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wouldn’t have allowed the girl to be seriously hurt, would he? Then again, he’d kept her tied up and hadn’t even fed her!
    She glanced at the child again, still stuffing food in her mouth, and her misgivings went away. How dare they mistreat this child!
    “I’ll see that you get home,” Katey said with a reassuring smile. “I’m traveling to London myself. We’ll leave first thing in the morn—”
    “Please, could we leave now?” the girl interrupted, her expression turning frightened. “I don’t want them to find me again. I heard them say that the lock on the door was broken, when they tied me to the bed, so they’ll know someone helped me out of there, that I couldn’t do it myself.”
    “And they’ll look close by,” Katey concluded with a nod. “Very well, we’ll leave now.”

Chapter Four

     
    K ATEY’S MAID, Grace Harford, grumbled about setting off down the road before dawn. Well aware of Katey’s habit of embellishing ordinary events into dramatic stories, she didn’t believe a word of Katey’s explanation of why they were leaving the inn so early accompanied by a little girl. Hadn’t they escorted Katey’s neighbor’s nieces all the way to England? Didn’t an innkeeper in Scotland ask Katey to escort his young son to the boy’s mother in Aberdeen when he heard she was heading that way? People took one look at Katey Tyler with her big green eyes, dimpled cheeks, and winsome smile and instantly trusted her, even with their children. Judith Malory, as the girl had introduced herself, was just another child who had been entrusted to Katey’s care for a journey, and that was that, as far as Grace was concerned.
    People did take a liking to Katey as soon as they met her, but Katey wasn’t sure why. Not once did she think it was because she was pretty. Her mother had been beautiful with her coal black hair and emerald green eyes. But while Katey had taken after her, no one had made much of her looks when she was growing up, so she didn’t either. In her opinion, her maid with her wealth of freckles and curly red hair was more interesting-looking than she was.
    Katey was quite tall at five feet nine inches. When her father had died, when she was ten years old, she’d already been as tall as he was, and she’d kept growing after that. She’d turned out to be five inches taller than her mother. Adeline had claimed Katey got her height from her side of the family, because her own father had been rather tall.
    Now Katey rarely thought about her height and only felt self-conscious when she got near a man who was shorter than her, but that didn’t happen often. What bothered her more than her height were her curves. She’d heard men describe her as a fine, strapping wench. Too many times she’d caught men staring at her ample bosom, even the old men in the village!
    But aside from that, Katey had felt comfortable in the tiny village of Gardener, and she’d been outgoing and always willing to lend a helping hand if someone needed it. Even strangers had been drawn to her. She could be standing in a group of people, and a passing stranger would ask her for directions and ignore everyone else, not that many strangers had passed through that tiny village.
    But the same thing could be said of her neighbors in Gardener. They often came to her because she was accessible, friendly, and if she couldn’t help with something, she usually knew someone who could. And she added a little excitement to their lives in the tales she told.
    Katey wasn’t a bit surprised that Grace had concluded this was just another of Katey’s tales. Five years older than Katey, who had just turned twenty-two, Grace had come to live with the Tylers ten years ago and had made herself invaluable as a housekeeper and a friend. But she was stubborn in her opinions, so Katey didn’t try to convince her maid otherwise. She just sat back in their coach on the way to London and smiled to herself, savoring that for once the