Wild and Free

Kristen Ashley

Published by Kristen Ashley

Kobo Edition, License Notes

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Kristen Ashley

First ebook edition: December, 2014

Contents

Author’s Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Epilogue

About the Author

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Author’s Note

The US of A is gloriously vibrant with color and culture and for those of you who read my novels you know I like to reflect that in my work.

With Wild and Free, when Abel came to me, he had a Chinese (which became a Chinese-American) family.

As I don’t know how to speak any Chinese dialect, because of Abel’s family, I got to go on a voyage of discovery. As a wordsmith, it was an exciting one. But in trying to find Mandarin words for the expressions I needed, doing this flying blind, it ended as a frustrating one.

You see, with Mandarin (as with all languages so it shouldn’t have been a surprise) there isn’t exactly an agreement on what name is a name for a boy, or a girl, or a surname, or a first name. There also isn’t agreement as to what endearments are appropriate say, between friends, family or lovers.

In researching this (and researching it and then some and more), I knew I would not find the answers on the Internet. I had to find a real-life source. I asked for that source on my Facebook page and got the usual swift and generous offers of assistance. We polled several folks who offered to help about the Chinese names and Mandarin endearments I used in this book and—get this—not a single person agreed with how I’d used the endearments!

I love this. I love how dynamic and pliable language is. I also love that it proved I wasn’t entirely an idiot while doing my research (since I found the same on my own). Not to mention, it isn’t like I haven’t seen this before (for instance, those who did not get my hero calling his heroine “buddy” in At Peace and the same with “mama” in Lady Luck).