Amber (Jewel Trilogy, Book 3) by Lauren Royal

said, tossing a nightshirt back into the basket. "I'll show you the way to the sickroom."
    She led her around the corner of the house and up the front steps. "I bless your husband nightly for saving these children."
    "Bless you for caring for them," Kendra returned, glancing around the entry. Though the house and its furnishings had clearly seen better days, it was clean and cheerful. "Are the children receiving an education?"
    "Mercy, yes. His grace has seen to it that tutors attend to that. All but the youngest can figure and read and write—"
    "Girls, too?"
    "Yes, indeed. Your husband has some odd ideas."
    They skirted a few wooden toys on the floor as Mrs. Jackson led her down a corridor. "Are they instructed in the classics? Latin and—"
    "Nay, not as yet. I cannot imagine what children like this would be needing with Latin. But with the duke directing things, you never know what will happen next at Caldwell Manor." The woman's ample bosom quivered with a good-natured if slightly befuddled chuckle. "Here we are."
    In the room Mrs. Jackson indicated, a young girl, perhaps five or so, sat propped among pillows in a four-poster bed that looked as though it had rested on the same spot for a century or more. Kendra paused in the doorway.
    "They're busy," Mrs. Jackson whispered.
    Trick sat in a straight-backed chair by the bed, an open book in his lap. The girl leaned forward, apparently engrossed in whatever he was reading. Feeling like an eavesdropper, Kendra listened as well.
    "'Then have I gained a right good man this day,' quoth jolly Robin," came Trick's throaty voice. "'What name goest thou by, good fellow?'"
    "And what did he say?" the child asked.
    "The stranger answered, 'Men call me John Little whence I came.'"
    The girl's blond curls bounced as she shook her head. "No, it's Little John!" she corrected, her brown eyes wide with delight.
    Trick glanced up from the leather-bound book. "Aye, but that was Will Stutely's doing. He loved a good jest and said"—he looked back down at the book—"'Nay, fair little stranger. I like not thy name and fain would I have it otherwise. Little art thou, indeed, and small of bone and sinew; therefore shalt thou be christened Little John, and I will be thy godfather.' Then Robin Hood and all his band laughed aloud until the stranger began to grow angry..."
    Kendra could only gape. She felt like the one of the Graiae, three sisters who had but one eye between them. What was she seeing? A highwayman, telling a story to an ill orphan? Or a duke? Right now, he looked like neither.
    She backed away from the doorway. She didn't know this man, not in the least.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    "Robin Hood," Kendra said on their way home, in that forthright way of hers that never failed to make Trick smile. "It's fitting, I'll credit you that."
    "Oh?" The caleche's wheels crunched on the dusty road as he wound the horses through the gentle hills toward Amberley House. "Whatever makes you think so?"
    "Don't jest with me. It's obvious!"
    "Aye?" He looked over at her, but she was gazing straight ahead, her bright hair glistening in the slanting late-afternoon sunshine.
    "I do believe I'm beginning to understand you."
    "Pray, enlighten me," he said dryly. "I've been struggling to understand myself for years."
    She snorted. " You are playing Robin Hood," she said with that same cocksure confidence that had drawn him to her the first time they'd spoken.
    Sweet Mary, was that but three days ago?
    "Only instead of stealing from the rich," she continued, "you're robbing the Roundheads, who are no doubt responsible for making most of those children orphans anyway." She sighed. "I do believe I could love you for this."
    It was his turn to snort. "The man you think you see, sweetheart, isn't me at all. I wish I could be that man," he added under his breath.
    "Balderdash. It's well done of you, Trick."
    "Nonsense. My father wanted to build himself a bloody monument, so he spent every shilling he'd ever made on the