by Tracy Sumner
And they’d been hers.
Brilliant.
The woman could break his gift, kiss him until he almost passed out, and cook.
One more moment, he decided as he stood there, indecisive and unsure. To allow his boiling blood to settle, to allow yearning to tighten his chest. Then he was going to get the information about the dreams and be done with this. Done with her. Let Julian record a thousand pages of notes in the chronology about the blocker, test Victoria with every talent on the estate, marry her off to Ashcroft if he so desired, but he, Finn Alexander, philanderer, mind reader, thief, would be finished. He couldn’t trust her. Obviously could never trust her. And he didn’t know her—and without his tricks, he didn’t know how to get to know her. Get to know any woman.
This feeling of helplessness was intolerable.
“Too thin, Tori,” she murmured and rolled a length of dough between the wooden chopping block and her palm, back and forth until he imagined both the dough and her skin were warm and sticky.
“Tori,” he whispered, his heart breaking all over again, knowing she’d taken his nickname and claimed it as her own. Fuck, this friendship business was killing him.
She brushed her wrist across her brow, trying to contain the wisps of hair that had escaped her chignon and clung to her moist skin when she only succeeded in sending a streak of flour across her cheek—adding to the one on the tip of her nose. His gazed lowered to her breasts, straining against the bleached apron she’d slipped over her dressing gown as she coaxed the dough into submission. Lowered again, all the way down, his body heating to the tips of his toes to see hers peeking from beneath fluttering silk, wiggling in time to her movements. Lovely ankles he would give a year of his life to press his lips against as he worked his way north, not stopping until she begged, and he meant begged, him to. Loving this idea, his cock sprang to life, a painful press against his trouser close.
A bit of boredom.
That’s what he’d told Julian, and he needed to guarantee the sentiment stayed true. It usually was. But his fierce desire for this woman wasn’t easily defeated. There was a way to have his mind overcome his longing, he realized. He had only to think about the secrets she—Tori—had been keeping from him for fury to deflate his erection like a needle stabbed into a balloon.
“Who is she?” he asked, pleased his voice sounded wrathful rather than wistful because his mind wasn’t quite sure which path to take.
Victoria startled, the dough in her hand flopping to the wooden block and sending a cloud of flour into the air. She coughed, dragging her hand over her chin, leaving another tantalizing trail on her skin as her eyes made a lingering sweep from his tousled hair to his partially exposed chest. In his haste, he hadn’t completed buttoning his shirt, and it hung open, the wrinkled ends batting his hips. Her gaze caught on his scar—he just knew that’s what she was looking at—before skipping away. “I had trouble sleeping and baking…it, I…it calms me.”
He stepped into the room, the scent of vanilla and butter rolling over him like a wave. So this is why she always smelled like biscuits. Halting at the chopping block, he mocked his spineless character. It didn’t matter if he was vexed as all hell, knew her to be a swindler, a charlatan, he still wanted to shove her against the wall and lick flour from her skin. Wrap her legs around his waist and get as close as he possibly could while standing up. He also wanted to dash from the room and never see her again. Each an avenue of escape. “Who is she?” Gripping the block, he leaned in until he could make out the flecks of green in her eyes, golden brown in the hushed gaslight. A mix of colors magnificent enough to adorn one of Julian’s canvases. “The woman in the dreams. Yours and now mine.”
Her chest rose on a stunned breath. “I didn’t lie.”
“You didn’t tell, either,” he said between clenched teeth. His cheeks heated, and he knew everything was spilling like ink across his face while she stood there, pressing her knuckles into the dough and looking good enough to eat. Like her blasted pastries. “When you knew it affected me quite personally. Knew for months, I’m guessing, while you let me rescue you from one debacle after another, as I tried to gain insight into my dreams about you. Mine brought me to you when yours pushed us away.”
“That’s not—”
“Who, Tori?”
Victoria blinked at his harsh tone, her lashes staying low to hide the changes her eyes would make, coloring to her mood. Sadly, he’d never look at her again and think of her as anything but Tori, a nickname he’d created on a whim. Not when she’d repeated it to herself in that soft, dreamy voice.
