The Rake is Taken

by Tracy Sumner

  She felt his lips curve against her brow. “You’re ravishing, and you know it. So damned beautiful, you take my breath away. How do you think we got into this mess? Twice, I might add.”

  The babe chose that moment to kick, a jarring thump Julian had to feel even through layers of clothing. The wondrous expression on his face when his eyes met hers was almost as devastated as Victoria’s had been when she’d shyly pressed her hand to Piper’s rounded belly earlier today. Which brought Piper back to the topic at hand. “Did you find him?”

  Julian’s arms clenched before he dropped them and stepped back. “He’s at the Stone Fortress. Humphrey sent his serving boy with a note. So we didn’t worry when he doesn’t make it to breakfast. Because it looks like he won’t.”

  “Ah, there’s drink involved,” Piper murmured and crossed to the settee they’d situated in the nursery for storytime and feedings, settling herself as gracefully as she could, which was not at all. She landed with a soft thud on the velvet cushions.

  “That detail wasn’t included in the note, but I think it’s a sound wager.” Julian brought a woolen blanket and tucked her in, his touch gentle, his smile tenuous, his aura speckled with azure and gold. Love and concern. Like a mother hen, he worried incessantly about his chicks. He and Humphrey shared this preoccupation. “That was quite a kiss we interrupted,” he noted, taking the empty spot next to her and drawing her into the comfy nook against his chest she’d been trying to locate. Coming at it from the side instead of the front solved the problem. A clever man, her husband, she thought with a smile.

  It had been a startlingly sensual kiss, Finn pressing Victoria Hamilton to the wall, their bodies so close you couldn’t have slipped a feather between them. However… “She’s the loneliest person I’ve ever met.”

  Julian flinched. “Who?”

  “Lady Victoria, silly, who else? I thought I was forlorn until the thunderbolt struck, and you realized I was the light of your life”—she laughed as Julian gave her a teasing shoulder knock—“but the way she looked at me, oh, she’s in much worse shape. At least I had a family with you and Finn and Humphrey, even then.” Piper ironed the blanket with her fingers and faced his questioning gaze. “The baby kicked, and I let her feel it, which I’m sure goes against every tenet in society’s blessed book. But I did it anyway like I always do—and her face just crumbled. She has no one, Jules, no one. Nothing to do with reading her aura because I can’t. I wanted to cry, which comes easily as you know, but I held off for fear of embarrassing her. Then I wanted to cry again when I remembered the Grape is going to be her someone. She’s giving herself away because she doesn’t believe in love enough to fight her family for the chance to experience it.”

  Julian looked to the fanciful mural he’d painted on the nursery walls as if it was suddenly of great interest. “She can’t marry Rossby. When it comes to her needing protection, as it did for you, he can’t provide it. Someone, someday, will find us again. In my gut, I know this. We’ve had recent warnings from the continent in the letters Finn is translating. The blocker is too tempting a target. The Duke of Ashcroft would be a suitable choice for her. He’s in the League, and being a former soldier, has men at his beck and call. He needs an heir, a wife, even if he wants neither.” Julian counted off the positive points on his fingers. “Society placated, Ashcroft not setting fires, Lady Victoria protected, her ridiculous father spared from debtor’s prison. Check, check, check, check.”

  Piper harrumphed beneath her breath. “There’s no check for love. Did you not hear what I said? My word, does the woman get any say in her future?”

  “Typically, no, they don’t. This isn’t America, Yank. Consider the dilemma with your suppressed British half.”

  “If this is about money…”

  “It isn’t. Thanks to my father’s corrupt solicitor, Finn’s inheritance is secure, and without a hint of scandal attached to it aside from the malicious byblow business none of us can change. Better bastard of a viscount than rookery orphan, that much I’m sure of. He has enough to save her family, Piper. It’s the societal discrepancy. Which, even with the lies I’ve been telling since Finn was a boy, is considerable.”

  “I was a walking scandal, and you married me.”

