The Hostage Bride

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that made her feel uncomfortably exposed.
    “Mmm. See what you mean about the scarecrow,” he said. “You’ve no meat on your bones at all. What’s a Granville protégée doing half-starved?” He gestured to the fire as he hung up her cloak. “Sit close to the warmth. You’re frozen.”
    “Lord, but the lass is white as a ghost!” Annie exclaimed, encouraging her to take a stool almost inside the inglenook. “But it’s a coloring that goes with the carrot top, I daresay.” She fetched a leather flagon from a shelf above the hearth. “’Ere, a drop of rhubarb wine’ll put the blood in yer veins, duckie.”
    Portia accepted the pitch tankard she was offered. She was not particularly offended by Annie’s personal comments on her appearance; she’d been hearing their like all her life and had few illusions of her own. But for some reason Rufus Decatur’s unflattering appraisal seemed to be a different matter, even if he was only echoing her own comments.
    “I’ve potato and cabbage soup and a pig’s cheek,” Annie said. “It’ll take me but a few minutes to get it to table. Would ye slice the loaf, m’lord?”
    Rufus took up a knife and a loaf of barley bread from the table and, holding the loaf against his chest, began to slice it with all the rapid expertise of a man accustomed to such household tasks.
    Portia watched with unwilling fascination. Such a homely skill seemed quite incongruous in the large hands of this red-bearded giant. Remarkably well-shaped hands they were, too. The fingers were long and slender, the knuckles smooth, the nails broad and neatly filed. But his wrists, visible below the turned-back cuffs of his shirt, were all sinew, dusted with red-gold hairs.
    “So,” Rufus said, putting the sliced bread back on the table. “An answer to my question before we eat. Who are you?”
    The diversion was a relief. “Portia Worth.” She had no reason to hide her identity.
    “Ah.” He nodded and took up his tankard again. “Jack Worth’s spawn.” He regarded her with a hint of sympathy. “Don’t answer this if you don’t wish to, but is it by-blow?”
    Portia shrugged. “Jack wasn’t the marrying kind.”
    “No, that he wasn’t.”
    “You knew him?” She was startled into a show of interest.
    “I knew of him. I knew he took his mother’s name.” Rufus gave a short laugh. “Some misguided sensibility about sullying the Granville name with his misdeeds! As if such a name weren’t sufficiently tainted…. Come, sit at the table.” He gestured to a stool at the table as Annie placed wooden bowls of steaming soup before them.
    Portia was not in the habit of defending her father’s family, because she was not accustomed to hearing them attacked. Even Jack through his drunken cynicism had accorded Cato, his half brother, a degree of careless respect bordering on what could almost pass for a measure of sibling affection. But base-born though she was, she was still half a Granville and she’d been taught to view the lawless viciousness of the outcast Decaturs with her father’s eye. Her blood rose hot and she forgot caution.
    “When it comes to misdeeds, you should maybe look to your own,” she said tautly. “Murder, robbery, brigandage—”
    “Now, now, missie, there’s no cause to be throwing such words around my table.” Annie, her cheeks pink with indignation,spun around from her pots on the fire. “Lord Rufus is an honored guest in my ’ouse, an’ if ye wish to—”
    Rufus’s response was utterly surprising in the light of their previous contretemps. He interrupted the woman’s diatribe with a lifted hand. “Hush, Annie, the lass is only standing up for her own. I’d think less of her if she did otherwise.”
    “Is that supposed to make me feel complimented?” Portia demanded. “I couldn’t give a hoot in hell what you think of me, Lord Rothbury.”
    “So far, I haven’t made up my mind on the subject,” he said. “Your Granville blood is definitely

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