by Tracy Sumner
The Rake is Taken
Tracy Sumner
THE RAKE IS TAKEN
Copyright © 2020 by Tracy Sumner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by: Holly Ingraham, Casey Harris-Parks
Contents
Foreword
Also by Tracy Sumner
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Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Thanks!
The Lady is Trouble
Chapter 1
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Foreword
As I was editing Finn’s story, I realized it contains many themes built around adoption. Finn, Simon, Piper, Humphrey, and Julian. Maybe even the Duke of Ashcroft! A family created through love, not blood. My son is adopted, and I placed a lot of what I imagine this feels like in Finn’s hopes and expectations. I also added the absolute joy you experience as an adoptive parent for Julian and sweet, hulking Humphrey.
Thanks to a few people I couldn’t live without. To Gin Jones, my very first RWA roomie, for the title assistance. Who would have thought of TAKEN? And to Stephanie Thurwachter, my amazing PA. I could not find my way out of the mad publishing maze without you!
And to my readers, always. Happy reading!
Also by Tracy Sumner
Garrett Brothers Series
Tides of Love
Tides of Passion
Tides of Desire: A Christmas Romance
* * *
Southern Heat Series
To Seduce a Rogue
To Desire a Scoundrel: A Christmas Seduction
* * *
League of Lords Series
The Lady is Trouble
The Rake is Taken
The Duke is Wicked (coming 2021)
Multi-Author Anthologies
A Scandalous Christmas
(coming November 24, 2020)
Chasing the Duke: Seventh Day of Christmas
(coming December 7, 2020)
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Prologue
In a very loathsome part of the city…
London, 1855
* * *
Finn had two choices. Which wasn’t dreadful, as he often had none.
Trust the word of the men waiting in the alley outside his lean-to. Or run. When he’d spent all nine years of his life running. Dodging misfortune, grasping hands, chaotic dreams, and thoughts not his own.
There’d been a life before. He had memories. A girl with flaxen hair clutching his hand as they raced through a field of some splendid purple flower, her smile wide, her gaze focused on him in a way no one’s had since. But those memories were as out of reach as Queen Victoria’s blooming crown, as murky as the rotten, throat-stinging stew hanging over the river outside his door.
Finn wiped his nose on his tattered sleeve and shivered, a frigid gust tearing inside his shack and sending the city’s stench into his nostrils. A reminder of how close to the bone he lived. All he didn’t have. Opportunities he couldn’t afford to miss.
The men, their promises, could be a good thing.
Against the better judgment of a world trying to beat that belief out of him, Finn hadn’t given up on good things.
He glanced around the dark, dank warren he’d constructed beneath the back staircase of the Cock and Bur with scraps of wood pilfered from the docks. It was a piss-poor rabbit hole in London’s most despicable parish, but it was his. His when he had nothing but what he’d managed to steal. A silver fork, a cheap paste brooch, a truly fine kid leather glove, a book, the stained pages nonetheless fascinating for what little he could read of the story.
Finn smiled, though it felt shaky around the edges. He was an incredibly good thief, of lots of things, and thank God for it, or he’d long ago be dead. Peering through a split in the timber, he inspected the two men conversing in low tones, their voices harmonizing with the howling wind. The posh bloke’s words from moments ago returned to him. Let me help you. I, too, have a supernatural gift I can’t control. You can trust me.
Trust.
Finn curled his hands into fists and slammed his eyes shut, tears pricking his lids. What he had—the ability to read minds—was no gift. It was a curse.
But he could use it. Would use it. Had used it every day to survive.
Calming himself, Finn let the men’s thoughts ruthlessly worm their way through the ragged wood of his battered abode and into his mind. He couldn’t always read a person without touching them…but sometimes, if they didn’t put up a mental fuss, he could. One of the men, a giant the size one rarely saw outside a fighting ring, oh, his thoughts were there for the taking, a clear match for the pity shining in his eyes. Humphrey. Well, nothing cross about Humphrey, even if he looked like he could smash you into the cobblestones with nothing more than a crook of his pinkie.
The fancy one, upon close inspection only a few years older than Finn, was a harder read. Troubled and angry, emotions Finn recognized right off. Slowing his breathing, Finn worked hard to grasp the man’s name, needing it for some reason. Needing the connection.
Julian.
He would love to tell the spit-polished Julian, who spoke with an upmarket accent no one got while living in this hellhole, that if Finn touched him, he’d unlock every secret. Twist Lord High-Class inside out with what he could see, no matter how hard a brain-battle the man waged.
