Rexanne Becnel Read Online Free Page B

wanted to stay. But back then he’d felt abandoned.
    Cybil Burns probably had been a handsome woman once upon a time. But a youthful indiscretion and the resultant pregnancy had turned her family from her in shame. Alone, abandoned by everyone, she’d had her child and made her way as best she could. But the music lessons, private tutors, and polite manners she’d been taught were no help when it came to keeping a child fed. Though raised a well-to-do vicar’s daughter in Newport, she’d been reduced to working as a maid in dock-front taverns. She’d whored too, Cyprian had realized years later. She’d slept with anyone who’d promise a better opportunity for her child. He’d gotten his first position as a cabin boy that way, and God only knew what else. Because his father hadn’t cared at all that she’d borne him a child, she’d been forced to sell her body so that she could make a life for herself and her son.
    He’d never been able to use a whore with complete satisfaction as a result.
    Thank God there were enough other women who were willing to lay with him without benefit of money, else he’d be as celibate as a monk.
    If monks were truly celibate.

    A shiver wracked him but he ignored it. Somewhere ahead of him was the means to his revenge. Once he had Haberton’s son in his possession, Cyprian could finally begin to purge himself of the hatred that sometimes threatened to consume him. The boy would suffer as Cyprian had suffered: the pain of abandonment; the frustration and the helplessness; the humiliation of making his way as a child in a cruel world that made no allowances for childishness or weakness. And Cyprian would see to it that Sir Lloyd Haberton was kept informed of every sordid detail. From port to port they would move, and from each new place Cyprian would write Haberton.
    The man would know how his beloved child shivered under a thin blanket, sleeping in the shed behind the home of his latest employer. He would be kept informed about how his son was reduced to fighting dogs for their food in order to fill his stomach adequately. Wearing rags on his feet when his one pair of shoes grew too small.
    Cyprian gritted his teeth and his fingers-tightened on the wet rail as he remembered his wretched childhood. But he had learned to fight. He’d learned how to stay alive, and he’d grown stronger for it. So would this boy, cripple or no. It was Haberton who would suffer more. With every letter Haberton would die a little more, just as Cyprian’s mother had. The man would still be wealthy, well fed, and well respected in his own circles. But Cyprian knew he would be dying inside. Not knowing where his son was would destroy him.
    It was a revenge Cyprian had relished all the years he’d searched for his bastard father—for that’s how he termed the man. Cyprian may have been born the bastard, but it had been his father’s choice, not his own. Nor even his mother’s. His mother had told him he had no surname. She’d lost hers, when her family disowned her, and his father had not given him one. So Cyprian
had named himself Dare. Even when she’d told him his father’s full name, he’d refused to take it as his own. Nor would he ever. He didn’t want the man’s name nor his wealth. Not a farthing of it. But his only half brother …
    Yes, to control the destiny of Haberton’s one true heir—to steal Haberton’s pride and joy away from him —that didn’t seem an unreasonable payment for twenty-eight years of abandonment.

Chapter Three
    T he river Thames and the long day they spent traversing its length to the sea made for as awful an experience as Eliza could remember. The rain came down intermittently so that they were confined to their chilly cabins. The view outside was of a dirty trash-filled waterway that looked more like a sewer than the greatest river in the land. And it stank.
    “God in heaven, please save us from anymore of this … this odor,” Agnes intoned, clutching her