It was a poor story for a thief. Too much grief. Too little profit. Connor thought of the baby in his arms two weeks ago, red-faced and furious, wrapped in a blanket with no name, no kin standing beside him, and no explanation but an ugly note written bya coward. He had seen a problem first. A responsibility. A question of blood and protection.
“I came to take him with me,” the woman declared.
He shook his head, a low laugh escaping his lips. “Nay.”
Her head snapped up. “His mother asked me to take care of him andlovehim.”
“Love doesnae give ye the right to carry him out of me castle.”
“And being a brute with dungeons givesyeany right at all?”
Connor stepped closer before he thought better of it. “Ye accuse me because I didnae allow a woman I didnae ken to steal the bairn I’m responsible for from me castle?”
She faltered, only for half a breath.
“I wasnaestealinghim,” she protested. “I was saving him.”
“From me?”
She didn’t respond, and yet her silence carried too much behind it.
“How did ye find the castle anyway?”
“It doesnae matter.”
“It does to me.”
Her breath caught once. She looked away from him, toward the bars, though there was nothing there but torchlight and stone. “Trust me, it doesnae.”
Connor looked away from her for the first time while the key pressed hard into his palm. He remembered the note.He has no name.
Those four words had irritated him at first for their coldness, for the insult of leaving a child at a gate like an unwanted carriage. Now the absence opened into something else. A mother had died before giving her son the first thing that belonged to him.
When Connor looked back, the woman was watching him with a hope she had no skill at hiding.
“I believe ye,” he sighed.
It cost him nothing to say it, but it changed everything to mean it.
The woman’s face softened before she could stop it, and the change made her look younger. More tired. More dangerous in another way, because hope made desperate people reckless.
“Good,” she said. “Does that mean I can take the bairn and leave?”
A wide grin spread across his face. “Of course nae, lass.”
The hope in her eyes vanished. “What?”
Connor curled his fingers around the key. The answer had become clear while she spoke.
If Jane Tolford’s family had lied once, they could come again. If Lachlan was involved, the danger had Moore blood in it. If this woman had risked the dungeons for the child, sending her away would only make her try again with less chance of surviving.
“That just means ye’ll stay here with him,” he said.
She stared at him, stunned and furious. “What?”
3
Violet didn’t know what to do for a second, and she hated…hatedthat he could see it. It was like he could see right through her and had done so since he stepped into the cell.
