by Tracy Sumner
The season was ending. It was time to retire to the country, to go home. The smell of cut grass and turned earth and pine sap flowed from his memory to his heart. He palmed his aching chest as he trailed Lady Hamilton around the corner of the townhouse, her gown flaring like a wisp of smoke behind her. Her scent, piquant, spicy, close to cinnamon but not, suffused the air, eroding the lingering note of cheroots, bergamot, and the moist promise of rain.
Mocking his endeavor, the storm chose that moment to announce itself with a soggy release that had everyone scattering, shrieking, through the terrace doors and back into the ballroom.
Not his lady, however.
Without hesitating, she slipped through a darkened servant’s entrance and into the private quarters of the house. Hell and damnation, he thought and followed, the smell of hearth fires, boiled cabbage, and mold sucking him into a narrow, uninviting service hallway. He hoped to avoid another rescue, especially as the damsel was unaware of his chivalry.
Traversing the deserted bowels of the house, that wisp of pale indigo silk was his guide. Halting before the room she’d disappeared into, Finn nudged the door wide. Gas sconces spilled light across the faded Axminster rug and revealed Lady Hamilton, thumbing through ledgers scattered across the imposing desk centering the room, her back to him, unaware.
He corrected his assessment, no passable thief, this one. Just an impulsive girl in the midst of calamity. Tossed into his world for no reason he could fathom.
But he would take the time to find out.
A book lay in his path, and he’d just enough brandy to take the edge off his balance. It went skidding into the wall with a thump. If he were back in the rookery, he’d be dead after tracking anyone this badly. He’d gotten rusty, lazy because larceny was only for sport now.
When she turned, his breath seized. Amber light fell in a tantalizing waterfall over a body drenched from the squall. Sodden silk clinging to each subtle curve, she exuded tempestuous beauty, an incomprehensible expression, and not one thought he could capture. Slim as a reed, and tall. More so than he’d judged from their chance encounter on St. James. Almost able, with a searching tilt of her head, a nudge to spectacles he’d never seen her wear before, to look him in the eye. Which, because he was feebly constructed, made him wonder what it would be like to take her while standing, with less concern over the always-present difference in height.
Pushing the suggestive thought from his mind, he moved a step closer, but let his arms fall out in supplication. Friend, not foe. At least he thought this was the case. His dreams hadn’t been completely clear on this point. “Searching for something?”
Adding additional appeal, curls the color of warmed honey had escaped her damp coiffure to gently frame her face. Light bounced off her lenses, drops of rain dusting the glass until he marveled she could see through them. He was impressed, he had to admit, by her calm acceptance of the intrusion. “I’m snooping since you barged in and asked,” she finally said. Her gloved hand flexed once where it lay on the desk, her only nervous tell.
“Dangerous business. Anyone could come along.” Finn brushed lint from his sleeve in what had become a habitual show of insouciance he wished he could jettison from his behaviors. “I wasn’t trying very hard to conceal.”
“Obviously,” she murmured with a look thrown to the book sitting topsy-turvy in the corner. Then she returned to her task as if he’d not come upon her sorting through Baron Samuelson’s correspondence. His gaze tumbled from her neck to her waist as she shifted, and he was no poet, but she reminded him of a sleek, meticulously crafted vase, delicate and tenderly rounded. Minute etchings waiting to be discovered if one inspected carefully. A crack, perhaps, to keep things interesting. Flaws you could run your fingers, your lips, and tongue over and settle in for the night.
At the continued silence, she lobbed a pointed glance his way. She had a mysterious look to her with the dark hair and eyes, until she appeared, except for the exquisite gown, like an urchin who’d stumbled in from a part of London she’d likely never even seen. He watched, mildly disappointed but not surprised, as she underestimated him with one painstakingly candid perusal, her decision rendered by the time she hit his polished Wellingtons.
Harmless rake who’d sought her out for the usual reasons.
