Midsummer's Knight Read online

  Praise for Tori Phillips’ previous books

  SILENT KNIGHT

  “Superb, magnificent, marvelous, woderful and electrifying are only a few of the adjectives to describe this book.”

  —Rendezvous

  FOLL’S PARADISE

  “A delightful Elizabethan romp.”

  —Ruth Ryan Langan

  “A great read!”

  —Dixie Browning

  “A delight to read...charming.”

  —Suzanne Barclay

  “...packed with love, adventure, history...I enjoyed it immensely.”

  —Rebecca Hagan Lee

  “I loved this story!...Tarleton (the hero) is pure magic!”

  —Martha Hix

  Praise for Tori Phillips’ previous books

  “What do I owe you this time?” he murmured.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Tori Phillips

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Author Note

  Copyright

  “What do I owe you this time?” he murmured.

  “The golden ribbon from your left sleeve, to match the others I have already won,” Kat replied with a smile.

  “If we continue, all my clothes will fall to your feet” Untying the satin ribbon, he held it out to her. “You would not wish to see me so...at one with nature, would you?” he murmured as he drew closer still.

  The idea of him standing stark naked before her both startled and fascinated Kat. Their fingers touched, and a dizzying current raced through her as if her blood had suddenly begun to boil.

  “Perish the thought, sire! Our weather here is most unpredictable. You might find you’d catch a sudden chill.”

  He took the ribbon from her shaking fingers, tied it in a love knot over her pulse point, then sealed the knot with a feather-light kiss. “Then perchance you might find it in your heart to keep me warm?” he whispered, the gleam in his eye turning to blue flames.

  Dear Reader,

  It’s June, so start thinking about your summer reading! Whether you’re going to the beach or simply going to relax on the porch, don’t forget to bring along a Harlequin Historical® novel. And speaking of summer, we are thrilled to present Midsummer’s Knight from award-winning author Tori Phillips. Critics have described Tori’s books as “superb,” “electrifying” and “not to be missed!” In this delightfully mischievous sequel to Silent Knight, which earned 4½ from Affaire de Coeur, a confirmed bachelor and a reluctant widow betrothed against their will switch identities with their friends to spy on the other, and fall in love in the process!

  When a young woman kills her stepfather in self-defense, she flees, only to be discovered by a kind cowboy who takes her back to his parents’ Missouri home as his “wife,” in Runaway by the popular Carolyn Davidson. And in Widow Woman, a compelling Western by longtime Silhouette author Patricia McLinn, a beautiful rancher must win back the heart of her ex-foreman—the man she once refused to marry and the unknowing father of her child.

  Laurel Ames returns with Infamous, her eighth book for us. In this fun and frothy Regency, a dashing nobleman and spy, having put up with a very silly and snobbish mother and sister all his life, Finally meets a woman he feels is worth pursuing—much to his family’s chagrin!

  Whatever your tastes in reading, you’ll be sure to find a romantic journey back to the past between the covers of a Harlequin Historical® novel

  Sincerely,

  Tracy Farrell

  Senior Editor

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609. Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  Midsummer’s Knight

  TORI PHILLIPS

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  Books by Tori Phillips

  Harlequin Historicals

  Fool’s Paradise #307

  Silent Knight #343

  Midsummer’s Knight #415

  TORI PHILLIPS

  After receiving her degree in theater arts from the University of San Diego, Tori worked at MGM Studios, acted in numerous summer stock musicals and appeared in Paramount Pictures’ The Great Gatsby. Her plays, published by Dramatic Publishing Co., have been produced in the U.S. and Canada, and her poetry is included in several anthologies. She has directed over forty plays, including twenty-one Shakespearean productions. Currently she is a first-person, Living History actress at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She lives with her husband in Burke, Virginia.

  “There was a star danced, and under that was I born.”

  —Much Ado About Nothing

  This book is dedicated with a great deal of love to our first grandchild, Konrad Martin Schaller, born March 22, 1997. He rode to earth on the tail of a comet and decided to stay.

  Chapter One

  Why, this is very midsummer madness.

  —Twelfth Night

  Hampton Court, England

  May 1530

  “Ma...marriage?” Sir Brandon Cavendish, gentleman of the king’s bedchamber, stammered out the loathsome word. His stomach twisted into a hard knot.

  Even though he was winning the set, Brandon lowered his racket. A tennis ball whipped by him, missing his ear by inches. He barely noticed its passing. “Me, your grace?”

  His opponent, Henry, the eighth of that name and king of England, roared with glee. “My point, Cavendish! Ha! Have I ruffled your fine feathers at last?”

  Brandon flexed his broad shoulders. “Nay, sire! I see you are jesting to put me off my game.” At least, Brandon hoped that was the king’s only motive for introducing such a vile subject on such a lovely day.

