For My Lady's Heart Read Online Free PDF

sweetmeats.”
    Lancaster grinned, allowing his shoulder to touch hers as he reached to
    refill the wine cup they shared. “Too commonplace. Nay, give us a more
    difficult task, Princess.”
    Melanthe hid her annoyance. Lancaster was courting her. He would not be
    snubbed and he would not be forestalled. He took her coldness as challenge;
    her reluctance as mere dalliance.
    “Then, sir—I will have it green,” she said smoothly, and to her vexation
    he laughed aloud.
    “Green it shall be.” He signaled to an attendant and leaned back to speak
    in the servant’s ear, then gave Melanthe a sidelong smile. “Before
    sweetmeats, my lady, a green unicorn.”
    The heavy red-and-blue cloth of his sleeve brushed her arm as he lifted
    the cup toward her lips, but the bishop on his other side sought him. In his
    distraction Melanthe took her opportunity to capture the goblet from his
    hand. She could already see the assembly’s reaction to his attentions. Swift
    as metheglin could intoxicate a man, another horrified report began to
    spread among the tables below.
    It would be a subdued mumble, Melanthe knew, passed over a shared sliver
    of meat or a finger full of sweet jelly, whispered under laughter with the
    true discretion of fear. Lancaster was thirty, handsome and vigorous in the
    full strength of manhood. While his oldest brother the Black Prince lay
    swollen and confined to his bed with dropsy, it was Lancaster who kept court
    as Lieutenant of Aquitaine, but who could blame a younger son of the King of
    England—most surely one of such energy and pride as Lancaster—if his
    ambitions were for greater things than service to his brother? Everyone knew
    he would take another highborn heiress after losing his good Duchess
    Blanche, and no one expected him to dally long about it. But Mary, Mother of
    God, even for the gain it would bring him, did he truly contemplate the
    Princess Melanthe?
    She could almost hear the whispers as she sat next to him upon the dais
    and surveyed the company. There—that woman in the blue houpelande, leaning
    back to speak to the next table—she was no doubt complaining to her neighbor
    that such a gyrfalcon as Princess Melanthe carried was too great for a woman
    to fly. Nothing in the duke’s mews could match it; not even the Black Prince
    himself owned such a bird. The insolence, that she would display it so at
    the duke’s own feast! Immodesty! Wicked vanity and arrogance!
    Melanthe gave the woman a long dispassionate stare and had the pleasure
    of watching her victim turn white with dismay at the attention.
    Her reputation preceded her.
    And those three, the two knights inclining so near to the pretty
    fair-haired girl between them—Melanthe could see the relish in their faces.
    Widowed of her Italian prince, the men would say, heiress to all her
    father’s vast English lands ... and the girl would whisper that Princess
    Melanthe had caused a maiden to be drowned in her bath for dropping a cake
    of Castile soap.
    From her late husband, someone else would murmur—the income of an Italian
    city-state; from her English father, lord of Bowland, holdings as large as
    Lancaster’s; she’d taken fifteen lovers and murdered all of them; for a man
    to smile at her was certain death—here the knights would smirk and
    grin—certain, but exquisite, the final price for the paradise he could savor
    for as long as it pleased her to dally with him.
    Melanthe had heard it all, knew what they spoke as well as if she sat
    among them. But still Lancaster paid her court with polish and wolf’s
    glances, smiles and covetous stares, barely concerned to keep his desire in
    check. Melanthe knew what they were saying of that, too. She had entrapped
    him. Ensorcelled him. He’d left off his black mourning; all trace of
    lingering grief for his beloved Blanche had vanished. He looked at the
    Princess Melanthe as he looked at her falcon, with the look of a man who has
    determined what