A perfectly acceptable verdict about Finn Alexander, bed-hopping byblow of a deceased viscount. A role he’d perfected until even he was unable to separate fact from fiction. Which was noteworthy as his persona was a figment of his not-actually-blood-brother Julian’s rather creative imagination. Julian’s desire to protect Finn at all costs.
“Blue, since you’re here, you can assist,” she instructed and slapped a stack of correspondence in his hand. “We’re looking for anything from my father, the Earl of Hanschel, or Baron Rossby, my intended.”
He glanced at the letters, intrigued despite himself. Blue. So she knew who he was. Short for the Blue Bastard. Senseless, the nickname, but what could one do? He’d once been discomfited by his eyes, his looks because they seemed to halt people, not only women, in their tracks. Attractiveness that had made him somewhat infamous in the ton. Along the way, nonetheless, he’d found ways to use it. “I’m doing this, why?” he asked and slanted the envelopes into the light for better viewing.
She sighed through her nose, charm personified. “Would you want to marry Baron Rossby?”
“Quite right,” he agreed and dug through the stack. The baron was a toad with alleged tendencies one did not discuss in polite company. Not at all a good match for this gorgeous hellion.
Finn considered asking for more detail about this investigation as he replaced the letters and circled the desk, dropping to his haunches to loot the drawers. He had no compunction, absolutely none, about robbing the man hosting this tedious soiree blind. Much of his moral fiber had been beaten out with fists, sticks, and the blunt end of a pistol before Julian and Humphrey saved him when he was little more than a five-stone lad. They’d gotten there too late to polish every rough surface. Rugby, and the later years at Oxford, hadn’t quite killed the filching, wrathful ruffian inside him.
A foreign emotion, one he couldn’t for the life of him place, crowded him as he glanced up to find Victoria Hamilton tangling with the baron’s files, tongue peeking between her lips, her focus one of complete and utter resolve. He’d witnessed a disturbing episode with her father at the Marshton ball two months prior and assumed the knife pressed to her back was paternally placed.
Familial weapons were, after all, the trickiest to disengage.
“There’s nothing here but promissory notes. Letters of debt.” She tossed a scrap of foolscap to the desk with an oath he was surprised she knew. “Threats from creditors. Similar to my father’s correspondence because, yes, I searched those as well. Samuelson introduced my father to Rossby, put the idea in his head for the marriage, I suspect. I don’t know what they hold over each other, but I’d hoped to find something. A way to negotiate myself out of an unwelcome entanglement. Provide another solution, gain an element of control when I have none. If it’s a liability, who is it owed to? And how much? I’m desperate, as you can see. Or rather, my father had placed his desperation on my shoulders.” She sighed and blew a wisp of hair from her cheek. “Why I’m telling a virtual stranger this, I can’t say. Perhaps I’m going the way of my great Aunt Hermione, who began her journey to Bedlam by talking to herself.”
“Samuelson’s up to his neck at the gaming hell, hence my invitation this evening. Keep your enemies close, as the saying goes. As if a glass of champagne and a puff pastry will keep me from his doorstep if I need to be there.”
Interest, the first she’d ever directed his way, coated him like a ray of sunshine, the pleasure he felt proving he was an idiot. “So you do own it? The Blue Moon. The rumors—”
“A gift from my brother, Julian Alexander, Viscount Beauchamp. The rumors”—he dipped his head, hair sliding over his eyes and hiding anything he might want to conceal as hi
s betting face, unbelievably, was not impenetrable—“I likely earned by honest means.”
Curiosity raced across Lady Hamilton’s delicate features as she recorded the emotions he couldn’t control crossing his, her hands squeezing the life from the sheet of parchment she held. In the end, she let it go, curiosity and parchment, society miss conquering sticky-fingered termagant. Finn felt a smile crack the solid set of his cheeks, a rare occurrence these days. Disconcerted, he took a breath that was all her, exotic but agreeable, a fragrance to fall into, when every verbena-scented bosom in the ballroom pushed one away. “Maybe you’re wasting your time looking for a reason for the proposal. Maybe the baron simply wants you.”
