by Tracy Sumner
She hopped off the wall and went to stand over Hester. He was breathing, air whistling from his bruised lips. So not dead. “Are you daft?” she whispered and turned to find Finn flexing his fingers with a pained expression. The aroma of Hester’s drink of choice enveloped them, driving out Finn’s enticing scent. Another blasted interruption.
“You don’t want to know what he thought when he saw us.” He blew on his knuckles and bared his even, white teeth. “He’s lucky I didn’t kill him. I should carve him up with the knife in my boot. The rotter has no idea who he’s dealing with.”
“How lethal,” she murmured, wondering why seeing Finn’s uncivilized side sent heat swimming through her body. And then she realized…
“Finn, you were able to read his mind.”
He halted and palmed his brow, his lids fluttering. “Lady Teasdale is looking for Hester. She’s crossing the lawn, daring the rain to ruin her rendezvous with him. Apologies, Tori darling, but I think the fountain is a well-used location.” Giving the earl’s shoulder a nudge with his boot, he flexed his hand again and said, “Can you take care of this? Erase the last five minutes or so? I think it would be best.”
As cool raindrops began to pelt her, she squatted beside Hester, circled his wrist with her fingers, and let the sound of his pulse enter her consciousness. She held on until she heard a click, until she’d stolen enough from his memory to secure their safety. “It’s done. Perhaps even so much as the entire night, poor Lady Teasdale. I can’t control how much. Or how little. We’ll hope it worked.”
Hester rolled to his side with a loud snore. Laughing, Finn grabbed her hand and yanked her along behind him as the sky opened up in a violent deluge. The storm had sent the revelers fleeing into the house, so Finn and Victoria skidded and tripped their way across a thankfully deserted lawn. Around the house, through a side garden, down an alleyway, through a rusted gate. He obviously knew the estate well, likely had kissed someone, a hundred someones, behind Ashcroft’s fountain.
The most amazing experience of her life when it undoubtedly meant little to him.
Foolish to be possessive of a man nearly every woman in London owned a piece of.
A landau was conveniently waiting at the curb, and Finn shoved her into it with a terse directive to return to Julian’s townhome shouted to the coachman who sat shivering on the bench. She went to her hands and knees on the velvet squab, expecting Finn to follow. She glanced over her shoulder, got a good look at his face, and realized he had no intention of doing so. His hair was slicked to his head, his skin glistening in the streetlamp’s glow. Water streamed into a gaze fixed stonily on her in an impassive assessment.
“The kiss broke my gift,” she rushed to say over the rain popping sharply against the carriage’s soft top, fearing he was set to send her off without another word.
He dipped his head, but not soon enough to hide his smile. “Yes, love, it appears it did. Although only for a few moments. I’m not that good. At kissing, I mean.” He tapped his temple. “Silence governs once again.”
Love? Her heartbeat scattered. “If I come to the Blue Moon, will you let me in?” she asked, the last thing she’d expected to leave her lips. She’d never gone further than kisses behind potted palms with anyone else, but with Finn, she wanted to go to the ends of the Earth.
He leaned in, cupped her cheeks, and kissed her. Deeply, tenderly, thoroughly. Finally. “No, I won’t let you in,” he murmured, releasing her and shutting the door. “I’m ruinous to you, and you’re quite simply dynamite in my pocket, deadly to me.”
She wanted to fall into him, become part of him, lose herself completely. Risk everything. In that moment, nothing else mattered. “Wait!” she called as Finn tapped the side of the carriage, and it rocked into motion. “Your sister?”
Finn swallowed, his cheeks taking on the pale gray of the foggy night. “You were right. She’s in London.”
She slammed her fist against the trap, and the vehicle halted. “Tell me,” she implored. “You can talk to me, you know you can.”
A look of naked agony crossed his face. Indecision and relief and torment. “Ashcroft received your information, and his men found her. I’m going tomorrow morning. All this time and I never knew.” He slapped the side of the carriage harder than he needed to and let the coachman know with an ill-mannered directive not to terminate the journey again. No matter what the lady said. “I suppose it’s not too late even if it feels like it. When all is said and done, you truly can’t outrun the past.”
