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Page 18

| Also, Ashton could perhaps put another man from his mind. Superintendent Silas Howland. While in Melbourne, Ashton was forced to keep an eye out for him day and night even though he wore a beard to help hide his identity. If Superintendent Howland's wounds ever healed, it was for certain that he would strive to seek vengeance on the man who had half crippled himAshton York! |

| The dingo pup following her, Sasha gave Ashton a half smile and began making her way around the room, taking orders and filling them. She had become adept at avoiding the raucous, foul-talking miners who tried to sneak in strokes and pinches. She was no less skilled tonight even though her mind was elsewhere, on another timefour years ago, when she was fifteen, in London . . . . |

| Sasha's father had been a metalfounder who died paralyzed with lead poisoning. Her mother had preceded her father in death by three years in childbirth, the stillborn infant joining his mother in the grave. |

| As the only surviving child, with no close cousins or uncles to care for her, Sasha had been forced to fend for herself on the streets of London, begging for even the tiniest morsel to keep herself alive. Bedraggled, barefoot, and half-starved, she wandered to an affluent section of the city and curled up on the steps of a grand mansion, only to be awakened by the sound of coins dropping close to her feet. When she discovered two of the brightest gold coins she had ever seen, and then a man wearing elegant patent-leather boots standing beside them, she looked slowly up into dark and questioning eyes. |

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