  Julian rolled his head to look at her. “You were a hellion but granddaughter to an earl, daughter of a viscount. Finn has no such lineage. This issue will always matter to the ton and be exemplified in the most hypocritical ways. Most ladies in our circle wouldn’t dare attach themselves to him for more than a brief time. A liaison, a flirtation. Although we’re staunch champions of women’s rights in this house, what about Finn? Does he want Lady Victoria for more important reasons than not being able to read her mind? I told him all this, and call me a killjoy, but I’m not sure. Although he did offer to steal Rossby’s thoughts for her, which sounds like more than a simple case of desire to me.”

  Piper thought back to that kiss, the dazed expression on Finn’s face when he’d glanced over his shoulder and seen them standing in the doorway. The way his gaze lingered on Victoria after they’d hastily separated, murmuring inane explanations and brushing at their clothing as if a swarm of bees had lit upon them. “I think he wants her.”

  “Yes, and a thousand others. Or the reverse, I suppose, is the more accurate statement. Blasted hell, if I had a face like his, I’d never leave the house.”

  Linking her fingers with Julian’s, she brought their hands to her lips and placed a tender kiss on his knuckle. Her husband was more than a little handsome himself, and he knew it. “He let her cut his hair.”

  Julian sputtered a laugh. “He what?”

  Piper giggled and pressed her cheek to his chest, the steady rhythm of his heart the most reassuring manifestation in her universe. “Love can change him, give him a sense of security and hope. Lead him home in a way we can’t. As it did for me, for you. He’s smiling for the first time since the accident on the wharf. Writing in his journal. Growing into the man you hoped he would. And, wonder of all wonders, he can’t read this lively, fascinating, discarded woman’s mind.” At Julian’s doubtful look, she pinched his arm, then soothed the spot when he growled. “She was the first to reach him when he took that tumble off his horse. Opera glasses to watch the birds, my foot. He’s her bird, a dazzling azure one! I’m not fooled.”

  Julian tipped her gaze to his, his grin digging that dimple she so loved deep in his cheek. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You understand that, right?”

  “If I say trust me, will you?”

  He frowned, his arm tightening around her. “Trust you to do what? That’s never worked well before.”

  “Engineer a little magic?”

  “Will you still respect me if I admit I’m scared?”

  She slid her hand behind his neck and brought his lips to hers. “Love is always dangerous, darling. Don’t be frightened.”

  Chapter 11

  The plink of a stone striking her bedchamber window pulled Victoria from a restless slumber. Dazed from half-sleep, she wondered at the hollow ache in her chest. In a flash, the look of stark betrayal on Finn’s face returned, an image she’d had no success wiping from her mind, even with the tray upon tray of pastries she’d baked after he stormed from the house. To find that this sophisticated man, admired beyond measure although for wholly superficial reasons, had a heart she could injure surprised her as nothing else this remarkable summer had.

  Even with honorable intent, she didn’t like knowing she’d hurt him. Banter, parry, thrust, the teasing game of trading insults and innuendo was all well and good, but throwing a dart that wounded was unacceptable to a woman who urged her staff to release spiders into the wild. A killer of insects or feelings or hope, Victoria Hamilton was not. She was, in truth, not quite the misanthrope she portrayed herself to be.

  Not deep in her heart anyway. A place she invited no one.

  The second dink sounded, and she slid from the bed, grabbed a dressing gown, and slip
ped it over her night rail as she crossed the room. Her feet were bare, the floorboards chilled from the draft seeping through the panes, and she shivered as she raised the window high and leaned out, squinting to get a better view.

  Of course, she thought, the hollow ache in her chest receding.

  Finn stood just below her window, light glinting off the gray streak in his hair, sparking off an expression she couldn’t make out clearly without her spectacles. His shirt was untucked, though properly buttoned, his feet bare as they’d been when he left the house. He looked impossibly tall, handsome, young. While she…

  Grasping her dressing gown at the neck, she clenched the material tight, confirming her suitability. Covered, albeit not in the most appropriate manner, but covered. While he looked ethereal, a statuette gilded by moonbeams and mist, his gaze chronicling her in fascinated silence.

