If He's Daring Read Free Page A

take the time to return home to get another horse or the carriage.”
    “Why did some man take your son? He want money for the boy?”
    She dragged her hands through her hair, idly noting that it had fallen free from the neat style her maid had spent a great deal of time perfecting. “I need to see to the horses right now.”
    Giles did not push her for an answer to his question but moved to lend her a hand. As they worked together to unhitch the team, rubbed the animals down with handfuls of grass, and then watered them, she told Giles all about Morris and his fight to gain control over Alwyn and his inheritance. Her openness with the boy surprised her, but she decided she just had a deep need to speak her thoughts aloud to someone and he was there, watching and listening, his pretty eyes sharp with intelligence. At times Catryn felt as if she spoke with an adult while at other times, especially when the boy asked why again and again, she could see the young boy beneath the air of toughness and maturity.
    Just speaking of all Morris had done stirred her anger. The moment the horses were tethered so they could graze, she began to pace as she talked. Spitting it all out, her father would call it, and that was just what she was doing. She cursed Morris for his greed, his inability to accept what was right by law and his brother’s will, and even for his fanciful blue-and-gold carriage. Even telling herself that a young boy should not be subjected to her fury at Morris and her fear for her child, she could not stop talking. Or pacing.
    “Morris is headed to the coast,” she said, abruptly changing from ranting about all of Morris’s past crimes and thinking only of the one he had committed this time. “He may be trying to take Alwyn out of the country. He may even be thinking to just toss my baby overboard once he is out to sea.”
    “No, he would ne’er do that,” Giles said as he paced alongside her. “He wants what your boy has and that means he best be keeping that boy alive until he gets it. That is how the game is played.”
    She paused to stare at him. “How old are you?”
    “I think I am eight.”
    “You think?”
    “Well, no way to be certain since my mother left me in an alley in the city when I was a babe still swaddled and all.”
    Catryn did not know what to say and stared at him in silent shock for a moment. “And your father?”
    “I told you; I just found him. Me and my mates were helping his cousin and then he came to help, too, and one of the older ladies said I was his. No one argued with her, said she knew what she was about, so he took me in. My mates are all staying with his cousin and are at their country house now. We are going to better ourselves and not have to live in the dark alleys, maybe thieving a bit, maybe going hungry. I begin to think the lady knew what she was talking about, too, because my father and I do well enough.”
    “But how did you survive until you found your father?”
    “My mates. There was a woman or two along the way who helped, but it was mostly my mates who raised me. As I told you, they are all at Penelope’s now and that was where my father was taking me. Lady Pen is my father’s cousin and she used to have a house where all the other Wherlocke bastards stayed. My father named it the Wherlocke Warren. Now that Lady Pen is wed, she has kept the ones she has and deals with whatever new ones appear as she thinks best.”
    It was impossible for Catryn to envision the life he spoke of. So hard, stark, and dangerous. That a mother would leave her babe in an alley as if the child were nothing but trash to be tossed away was also impossible for her to understand. Without his mates, Giles would have died and she had no doubt that he knew that well. It was no wonder he often seemed to be so much older than he was.
    She was not so certain he had improved his lot much by being taken up by his father. A cousin who had run a house for the bastard children of her