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

She had to explain the fight when she had returned home, showing up on her father’s doorstep and telling the man that she had been sent home in shame. She knew, at some point, that her father and aunt would speak and that her father would eventually find out just why she had been sent home, so it wouldn’t do any good to lie to the man.

Therefore, she tried not to.

She’d told him, quite frankly, that Aurelia was a vile girl who had forced her to go to a guild called Gomorrah. She told her father of all the horrible things she saw there and how Aurelia and Camilla let strange men kiss them and fondle them. She proceeded to tell her father that she had been trying to get out of the place and became lost when a nice man helped her to find the exit. The man, she explained, had been very proper and polite with her, so much so that she accompanied the man the next day to see entertainment.

Her aunt had taken exception to that.

It was the truth and Gavriella stood behind it. Of course, there was much more to it than her simple explanation, but her father wasn’t going to ask for details and she wasn’t going to tell. At this point, she controlled the narrative of the situation and she was going to leave it at that. If her aunt, at any point in the future, decided to make an issue out of it, Gavriella would deal with it at the appropriate time.

But the truth was that her father had been extremely displeased to see her returned to Falstone Castle. He hadn’t expected to see her anytime soon and he hadn’t really cared why she had come home, only that she had. It was clear that he didn’t want her there and it had made for an awkward few weeks after her arrival.

Merek de Leia had never been an overly affectionate man and his standoffish behavior towards her hadn’t been anything unusual. Gavriella quickly resumed her routine at the castle, resuming her duties as chatelaine and taking over other duties such as becoming more involved in meal preparation and any number of smaller tasks that she had always passed off on the cook.

At that point, she was looking for something to occupy her time.

Anything to make her feel useful.

Now that she had returned, she didn’t want to think about what she’d left behind in London.

It was so strange, really. She had hated London at first, grieved because of why her father had sent her there, but Andreas had quickly changed her mind. The time spent with him had been something that had changed her outlook on life. It had changed her life. Then she’d come home again, home to the terrible memories of the child that she had given birth to on that stormy morning in April.

It was as if she had never left.

Her child, a son, had been born after just a few hours of labor. Truth be told, it hadn’t been all that difficult to push the baby out, into the waiting hands of two servants and the cook. Her father wouldn’t even call for the physic, nor would he call for a midwife because he didn’t want anyone to know his daughter was pregnant. Even though the village of Deadwater knew about the attack, that was all they knew.

No one knew about the resulting baby.

In fact, the only people who really knew of the pregnancy were Gavriella’s maids and the cook, women she had known her entire life and women who are very protective over her. The little boy was born healthy, screaming at the top of his lungs, and Gavriella was able to hold him and nurse him for a couple of weeks until her father insisted that the child be sent to the foundling home at Edenside.

The permanent reminder of her shame had to be removed.

Her beautiful, perfect son was taken away from her when he was barely two weeks of age, handed over to the nuns who had come from Edenside. They had been quite gentle with the infant, but Gavriella felt as if her heart had been ripped from her body. It was true that child had been conceived in a violent, terrible act, but in Gavriella’s mind, that hadn’t been the baby’s fault. He was innocent, just as she was, and the day she returned home from London was the day she knew she would never be able to forgive her father for what he had done.

He had taken her son away.

A lad named Storm.

Those were the things he had sent her to London to forget, and she had for a short while. At least, she had forgotten the gut-wrenching pain she had felt from being separated from her baby and the horrific shame and anguish from the attack. She knew who had attacked her. She had known that from the beginning when she had identified the brand on one of the horses.

Assaulted by the most hated family on the borders.

And justice would never be served.

For those few brief days that she had been in London, the situation had seemed more distant and she had been better able to deal with it although the anguish hadn’t completely gone away. She wondered if it ever would. It had been Andreas who had shown her something other than that dark and horrific anguish that seemed to follow her around like a fog.

Andreas, her knight in shining armor, a man who had shown her a glimpse the world she never thought she would know.

And now, here she was, back home in a place she hated, with a father she hated, with no future and no way to reclaim her child. The past six months had been her greatest effort to try and forget about what had happened, but much as her son had been a reminder of the shame brought upon her family, her father was a reminder