She leaned out the window as the carriage rolled away, bringing more scandal atop her should anyone see the indecorous display. “You’ll take me. So you may meet her without her thoughts tainting it. Promise me, Blue!”
He turned without comment, his tall form disappearing into the mist rising off the cobblestones. That melancholy look had flowed right back into his eyes; her touch hadn’t kept it away for long.
Again, his words rang in her ears. No, I won’t let you in.
Collapsing to the squab with a punitive exhalation, she caught sight of her reflection in the rain-streaked windowpane. Touching her swollen lips, it was all she could do to keep from curling into a ball and crying her eyes out.
She looked wholly compromised.
Wild-eyed. Well-loved. Wrecked.
And there was no need to contemplate how she felt.
Humphrey and Agnes were not going to believe a single word she said when she lied to them about the evening’s events.
Victoria barely slept, wrenching awake with every shift and settle of Julian’s townhome until she gave up and did puzzles until dawn, then went down to the kitchens to shock the staff and ask to be allowed to bake. They were stunned but cordial—and ungifted, according to Humphrey—likely only thinking how odd the titled class was, working when one didn’t have to. Baking, of all things.
She learned nothing new while preparing cinnamon waffles and blueberry scones to accompany the standard fare of kippers, beans, and eggs. Humphrey was respected but solitary, Finn adored but forlorn. Imagine living above a gaming hell when he could reside in Mayfair, where rubbish didn’t litter the streets, and the stink of the Thames was beaten down by the scent of lemon and vinegar. The consensus was, with notably engrossed looks thrown her way, that both men needed wives to straighten out their regrettable existences.
Victoria pressed dough and sprinkled spice and slid tray after tray into the oven—only burning herself once—as the previous night rotated through her mind like the wheel of an overturned carriage. Finn’s fingers cupping her breast, teeth nipping her bottom lip, hips grinding, pressing his long, hard length against her. Eagerly pleasurable perfection, all of it. Raw and spontaneous, gasping breaths, trembling limbs, moist skin. Amazingly, she’d come close to securing that intense feeling she’d found in her darkened bedchamber, her hand tucked between her legs in exploration.
My, what would it—he—feel like if they had greater access? Free of clothing, lying on a bed or a sofa or the floor, where she didn’t have to stretch to reach his mouth? Or any other part of his body. She pressed her fingertip to a cooling scone and shivered. The landau she’d traveled home in last night was extremely spacious. The brocade settee in her bedchamber big enough for two if the two were pressed close together. One atop the other would undoubtedly work. Before the hearth, on the sweeping marble staircase, in the linen closet she’d passed this morning.
Her imagination overflowed with possibilities.
However, men didn’t crawl into linen closets with women they compared to dynamite.
A statement she had no idea whether to consider a compliment or an insult.
As she was pulling the last of her scones from the oven, Humphrey stomped into the room, took one look at her and snapped, “I’ll be damned.”
Placing the tray on the metal shelf at her side, she swiped her hand across her brow. “Excuse me?”
Humphrey yanked his hat from his head and beat it against his thigh. “I wa
s worried when I couldn’t locate you after last night’s fiasco, Ashcroft’s piss-poor job of management, you coming back without that crying maid of yours, looking like you’d been tossed over someone’s shoulder. Look in the kitchens, Finn tells me when he arrives, flecking a spec from his sleeve, cool that one. I ask myself, how does he get that if he isn’t pocketing your thoughts, which we all understand he’s not. But here you are—like he knows you better than you know yourself. Like my suspicions about the two of you are on the money, a safe bet I’m feeling close to crying over because it gives me that itchy, fated feeling I haven’t had since Julian and Piper got tangled up. But a gentleman is supposed to forego stating the obvious, isn’t that the way it works? So I’ll be a gentleman and not say what I honestly think is going on here.”