Finn caught his reflection in the mirror shard balanced on a crate, and his heart sank. Another curse. Another limiter of choices. Prettiness that had so far been nothing but a disaster. Eyes so bleeding blue that once seen, they were never forgotten. An unfortunate circumstance for a pickpocket—being unable to slink away without being identified as that beautiful boy.
“Beau garçon,” he whispered, the words coming to him in French like they always did. A language he dreamed in for no reason he could figure. Part of his blank slate of a past, when all he truly knew was the name—Finn—scribbled on the foolscap delivered to the orphanage with him.
Through a serrated gash in the wood, he watched Julian place his hand on the lean-to and shudder with comprehension. The word immediately tripped from the posh bloke’s mind to his.
Family.
Finn’s deepest desire, and the one phrase with the power to break him when nothing else had. Not the edge of a blade dug beneath his chin, not a flaming cheroot extinguished on his wrist. Not rough handling of the worst kind.
Pitch-black, nightmare handling one never, ever forgot.
Remembering, Finn released a cry that sounded like it had come from a dist
ressed animal and dropped to the filthy cobblestones, hugging his knees to his chest. The hulking giant tore the lean-to’s door aside and pulled Finn into his arms, making hushing sounds as if he were a babe. Finn sagged against the beast’s rough woolen coat, appalled by his weakness, embarrassed, ashamed, but unable to find the courage to turn away.
To run.
In the end, he let them lead him down the alley and to the waiting hackney cab. Lead him to an uncertain future. Of course, he wouldn’t have accepted the offer, any offer, without a fight if the men hadn’t already visited his twilight musings on more than one wretched night.
Because he only dreamed about those who mattered.
In a very enchanting part of the city…
Her father was outraged. Again.
Victoria pressed her back against the nursery door and scrubbed her face free of tears. No use trying to leave the chamber when they’d locked her in. After the last incident, she’d gone two days without food. Now, there were crackers in the top drawer of her chest, secreted beneath her badly-embroidered handkerchiefs, and a slice of cheese wrapped in a linen napkin hidden underneath her pillow. Agnes, her companion, and lady’s maid once Victoria was old enough to need one, always kept water in the room, just in case.
Victoria hadn’t meant to ruin her father’s party. She’d approached Lady Dane-Hawkins because the woman had whispered a rude comment about her to Lady Markem as they strolled from the dining room to the salon. Victoria was odd; she knew that. But she’d worked hard to appear normal, or as normal as a child could when they were, in fact, not normal. To have that gray-haired snipe say something that made her parents turn and look at her—as if to determine what precisely about their daughter was so strange—when Victoria tried valiantly to evaporate like morning mist when she was around them, was too much. Lady Dane-Hawkins had placed another crack in the cup that held their love, and Victoria felt it leaking away even faster.
She would have told them about her talent long ago if she wanted her parent’s affection to wither like an aster bloom in the winter.
She’d only slipped her fingers around Lady Dane-Hawkins’ wrist for one moment, long enough to erase whatever Victoria had done to make the woman think badly of her. A few minutes of the lady’s memory obliterated. Maybe the entire night, but with a crowded social calendar, who needed another of those? Unfortunately, Lady Dane-Hawkins had fainted dead away, dropped right to the Aubusson carpet her mother loved, her glass of sherry going with her in a rosy-red spill.
Victoria’s parlor trick, the ability to steal time, was one she’d been employing since forever. Although it never worked out well for anyone.
A light knock sounded. A folded sheet of foolscap inched beneath the door.
Victoria opened the note, a tear rolling down her cheek and dropping to the parchment. She watched it bleed into the ink, fracturing the script into broken pieces. You’re not odd. You’re unique.
Charles.
Her brother, her protector. He and Agnes knew about her peculiarity when no one else did. No one else cared.
Her family was much smaller than it looked from the outside.
Dropping her head to her knees, she shivered. There would be no fire in the hearth tonight. No companion to read her a story. No food aside from the concealed cheese and crackers. No love, as expected.
She’d been told often enough that eccentric people usually grew to live solitary lives.
So often, she now believed it.
Chapter 1
Curzon Street, Mayfair
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London, 1870
* * *
Finn had two choices. Which was remarkable as he usually had many.
Continue to follow the woman he’d been dreaming of for months. Or surrender his pursuit. Only, he wasn’t a runner. Hadn’t run from a problem since Julian and Humphrey offered a new life as effortlessly as the baron’s liveried footman offered champagne.
His smile was menacing, he knew. Because there was no choice. Not when the woman standing across the ballroom, his unwitting twilight partner, was the only person he’d ever encountered whose mind he couldn’t read as easily as he did a copy of The Daily Telegraph.
