He barked a laugh which contained no humor at all.

“At best,” he went on harshly, “it will be your word against his… and a carefully orchestrated background chorus designed to drown out anything you say. And to be honest, the two of you have spent so much time together, both publicly and in private, and worked so closely with one another that it’s going to be impossible to refute the inevitable allegations that you obviously had ample opportunity for it!”

“Refute?” White Haven sounded strangled, but Honor could only sit in paralyzed shock. Behind her, she heard the soft thud as Nimitz leapt from his perch to her desk. She felt the ’cat reaching out to her, felt him trying to insert himself between her and her pain as he’d done so often before, even before he vaulted over her shoulder and landed in her lap. She scooped him into her arms without even turning her chair and held him tightly, pressing her face into his silky fur while he crooned to her, but this time no one could protect her from the pain. Not even Nimitz.

For the most part, Manticoran social mores were far more relaxed than those of Grayson. Indeed, those of the capital planet itself were more liberal than those of Honor’s native Sphinx. Normally, the idea that an affair between two consenting adults was the business of anyone besides the two adults concerned would have been laughable. Normally.

But not in this case. Not for Steadholder Harrington, who also had to concern herself with the sensibilities of her Grayson subjects and how Grayson public opinion would rebound against her. And through her, against Protector Benjamin and his beleaguered efforts to maintain Grayson’s military preparedness in the face of the Star Kingdom’s effective abandonment of the Manticoran Alliance. Her earlier relationship with Paul had been hard enough for Grayson to swallow, but at least if they’d never married, neither of them had been married to someone else, either.

White Haven was, and that was the second prong of the threat, for Lady Emily Alexander, Countess White Haven, was one of the most beloved public figures in the entire Star Kingdom.

Once one of Manticore’s most beautiful and talented HD actresses, she’d been confined to a life support chair following an air car accident since before Honor’s third standard birthday, yet Emily Alexander had refused to let her life end. The accident had crippled her physically, but the damage hadn’t affected the brilliance of mind and strength of will which had propelled her to the very top of her vocation. The surgeons had managed to salvage enough of her motor control centers to give her almost full use of one hand and arm and almost normal speech, although the regulation of her involuntary muscles depended entirely upon her life support chair. It wasn’t much. Indeed, it was pathetically little, but small as it was, she had made it enough.

Unable to take the stage again, she’d become a producer and writer, a poet who was also a brilliant historian and the semi-official biographer of the House of Winton. And along with her stature as the great tragic heroine of Manticore, the beloved example who challenged and inspired an entire kingdom with the proof of how much could be overcome by sheer, dauntless courage, had come the great romantic story of her marriage to Hamish Alexander. Of the devotion and love which had survived almost six T-decades of confinement to her chair. Many men would have sought the dissolution of their marriages, however gently and on however generous terms, so that they could remarry, but Hamish had rejected any suggestion that he might have done so.