The Rake is Taken

by Tracy Sumner

  Julian nodded, his gaze also going to the women on the lawn. “We have a new groom who’s a most talented clairvoyant. He’ll provide a suitable mount while telling you when you’re set to pass into the great beyond. Why, may I ask?”

  Finn tapped the desk drawer holding her spectacles, marveling at his fierce urge to touch them. Thoughts from a maid on an upper floor were leaking in, the dreaded return of his gift. Victoria had moved far enough away to break their bond, and in a moment, he would tell Julian and watch him spark like a hot ember. “A gift for a friend,” he murmured, “just a gift for a friend.”

  Victoria halted at the woodland boundary, the hum in her ears increasing in volume until it sounded like a train roaring down uneven tracks. Closing her eyes, she let the disturbance overpower her senses and shove everything else out. Her skin tingled as a feeling, a force, rocked her where she stood. She was falling before she realized she’d lost her balance, landing on her hands and knees with a jarring thud.

  Piper gasped and dropped beside her in an awkward half-kneel. The viscountess’s hands were covering hers as she murmured soft words of comfort. Of healing. A calming rush swept Victoria, lowering the muddled drone, the sensation of a knife scraping her skin until it was raw. A flash of perfect, wondrous ease.

  “I’m fine,” she said in a hoarse voice she barely recognized. Forcing herself to a shaky sit, she wondered what, exactly, had happened. Shoving her hair from her eyes, she blinked into the bright sunlight. One moment she’d been recalling riding through fields like this with her brother, the next, she’d felt someone opening the door to her mind. An invasion she’d forcefully rejected, which had caused the world to tilt.

  Finn. Sneaky, adorable scoundrel.

  Piper groaned and flopped to her bottom next to Victoria. “Oh, goodness, I may not be able to get up.” She wrapped her arm around her protruding tummy and balanced her chin atop it. “This baby is getting too big for me to manage. You may have to summon the field cart to bring me back to the house.”

  Victoria turned, horrified. “Are you well, Lady Beauchamp? I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have thought to tumble down here with me.”

  “Piper, please. I’m fine. Fat, but fine.” Sprawling back in the grass with a sigh, she stacked her arm beneath her head. “And I love tumbling. Ask Julian.”

  Victoria sputtered a laugh and waved her hand before her face, the wobble in her knees finally starting to retreat. If she waited a moment, she’d be able to stand. “You’re far from fat. I’d go with ungainly. Lovely but cumbersome?”

  “Dashed if that doesn’t sound worse.”

  “You were able to heal me,” Victoria murmured, recalling the tranquility Piper’s touch had brought, the instant stillness. “When I thought I blocked your gift.”

  “I tried, but I didn’t know it got through. Though I can’t see your aura, which is most unusual, I must be able to partially reach you.” Piper plucked a cornflower from the ground and twirled it between her fingers. “Wait until we tell Julian. He’ll record about a thousand pages of notes in his excitement.”

  Victoria laid back as well, grass tickling her cheek as she turned her head toward the viscountess. “Don’t tell Finn. About my fall, I mean. I felt him intrude, and when I pushed him out, the world just spun on its axis. For a second, it was like we were out of rhythm with each other, and I had to run to catch up. I wonder if I didn’t do my little parlor trick on myself, stealing time, just enough to recalibrate.”

  “That makes sense, I suppose.”

  “I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel…more here. At Harbingdon. It’s like tiny abrasions on my skin. A prickly sensation, no, more a vibration. All these abilities flowing through me, leaving bits and pieces like flotsam caught on a branch in the river. I’m not sure how much control I have or that I even know how to channel this.” She shrugged her shoulder against the ground. “I don’t understand how I’ll be able to help anyone when I can’t help myself.”

  “We’ll work on that. It’s going to take time. You’re powerful, and you don’t realize it.” Piper pointed with the cornflower to a hawk circling overhead. “Supernatural talents require exploration. There are no easy answers, often no answers at all. Julian is extremely focused on providing them through the chronology, but it’s not always that simple. There are so many variables that come into play. Which is frustrating if you want conclusive evidence, as my husband does, exhilarating if you consider life an adventure, as I do.”