“Oh, he does want me.” She hesitated, her cheeks losing color in sluggish degrees. “My brother’s gone. Almost ten months. I’m the only remaining asset not milked to the bone, and without a financially rewarding marriage, my father will be in debtors’ prison before year’s end. Or so he tells me. Heavens, what would some passionate fumbling in the dark add to that equation?” She exhaled on a gust, her chest rising and falling, and he couldn’t help but track the movement.
Fumbling in the dark, indeed.
“Rash and reckless female. Unappreciative, puerile. I can read your thoughts,” she said, slightly breathless as she uttered it at the close of the next exhalation.
But I can’t read yours, he marveled with astonishment and not a little apprehension.
She palmed the desk, leaning down until he noted a tiny freckle on her cheek, as tempting a topping as a cherry on a cupcake. The urge to rest his thumb there, draw her close and roll the dice, was palpable.
The fierce shot of yearning was unexpected. Unwanted, truthfully. Her eyes, he noted at this distance, because he couldn’t not, weren’t brown at all but a deep, deep green. The color of lake bottoms and forest floors, nothing spring-like or effervescent.
Like his, nothing easy to forget.
“I’ve been thinking,” she whispered after a charged pause.
From his position crouching on the floor, he gazed up at her, keeping his smile in place because it’s what Finn Alexander did, but he could only think, please don’t.
“You were standing by the drink cart at Braswell’s dinner party when the glasses went down like a pyrotechnist’s display. Affording me a handy escape from unwelcome mischief.” She deflected, brushing at her own bit of sleeve-lint. “Strange that. Although it was entertaining to watch the Countess fling herself at you to avoid the shards.”
Finn paused, hand buried in the baron’s erotic curiosity drawer, if the contents—a garter with a dangling rosette, a scrap of pink lace, one aromatic stocking, and a scandalous daguerreotype, Finn turned it upright, of an actress currently housed at the Adelphi—were any indication. Two things occurred to him in rushed succession.
One, Victoria Hamilton had noticed him—although the accompanying dart of gratification had him shoving to his feet in exasperation with himself over the need.
Two, he was out of practice. At talking. To women. Using his brain, that is. He had loads of experience with conversations governed entirely by his cock.
Finn scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck, emotion simmering beneath the surface. Desire was misplaced in this godforsaken townhouse in a soot-soaked city he had no wish to inhabit. And he didn’t believe in premonition. Though he’d never, not once, dreamed of anyone unconnected to the League. Anyone who wasn’t, at some point, in danger.
He hated mysteries, was not a problem-solver.
He liked facts. Handed to him via nefarious means. Like reading minds.
His weeks of surveillance had taught him one thing: Victoria Hamilton was a nuisance. Truthfully, this whole caper was bollocks. But as much as he longed to, he couldn’t remove himself. Not when he was dreaming about her. Bloody hell. He braced his hands on the desk, completely out of sorts, a headache beginning to pulse in his temples.
“Welcome to the party.”
He glanced up to find her crimping her plump, darker-than-rose lips to contain what could only be a smile. He straightened to his full height, usually a lucrative intimation tactic, questioning what she found so amusing. “What?”
She lifted a slim shoulder beneath ice-blue silk. “This is the first time I’ve seen you look like anything aside from frosting set to top a cake.”
He tossed the baron’s garter to the floor and slid his hands along the desk until they rested next to hers. In an inspired show of courage, she issued a measured blink behind spectacle glass but didn’t move so much as a pinkie. A gust blew through the open window, sending the scent of coal ash between them and a strand of hair from her limp chignon against his cheek. Their gazes locked as muted gaslight buffed the tips of her hair amber and gold, a kaleidoscope coloring the potent awareness claiming his mind, his body.
The shift was noticeable, to him at least, that rough tumble into a deep green sea.
Something, some damn thing about this woman simply made his heart stutter.
She was reaching, and he was acquiescing, his lashes lowering to hide his desire when he felt the touch. Modest pressure as she wrapped her fingers around his wrist, her thumb seeking his racing pulse. A tiny shock hit his senses, not altogether pleasant, and for one moment, he lost thought. Then everything came rushing back like an enraged tide whipping the shore.