  They were fascinated, she realized with a dull thud of dread.

  Both of them.

  There wasn’t cause to admit it, oh, that way lay danger, but she felt comprehension radiating from him and guessed he felt it radiating from her. There was precision in the dictum that you didn’t choose who made your heart race, your pulse pound, your skin heat.

  Who made you wish for things that could never be.

  Breaking the spell, Finn shifted from one foot to the other, tunneled his hands in his trouser pockets and shrugged. As if he’d given himself instructions he wasn’t sure he could follow. After a moment, he exhaled and glanced at her, humility curling his lips if an assessment made with less than perfect vision stood correct. An unpretentious smile. Real. Nothing like the fraudulent efforts he showcased in London, intimate disclosures she was coming to covet in a hazardous-to-her-heart way.

  He shrugged again, and she almost made it easier on him by diving into the conversation, a typically feminine reaction to ease the tension. Although his discomfiture was utterly appealing, blast the man, she simply raised a brow and remained silent. This should be good, she thought with a smile she tried valiantly to contain, wishing she had her opera glasses handy.

  He caught her faint grin and laughed beneath his breath with her. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. Looking away, he scratched his chin with his shoulder without taking his hands from his pockets. “For my indignant display this evening. And for the kiss earlier today.” His jaw clenched; she could see that clearly in the moonlight. “For the kisses. I let us fall into a pattern I’m comfortable with instead of striving to establish a pattern I’m not. Which is why I’m standing down here instead of up there. I don’t like that you kept the dreams from me, but I accept the reasoning for why you did so. I’m annoyed but…” He kicked at a bramble by his feet with a muttered curse that drifted to her. “I’ll get over it.”

  She slid to her knees, balancing her elbows on the dew-moist ledge. She needed a hushed moment to gather her composure. Her father had never apologized to her mother, to her. Not once. When there were many times he should have. “I’m sorry for keeping the dreams from you,” she returned when her voice was steady. But I’m not sorry about the kisses.

  I will never be sorry about the kisses.

  His gaze snagged hers, and she squinted, trying to record his expression. She expected mockery, but he looked frightfully sincere standing there, staring up at her. “Yes, I know.” He tugged a hand from his pocket and shoved it through hair already spiked about his head. “That’s why I’ll get over it. Friends often muddle it up, don’t they? Like family.”

  “I suppose they do,” she whispered for her ears alone. Then, louder, a safe topic, “This couldn’t have waited until breakfast? I made enough blueberry pastries for everyone on the estate and the village. Penitence brings out the enthusiastic baker in me.”

  He smiled, another of the authentic ones she was coming to cherish. “I’m still feeling the effects of a whiskey and advice session with Humphrey, liquid courage as it were. Also, I’m leaving for London at daybreak, off to enlist the Duke of Ashcroft’s aid as he has endless contacts in Town.” He paused, cleared his throat, snaked that hand back in his pocket. “I didn’t want to leave without telling you. Apologizing, that is. Until I return, you’ll be fine here with Piper, busy fulfilling Julian’s grand plan to record your every interaction in the chronology.” Seeming to deliberate, he then said in a gentle voice, “There’s a perfectly calm but spirited mare waiting for you at the stable. Harmony. It’s time to return to doing the things you love, Tori darling. If I may be so presumptuous, I think your brother would want that for you.”

  Victoria swallowed past the sting of tears, the thought of this complicated man riding down the graveled drive and away from her more painful a thrust than she had any right to feel. A thrust proving how deeply she’d waded into a turbulent sea. On impulse, she leaned further out the window, an errant gust whipping her hair against her cheeks. The horizon was streaking crimson and gold as sunrise closed in upon them. “You’re going to try to find her. I understand this, but I haven’t told you all I dreamed.”

  Finn glanced at the sky, the first hint of impatience stiffening his shoulders. “Humphrey will be right on my heels. Tell him everything before he leaves. Once I clear your shielding boundary, I’ll read his mind and know everything he knows. Including how far behind me he is.” He yawned into his fist. “It isn’t even a fair chase.”