  Henry’s answering laughter reverberated around the dark green wooden walls of Hampton Court’s tennis hall. “Aye, I would put you off your game, my lord, but we do not speak of tennis. Look you, second service!” With that barked warning, the king drew back and fired another buff-colored d all at his victim.

  This time Brandon managed to return the serve, but without his usual strength. God’s nightshirt! What piece of deviltry was the king up to now? His Grace seemed to be in unusually good spirits, even if he was down by two sets. Brandon mopped the perspiration out of his eyes with the loose, frilled sleeve of his shirt, then ran his fingers through his damp blond hair.

  “This game is mine, sire, though I warrant you took that last point most unfairly.”

  “How so, Cavendish?” The king crossed to the side gallery where a page waited with silver goblets and a pitcher of chilled wine. “I think you are growing fat with old age.”

  Brandon bit the tip of his tongue lest he point out that the king was both older and more stout than he. Brandon knew just how far he dared to go when speaking to the large, perspiring man next to hi
m. Great Harry played the part of the bluff and hearty sportsman, but underneath that smiling exterior, there lurked a vain and vicious temper. What was the loss of a game or two of tennis to the loss of one’s place in court—or worse?

  Brandon drank deeply from his goblet. The crisp white wine cleared his throat of dust, and of the sour taste that the mere thought of marriage always left in his mouth. He knew he was poor husband material; his interest in wooing a woman never lasted longer than a fortnight. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “’Tis unfair to speak of wedded bliss to a man when he is at serious play, your grace,” he remarked mildly.

  The king’s gray eyes twinkled behind the narrow folds of his lids. “Aye, but in this matter, I am serious, Cavendish.”

  Taking a deep breath, Brandon tried to clear the humming in his ears. “If you speak to me of marriage, sire, I fear you toss your words into the wind.” I would tire of a wife in a month’s time.

  The king’s thin lips pursed under his red mustache. “Ha! This bachelor state does not please your father.”

  Brandon groaned inwardly. What had his sire done now?

  “Last week, Sir Thomas sent me a long letter, begging my assistance in a grave family matter.” Henry signaled the page to pour another round. “It seems that you have turned a deaf ear to all his entreaties concerning your future.”

  A very unfilial thought crossed Brandon’s mind. Why couldn’t his well-meaning father have left him alone? “My future is to serve your pleasure here at court, your grace,” he replied, picking his words with care.

  “Aye, and so you shall—but not at court.” With a roar of laughter, the king whacked Brandon between the shoulder blades.

  Brandon nearly slopped his drink on the king’s brown suede shoes. He licked his dry lips. “May I know what boon my father has asked of you, your grace?” Do not saddle me with a wife, I pray.

  “Aha! Now you have hit upon the subject of my speech, you wily rogue!” He gave Brandon another bone-crunching whack. “The good Earl of Thornbury has grown tired of waiting for his firstborn to choose a bride and settle down. He has grown weary of requesting you to do so. In his wisdom, he has turned to me, his king and liege lord.” Henry’s brow furrowed and his countenance grew dark. “How well I know the yearning for an heir!”

  The nearby spectators in the gallery went deathly still. Not even Brandon dared to respond to such a dangerous statement. The king’s frantic desire for a son to succeed him had sent the saintly but sonless Queen Catherine to a distant manor in the midlands. In her place, Viscount Rochford’s younger daughter, Lady Anne Boleyn, kept Henry and his court dancing to her tune with her promise to give the man she married a house full of sons. The subjects of marriage and heirs constantly played a raucous tune in the king’s besotted mind. Henry’s Great Matter, as he called it, obsessed him.

  Now, thanks to the prompting of Sir Thomas Cavendish, that obsession had turned outward, and Brandon did not like the direction in which it was aimed.

  “The choosing of a wife is not a thing to be taken lightly,” Brandon murmured, not daring to look the king in the eye. He twirled the handle of his racket in his hand. “And certainly not when there is still one more game to be played.” He prayed that Henry would drop the uncomfortable subject.

  “You speak the truth, Cavendish.” The king’s mood brightened again. “And your last game draws apace.”

  Licking his lips again, Brandon wished for a third cup of wine. The wicked gleam in Great Harry’s eyes unnerved him. “A game of tennis, your grace?” he bantered.

  The courtiers in the gallery, including many of the ladies with whom Brandon had flirted over the years, leaned forward to hear the king’s reply. Lady Anne Boleyn and her companion, Lady Olivia Bardolph, smiled openly at Cavendish’s discomfort.

  “A pox on tennis, you clodpate!” roared the king, his voice shaking the rafters of the tennis hall. A wide grin spread across his thin lips. “I speak of the marriage game—for you, my fine friend. Since you have danced out of Cupid’s way for many years now—” the king swept a glance over the colorful, bejeweled company in the gallery “—much to the disappointment of many a fair lady here, we have taken it upon ourselves to arrange a match.”

