Royal Protocol by Christine Flynn

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’dthought 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 andacceptable 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