Why not let her believe? He should encourage her ingenuous simplicity, her sense of destiny, her peculiar but absolute trust in him. In these few brief minutes he’d learned little enough about her, but already he was grateful to the uncle who’d kept her hidden away out of fear. She’d clearly grown up ignorant of the greater world and its myriad complications—propriety, social distinctions, temptations, and hidden dangers—with her innocence remarkably intact.
All to the good. Such naïveté would make her biddable, easily shaped to the role required other.
And yet she’d come across the sea to find relations she’d never met and walked the night streets of a foreign city alone, this child from the backwaters of an outlandish country, this paradoxical offspring of the rebel Forsters. Her gifts were unmistakable, her common sense sound. As loup-garou she was safe from most ordinary harm, but she had the wisdom not to run as a wolf in an unfamiliar world.
She was innocent and canny at once, an unexpected combination. And she had been restored to him. To the Cause.
He could not afford to forget that she was more than merely some valuable article lost through his carelessness and fortuitously recovered. Far more. He vividly recalled the feel of her skin, her hair, her mouth under his fingertips and felt the first stirrings of a deeper interest touched by an emotion he couldn’t define: almost intimate, personal, altogether separate from his concern for her part in the Cause.
Too personal. Treacherous. Forbidden.
“You… do want me, don’t you?” Cassidy asked. “I won’t be any trouble. I can work—I know cattle, and sheep, a little cooking and sewing. If you’ll just give me a chance…”
His throat acquired a peculiar knot. “The Greyburn Forsters are not servants, cousin. You’re among your own kind now.” He took her arm in a rigid grip and steered her toward the house. “I’ll send a man to the hotel for your things. You may write a note to this Isabelle informing her that you are safely with your family, and that her services are no longer required.”
This time she allowed him to lead her as far as the front steps before she jerked him to a stop. “I asked Isabelle to come with me. She’s English—”
“But she is human, is she not?”
The question seemed to startle her: “Yes. But she knew everything about my mother. She was never afraid.”
It was no surprise that Edith Holt had chosen humans as friends, just as she’d chosen one as a mate. She, like her parents, had turned her back on her blood and heritage.
Cassidy had not. But she understood nothing of what lay in her future, or how much rested on her slender shoulders. She must learn, and accept.
“You do want me, don’t you?” In one simple question she’d revealed her greatest vulnerability, what she hungered for above all else, what she had never known among her father’s people. Something only he could provide.
Belonging. Family. Acceptance. He could grant or withhold what she had come so far to find.
“There is no place for Isabelle where we’re going,” he said. “We shall remain in London only a few more days, and then—”
“We’re leaving London?”
He took her hand—warm, fingers slender but strong and roughened with work—and removed it from his sleeve. “To Greyburn, the heart of our family and our blood. You do wish to join your family?” He hardly paused for her affirmation. “Then you may begin by doing as you’re told. You know nothing of our ways. Rowena will take you in hand and see that you get proper clothing—”
“Rowena? Is she the lady you brought back from the party?”
It was unfortunate that she’d witnessed that little scene: Rowena’s veiled mutiny, the defiance that masqueraded as feminine obedience to her brother’s will. He would tolerate no further opposition—not from her or from anyone who scorned the Cause. There was no time for the indulgence of childish whims—
“Is she your wife?” Cassidy asked.
Startlement broke his anger. “My wife?” The word emerged as a curse. “No. She is my sister and your cousin, Lady Rowena Forster. You’ll meet her tomorrow.” He ascended the stairs and opened the door. “Come.”