  “Opposites attract,” Victoria said, wondering how long she’d have to wait before Piper asked about the kiss. “You and Julian, I mean.”

  “So, you plan to keep this little episode from Finn?” Piper asked when the silence had begun to chafe.

  Here we go.

  She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want him to know his gift had affected her. Maybe because this one thing—that he couldn’t read her mind—set her apart from the parade of women in his life. Which was foolish pride talking when she wasn’t a woman in his life at all. Unless two errant kisses placed her there. “I haven’t told him everything,” she admitted. About the dreams, about her gift. That she was starting to feel herself obstructing mystical lines of communication, turning down the glow on mental gaslamps all over the estate.

  Because she didn’t trust him. Or rather, she didn’t trust herself.

  She’d never responded to a kiss with everything in her.

  Falling in love with the Blue Bastard would be an unadulterated disaster. Worse than marriage to a man she not only didn’t love but was repulsed by. At least that situation she had control over. When she had control over little else.

  “Maybe sharing isn’t the best route, at least at first. I told Julian absolutely everything, and it took me years to land him. Our love story could aptly be titled ‘Chasing the Viscount’.”

  Victoria gathered a pine needle and tied it into a tidy knot. “You misunderstand. I don’t want to land anyone. He has his pick of women, and I’m betrothed to—”

  “The Grape, yes, I know.”

  “It’s a financial obligation.” Victoria felt the need to stress this when most marriages in the ton were based on a business arrangement, not love. But Lord and Lady Beauchamp had a legendary connection, if the gossip was factual, which after seeing them together, she wholeheartedly believed it was. “I was baiting Mr. Alexander, and he accepted the challenge. What you witnessed is the unfortunate result. Both of us, I’m abashed to admit, are known for tossing out kisses like we would dirty bathwater. It’s an insignificant occurrence, I promise you. One and done.”

  “You being at Harbingdon is momentous. There’s no need for a kiss to make it more so.”

  “I’m only here so Finn can interpret the dreams. And now, so Lord Beauchamp can pick my brain like a lock.”

  “The dreams. Is this what you’re keeping from Finn?”

  Victoria came up on her elbow, dusting at the dirt clinging to her bodice. She yanked a piece of straw from her hair and sighed. If Aggie should come upon them rolling around in the grass like children…

  She turned her head to hide her smile. Piper was a radical influence when Victoria needed no incentive to misbehave. However, she felt a heartfelt zing of affection that surely meant she’d found a friend. “I’m going to tell him,” she promised. Piper likely thought she’d kept quiet to protect herself when the dreams were going to change Finn’s life, not hers. It felt like protecting him to keep them to herself. Plus, she was a little worried about his reaction.

  “Perhaps you should wait until tomorrow,” Piper said with a yawn.

  Victoria glanced anxiously over her shoulder, wondering where in the dickens that field cart might be. She couldn’t very well carry the lady home.

  “Time enough to let your lips cool off, that is.”

  Victoria clapped her hand over her mouth with a hoot of pure delight. “You are unlike any viscountess I’ve ever encountered.”

  “I’m recreating the role one uncouth deed a
t a time. For the betterment of society, of course.” Piper clutched her belly and groaned softly. “He or she is kicking in agreement. Oh, my. Would you like to feel?”

  Victoria stilled, joy and dread racing through her. “Oh, well, I don’t know…”

  Piper glanced at her from the corner of her eye. A mischievous peek through long lashes that let Victoria know exactly how Julian had come to be wrapped around his wife’s pinkie. “It’s quite beyond the pale. Outside the bounds. Vulgar. Isn’t that how an old crone sitting in a Mayfair townhouse would describe it right this very minute? Who do you want to side with, Victoria, that withered shrew or the eccentric daughter of an esteemed American actress and a debauched viscount?”

  “When you put it that way,” Victoria murmured and grazed the back of her hand across Piper’s stomach, as cautiously as she’d touched the butterfly that had landed on her arm earlier. During the charged instant when she’d felt Finn’s focus seize her as surely as his lips had. When she’d begun to sense him tap, tap, tapping on the entrance to her mind.

