To Love a Thief (Steel Hawk) Read Free Page B

fickle.
    She turned into Pickle Street, named because of the pickle factory at the end.
    “Hey, Rose.” Mary-Beth Sullivan sidled up to her, her face shining with a happy glow. “Paulie has asked me to walk with him and…” She leaned forward, her words coming in an excited rush. “Ma says if I play it right, he might ask for my hand.”
    “But you hardly know him.”
    “I’m sixteen next week. Time I got hitched afore I end up on the shelf and too old.”
    “Sixteen! Lordy, Mary-Beth if that’s too old, what does that make me?”
    “Well, you coulda accept Hank Parker.”
    Rose shuddered. “Hank Parker has bad breath that makes my nose twitch and my stomach rebel any time he gets too close.”
    Mary-Beth’s titter escalated.
    “Marriage to him? I think not.”
    “But what about Clifford Eadie and Floyd Hadfield, the blacksmith? You can’t say you haven’t had plenty of chances.”
    Rose shrugged. “I suppose, but all I can see if I married Floyd is a life of washing his blackened clothes. I’ll not be any man’s skivvy.”
    “Then you’ll end up an old maid.”
    “I think it’s too late. I’m already an old maid.”
    “Is it any wonder? Look at you. You dress like a man.”
    “It’s easier to get about.”
    “But what will everyone say?”
    Rose shrugged her indifference. “Tough. I do what I need to do, and besides, it means I don’t get hassled.”
    “But no beau will want to kiss you when you’re wearing trousers.” Mary-Beth’s gaze roamed the length of Rose, her assessment quite clear in her pretty brown eyes. “A man likes a woman to look…well…” She ran a worn hand down her silky blonde hair. “Pretty.”
    Rose glanced down at her attire. True. Mary-Beth was pretty, while she…she was…
    She shook her head, her cap finally tumbling off and her hair unraveling down her back.
    “If you only tried a bit harder, you could look almost pretty.”
    Almost? “I don’t have time for pretty.”
    A few doorsteps away, she spied two men elbowing open the door to her father’s downstairs workshop. She recognized them in an instant and her fear reignited.
    Pretty could wait.
    Rose burst into a run, feet sliding across the uneven cobbled road. “Papa. Papa!” Dear God. Pretty. She worried about being pretty when her father…
    Breathing labored, she reached the entrance. He wasn’t there.
    She raced upstairs and came to a dead halt.
    The two mean-looking hooligans from yesterday towered over her father, his face already battered, blood seeping along one eyebrow, his eye beneath swollen and turning purple. For a split second, they didn’t see her, and she lunged at the man who held her father by the throat. She tore at his back, nails digging into the man’s flesh. “Leave him alone. Get out. You have no right to be here!”
    He swatted her off as if she were a pesky insect, and Rose tumbled to the ground.
    She kicked out at the man, her foot connecting with his shin.
    “Bitch.”
    Back on her feet, she went to attack again, but the other man caught her and yanked her arms viciously behind her back.
    The giant loosened his hold on her father, turning to her with an inebriated sneer. “Told ya we’d be back. He didn’t give us what we wanted, so we’re making up his mind for him, and he’s coming to stay with us for a while.”
    “Stay? What for?” She tried to wrench free of her captor, kicking out at him. “No! Leave him alone. Leave us alone.”
    The man’s hold on her tightened.
    “Why are you doing this?”
    “There’s a little job to be done.”
    The blood in her veins ceased to pump, dread heavy in the pit of her stomach.
    “He owes us something.”
    “The diamond?”
    The man smiled but cast an ice-cold glance in her father’s direction. “So she knows, does she?”
    “She knows nothing about it. Leave her alone. She’s innocent.”
    “I tried to get it for you.” Not quite the truth, but it might buy her time.
    Despite her father’s injuries, his gaze