by the high, arched window, what she’d seen was fatigue and something that looked very much like dejection.

When he faced her now, the dejection had vanished. But the fatigue stayed etched in the sculpted lines of his face. It deepened the creases fanning from the corners of his eyes and the masculine creases bracketing his sensual mouth. That weariness almost seemed tangible to her as he motioned to one of the two burgundy leather wing chairs facing his huge desk.

“Please, sit down.” He’d tossed his uniform jacket over the nearest chair. He moved it now to the one beside it.

“I don’t know that I’ll be that long,” she replied, wondering if he realized how dim it was in the office. The only light came from the brass lamp in the leather conversation grouping at the other end of the room. It was as if he’d turned off the overheads to watch the sunset, then totally forgotten his purpose.

“I just wanted…the queen wanted,” she corrected, “to know what’s being done to find Prince Owen. We’ve had no word today.” She glanced behind her, into the empty outer office. There was a cleaning crew in the
hallway. She’d run into them on her way in. “Is there nothing to tell, or should I close the door?”

Harrison’s expression was a study in stone as he ran his fingers through his hair once more. “Close the door.”

She’d barely turned after the latch caught, when she saw him push aside a pile of documents on the corner of his desk.

The desk itself overflowed with papers, files, charts. The wall and credenza behind him were covered with aerial photographs of battleships at sea, pictures of crews crouched in front of aircraft and the certificates, commendations and royal decrees that proclaimed him the accomplished and powerful man that he was.

Of everything surrounding him at that moment, it was his fatigue that impressed her the most. She truly doubted he thought that fatigue was visible, but as she crossed back toward him, taking in the tall flags flanking the credenza, the young men in the photographs, the sheer volume of work on his desk, she realized that the responsibility she’d seen him bear the past few days barely scratched the surface of what he carried on his broad shoulders every single day.

“There isn’t much,” he said as she stopped beside the chair he’d cleared for her. “Our trace of the call Prince Broderick received the day before yesterday got us as far as northeastern Majorca before it petered out. The voice prints don’t match anything in any of our intelligence files or any on the international criminal registry. Our best shot at the moment is Gage Weston.”

“You’ve called him?”

“I’d put a call in for him before you suggested it,” he told her, hitching the fabric at the knee of his slacks as he rested his hip on the corner he’d cleared. “So we were already on the same wavelength there.” They actually
shared that wavelength on a lot of things, he realized. Far more than he would have ever imagined. Even on those occasions when their approaches seemed diametrically opposed, they were after the same end result. “He just couldn’t get here until this afternoon. He’s searching the prince’s apartments now.”

“Have you heard if he’s come up with anything?”

His hand clamped the back of his neck again, his fingers kneading at the hard muscles there. “Not yet,” he muttered, the furrows in his brow doubling. “I’ll call Pierce in a while.”

He sounded frustrated. He looked exhausted.

Something about that combination looked very familiar to Gwen. Watching his shoulders rise when he took a deep breath, she realized there had been something familiar, too, about the sense of dejection she’d glimpsed when she’d first seen him minutes ago. She’d seen it before, the morning he’d claimed to have avoided the complications of caring.

She wondered now if what she’d seen hadn’t been dejection at all. If what she’d seen then, and what she was seeing now because he was too tired to hide it, was simply loneliness.

“Do you want me to do it?” she asked, unable to imagine how he survived. The burdens he carried, he’d chosen to carry alone, with no one to share that strain at the end of the day.

He shook his head slowly, as if to conserve what energy he still possessed. “Thanks, but I’ll do it,” he said, still kneading. “There are a couple of other things I need to talk to him about, anyway.”

She took a step toward him. “Is there anything else I can do?”

Four feet of carpet separated them. Across that short
distance Harrison lifted his glance from the long length of her shapely calves, past the slim knee-skimming skirt and trim jacket and met the blue of her eyes. There was concern in those intriguing depths. He recognized it because he’d seen it there before, for the queen, for the queen’s children. He’d seen it for her own daughter.

On occasion he’d seen it for himself.

Her concern for him had just never seemed quite so obvious as it did now.

“Would it help to talk?” she prompted.