Even touching her arm that time on St. James, as she rushed from a hatter’s shop, had brought him naught. That was a first. A never-before-in-his-life first, because when he touched someone, the thoughts came. Added to the bizarre circumstance of not being able to read her, being close to her obscured his ability to read others, like she’d dimmed the flame on the gaslamp of his mind, leaving only his thoughts to contend with.
What was she thinking, he wondered?
What were they—the glittering mass of humanity filling the fragrant, brightly-lit space—thinking? It felt odd to not know.
Finn dusted the toe of his boot through a candlelit prism cast on the marble floor and lifted his tumbler, the brandy doing a reassuring glide down his throat. He’d never entered into a relationship of any kind—friend, enemy, lover—without a landscape of probabilities laid out before him. He knew from the get-go what everyone thought of him, what they wanted, what they hated, what they desired. It was an unfair fight, a gamble weighted entirely in his favor.
Always in his favor.
But not with her.
The dreams had tormented him for months before he found a name to connect to the face. Victoria Hamilton. Lady, as in daughter of, because he wouldn’t be lucky enough to dream of an aging widow. A chimney sweep. A seamstress. Someone of the same social standing as a mind-reading byblow of a viscount.
The lady currently stood by the terrace doors should she feel the need to flee, which happened on occasion, candlelight sparking off a gown so glacial he felt the chill from across the room. She had a glass in her hand but hadn’t imbibed enough of whatever it contained to affect her, as she possessed the vigilant attentiveness of a thief.
Finn recognized this instantly as he’d once been a proficient thief himself.
He sipped and watched Lady Hamilton wiggle from the hold of an inebriated baron. Finn tilted his head; no, maybe a marquess. Though he cared little, he did lament the nip, slight but existent, that had him clenching his tumbler when the baron/marquess reached for her as she edged away, an unsteady, quaking grab. Finn’s cock did enough of a shift in his fine woolen trousers to have him peeling out of his slouch against the pillar. What could he say? Troublesome women fascinated him. The only woman he’d ever loved, his sister-in-law Piper, was more than a handful and always would be.
He was much accustomed to feminine rebelliousness invading his life.
Lady Hamilton’s defiance seemed insignificant on the surface—stolen kisses; midnight fountain dips; ballroom floors covered in glass, a diversion he’d created to give her time to remove herself from an unfortunate situation with a debauched heir to an earldom.
Insignificant, when the stuff of Finn’s dreams was not.
In truth, the turmoil surrounding the lady captivated him. In his darkened midnight and outside it.
Perhaps he was lonely. Bored. Angry. Guilty. Emotions urging him to embrace chaos in a way he’d never felt the need to before.
Chaos. Which, in lethal tones of late, Julian claimed Finn was addicted to.
The thought of his brother slipped a forlorn cloak over Finn’s mood. Humphrey, another brother of sorts, would be even more cross with him. They were allowed. It had been months since he’d been home, ignoring pleas from a family worried, and with just cause. Months spent trying to forgive himself for misjudging a situation and costing a boy his life. A boy who’d come to the League, Julian’s community of supernatural outcasts, with the same challenge—saddled with a gift he couldn’t control.
Finn shoved his hand deep in his pocket to keep from reaching for the scar on his chest, a throbbing reminder of his failure.
Failure that had injected fear in his veins for the first time since Julian and Humphrey dragged him from that filthy hovel all those years ago. Made him stumble w
hen he’d previously sauntered. Revealed a man struggling to hide his true self under layers of sickening but accomplished charm, a convoluted package he couldn’t take home to Harbingdon just yet. When someone loved you, they noticed things you tried to conceal. At least his family did. Julian, Humphrey, Piper…
They would see how bloody damaged he was, straight off.
As if on cue, Lady Hamilton gave the baron/marquess a jaunty half-wave and backed through the terrace doors. Finn smiled, lips curving against crystal, snagging the interest of Countess Ronson, who paused next to him with a wink. Although Finn warmly recalled her very talented mouth, he was already on the move, his focus solely on his prey. The crowd’s hushed attention hammered him as he worked his way across the ballroom and out the terrace doors. A high-born bastard, he was considered acceptable entertainment, an appealing party favor.
The woman he chased seemed indifferent to him, however, having never once cast a look his way. Which was not the norm, he admitted with absolutely no pleasure. In any case, her disinterest made it easier to track her because she never looked back. That, and a gown the color of the hibiscus bush that bloomed beneath his bedchamber window at Harbingdon each spring. Would be blooming now, in fact. The hue glowed like a beacon, pulling him along in its silken grip.