Tori worked quite well with Blue, should it have come to that.
“I’ll wait another minute, then I’m coming around this battered slab of wood, and you may not like the result. We haven’t tested what happens when I touch you and very diligently try to steal your thoughts. I’m willing to take them by force if I have to. I’ve scrambled minds when I’ve pressed too hard, left people in a state for days, and I would hate for that to happen to you. But as I see it, how I, in truth, saw it this evening, your dreams are rightfully mine.”
Her head lifted, her gaze scalding him where it landed—belly, chest, shoulders—before settling on his face. Hers was dusted with flour and flushed with remorse. “I didn’t know how to tell you. What to tell you. This dream interpretation business is more involved than a simple parlor trick where I make someone forget a foolish thing I’ve done behind a potted fern. I’m still feeling my way here, whether I’m given leave for that or not.”
“Who is she?” The whisper was low and furious. One second. He was one second away from demanding she release his life to him, demanding she kiss him as she’d done in the library. As if it were the first of her life, the only that had ever mattered to either of them.
Get the information and be done with her, push her away, stay safe.
He held up a finger. “One.” Another. “Two.”
“Your sister! I think she’s your sister!”
The kitchen fell deadly quiet, apart from the ragged breath he took and the clipped one she released. “I don’t have a sister. I have no one from the past.”
“Did you see her eyes, Finn? And how young she was? There could be no one else in the world with eyes exactly like yours so close to our age who is haunting our dreams.”
“I don’t have a sister,” he repeated in a gruff voice, the words sounding like they’d been rendered on the edge of a blade. His heartbeat gained speed, cracking against his ribs until he feared pitching to a lifeless heap at her feet. There was no sister. There was nothing before Seven Dials. Before Julian and Humphrey. Piper. Simon. Ashcroft. Harbingdon. And if he’d once recalled a girl reaching for him as tears streamed from eyes exactly like his, he couldn’t endure admitting it.
“I’ll tell you everything,” she whispered hoarsely. “I’ve seen enough, perhaps, to find her. She has a slight accent. French? Light hair—and those eyes. And she’s in London. This I have witnessed. This I know.”
Finn stumbled back, out of reach. If Victoria touched him, he would go up in flames. Turn to ash and blow away in the breeze, an eloquent end to the Blue Bastard.
Sister.
A headache had started to thump, and he pressed his hand to his brow in agony. Victoria’s answering look of pity shot a crimson haze across his vision.
Her fingers grasped his sleeve as he stormed past, out the servant’s door, and into the walled side garden. The grass was damp and chilly beneath his bare feet, a crescent moon casting muffled light and shadow across his path—and before he had time to formulate a plan he was running. Past the clump of unpruned rose bushes, past the gardener’s cottage, the conservatory, the potter’s shed, the lake. Running until his lungs burned and his skin stung, until sweat coated his face and trickled into his eyes, through fields and forest he’d traversed as a young man, every nook and valley as familiar to him as the lines on his palm.
He ran until he got far enough away from Victoria
Hamilton for his gift to return in full force, bringing with it the torment of his life, hearing too much.
When his legs finally gave out, he locked his hands on his knees, hung his head, and gulped in sputtered breaths, stunned to find he’d made it to the Stone Fortress, the dwelling receiving its name when the Duke of Ashcroft lived there when he first joined the League, the lone structure on the estate impervious to fire.
The sound of the front door opening didn’t shock Finn.
On this night, nothing else could shock him.
Slowly rising, he swiped his hair from his eyes to find Humphrey lounging in the entranceway, hands in his pockets, a golden flood of gaslight spilling around him.
“Come in, then, as you look in the middle of a first-rate sulk. Unless you’d like me to come out there. We can crack each other’s teeth until your fury’s got nowhere to hide. Sometimes that makes a man feel better. Crude, but efficient.”
