No Choice but Seduction Read Online Free PDF Page B

loose, since the child had apparently strained against them. But Katey traveled prepared for minor mishaps and emergencies.
    While she usually left her main clothes trunks tied to their coach if they were only briefly staying in a place, with their driver sleeping in the coach to guard them, she carried a valise with an assortment of underclothes, an extra traveling dress, and a small sewing kit.
    She fetched the little pair of scissors from the sewing kit now and quickly snipped through the girl’s bindings. But no sooner was the child released than she made a mad dash for the chamber pot in the corner of the room, stumbling and tripping on the way no doubt because her limbs were numb from having been constrained for so long. The poor child! No wonder she had been making such pitiful noises.
    Katey turned aside to give the girl a moment of privacy. She opened the food basket she and Grace had taken to carrying ever since they’d gone to bed hungry one night because they’d arrived at an inn too late to get a meal.
    “Are you hungry?” she asked as she pulled out some bread and broke open the round of cheese.
    “I’m famished.”
    “Well, come sit down here. It’s not a feast by any means and a bit stale, but—”
    “Thank you so much,” the girl cut in, and snatched the bread from Katey’s hand.
    “If you wait a moment, I’ll make you a plate.”
    “I can’t wait,” the girl said around a mouthful. “This is fine, really.”
    Katey frowned. “When did you last eat?”
    “This morning. Or was it yesterday morning? I don’t know what time it is.”
    Neither did Katey. It could be nearing dawn for all she knew. With the curtain in the room closed, she couldn’t tell. But she was staring appalled at the girl now.
    “How could your parents do this to you? Did you misbehave so horribly?”
    “My parents would never treat me this way,” the girl said, her tone almost offended. But she paused when she saw a pastry in the basket and grabbed that before she continued, “If you mean the man and woman in that other room, I’ve never seen either of them before in my life.”
    Katey found that highly doubtful and started to say so, but held her tongue. The child was desperately hungry, eating everything in sight. She had been tied and left on the cold floor to sleep. If those were her parents next door, then they ought to be shot.
    “So how did you come to be there?”
    The girl sat down in the chair at the table and ate more slowly. Katey now saw that she was exceptionally beautiful. Her sun-gold hair was streaked with copper, and although it was mussed up, it was still clean and shiny. And her eyes were such a dark, lovely shade of blue. She had a scratch on one cheek. And while the pink velvet riding habit she was wearing was dirty with dust and what even looked like a cobweb clinging to the skirt, it wasn’t an old garment. The material had the sheen of being quite new, and it fit the girl perfectly. It must have been made for her, which meant she must come from wealth.
    And then the girl’s little voice broke into her thoughts. “The woman pulled me off of my new horse and said she’d cut my throat and leave my body in the bushes if I made any noise. I don’t know why I don’t remember what happened after that, but when I woke, I was tied up on the floor of an old coach. And then I was carried into that room.”
    “They stole you!?” Katey gasped.
    “The woman did. The man, it sounded like he’s a cousin to my mother, and I remember her talking once about a cousin who gave her a lot of trouble before I was born. It wasn’t his idea to bring me here, though. He wanted to take me straight back to London. He seemed to be very afraid of my father and what he would do to him. But the woman refused to let me go. She wants the fortune she thinks she’ll get for me. And she seemed to have the final word.”
    Katey was starting to have a few misgivings now that she knew a relative was involved. He