Free Thief by Linda Windsor Page A

but to follow. The scrape of the stranger’s boots on the floor as his countrymen dragged him across the room echoed in Sorcha’s ears as she hastened after Gemma and closed the door behind her.
    “Would you’d left Caden’s purse on his belt,” she told Gemma as they departed from the flickering light of the lantern beside the entrance. “I was trying to think of a way to give it back.”
    Gemma stopped midstride. “’Twas yours . He said as much. Your inheritance.”
    “My inheritance was land, Gemma.”
    “If there is one,” Gemma countered. “He fancied you, and that is certain.”
    Yet his appraisal had been different from others who simply sought a wench to warm their night. Gathering her cloak closer, Sorcha hurried even more toward the alley. Gemma practically had to run to keep up.
    “And you can’t pay Wada with land tomorrow, unless it is here in Bernicia with a clear title from its lord,” Gemma argued. “Slow down!”
    Sorcha had to force herself to obey. She wanted to put as much distance between her and the stranger as possible. “He’ll know we took the money.”
    “No one saw a thing, him included.”
    Which of course was true. Gemma was good at her craft.
    “And even his own kind saw he gave you trouble. ’Twas more than reason enough for Mann to do what he did. That Caden of Lothian is a giant.”
    Sorcha could imagine just how large he must have appeared to Gemma. She rounded the corner of the street and stepped into an alley leading straight to the beach. Without the sun to warm it, the cold blown inland from the water made Sorcha shiver to the bone.
    “I hope the children are sleeping in some hall this night,” she thought aloud as they rushed through the alley to Water Street. Was it only that morning they’d left?
    “Eadric will find them shelter,” Gemma replied with absolute certainty. “When there’s no chieftain, there’s always a farmhouse to welcome a bard. And the babes have warm cloaks.”
    “Aye.”
    Ahead was the door to their home. After checking both ways to see if any mischief makers were about to give two lone women trouble, they hurried across Water Street and into the welcome haven.
    “I hope little Ebyn was no trouble this night,” Gemma remarked, heading straight for the banked fire in the hearth to add more turf. “He was fascinated by the weaver’s loom.”
    Sorcha hardly heard her. What was it Caden had last said? The words hadn’t quite registered at the moment.
    It wasn’t like you thought, lassie. Your father died trying to find—
    To find what? Her? By Freya’s mercy, had she been wrong all along?
    Sorcha’s mind spun along with her emotions but refused to settle on any conclusion. Except that Sorcha had not seen the last of Caden of Lothian. She was no soothsayer, but that much she knew.

Chapter Six
    The throbbing lump on the back of his head forced Caden to use every bit of his self-control not to take the tavern keeper’s club to the man himself. But for the witness of Caden’s fellow Cymri that Mann had misunderstood Caden’s intentions toward the lady, he would have.
    Although, Caden berated himself, a seasoned warrior with keen senses should have known someone was behind him. But by the time he realized the alarm widening Sorcha’s incredibly green eyes was not because of him, but because of what was about to happen to him, it was too late.
    And no one could account for how he’d lost his purse. He’d been unconscious, so it could have been any one of them. Perhaps the tavern master, who generously waived the fee for spending the night on his floor, although Mann had seemed genuinely distressed that he’d had to knock Caden senseless. He’d even had the woman Utta tend the swelling with a cloth wet with cold water.
    The barmaid’s compassion seemed real, and the willow-bark tea helped ease the throbbing in his head, although there was a lump on the back of his head the size of a goose egg. But his pride stung most at