WolfeBlade: de Wolfe Pack Generations by Kathryn Veque (top 20 books to read .TXT) 📗

a moment. “We are not supposed to ask for names, but do you have something you are called?” She reached over and picked up the mask she’d torn off her face. “I am to tell everyone that my name is Kitten.”

She put the mask back over her face, showing him that it was a cat’s face. He smiled. “It suits you,” he said. “I suppose you can call me Wolf.”

His mask was a dog’s face, elaborate and painted. “Wolf,” she repeated. “I would like to thank you again for bringing me the drink. You did not have to bother with me, but you did. I feel better now.”

“Would you like more?”

She shook her head. “I simply want to leave, if that is agreeable,” she said. “I will follow you when you are ready to go.”

“I am ready.”

She sounded stronger now, in control of herself. He stood up from his crouch as she tied on her mask before tossing aside the coverlet. She stood up, stiffly and perhaps a bit unsteadily, revealing herself in a beautiful red silk that made her breasts appear quite large. Andreas would have had to have been a blind man not to notice that.

In fact, along with her beautiful face, he’d never seen a finer woman. A woman like that finding her way home, alone? Not bloody likely. He couldn’t just help her find her way out of this place only to leave her alone on the dangerous and dark London streets. He suspected he was going to follow her home, which wouldn’t be well met if she saw him. He could just tell by looking at her.

In fact, he couldn’t believe that she was without a man, period.

A woman like that was surely spoken for.

With those thoughts on his mind, he headed out of the alcove. As he stepped out, Theodis called to him.

“Where are you going?” he demanded. “Our evening is not over yet.”

Andreas paused. “It is for me,” he said, glancing at the woman as she emerged behind him. “I will see you at Lothbury.”

Theodis was set to argue with him until he took a good look at the woman. She was stunning. That screaming mass of hair and silk that he’d seen blow by was actually something quite spectacular and he suspected that Andreas had found someone to keep company with, so he didn’t argue with him. Gentle Andreas, who could have any woman he wanted with his comely looks and kind demeanor. Theodis simply waved at him, as did William and Tor. All of them waving at a man who was probably one of the most discriminating men in England when it came to women.

Andreas wasn’t a hound when it came to the fairer sex.

In fact, he was a paradox.

Big and handsome, he was hell on the battlefield but sweet and gentle when it came to women. He always had been. But there was something of a problem with him – Andreas was rather old to have never been married at thirty years and seven, but it wasn’t for the lack of his family trying. They’d tried too many times to count, but he had never found a woman he would consider spending his life with.

Unfortunately for him, he had a legacy to uphold.

Andreas was the oldest son of Troy de Wolfe, who would have been the eldest son of The Earl of Warenton had it not been for his twin being born a few minutes before he was. But Troy was a powerful warlord in his own right and had multiple properties and allies, including a great alliance with Clan Kerr because he had married a chief’s daughter as his second wife.

As Troy’s eldest son and heir, Andreas would wield a great deal of power upon the death of his father. He would have property in both England and Scotland in addition to inheriting his father’s title of Lord Braemoor. Much was expected of Andreas because he was one of the oldest male de Wolfe grandchildren and that included an advantageous marriage.

But Andreas had other ideas.

His mother had died when he had been a youth, drowned in an accident that also took the lives of his younger sisters. Andreas had been away fostering at the time and the news had been devastating because he had been close to his mother, who had been quite young when she had given birth to him. When he had been a small child, she had been more like a sister and a playmate than his mother. They had spent an inordinate amount of time together and he had been an only child until he was nine years of age.

That meant that he and his mother had been very close.

Sometimes, he still talked about her. His mother had been a small woman, with blonde hair and big, blue eyes that she had passed down to her son. She had been lighthearted and witty, and sometimes Andreas said that he could still hear her silly giggle. She’d had a way of giggling that had made anyone who heard it want to giggle right along with her. Andreas could remember his father putting his hand over his mother’s mouth when that giggle grew out of control, but it had never been mean-spirited. Her death, and the deaths of his two younger siblings, had left Andreas as the remaining child of a man who was grieving too deeply to function.

It had been a difficult time for them both.

Those in the family thought that it was perhaps his mother’s death that prevented Andreas from marrying. The last woman he had been close to and had loved unconditionally had died, and her death had left a son who had incorporated that loss into the very fiber of his existence. Once Troy came to grips with the loss of Helene, he tried to speak with his son about it, but Andreas didn’t want to discuss it. He lived with that loss as part of him and he wasn’t willing to deal with