by Tracy Sumner
Stepped back—but not before he’d broken her heart. What she’d always wanted to share with him, those intimate things she’d seen other couples doing in dank alleys and hidden nooks of public houses. Saved herself to share with him. An experience Simon had thrown away on one of a thousand. Just another toff getting his dangly-bits off.
She’d vowed then and there never to come back.
Delaney’s teacup hit the table with a thunk. “You saw Simon and…” She flapped her hand in the air instead of completing the statement, her breath rushing out in a diminutive, duchess-like whoosh.
Emma gave his gloves a fierce twist. “I don’t know how I ended up in a bedchamber. I believe it was hers. So much pink. Gaudy, like this brothel I stumbled into once when I happened to be delivering coal. Not time travel that one, I just walked in.”
“A countess, you say?”
Emma sank her fingertips into the soft leather and tried to push the picture from her mind. “There was a tiara.”
Delaney scooted forward in her chair. “A tiara?”
Emma threw his gloves on the table. “And not much else.”
Delaney slumped back, her laugh rolling out too fast for her to suppress it. This was the American, on full display. “I can’t imagine,” she whispered and popped her hand over her mouth.
“You can’t imagine Simon…?”
“He’s an Alexander. And a gorgeous one at that. Of course, I can imagine. The stories they print can’t all be fake.” She licked her lips, her voice dropping to a whisper, “What I mean is, I can’t imagine you, a young girl, seeing that.”
Emma sighed and went to her knee, deciding not to tell Delaney that fornicating couples were a common sight in the slums. Lord, save her from naïve duchesses. “They have a code at the Blue Moon. Three knocks, followed by two, followed by a final. This one the decider. It means a woman needs to make a shifty escape. They have so many bloody kittens traipsing in and out of there, they had to invent a cipher!”
“And you know this how?”
Emma rocked back and forth in slippers that pinched. “I just do, that’s all.”
“You just what?” Simon asked from where he’d sneaked up behind her, his long body stooped to hear better a conversation she didn’t want him to hear. Aside from seeing ghosts at every turn and having the fastest hands in England, the man moved like a thief in the night.
She’d never seen him coming—a girl who always watched her back.
Emma swiveled on her toes, graceful herself when the situation called for it. But entirely at a disadvantage, what with him lording it over her, his body rising to his full height now that she’d turned to look up at him. His eyes flashed, those slender rings of purple visible in the gaslight. And the freckles, a piece she’d bet the countess she’d seen him tangled up with in that flaming pink bedchamber hadn’t cared a whit about. “None of your business,” she growled and shoved to her feet. “How ‘bout that?”
“You sure about making this one into a lady?” Simon murmured and gave his coin another crazy spin. “Although it was my idea.”
“You cad.” Emma jammed her hands on her hips, ready to shout from the rooftops about that blemish on his person. She’d seen it up close before transporting herself back to her time. A crying, unhappy mess, landing in 1802, alone and miserable. With visions of Simon’s pert, perfect, birthmarked arse forever in her mind.
Delaney sighed and lumbered to her feet. “Thank you for asking, Simon, darling. Miss Breslin would be delighted to have this dance. As the duke has continued to play, in hopes someone waltzes before dawn breaks.” When they looked to her with arguments lined up on their tongues, she clapped her hands lightly. “Are you really going to argue with an expectant mother? Causing her any minor amount of undue stress? Shall I tell Sebastian that’s what’s occurring in his ballroom at this very minute?”
Emma dug the toe of her slipper in a crack in the marble floor, chastised. “No, ma’am.”
“‘Your Grace’ is the proper address,” Simon muttered, tucking the farthing in his waistcoat pocket with a resigned roll of his shoulders. “Are we pretending she has a dance card I initialed, Delaney, duchess dear? Bursting with signatures of the ineffectual, men sure to get their toes smashed for their earnest efforts.”
Delaney cuffed him on the arm. “Simon!”
“I quit!” Emma turned, five paces away before he caught her.
His fingers circled her wrist, tugging her to a halt. She glanced over her shoulder, the wrong moment, the exact wrong, bleeding moment to do it. Color had risen in his cheeks, slight but noticeable when she found she couldn’t help but notice everything about him. His dark-as-oak eyes wide, his lashes, dear heaven, so long they brushed his skin when he blinked. A muscle in his jaw ticked, his annoying dimple pinging to life. He was handsome, plain and simple. Just a mark beyond, even. On the outer edge of pretty.
Why, oh why, had he grown up to be even more fetching than he’d been as a boy?
“I’m sorry,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. But just barely. “Come, I’ll help you with the waltz.”
Emma wiggled her wrist from his grip, her pulse, which he’d pressed his thumb over, thumping in time with her breaths. His touch was not something she could easily endure when she’d gone years without anyone’s. “Come again?”
