A Loving Scoundrel by Johanna Lindsey

belong.”

Chapter 10
     
    D ANNY WALKED AWAY from that restaurant trying to hold her head high, though it took every ounce of will she had to accomplish it. She wanted to run instead, had an overwhelming urge to do so, but she had no doubt someone would try to detain her, because running would make her look guilty. They wouldn’t consider that she just wanted to find a deep hole that she could crawl into and cry, she was so heartsick and embarrassed.
    She’d experienced that kind of snobbery before, when she’d looked for jobs in the past. She shouldn’t have let it crush her as it did. It merely pointed out just how hard it was going to be to find a decent job.
    It took a while to push the hurt aside. When she finally did, it was replaced with unease, because for the second time in two days, she felt that someone was watching her, following her. This time it was probably just someone who’d been in that crowd, making sure she left their neighborhood.
    But turning to look, she saw nothing out of the ordinary, at least, not close to her. A lordly type entering an office building. A delivery boy. A lady with a maid following behind her bogged down with packages, a few couples walking along arm in arm, and dozens of other people going about their business. For the next two blocks, the feeling just wouldn’t go away, but every time she looked over her shoulder, she couldn’t imagine who it might be. There were just too many people on the street in this part of town.
    She finally ducked into a shop, then got yelled at when she kept on going, running through the back, which was restricted to employees only, and out the back door. For the next ten minutes she ran, backtracked, passed through other buildings, and finally, the feeling went away. If someone had been following her, she was satisfied she’d lost them.
    It was a long walk to Grosvenor Square. Night arrived before she got there. And there was a definite lack of nice alleys in the areas she’d been passing through. There were parks, though, lots of them, some so big she worried that she’d wandered out of the city by accident. She finally curled up in some bushes to wait for morning so she could get her bearings again.
    Dawn brought the hunger again, and even more anger because of it. But that was pushed aside when she actually looked around her and recognized the park she was in, though she’d never been in that part of town before to her recollection. She’d barely seen any of the park last night, it was so dark. But this morning, the benches along the pathway, the giant old oak shading them, the child running through a flock of pigeons to scatter them, laughing in delight. She blinked, and the child was gone, had never been there. A memory!
    Danny sat back down, shaken to her core. It was the first memory of her past that had ever come back to her, and it had come to her because it was the first time she’d ever been to a place that she must have visited as a child. Had her parents lived in this part of London, or had they only been visiting? There had been a hotel on one side of that park, along with a middle-class neighborhood, though she found more fancy houses on the other side when she left in that direction.
    She tried to remember more, to recognize other things, but nothing else stirred any memories, and it was giving her a headache to try. No, the hunger was doing that again. So she hurried now, had to question a few more strangers for directions, and finally arrived at the Malory house around midmorning.
    It was a bleedin’ mansion! It stood by itself, was fenced in, even had grass all around it, and nice flowers and shrubs, hardly what she’d been expecting. She was too intimidated to approach a house like that, especially after what had happened at that restaurant yesterday, so more time was wasted while she waited around for someone who looked like a servant to leave the house. A young woman finally did, dressed in a maid’s uniform—well,