  “Here,” Piper said, and repositioned Victoria’s hand.

  The kick against her palm was harder than she imagined it could be, and she sucked in a breath, releasing it with a marveling sigh. “My, how remarkable.”

  “Isn’t it? Lucien was the calmest thing, a little gentleman like his father, so this baby’s vigor has been a surprise. A girl I’m guessing, the tiny imp. I sound proud, don’t I? Which proves why I should live very far from the decorous inhabitants of London, that withered shrew included.”

  “A tiny imp like her mother,” Victoria concurred and shyly removed her hand. She’d never had a friend to discuss female things with. No sister, and a rather taciturn mother. No family to speak of in any way that counted aside from Aggie and her brother, and Charles was gone. This intimacy, while delightful, was also distressing, sending a pulse of longing through her.

  One that made her feel lonelier than she had in ages.

  A shout from the house sounded, dispatching a flock of starlings in the alder tree above them. Piper wrestled to a sit with an oath no respectable woman would ever utter. “That’s Humphrey’s bellow. We’d better go, or he’ll come looking for us. Should he find me down in the dirt in my delicate condition, he won’t be happy. You think Julian is protective, my word, is that man dictatorial. We’re like his fledglings, everyone on the estate. He needs his own family to worry about, but that is a project for another day.”

  Victoria scrambled to her feet and held her hand out to assist Piper, again wondering where that field cart might be. But they got the job done without issue, the two of them in minutes headed back with the sun sliding low and throwing subdued shadows across their path. There was a decided chill in the air as they lost the light, and Victoria shivered. She’d left her shawl and her spectacles in the library—and she might never be able to return to that room, a space Finn had taken over with his language books and his ledgers and his kisses.

  As they started up the pebbled path leading to the front door, Piper halted her with a light yank on Victoria’s wrist. Again, a sense of peace overtook her, and she could see why someone would long to have Piper work her magic and make the chaos slip away. The understanding sent a chilling pulse of recognition through Victoria. Someone could also, she was beginning to see, long to have her block their gift. Or block another’s gift—with very despicable intent.

  Victoria turned to find the viscountess gazing at her with an expression solemn enough to have her taking an apprehensive step back. “What you said earlier, about Finn, isn’t quite true. He has his pick of women if you believe the broadsheets. And the gossip.” She laughed softly, her eyes glowing the color of the grass beneath their feet. “Has his pick because he’s near the loveliest man in England. But I know him better than anyone, or I used to before he grew up and starting hiding things from me, and those women he has his pick of are for one night.” She shrugged a slim shoulder beneath soiled, wrinkled silk. “Men can’t always resist the tempting offers thrown their way. But he doesn’t want that. Finn wants someone for a lifetime. Wants a love to last a lifetime because that’s what he’s seen his brother obtain happily with me. Someone to match him in intelligence and wit and kindness, someone to deal with his temper because he has one though he hides it well. Someone to help navigate the mystical world he’s been unjustly forced into, a world he paid a horrific price as a child to enter.”

  Victoria glanced at the library window, the feeling of someone watching—though she couldn’t see clearly without her spectacles—shooting a dart of unease through her. She didn’t need to picture him as a child, abandoned and abused, to make her want him more. Her yearning was a vibrant entity all on its own. “There’s no need to tell me this,” she replied in a terse tone she wished she could sweeten like one of her confections, “when I’m going to marry the Grape and live happily ever after. Or not. The end of the story isn’t always a love to last a lifetime. I’ve never seen it done in such a fashion. Not necessary, is it?”

  Piper sighed despondently and trudged up the path. “That, my new friend, is exactly why I told you. Finn knows what love is like. He’s experienced it every day since Julian and Humphrey pulled him out of Seven Dials, when you, sadly, have not. You’re the one we’ll have to fight harder for.”

  Victoria stumbled to a halt, Piper’s words stinging like she’d walked through a patch of nettles.