With a grimace, Finn crossed the yard and shouldered past Humphrey and into the cottage, never once considering the brutal offer. He’d no desire for a man Humphrey’s size to ‘crack his teeth’ when he quite liked them. Too, he already had the chip from his fall off his mare. His smile was almost as noteworthy as his eyes, and one had to protect one’s assets in an uncertain world.
The Stone Fortress was modestly furnished, rustic, and cozy, which suited the hulking man currently perusing the collection of bottles lining a rough-hewn sideboard. A fire was crackling in the hearth, but the open window allowed a bracing draft inside, opposing sensations Finn let swirl and settle. He had no fight in him at this point, even to decide between being cold or hot.
Humphrey held a bottle aloft. “I’d go with Ireland, as you look like you’ve been pulled through a keyhole. Scotland requires more soothing contemplation.”
Finn grunted and collapsed to a brocade sofa that had seen better days. He poked his finger in a hole in the faded upholstery, remembering Humphrey had moved to the cottage once Ashcroft found reasonable control over his fiery talent, and Julian no longer feared letting him reside in the main house when he visited—because the main house certainly better suited a duke. But stone walls better suited a man known to start fires.
Humphrey retreated to a chair across from him, a bruised leather piece that looked like a castoff from the servants’ quarters. He offered a glass—filled to the brim, thank God. “Go easy,” Humphrey advised, “this is the strong stuff.”
Finn winked, saluted, and drained the glass in one shot. His eyes watered, and he coughed, the whiskey burning a path from his lips to his heels, just what he needed to incinerate the vision of Victoria’s ashen face and the dark blue eyes from his dream.
A sour smile crossed Humphrey’s face, and he shoved to his feet, bringing the bottle back and pouring another draught for Finn. “One of those nights, is it? Going to have to hold your head over a rubbish bin, I’m guessing. The anticipation of that is killing me.”
“It’s one of those months, Rey. And never fear, I’ll puke outside in your azalea bushes. I’m a gentleman.”
Humphrey took a leisurely sip, gazing at Finn over the crystal rim. Patient, almost as patient as Julian, when Finn had little of the skill himself. Twitchy when he was a boy, full of verve and arrogance as a young man. Reckless. Even a mite demonstrative, something a lad wasn’t often allowed to be in an aristocratic household. Julian’s words sounded in his mind, about Humphrey comforting him during the night terrors, and he wondered why the hell anyone, a young man himself, would have accepted this responsibility? Why would anyone want to be surrounded by the occult and the danger it presented? Especially when you weren’t cursed yourself.
Besides a family, what was in it for the pensive man sitting across from him?
But there it was. Family. Which answered Finn’s question.
“Powerful thoughts churning through that hard head of yours.” Humphrey tapped the crystal against his temple. “Almost afraid to ask. Your smile usually provides good cover. I’m not sure what to think about this pathetic display.”
The whiskey had done its job, chasing away some of his apprehension, and Finn slid into an answering sprawl, balancing his glass on his belly. “It’s a woman.”
Finn watched Humphrey catch himself before the grin broke free, the rotter. “Which one? According to the chattering snits, more of those than you can count on both hands.”
“There’s only one, I’m afraid. The rest are immaterial.” He tipped his glass and peered into it. “Which does present a problem, one I’ve never had to deal with.”
Humphrey’s eyes widened at the admission.
“Did I mention she’s betrothed and an earl’s daughter, therefore untouchable, as well as being one of the most powerful beings in our mystical universe? Remember her?”
Humphrey took a deliberate sip. “I remember.”
“Julian’s so eager to fill pages of the chronology that I’m panicked to admit housing Lady Hamilton is becoming an issue for me and a reputational danger for her. Leave it to me to find myself captivated by the rarest find in three hundred years in our strange little world.” He finished the second whiskey and poured a third, certain both decisions were going to force him to bed down on Humphrey’s battered sofa—after, as promised, he left his dinner in the shrubs surrounding the cottage. “The kicker? She’s dreaming of someone she swears is my sister. And you know what?” Finn laughed, a serrated sound with all the buoyancy of a pillar stone. “I believe her.”