He stepped back a feather space, his expression hardening like the marble beneath their feet. “I said I’m sorry. This was my idea, inventing a new history for you, because it’s how Julian solved my problem when I was a boy. I thought to do what worked before. Bring someone into the League and construct a life for them. He lied to everyone. To this day, telling tales about us being half-brothers when we’re not, forcing society to accept the falsehood. So much so that I now believe it myself. Never contemplating that they wouldn’t acknowledge me because he made it so. He’s very tenacious. It’s endearing and infuriating.” Exhaling, he dragged his fingers through his hair, leaving the strands in ferocious tufts she had to squeeze hers into fists to keep from straightening. “I’m being a miscreant. And for that, I apologize.”
Her heart tumbled, an absolute roll, like a length of carpet spilling out carelessly along polished oak. “Miscreant? Is that the same as a scoundrel?”
He laughed softly, his lips twitching as he tried to suppress a smile. “More villainous than a scoundrel. Perhaps cad is closer. When I was a ruffian at the start, this is what I honestly tell you. Julian and Finn took a rowdy, uncouth boy and made”—he swept his hand down his form with a self-deprecating shrug thrown in—“this of him. It’s not who I would’ve been, but it’s who I am. And I’m finally, much to everyone’s surprise, coming to accept him.”
“And you’re askin’ the same of me, this transformation. Emmaline Breslin, forgotten cousin of a duke made from a meager chit from Tower Hamlets.”
His mahogany gaze circled the ballroom before returning to her, his face serious, solemn. His sincerity struck a chime deep within her because very few people in her life, even while telling her things she didn’t want to hear, had been sincere. “Yes, I’m asking the same of you.”
Say it, Emma. No reason to hold back when he knows. “Are you ever going to forgive me for leaving? Would it be easier, us working together, if you did? If I tell you I tried to come back, take it at that. Then we never speak of it. My word is good.” She couldn’t open her heart again, not after he’d destroyed it with that daft countess and the hundreds of others. Not waiting for her, which was a pointless bundle of feminine nonsense anyway.
But maybe they could be friends.
Emma would remember Simon’s frank response for the rest of her days, endearing him to her in a soulful way she’d never be able to eradicate. A splinter buried so profoundly it eventually became a part of you. “I don’t know, Emmaline Breslin. But I’m going to try.”
She bowed her head as a shiver of awareness glided along her skin. His scent drifted to her, soap and some spice she rarely smelled in the rookery.
The mint he used on his teeth. The urge to close her eyes and travel to another time was almost stronger than the urge to step into his arms and beg him to hold her. Never leave her, take her. But she’d left the swish stone under her pillow, and God knows where she’d end up without it. Maybe in the middle of a Scottish winter again, which had been horrid. This new life, the League’s offer, right now, for the moment, she reckoned she was going to accept.
Holding out her hand in the upmarket way the duchess had shown her, Emma tipped her chin, also just so. “Thank you. I would love to dance, Mister Alexander.”
Simon glanced at her hand, bare because she’d brought only his gloves to the parlor in hopes of returning them. Instead, she gave her fingers a wiggle, no way to change what was, the thought of dancing with him, her body tucked against him, making her jumpy. They looked to his gloves resting in a tumble on the side table, then back to each other.
Now or never.
Pausing, he tapped his boot, catching the tempo of the duke’s melody. “I suggest gloves for the real thing. The waltz is intimate enough without added temptation,” he whispered, then swept her into his arms.
And the world disintegrated until it was only theirs and theirs alone.
Chapter 6
She could dance.
Emmaline Breslin, Regency time traveler from the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, could dance. True, she’d stepped on his toes. Twice. And Simon had to keep negotiating control, a gentle squeeze of her hand to remind her, follow, don’t lead. Too, she didn’t get the four-step rhythm at first, turning as they whirled into their first rotation one way when he wanted her to go another…
But. She. Could. Move.
Dancing with her, even with the minor blunders, was effortless. She was fluid, willing to change course, direction, on a penny. She trusted him. In the ballroom, if nowhere else. There was a…flexibility to her form—he couldn’t think of another word that worked as well—that he hadn’t encountered. By the time he swept her into the fourth turn, she had the steps down, her gaze cast over his shoulder, not at her feet, her attention entirely focused.
And he was mesmerized.
The scent of rosemary and lemon drifting from her skin, mingling seductively with the floral bite from the vases lining the outer edge of the ballroom, was beginning to adversely affect his rhythm. As well, there were other distractions. That tantalizing birthmark, really more a freckle, on her cheek. Her bottom lip glazed from where she chewed on it as she concentrated on her steps. Her breasts bumping his chest with each turn he guided her through. Their thighs linked as they maneuvered the measures in a way usually reserved for horizontal bed play. Which, once he pictured Emma beneath him, even for one, hot second, he couldn’t not consider.
The image sending his cock into the perilous situation of becoming known.
He wondered how she would do, letting some smitten toff handle her beneath these very chandeliers in two weeks during a fete meant to deceive society into thinking she was one of them. He’d have liked to waltz with her then, before all of London, a possessive assertion, which would never occur. Dancing with a viscount’s byblow, even should the byblow be invited, which he would be, would not further her cause.
Two, he wasn’t about to claim this woman ever again.