Talking was the last thing he wanted to do. “Probably not. But thanks.”

He couldn’t imagine dumping the burdens of his job on anyone. He couldn’t imagine anyone being worried about him, either. But she was. There was no doubt in his mind of that as she stepped closer, her troubled glance sweeping his face.

The knowledge that she cared touched something inside him that refused to be denied.

Too weary and discouraged to fight it, he found himself craving her caring to the depths of his soul.

“It’s been a long day,” he explained, trying to deny it anyway. “I’m just…”

She stepped closer when he said nothing else. “Tired?” she ventured.

“That, too,” he muttered, not trusting the need building inside him.

“Can you just leave all this and go upstairs? If you’re waiting for a call or a delivery or something, I can stay here and get it for you.”

“Gwen. Don’t.”

Confusion clouded concern. “Don’t what?”

“You don’t have to run interference for me.”

“I just wanted to help.”

He knew that. That was what was tearing at him. She wanted to make things easier for him.

She was only making them more difficult instead.

The golden light from the lamp behind her made a faint halo of her pale hair. She wore it smoothed back and clipped at her nape, the soft strands fairly begging to be freed of their confines. Her lush mouth was glossed with something that left her lips looking natural and soft.

She was close enough for him to see the chips of turquoise in her eyes. Close enough for him to breathe her scent—that impossible combination of gentleness and seduction.

Close enough to touch.

At that moment that was what he needed very much to do.

With his eyes locked on hers, he snagged her waist and slowly tugged her to him. She took the step easily, looking far more worried about him than with what he was doing when he lifted his free hand to her face.

She had a tiny cleft below her mouth. He touched it lightly, then skimmed his finger to the point of her chin. Intent on the motion of his hand, he slowly traced the delicate line of her jaw to where fragile bone met the pea-size gold ball piercing the small lobe of her ear.

Her skin felt warm to him and soft, like the petal of a rose—though he couldn’t honestly say he’d ever stopped to appreciate the beauty of that particular flower before. He was appreciating beauty now, though, he realized, and let his exploration drift down the side of her graceful neck to her collarbones. In the hollow space between them, he felt her pulse skip wildly beneath his touch.

His touch drifted lower, his knuckles brushing the porcelain skin visible between slashes of cobalt linen.

When his fingers slipped beneath that fabric and
stroked the gentle swell he’d brushed once before, her lips parted, a tremulous breath slipping between them.

Gwen said nothing. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even move. His hand at her waist rested as lightly as the brush of his fingers against her skin. Yet, he might as well have shackled and bound her. Raw need shadowed the sculpted angles and planes of his face. A kind of hunger that made her ache inside even as he sent little licks of fire racing along her nerves. She couldn’t have pulled from him had her next breath depended on it.

His hand slipped to the top button of her jacket.

It was only then that his glance drifted up. That same hunger was in his eyes, turning them diamond bright as they locked on hers.

She swallowed and stayed right where she was.

The gleam in his gaze turned feral, but the motion of his fingers remained unhurried as he slowly flicked open one button. Then, another. And one more.

It wasn’t until the front of her jacket was open that he let his glance move from her face. When he did, he slipped his hands between the sides of the deep-blue fabric, moving them back to expose the ivory satin camisole she wore beneath it.

She had no idea what made his features go so taut just then. But what he did made her throat go tight. Flexing his fingers against the sides of her hips, he pulled her nearer and rested his forehead between her breasts. His broad shoulders seemed to sag when his breath leaked out in a long, relieved sigh.

Caution filled her as she lifted her hand and touched it to the back of his head. She couldn’t believe how defenseless he suddenly seemed, or how exhausted he had to be to expose such vulnerability to her. The way he held her, with his arms snug around her hips, his head
leaning against her, made it almost seem as if he were seeking comfort.

She didn’t know which pulled at her more profoundly. The thought that he truly needed solace or the thought that he wanted it from her. The fact that he needed it at all had her threading her fingers through his surprisingly soft hair, cradling her to him as she would a tired, lonely little boy. Except the little boy in him had long ago ceased to exist. And the needs of the grown man were creating needs in her that she had long denied.