A struggle as he dragged it back.
“What did you just do?” he asked hoarsely and grasped her arm as she tried to scoot away. With a muttered oath, he was around the desk in two strides, his thoughts still bouncing off one another in a scramble to right themselves.
She turned her head when he reached her, chin digging into her shoulder, presenting the delicate curl of an ear he would like nothing better than to torture with his tongue and teeth until he had her on her knees.
“I ask again, Lady Hamilton, what was that?”
She hesitated with another press of those astounding lips, thinking through her story. Oh, no. His sister-in-law, Piper, had provided far too much experience in dealing with duplicitous women for this one to get away with anything. “A parlor trick,” she finally said and traced the toe of her slipper along a silver thread in the carpet, avoiding his gaze. “Just this little”—she flicked her fingers in the air, a whimsical, inane gesture—“hidden talent.”
He cupped her cheek, tilting her face into the light, that delectable freckle winking at him. Now menacing instead of charming. Gorgeous goddamned trouble. “What usually happens when you unleash this trick?”
He thought she wasn’t going to answer, then she whispered, so low he had to crowd in to hear her, “People forget.”
Like gossamer, a scene from one of his dreams floated into his mind: her fingers slipping around his wrist followed by a smooth fade to black, a door clicking shut on a lampless room.
He stole thoughts, but she erased them.
“It’s nothing,” she stressed and wrenched from his hold with a stumbling step.
He let her go but held her gaze.
He’d wanted answers. Well, now, he had them.
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he said with a weary sigh. “It’s everything.”
Chapter 2
She knew she had a guardian angel.
Or imagined there was some benevolent spirit, a deceased relative, Grandmama Cecelia or Cousin Harold, who’d helped her escape quite a few calamities in a stomach-dropping pinch this season. Two occurrences came to mind without much effort behind the examination. Three, if she included the muddle with Lord Kellerson at the Epsom Derby.
She’d simply never guessed her angel was the man reputed to be the most beautiful in all of England.
“Cor, you foolish girl, the Blue Bastard’s door you think to knock on,” Agnes hissed with a shiver and a sniffle. Her maid’s nose ran when she was nervous, something Victoria recognized because Agnes had arrived in her father’s household while Victoria was still in nappies.
She’d heard that sniffle often.
Victoria ducked her head but, woeful truth, it was hard to hide from a person who’d wiped your bare bottom and witnessed every dreadful decision since.
* * *
“Trust me,” she whispered. “Just this once.”
Agnes snorted. “How many times have I heard that in my life?”
Victoria tugged her collar past her chin until only her eyes were visible. A drunken shout and the shatter of glass on the main thoroughfare had Agnes bumping against her until they were huddled in the gaming hell’s side entrance like cornered animals. She felt cornered by Finn Alexander and his blasted presumption. The ridiculous invitation had arrived this morning and was burning a hole through her cloak.
Or maybe the heat was just anger.
She raised her hand, took a breath. Glanced at her feet, her slippers now splattered with grime. Moonlight registered as a slimy wash on the cobblestones beneath them, but just barely, and the smell—
She grimaced behind her gloved hand. No need to inventory the aroma.
A part of London her brougham typically increased speed upon entering for sound reason.
“Go on, girl, or we’ll be getting right back in that hack. Paid him threepence to wait on Jermyn, we did.” Agnes huffed a clove-scented breath that charged past Victoria’s cheek as London’s brume swirled and settled around them. “As if a lady of your station should be traveling in a hired rig in the dead of night to what is just one step up from a slum. Agree with this I did. Daft! My good sense be beat to death by all your shenanigans—”
“Hush, Aggie,” Victoria whispered, resisting the urge to send her beloved maid’s thoughts on temporary holiday. A swift pinch to her wrist would do the job. Agnes would return unsure of what she’d said. Better yet, of what Victoria had done. Except, after the last debacle, Victoria had promised not to incapacitate her ever again.