  She shrugged, puzzled. “Why not wait for him then?”

  “Because,” he said, the word shooting from his mouth with an edge that could slice leather. “Julian’s high-handed management vexes, as does Humphrey’s, so I’m childishly giving them the slip. Jule can’t leave Harbingdon with Piper soon to deliver. He won’t, that is. Almost any husband in the ton would gladly accept a reason to escape the confines of an expectant wife’s clutches, but you’ve seen them. He can’t stand to be away from her. So, he’ll send Humphrey trotting after me while I wait in sophomoric anticipation.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s a brotherly game we play. Let us have our fun.”

  Men, she concluded with a sigh.

  He stared for a long moment, opened his mouth as if he would say more, then shook his head, bowed with more elegance than a barefooted, half-dressed man should’ve been able to, and entered the house through the door located just beneath her window. She heard it shut with a dull thump.

  Conversation complete.

  Victoria slid down the wall and dropped her head to her knees, drawing a breath to slow her racing heart. She didn’t like what Finn Alexander was doing to her usually steady equilibrium. “Fig,” she whispered as the image of Lucien wiping jam across his cheek came to her. Gorgeous, infuriating Fig. Kind, infuriating Fig. A man who thought to have a horse provided for her pleasure, riding an interest he knew she desperately wanted to do again but was afraid to try. And tormented, by a gift he couldn’t completely control. By his past. In some respect, by his bleak future. Whip-smart and sincere and funny—

  “I’m sitting here listing the Blue Bastard’s attributes when I should be listing the Grape’s. If he has any.” Lady Grape had to be able to list the positives, didn’t she?

  The real problem at the moment? Victoria felt outfoxed, skillfully cornered, cleverly maneuvered. Finn expected her to set this bit of fraternal theatre in motion. Alert the house to his departure. Provide details about her dreams. Patiently await his return while he solved the mystery. As if he’d tapped her politely on the head and said, “Be a good girl, and I may come back for more of those tantalizing kisses.”

  She shoved to her feet with a reckless burst of umbrage, the scheme coming together in her mind.

  She was going to alert the house to Finn’s departure.

  Provide details about her dreams.

  Then convince Julian—enlisting Piper’s assistance if necessary—that Finn needed his mind free of other’s thoughts when and if they found his sister. Keen, Victoria’s ability to block and thereby protect him.

  She would present it just so.


  While hiding her desperate desire to be by his side during what could be the most significant event of his life. She only knew, a soul-deep feeling, that she must be there.

  And she wasn’t up to talking herself out of the decision.

  Which meant she and the long-suffering, sniffling Aggie were going to accompany Humphrey on the chase.

  Turning her back on the beautiful man and his beautiful plan, Victoria went to pack.

  “Another daft scheme, this one. And I couldn’t talk you out of it. The years are catching up with me, it’s certain. Absolutely certain.”

  Victoria turned from her penetrating review of the countryside outside their swiftly-moving carriage to her perturbed companion. Agnes looked as if she’d not only bitten into a lemon but swallowed it whole. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

  “Don’t try that with me, young lady. Not when I’ve been around for all your heedless life. I won’t be easily fooled.” Agnes yanked a handkerchief from her reticule and sniffed into it. “As if discussing your prank with a clairvoyant viscount wasn’t bad enough, now we’re loping off after his equally-magical brother, a blue-eyed devil who gawks at you like a sweetmeat when he thinks no one is looking. He’s not so skillful at secreting, that one, even with all the stories. And the way you look at him”—she jabbed the scrap of lace-edged linen like a sword—“not much better.”

  Victoria huffed, hoping it sounded like outrage when inside, a warm glow traveled from her chest to her knees. She would like to be Finn Alexander’s sweetmeat, which was a hopelessly pathetic aspiration. As for what she’d like to do to him, it didn’t bear repeating to a woman who’d slept on a cot in her nursery for the first two years of her life. “We’re colleagues of sorts. Friends. Research associates.”