Humphrey paused, his glass arrested halfway to his lips. Finn was delighted to finally crack his composure. “Sister? What sister?”
Finn slid low, until his head rested on the back of the sofa. Closing his eyes, he let the world tilt. Not the heaviest of drinkers, as mind reading didn’t tolerate drunken comportment, he’d pay dearly for this indulgence. As it was, Humphrey’s thoughts were intruding, and the whiskey was making it hard to fight them off. “Tori’s been dreaming, and of course, with the number of fanciful ones I inspire, I assumed they were about me. Ro-man-tic even. Embarrassed to tell me and all that. Sounds plausible, doesn’t it? But they’re about someone with eyes exactly like mine. A woman with an accent.”
In a language that had come easily, too easily, to him when he’d first tried to speak it.
“Tori, is it?” Humphrey’s glass thumped the table, his boot heels scraping across the stone floor as he inched forward in his chair. “An accent. Interesting, as you’ve always had a knack with languages.”
Finn blinked into the amber radiance cast from the fire, the whiskey composing a delightful musical score in his skull. “Do you think it’s possible, Rey? That there’s someone out there related to me? Why wouldn’t I have dreamed of her? Been able to read her mind? Why would this woman, this stranger, be our connector?”
“How the hell do I know? All I grasped was that this summer was going to be anarchy, an itch I’ve had under my skin for weeks. The insane gods of magic stirring up our lives. Our peace interrupted.” Humphrey pointed his glass at Finn. “That’s my gift, the ability to sense chaos. Let Julian record that in his book.”
“I have to find her,” Finn whispered.
“You don’t have to convince me, boy. Can’t have anyone entering our world without finding out why.” Taking a considering draught, Humphrey tilted his head. “When we found you, I was so damn reckless. Act first, think never, that sort of thing. Wasn’t unheard of, a titled bloke dropping a byblow in a slum, a place no one would ever connect them. So, I broke into the orphanage even though you were by then living in that shack—maybe a month after we rescued you—tore the place up looking for records, papers, something to tell us who you were. There was nothing, but I always wondered. You were filthy, covered in insect bites and bruises, a layer of dirt on your skin it took five baths to wash off, but the moment we cleaned you up, you looked like a little prince. Sounded like one once the cockney slipped away. You came from somewhere, that’s all I knew. Because I’d come from the gutter, never a
nyplace but, and I recognized the difference right off. Julian’s creation about you being from his side of the world may not be far from the truth.”
“I don’t want another story. I’m happy with Julian’s creation,” Finn murmured and slumped back on the sofa, slinging his arm over his eyes, the whiskey cutting a wide path through him. Oh, was he going to feel wretched tomorrow.
A blanket settled over him as Humphrey loosened his fingers from around the glass and set it aside. “Thank you,” Finn whispered, when he meant, for everything.
He didn’t want his life to change. He wanted the family he’d found, the family who’d found him.
Why go and wreck his moderately predictable supernatural existence by falling in love?
With Victoria Hamilton or a long-lost sister.
Piper lifted her finger to her lips as Julian tiptoed into the nursery. “Finally,” she whispered, gesturing to their son who lay sprawled on his bed, his favorite bunny, Alfred, tucked beneath his chin, a dabble of spit sticking fur to his cheek. She’d practically had to pin Lucien to the mattress to get him to sleep, a battle of wills that had left them both exhausted. It was hard to be vexed when the little devil looked so much like his father that it made her heart ache.
Moving behind her, Julian wrapped her in his arms, placing his chin on the crown of her head. “Trouble with my beautiful boy? How could that be? He’s an absolute angel.”
She turned, trying to wiggle close enough to press her cheek to his chest, but it was impossible. “I’m corpulent,” she said with a sniffle, “and I still have another month to go. Maybe longer. It went longer than anticipated last time.” Pregnancy had left her with the predilection to cry at less than the drop of a bonnet, for no reason at all and every reason in the world. A circumstance Julian had handled with the calm self-possession he was known for.
