‘The child’s yours, if you’d only look.’ The woman took a step forward, her foot soft on the wood planking. She wasn’t properly shod for winter. Another desperate wench trying to survive the last months of winter. Too bad she spoke and ensured she wouldn’t survive this evening.
‘Words you give me,’ he said. ‘It appears you don’t want the coin. I’d have my guards take you from this room, but I’m aware of the child in your arms. For its sake, I will give you until the count of three to leave. After that, whatever harm comes your—’
A coarse laugh erupted from the woman. ‘I knew you’d be like this. Cold and unforgiving. But I don’t care, it suits my purposes, it does.’
This woman had...purposes. Intriguing. If this commoner had purposes, she knew something about him. If so, his need for anonymity had been compromised, which didn’t suit his games at all.
His survival depended on his obscurity. This woman would die, but he had questions first. Deliberately, Reynold turned and swept his eyes from her feet to her features.
The woman was far coarser than her reflection revealed. From the roughness of her skin to the mud staining the bottom of her gown, the very air she held was one of servitude, and something else he recognised...greed.
Avarice. It was that emotion prompting him to look at the babe in her arms. If she had financial purposes, they weren’t well planned. The child was small and he hadn’t been in Paris for almost two years. This one looked puny and, despite the icy winter wind, the babe was scarcely covered. The cheeks and hands red though they’d waited inside his heated home.
The head, however, was completely exposed, revealing a shocking amount of black hair. Black hair similar to that of the woman in front of him. But she wasn’t claiming the child was hers...only his.
With hair that dark, he could not immediately dismiss it. ‘Who is your mistress?’
‘Not my mistress, though I pretend she is. Paid me nicely to keep quiet, but I knew you’d return so I waited. I waited, because as much money as she had, you have more.’
The woman shrewdly perused the room, her eyes resting on a gold enamelled box. ‘I’d say you have plenty more.’
‘You say the babe is mine and the mother paid you to keep quiet about me? You’re quite the confidante.’
‘I’m no confidant or friend. I hate her. She believes I am only fit to empty her chamber pot. No one looks at the servant cleaning their piss. But I was there the night she left to visit you and I was there the months after you left. When the time came, I let her know I was noticing.’
The woman smirked. ‘Thought she was the clever widow, passing off the child as another gentleman’s. So when I said I knew it wasn’t his, she paid me exactly what I asked her to. She begged me not to tell her current lover because he paid her more because of it.
‘But I got wise, ʼcause she loves this child, and she paid me quick. This woman is cold, like you. She wasn’t afraid I’d tell that listless braggart who moaned between her spread legs. Oh, no, she was scared I would tell the true father.
‘That’s when I knew you were important. That’s when I knew you’d have the hefty coin. Something to set me up real nice.’
His memory flashed of a wealthy blonde widow who took coin for her favours. Though he couldn’t remember her name or exactly what she looked like, there was such a widow here and he had lain with her a year ago.
An emotion scraped across his heart. One he hadn’t felt since he overheard his parents’ machinations to break him. It was now slinking across his insides as if it had merely been waiting. It was faint, but even so, familiar.
Fear.
Because though there was enough evidence before him to question this commoner’s truth, there was enough plausibility for it to be true. A greedy servant, a black-haired child and a wealthy mistress, who loved her child enough to protect it against him. The widow he thought of had been a courtier, but had fallen on hard times, thus, an exception to his rules. She was a noble who knew how to run.
But on the heels of that fear was something bright and piercing. If this child was his...he couldn’t think that way. Mustn’t despite everything, but already he could feel the need to hold her in his arms, to see for himself. As he had done so many times before. Would the need never stop haunting him?
And how could a true mother let this child into the arms of the vile creature before him? ‘What did you do to her?’
‘I’ve done nothing to the mother.’ The woman shifted the child in her arms. ‘She’s at her home, she is.’
‘You’d have me believe you stole a child from its mother? It’s more likely the child’s yours.’
‘It has black hair.’
‘You have dark hair.’
The woman made an impatient sound. More warnings went off in his head.
‘She won’t want to see you. Why don’t you pay me and I’ll hand it over? Don’t you want your own child?’
She held it like an offering and the child opened its eyes. He couldn’t see their colour, but he could see this child was a plausible age. Small, underfed, but old enough to be his.
He risked all, listening to this woman. He risked more if he didn’t. He could kill this wench and the babe, but a mother with a missing child would put more players in his game than he was willing to manoeuvre. His board was already full.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know where the mother lived for they had met at another location. A flaw in his clever plan for anonymity.
So his only option was to follow this wench and step outside. He might as well be stepping into a trap. Now this was a distraction worthy of his attention. ‘Prove to me you’re not the mother and you’ll get what you came for.’
The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘I take you and you’ll pay me?’
If this mother wasn’t the woman he lain with, he’d give one clean swipe of his blade across her neck to silence her for ever. Then he’d stab and twist the knife into the heart of this traitor, so she’d feel it. Liars every one.
If the child was his, it had no place in his life. His brothers would kill it, but only after torture. If the child was truly his, and he cared at all, he’d turn around and abandon it all over again.
He had enough players on the board and more moves to make. He might not have started this particular game, but he was determined to finish it. A child had no place in his life. As for the servant, she’d be lucky to survive his blade.
He kept his gaze on the wretched woman before him. ‘If this child is mine, I’ll reward you amply.’
‘You could not have possibly done what I think you have done.’ Aliette pinched the bridge of her nose and clenched her eyes. A temporary solution to the very visible evidence she returned to after the morning’s work.
‘I didn’t,’ Gabriel said readily.
Ten years of age, his tuft of brown hair sticking up, his light brown eyes framed by eyelashes wasted on a boy. He looked innocent, but everything he said was a lie.
A good lie. She suspected he said it to ease her worries, but it was all too apparent he had indeed gone out and stolen four loaves of bread. She didn’t want it to be true.
It needed to not be true.
But it was. Just as it was true she was responsible for a ten-year-old