Her temper sparked. “As I told you and Agnes—”
“I know what you told me.” He exhaled and jammed his hat on his head. “What you told that unfortunate woman whose job it is to corral you.”
“But—”
“Listen, princess, are you going with us or not?” He grabbed a scone and bit into it, squinted at her as if doubting she could make something so delicious, then took another bite. “Having Finn’s mind on the task at hand and not on the usual confusion cluttering his brain is a crafty idea. Even if you used it as leverage to get to London, you were right to suggest it.”
She stilled, her heartbeat tripping into a mad rhythm. “He’s letting me go,” she breathed.
Humphrey regarded her with a penetrating gaze as he polished off the scone and reached for another. “Only if you want. No one’s forcing.”
Oh, she wanted.
So many delicious things she’d never get.
Chapter 13
The dwelling Ashcroft’s investigator directed them to was a hovel.
Located in an area by the docks Finn guessed Victoria had never set foot in. Likely her servants hadn’t even stooped to crawling this far down society’s ladder, even for blood oranges or Moroccan coffee straight off the boat. He almost laughed when absolutely nothing about this was amusing. They weren’t far from where he’d taken a knife in the chest trying to save Freddie. Maybe this woman Victoria claimed was his sister had even scurried by him that day, rushing past another person bleeding out on the wharf.
A putrid gust lashed his back, giving him an unsolicited nudge toward the door he stood before. One knock against pitted wood to change his life. Conversely, he could turn to the woman standing close behind him and change it in another way entirely.
Both choices terrified him.
Drawing an agitated breath, he identified the scent of hyacinth and cinnamon riding above the rank aroma of charred meat and coal smoke. Tori. His sweet-smelling companion hadn’t uttered one word this morning—the carriage ride had been tense and joyless, propelled by his somber countenance—but he felt what could only be called protective support radiating from her. From Humphrey, which was his norm. Maybe even from sniffling, woebegone Agnes. She likely worried about everyone and then some, the hapless woman.
With a resigned sigh, Victoria reached around him and knocked, her gloves worth more than a year’s lease on this dilapidated space. Finn heard the tumblers shift without the occupant asking who stood on the other side of the door, and the questions raced through his mind.
Who am I? What if I can’t live with what I find out?
And finally…how do I know this is real?
But he knew it was real.
Because he recognized his sister, in a way that went beyond sight and arrived from the heart, the soul, the moment he saw her.
Eyes a replica of his widened before the woman gasped and slid into an elegant swoon that in no way fit the dreadful surroundings. Humphrey was there before Finn could react, able rescuer of vulnerable women and orphaned children, lifting her into his arms as if she weighed nothing. Which from the look of her frail form, she didn’t.
“Inside,” Agnes hissed and gave Finn and Victoria a shove across the threshold and into the dank rabbit hole of a flat.
Except for him, they were a well-organized group. Humphrey settling his slight bundle on a threadbare settee; Victoria prodding Finn into a chair he neither remembered seeing or sitting in; Agnes procuring a moistened rag she placed on his sister’s brow. Task complete, Humphrey took one look at him and set to roaming the space, no doubt searching for liquor as Finn had an idea he wasn’t far off from fainting himself. Black dots were spotting his vision, and he inhaled sharply, trying to drive them away. Dreams of the past, imagined or real, swirled like mist through his consciousness.
Humphrey pushed a chipped glass in his hand, the first-rate port sliding down Finn’s throat and making him choke but bringing heat to his cheeks.
A murmur came from the settee, and the entire room stilled until the only sounds were loud bellows from the street and gusts whistling through the multitude of cracked windowpanes. The woman turned her head toward Finn, her eyes, his eyes, locking on him. She gestured limply to his drink. “Your grandfather was born in Portugal. It was his favorite, I was told.” She closed her eyes and swallowed deeply. “I kept it, always, for when you finally found me. With your talent, I knew someday you would.”
“Can you afford this?” Finn gazed into the glass, asking the most inane question possible and considering if he should finish the dram if she couldn’t.
