A Loving Scoundrel Read Online Free PDF Page B

impression that had never altered.
    She quickly became “one of the boys.” She’d learned to steal with them, learned to fight with them, learned everything they did—well, except when they went looking for female companionship of the type Danny didn’t want to know about.
    There were fourteen of them at present, and they lived in a dilapidated house that Dagger paid the rent on. There had been many houses like it over the years, even a few abandoned tenement buildings when there wasn’t enough money to pay for rent.
    Dagger never stayed in one place long. The current house had four rooms: a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a large living area. Dagger had one of the bedrooms for himself. The girls got the other bedroom to sleep in, or work in, if they were old enough to start whoring. Everyone else slept in the large living area, Danny included.
    There was a small backyard. Though no grass grew in it, it was still nice for the younger children to play in. Danny had enjoyed backyards herself, once she got over her aversion to being dirty. Bathing wasn’t an option for her, at least not in the communal tubs set up once a week in the kitchen. She snuck off to the river instead, when she could manage to. And the rain became her friend.
    Lucy was her only confidante. Lucy didn’t get the pox as she’d feared, but she did end up selling her body at Dagger’s insistence. Danny understood his logic, even if she didn’t like it. Being a comely woman, Lucy would have gained too much notice from the victims she intended to rob. A pickpocket had to be almost invisible to his target. Lucy couldn’t be that, and how else was she to earn her keep then?
    Dagger had been the oldest among them back then and he still was, so he was their leader by default. There’d only been a few rules to start with, nothing anyone could really mind. But Dagger seemed to think if he didn’t add more rules every so often, then he wasn’t doing his job.
    Danny never argued with him. She did what she was told to do without complaint. His was the only keen eye she really worried about because, aside from Lucy, he was the only one left who had been there the day she’d arrived with Lucy, and eventually it was going to occur to him to count up the years—and wonder why a twenty-year-old man still had the face of a twelve-year-old boy.
    He was thirty himself now or thereabouts, thirty and still running a pack of orphans. He could have moved on. Most of them did when they reached their high teens, wanting more than the pack offered, wanting to be able to keep what they stole, rather than turning it all over to Dagger to buy the food and pay the rent and bring home the occasional trinket to make one of them smile. Dagger could have moved on himself to more lucrative crimes, but he hadn’t.
    He meant well, even if he was abrasive. Danny had concluded years ago that he had a kind heart hidden somewhere in his scrawny chest. As leader, he probably thought he had to be hard and unbending. But she guessed he didn’t see himself just as their leader, but also as their father. And that’s why he hadn’t moved on with the rest. More orphans joined them, more left. Their numbers never really got higher than twenty or so, but they never got lower then ten either. There was always someone who needed looking out for.
    The number one rule of the pack was never, ever, rob the gentry in their own homes. That was the surest, quickest way to get them up in arms and to have the authorities come sweeping through the slums in search of the culprits. Finding a house full of orphans who weren’t official orphans would be a dead giveaway. And the horror stories that Dagger told about real orphanages were enough to enforce that rule. He knew firsthand, since he’d escaped from one years ago. Danny was breaking that rule tonight.
    Not that the gentry were off-limits, no indeed. But they were only to be robbed when they were found out and about, on the streets, in taverns, at