  With a choking sigh, she realized she’d not had anyone fight for her in a very long time.

  Chapter 10

  The dream tore through his night.

  Victoria. Light from a blazing hearth washing over her, hair loose, an amber shroud about her face. He peered through the dense shadows to see she clutched a tarnished chain, the ends dangling from the crease in her fist, the clasp slapping her wrist as she gestured. An appeal. Imploring. Not in fear but frustration.

  He moved closer, heat from the fire stinging his cheeks. Que voulez-vous de moi? What do you want from me?

  Victoria shook her head and pointed to the darkened corner…and it was then he noticed the other woman. The filthy tip of a worn slipper, the ragged hem of a nondescript gown. She tilted her head into the meager light—revealing eyes the exact color of his.

  The smile that captured her face was golden, as earnest and radiant as the sun. The answering dash of love to his heart, instant and spontaneous recognition, nearly brought him to his knees.

  Finn wrenched from sleep and dragged quivering fingers through his hair, the ends blunt and shorter than they’d been in many a day. That damned haircut. Backhanding sweat from his brow, he slid from the bed on unsteady legs. Rage was carving him up, as was the memory of that kiss, the most erotic he’d experienced in a lifetime of experiencing them.

  She’d touched him, ferocious, lips and tongue and teeth, scorching him with her hot breath and even hotter skin, making him consider a future he’d never before considered while knowing her dreams were more than she’d implied.

  Personal. To him. A piece of his life.

  Victoria Hamilton had made him, for one imprudent moment, feel things he’d never hoped to feel. To him, as potent as a first kiss, a first tup.

  The sense of betrayal, a sensation he’d not suffered since those appalling days in Seven Dials, drummed through his body. Stealing his breath and his restraint.

  Yanking a shirt and trousers on, he was out his bedchamber door and down the hallway before he’d put his thoughts in order. Muddled, mixed with the scent from the dream—lemon and linseed—a fragrance that called to him from long, long ago. Victoria’s room was on his floor, second door, left. He’d known but tried not to imagine her nestled beneath a silk counterpane, her long legs twisted in damp sheets. His body covering hers, pressing her into the feather mattress. Those amazing eyes of her lighting up as he wrapped his fingers around hers and slid inside.

  He’d imagined everything. And more.

  How dare she, was all he could manage, knowing full we
ll talking to her in this state—with fury making his hands shake until he had to curl them into fists to steady them—was not the smartest plan. An experienced swindler, he rarely showed even the slightest whiff of irritation or let anyone see what he thought of them, even when dealing with the mindless procession of titled idiots who frequented the Blue Moon. Anger was the biggest tell. He’d never encountered anyone who, with a simple snap of their fingers, made him so furious he wanted to put his fist through a wall.

  Until her.

  When he reached her bedchamber, he cursed soundly to find it empty, those tangled sheets he’d visualized highlighted in a streak of pale moonlight. The room smelled of her, that slightly sweet, appetizing, entirely too tempting fragrance that only kicked his resentment a notch higher. Well past midnight, the house was silent, at rest, her long-suffering maid sleeping belowstairs. He strode to the window, knocked the drape aside. The lawn was deserted except for a footman he could see patrolling the parameter. Julian and his security. Though it looked like they would need it.

  Where could she be?

  He closed his eyes, concentrating on the thoughts flowing in and out of his mind like a gently-drawn breath. Only a faint flicker of recognition not his own, so she was close. Close enough to block, or he’d have been privy to every opinion in the house. Rolling his fingertips together, he searched the lowest level of his consciousness. Deliberate, patient, until he caught her.

  One teaspoon vanilla extract, he heard her say as clearly as if she stood next to him.

  Snapping his eyes open, he left the chamber at a run, barreling down the narrow servant’s staircase that led to the kitchens in a reckless sprint. He halted in the arched doorway, stunned to truly find her there, spreading blueberry jam onto flat squares of dough he suspected were the delightful pastries he’d eaten for breakfast the past two mornings, better even than Cook’s crumpets. He’d been late to Julian’s meeting for the bloody crumpets when he’d sever an arm for the pastries.