I watched him at his work, trying again to collect my thoughts regarding him, with no more success than any of the previous times I'd tried. Every time he started to make me believe something about himself, he would dispel it with a wink; on the instant I came to some judgment about him, he did something to shatter it. There was no question that he had blown me out of my personal doldrums, and the inn, too, and had become well regarded in Grey Rocks, and there was all of that. But I knew other sides of him. Aside from being a thief, at least a petty one, he was an actor beyond Meg's most fearsome suspicions — seldom a liar, but a master manipulator of the truth, and of people.

From Pirate's Passage by William Gilkerson ©2006. Published by Random House Canada.