WolfeBlade: de Wolfe Pack Generations Kathryn Veque (interesting books to read .TXT) 📖

sit with her and talk to her almost more than he was excited to finally know her name and where she was from.

In his excitement, he ended up going twice around the common room looking for the table where Gavriella would be waiting for him and by the third turn around the room, it began to occur to him that she wasn’t there. The tavern was full of people eating the very fine food that the tavern produced, but not one of those people was Gavriella, so he found his own table to sit and wait.

And wait.

Andreas waited all day for Gavriella to appear. He kept telling himself that she had only been delayed and that any second she would come in through the door, but she never did. He ordered food simply to keep the table, but he never ate the food. It sat there and grew stone cold as he continued to wait for a woman who had been so delayed that she still hadn’t shown up by sunset.

But he refused to believe she wasn’t coming.

Andreas ended up sitting there all night, even after the tavernkeeper locked the door for the night. He continued to sit and wait, wondering if Gavriella had misunderstood him about when to meet him at the tavern. He thought that perhaps she had thought he meant the next day and he was willing to put faith in that belief, but when dawn came on the following day, Gavriella still did not come.

But Andreas continued to wait.

After sitting there for two days and nights, William and Tor finally came looking for him and found him sitting at the table, now cluttered with old food and empty pitchers of wine, still waiting for the woman who hadn’t shown up. Andreas was exhausted and heartbroken, and it took both William and Tor to convince him that it was time to leave. But even after they left, Andreas walked to The Asher and stood across the street with his cousins, watching the front door, watching for some sign of Gavriella.

But he saw nothing.

Gavriella had told him that she was afraid for him to come to The Asher because she was unsure how her aunt would react to a man coming to call for her. He had mentioned that to William and Tor, and when the wait became too excessive, it took both of his cousins to convince him not to go to the door and inquire about Gavriella. But that didn’t stop William from going to one of the guards at the entry door and asking them about the lady. One of the guards knew nothing, but the second guard told him that the niece of Lady Blackburn had been sent home. That was all he could tell William, who returned to Andreas to relay the news.

Now, he knew.

But Andreas sent William back to talk to the guard who could tell him nothing more than what he had already told him. He didn’t know where she’d come from and he didn’t know where she had returned, and not even the offer of a few coins from William could get him to change his story. He positively refused to ask the countess about her.

The guard finally chased William away by refusing to answer any further questions and William had to return to Andreas to tell him that there was no further information about his mysterious lady. All they knew was that she had been sent back where she had come from, and Andreas knew that was somewhere in Northumberland.

Andreas hadn’t felt real disappointment in his life until that very moment. When he realized that he might never see Gavriella again, he felt disillusionment that was bone crushing. He only had one lead, that she lived somewhere in Northumberland, and he thought that if he started from one end of the province and worked his way to the other end, he might be able to find her or at least find someone who knew her.

He was willing to try.

Northumberland was quite large, but it wasn’t heavily populated, so it was very possible he would find at least her trail. Perhaps the easiest way of doing that would be to inquire at all the churches, for if she was meant for the veil, certainly he would find her priest at some point.

That meant he had to go home as soon as possible.

The sooner he could get to Northumberland, the sooner he could find his Gavriella. In fact, if she had been sent home the very last night that he saw her, that meant she only had a few days head start on him and there weren’t many roads into Northumberland, so he had hopes of possibly finding her on the road if they moved swiftly.

Four days after Andreas was supposed to meet Gavriella in that stuffy little tavern, he departed London along with William, Tor, and Theodis, heading for the wilds of Northumberland.

Andreas had never wanted to go home so badly in his life.

He was going to find Gavriella if it took him the rest of his life.

PART TWO

THE SCOTTISH MARCHES

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Year of Our Lord 1293

January

Wolfe’s Lair

The bailey was filling up with dirty, war-scarred men and knights, funneling into the great bailey of Wolfe’s Lair nearly as far as the eye could see.

It was an army returning from war.

The de Wolfe knights were filthy, sweaty, and in most cases, bloodied as well. They had just seen six days of a nasty battle in a long line of battles over the past five months, but this one had started when Clan Maxwell, reinforced with their allies from the north, had broken out in an ugly skirmish with Clan Elliot. There were pockets of fighting, and clans chasing clans, and all of those Scots had overrun the border north of The Lair.

Oddly enough, this wasn’t a typical land grab, the type of thing that had been going on for centuries. There were wars between