A Knight in Shining Armour Read Online Free PDF

everything that had happened hit her, and her knees collapsed. She fell to the floor, her hands on the tomb, her forehead resting against the cold marble.
    She began to cry in earnest, to cry deeply from far down inside herself. She felt as though she were a failure, a complete and absolute failure.Her tears were not just for today, but it seemed that everything she’d ever touched in her life had failed. Since she’d reached puberty, her father had had to bail her out of what had to be hundreds of scrapes.
    There was the “boy” she’d fallen madly in love with when she was sixteen. She had defied her entire family because they hadn’t liked him. But her sister Elizabeth—wise, never-made-a-mistake-in-her-life Elizabeth—showed Dougless some papers. The boy she loved was twenty-five years old and had a prison record. Defiantly, Dougless declared that she loved him no matter what flaws he had. They broke up when he was arrested for grand theft.
    Then there was the minister she’d fallen for when she was nineteen. A minister had seemed a safe person for her to love. She ended their relationship when his pictur(9_@_9_ed on the front page of the newspapers. He was already married to three other women.
    And then there was . . . Dougless was crying so hard that she couldn’t remember all the others. But she knew that the list was endless. Robert had seemed so different, so ordinary, so respectable—but she hadn’t been able to hold on to him.
    “What is wrong with me?” she cried.
    Through her tears, she looked at the marble face of the man on the tomb. In the Middle Ages they had arranged marriages. When she was twenty-two and had just found out that her latest love, a stockbroker, had been arrested for insider trading, she’d crawled onto her father’s lap and asked him if he’d choose a man for her.
    Adam Montgomery had laughed. “Your problem, sweetheart, is that you fall in love with men who need you too much. You ought to find a man who doesn’t need you, but just wants you.”
    Dougless had sniffed. “That’s exactly what I want: a Knight in Shining Armor to swoop down off his white horse and want me so much that he carries me back to his castle, where we live happily ever after.”
    “Something like that,” her father had said, smiling. “Armor’s okay but, Dougless, sweetheart, if he gets mysterious phone calls in the night, then jumps on his Harley and doesn’t return for days at a time, get out, okay?”
    Dougless cried harder as she remembered the many times she’d had to go to her family for help. And now she was going to have to ask for their help again. Once again she was going to have to admit that she’d made a fool of herself over a man. But this time was worse, because this man had been someone who had her family’s approval. But somehow Dougless had lost him.
    “Help me,” she whispered, her hand on the marble hand of the sculpture. “Help me find my Knight in Shining Armor. Help me find a man who wants me.”
    Sitting back on her heels, with her hands covering her face, Dougless began to cry harder.
    After a long while, she slowly came to realize that someone was near her. When she turned her head, a stream of sunlight coming from a high window hit metal and so blinded her that she sat back on the stone floor with a thud. She put her hand up to shield her eyes.
    Standing before her was a man, a man who appeared to be wearing. . . armor.
    He was standing so still, and glaring down at Dougless so fiercely, that at first she thought he wasn’t real. She couldn’t help staring up at him in openmouthed astonishment. He was an extraordinarily good looking man, and he was wearing the most authentic-looking stage costume she’d ever seen. There was a small ruff about his neck, then armor to his waist. But what armor! The shiny metal looked almost as though it was silver. Down the front of the armor were many rows of etched flower designs, each design filled with a gold-colored metal.