  Brandon gritted his teeth as he heard a breeze of female tittering behind him. “A wife for me, sire?” His heart thudded within his chest. “You have so many affairs of state, your grace. My father’s request will take up too much of your most valuable time.”

  “Let your fears take flight, Cavendish! ’Tis done!”

  “The match is already arranged?” The humming sound grew louder in his mind.

  The king’s laughter drowned out everyone else’s. “Aye! And to a fine lady with a fat estate in Sussex. Lady Katherine Fitzhugh of Bodiam Castle! By my command, Cavendish, you shall wed her on Midsummer’s Day. The banns were proclaimed this morning at Lambeth Palace by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. This week, you will ride into Sussex to woo your betrothed.”

  The laughter, which filled the cavernous tennis hall, could not drown out the hammering of Brandon’s heart. Marriage to an unknown lady in less than a month? An end to his freedom? Why had his father decided that he needed another heir? Several children already scampered around the family home at Wolf Hall in Northumberland. Brandon saw no reason to take a wife. He had enough domestic responsibilities as it was.

  Belle, his daughter, would turn the household into a merry hell if Brandon brought home a new mother. And what of Francis Bardolph, his page? Brandon cast a quick glance at the boy’s self-absorbed mother who sat in the gallery. Francis didn’t suspect his true parentage as yet, but daily he grew to look more and more like a Cavendish. How could Brandon present an unsuspecting bride with two love children?

  “What ho!” cried the king to his amused court. “Regard my Lord Cavendish! He looks like a great, goggle-eyed turbot caught in a net. Perchance you have won this tennis game, knave of hearts—but methinks, I have won the match! Ha!”

  “Sweet angels! What have I done to deserve this fate?” Lady Katherine Fitzhugh sank to the cold comfort of one of the stone benches in her rose garden at Bodiam Castle. She fanned herself with the parchment she held in her hand. The letter dripped with the thick, red wax seal of the king himself.

  Miranda Paige, Kat’s gentle cousin and companion, abandoned her trug basket on the newly turned flower bed. “Sweet Kat, is it ill news from court? What has that peevish nephew done now?”

  “Marriage,” Kat managed to gasp when she got her breath back. The bodice laces of her green gown had suddenly become too tight.

  “Fenton has married without your knowledge?” Taking out her handkerchief, Miranda began to flap it in front of Kat’s face.

  “Nay, nay, worse than that!” Kat reread the king’s missive, in the vain hope that she had misunderstood his message. Alas, she had not. “God shield me, Miranda, I am doomed.”

  “Shall I call Montjoy to help you to your bed, coz?” Miranda stopped waving her handkerchief, much to Kat’s relief. “Do you require a cordial for a headache? Shall I call—”

  Kat cut her off. “Call down thunderbolts and hail to rain on Hampton Court, Miranda! Send a storm of fiery arrows into every bleating idiot who utters the word ‘marriage’ to me!” Remembering her two disastrous forays into matrimony, she shuddered.

  “Who is to be married?” Miranda asked, taking Kat’s hand in hers and giving it a squeeze. “Is it me?”

  Despite her distress engendered by the king’s command, Kat smiled into her cousin’s hopeful eyes. Poor Miranda! Ignoring the unhappy examples of Kat’s late husbands, she had always harbored a childish romantic fantasy of true love.

  “Am I to have a husband at last?” Miranda prodded, craning her neck so that she could read the letter in Kat’s hand.

  “I wish that were so! Nay, ’tis I the king commands.”

  “To marry him?” Miranda’s jaw all but dropped. “But he is already wed to good Queen Catherine these pa
st twenty years—and they say he has a paramour besides.”

  “Nay, Miranda! ’Tis to some popinjay of the court named...” Kat consulted the letter again. “Sir Brandon Cavendish, eldest son of the Earl of Thornbury—whomever that might be. After the good Lord saw fit to take Fitzhugh to his eternal reward—”

  “May God have mercy upon his soul,” Miranda murmured at the name of Kat’s second husband.

  “Save your breath! That man is roasting his backside upon the devil’s spit!” Kat closed her eyes in the effort to blot out her last memory of Edward Fitzhugh’s face, mottled with insane rage.

  Miranda quickly made a sign of the cross. “’Tis bad luck to speak ill of the dead, Kat. Say a prayer!”

  “Say one for me,” Kat retorted. “Fitzhugh heard enough of my prayers and pleading during his lifetime. I shall not taint my mouth any further for his sake.” She shook the king’s letter, causing the red seal to bounce merrily on its white satin ribbon. “These past two years have been a paradise for me. After surviving two such husbands as mine, I had hoped to spend the rest of my life in gardening, and caring for my people. I did not expect to be saddled with yet another piece of vermin such as this...Cavendish! I will never be any man’s property again!”