Read Online A Love For All Seasons by Denise Domning - Free Book Online Page A

something brushed his face. Raising a hand, he batted at it. With that, the ragged ends of his dream slithered into some hidden recess of his mind. Sighing in disappointment, Rob opened his eyes.
    Although the fire behind him barely managed to keep night at bay, the shimmering golden light was strong enough to show him a thick table, legs like small tree trunks, just a few feet beyond his reach. From where he lay, he couldn't see the table's surface, but the floor beneath it was bare earth, long since beaten into rock hardness. Beyond the table, dancing shadows played along the wall, curling around large casks and finding glittering beads of sweat on the waxen surface of the great wheel of cheese. On the wall above these items hung six long knives, four rasps, three large ladles, and five sieves, all of them gleaming in the low light.
    Rob frowned. Wherever he was, it wasn't the kitchen at Blacklea Manor house where all the village women baked their bread. John the cook had only two long knives, two ladles, one rasp, and three sieves.
    In dreadful realization, Rob closed his eyes. This was Master Walter's kitchen. Despair followed fear. His world was destroyed. No longer could he proudly call himself Robert the Counter, heir to Ralph AtteGreen, the richest man and only freeholder in all of Blacklea. Instead, he was disowned by his sire and sold like a slave to a merchant from someplace called Stanrudde.
    A touch of outrage joined his despair. What if Master Walter forever after called him Robert the Bastard, instead of Robert, son of Ralph? It was neither right nor fair that he should be called so when he was no bastard.
    "I know you are awake." It was a girl's voice. "Look at me, Robert of Blacklea!"
Rob clenched his eyes even more tightly shut. Was it not bad enough he'd lost everything important to him in life? Now some lass thought she could tell him what to do. She lifted his blanket, allowing cooler air to enter beneath it. With a gasp of shock, Rob shifted on the mattress to glare up at his tormentor.
    The girl sat on a stool beside him. Her reddish gold hair was tangled and loose. Bare wisps of that same golden-red color rose to peaks above her blue eyes and freckles were strewn like golden seeds across her face. Her gowns were blue trimmed with a band of glittering stones, but they were rumpled as if she'd slept in them. In the same hand that she had clenched around his blanket's edge she held a long straw.
    Anger flared into being at this indignity. "Drop my blanket," he croaked.
    A superior smile blossomed on her face, as if daring him to make her do so. He reached up to take the blanket from her, but his arm trembled so badly, he couldn't jerk it from her grasp. It was she who released it to him, and she knew it.
    "Don't do that again," he warned in an effort to save some shred of pride, once again gathering the woolen sheet around him.
    His gaze lowered to the kitten writhing in the crook of her elbow. Mama disapproved of any attempt to hold a cat, especially scolding when he let it dangle so. Rob leapt on the girl's misdeed. "You're not sup-posed to hold a cat that way. Don't you know anything?"
    Her eyes widened at his insult, then her jaw firmed and thrust ever so slightly forward. A quirk of appreciation shot through Rob. She wasn't one of those weak-willed lasses, but the other sort, the kind that punched first and cried after.
    "Puss is mine, and I may hold him any way I like. I can do anything I like, because I am Johanna, daughter of Walter le Espicer," she announced in a grand and lofty voice. "You are my servant and cannot tell me what to do."
    Her words tore through his already aching self-image. "I'm no girl's servant! Master Walter hired me as his scullery lad," he cried, then struck out again at her. "Once I have earned the value of the ten coins he gave my papa, I will be a free man, unlike you, who will always be a girl."
    That tweaked Johanna the spice merchant's daughter right prettily. She