It wasn’t his fault, entirely, if he imagined crawling atop her and sliding inside, nestling his body to hers without a lick of clothing between them. Without secrets and mystical gifts and betrayal between them. He couldn’t help himself. Not with her unique fragrance overpowering his senses, her devastating eyes daring him in ways he dreaded and sought.
It was more memory than fantasy.
In bed. Laughing, teaching, learning. Moist skin and tangled limbs…everything he wanted to share and nothing he would. Allowing Simon MacDermot to enter the erotic dance, more destructive than a mere waltz. Cold lust, everything he’d previously experienced.
Simon Alexander was all anyone was getting.
A man for sale.
The duke’s melody intensified as Simon swirled Emma through a chandelier’s golden puddle, a storm having descended beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting the ballroom in silhouette.
A storm had also descended in him, a bleakness he well recognized.
Emma stared as if she knew. As if she understood. Her indigo eyes pulling him in. Making him want. Yearn. Hunger. For the girl who’d stepped into his life and made him believe she was his.
When all he’d learned was, the things you hungered for were the things you lost.
“Is your friend with us?” she asked, breathless from the waltz. Breathless from something. “Henry?”
Lurching to a graceless halt, Simon released her and stumbled back. Snaked his hand in his pocket to grab a coin before he realized what he was doing and snaked it back out. “You’ve danced before,” he murmured, heat sweeping his body when he got a look at the shy smile on her face. When had this untamed chit ever looked hesitant to discuss any-damned-thing?
Emma pleated her skirt between her fingers, shifting her slippered feet in time to her matchless rhythm. “Here and there. On the warped planks of shabby knotholes, no waltzes, of course. Nothing so grand as this.”
Simon didn’t want to ask who she’d danced with.
The thought making him walk the natural path and wonder what else she’d done. Which wasn’t his bloody business and brought images that had the power to send his temper, lightly restrained on a sunny day, zipping off like one of those pyrotechnics the duke was so fond of. “Good thing, the prior experience. You have it. The waltz. Or close enough not to do grave damage. Practice the turns, let him lead. No more than one dance with each partner. Two in a single evening signals notice you won’t wish to receive.”
The duke’s ballad stuttered to a wobbly close as he realized he’d lost his dancers.
Emma’s head tilted as she searched his face, trying to read him. The woman concealed little of what crossed hers—and he felt a crack, a slight chasm, as emotion flowed from his heart, threatening to expose him.
No way in hell, he ruled, bowing slightly, not waiting for her curtsy, if she even knew how to deliver one.
He was out the back entrance and through the rose garden before Delaney could waddle across the ballroom and stop him. Before Emma could open her mouth and whisper a desire he wouldn’t be able to ignore, or God forbid, touch him, tempt him beyond reason, something only larceny had done before.
He always got an itch between his shoulder blades when he thought of stealing.
And now, after spending years trying to kill the inclination, he also got the itch when he thought of her.
Bruton Street was clogged when he hit it, carriages and carts tangling for purchase, the scarce inhabitants of the boulevard sprinting along with gazes downcast to avoid the storm, bumping into him as he himself sprinted. He stepped off the curb and into a shallow puddle, certain, thanks to the modern sewer network, it no longer contained a streaming river of waste, only conventional urban grime. Henry was just behind him, avoiding the slick, as ghosts were able to do.
Simon strode in the opposite direction of the Blue Moon, following the streets as they meandered into murkier environs. Traveled through the muddled damp until he was soaked clean through to his drawers. Until his path wasn’t lined with picturesque arcades, apparel shops and confectionaries, but with dilapidated structures jammed together so tightly, they looked like they were holding each other up. Gin palaces and squalid flats and ramshackle shops, one depressing dwelling after the next. Tattered clothing on hooks fluttering in the breeze, the windows he passed patched with wads of newspaper and strips of fabric.
The sounds of the lesser tier surrounded him as he crawled inside, recognition and preservation awakening his senses. Simon Alexander stepped back to allow Simon MacDermot to enter the space, the man better outfitted for the decadence that was St Giles, Shoreditch, Old Nichol. Children’s shouts, hawker’s bellows, the curses of blokes with nothing to lose, soa
red in volume as he closed in on a part of the city he could taste, breath, feel. Choked lanes and trapped paths and blind alleys, the gritty blend of charred meat, coal smoke and the river tainting the air. Laundry soap and ale and dung. Impoverishment and a clandestine energy he thrived on when he wished he didn’t.
A slice of London he felt more comfortable in than the slice, the life, his brothers had offered him like a piece of angel cake on priceless bone china.
Which would distress them to know.
As he passed a set of filthy windows on Old Nichols Street next to the residence he sought, he caught sight of his image in the rain-slashed glass. Cracks and more repair with tattered newsprint. His hair was the color of the Cork Distilleries whiskey he stocked at the Blue Moon, darker than it’d been when he hustled these streets, his body broader, his jaw rigid. But his eyes were less wary, less aggrieved. And for some bizarre reason, he felt remorse over leaving that terrified boy behind. Leaving this life of misery and poverty behind.
He despised himself for fitting in so well in fucking Mayfair.
