Edward’s face flushed. “By law I am the heir to Dobria. That is my right to her, to dispose of her as I see fit.”
Summer flinched. “I am not an object,” she said, voice choked. “I deserve some say in my life.”
“Oh, aye, and see what you have done with it!” Edward snapped. “Lain with this boy of no name and no house and no worth and trampled your own name in the dust thereby. Absolutely, you deserve a say, Summer, but not while you are of my house, if not my blood.”
“Mordred is worth a hundred of you, and more,” Summer cried. “No matter what else he is, it wouldn’t matter, because I love him, and he loves me.” She stepped between the two men, one hand hugging the blanket to her chest. “If you intend to fight him, you’ll have to fight me first.”
Edward backhanded her to the floor. “Know. Your. Place.”
Anger ran over the young knight’s face and he surged forward, gripping Edward by the collar and throwing him back against the wall, his head colliding with the stone. “Don’t you ever raise your hand to her again,” he hisses, his hand finding the elder man’s throat, “or I swear to the gods you will regret the day you were born.”
”Perhaps it is time you learned your place,” the knight tells him, glaring up at him.
Summer held one hand to her cheek, still clutching the blanket with the other where she’d fallen. Edward froze under Mordred’s grip, expression shocked.
“I think you’ve both made your stances more than clear,” a new voice interposed from the doorway. It belonged to an older man with iron-grey hair, still tall and straight and bearing a resemblance to Edward. “I would take it as a kindness if you could release my son, Sir Knight,” he added, nodding to Mordred. “Daughter, please collect yourself; you do your knight no good from there.”