She laughed, a wonderfully authentic reverberation when most laughter in his world was forced. “No, Finley Michel, I can’t.”
Finley Michel. The name brought forth that memory, faded and indistinct. Racing through grass high enough to whip his knee, giggling, tripping, and someone coming back for him. Tossing back the remainder of the port, he slapped the glass to the table and wrenched forward in his chair. “Had I known, I would have torn England apart searching for you.”
His sister elbowed to a sit, her hair, as light as Finn’s was dark, flowing over her shoulders and down her back. Her clothing was quality but years out of date, patched and faded. She was petite like Piper but thin, too thin. He was afraid to catalog her features to determine what else they shared outside their eyes, each revelation adding weight to his chest until he felt the room closing in on him, his breath hard to catch.
“Isabelle,” she murmured and rose, going to her knees before him. With trembling hands, she drew the locket he’d seen in his dream from beneath the bodice of her gown. Flicking the pendant open, she showed him the painted portrait of two children.
“Belle,” he whispered.
“Yes.” She reached for his hand, and he let her take it. Offering solace when he felt hollowed out inside. Her palms were chapped and raw, the hands of an older woman. “Our mother was the daughter of a marquis, an impoverished title, meaningless after the French Terror, wealth and lands gone, most of the family killed in the siege. Our father, Tennison Laurent, was a tradesman who died in Lyon just after you were born, and Maman had nowhere else to go but the home of a distant cousin in Surrey. She met a man there, married.”
“And…” Finn’s fingers clenched around hers.
Belle shook her head, shrugged. “Maman was stunning, we were destitute, he was wealthy. Simple enough as those arrangements go. But I didn’t stop you from telling him what was inside his mind. Even at three years old, you said too much. You dreamed of him, too, so he began not only to loathe but fear you. There’s time for me to tell you everything, but know this…” Her eyes glistened, and the tears overflowed, racing down her cheeks and dropping to their linked hands, searing his skin and his heart. “You weren’t to blame. I was. I could have hidden us, but he took you away the day after she died, the only person I had left, and I’ve been looking for you ever since.”
“How?” he breathed.
“I have no gift, nothing like yours, but I know when others do. I realized the moment you were born that you were different. I can walk a street and tell you who sees things they shouldn’t. A serving girl in the Ax and Shield, the bloke who operates the
coster cart in Leadenhall. My skin tingles, my brain hums.” She glanced about, pointing to Victoria, Humphrey, Agnes. “The upmarket lady, yes, the handsome brute, no. The frightened mouse of a maid, no. ”
“The mystery deepens,” Humphrey said wryly from his position guarding the darkest corner of the room. “Holy hell, but will Julian love this. Any chance you can locate a gifted majordomo with that humming mind of yours, Belle sweet, as we need one on the estate?”
Belle turned to gaze at Humphrey for a long moment, her eyes narrowing in fascinated study, then she shook herself and circled her attention back to her brother. “I was told our beast of a stepfather dropped you in a London slum. I ran away from him when I was fifteen and went to a smaller village in the next shire where I could afford lodging. Then I took every job an insufficiently educated woman who nonetheless speaks three languages and is willing to lie through her teeth can—seamstress, tutor, shop girl, maid—while I saved money. I arrived in London ten months ago and began to roam the streets, lying in wait for a man with my eyes. I knew you’d find me eventually, with the dreams, but I hoped to hurry fate.” She smiled without humor and motioned to his expertly-tailored clothing. “I fear I was walking the wrong streets. I don’t often go so far as the West End and the society pages. You’re the bounder with the blue eyes they write about.” Her lips tipped low, a short sigh slipping from her. “Oh, Finley Michel, what have you been doing?”
As if awakening from a stupor, Finn glanced about the room, recording every tattered piece of furniture, every battered surface. The sound of glass breaking and a hoarse shout in the alleyway running alongside the building only added to his unease. “You’re not staying here, Belle. Not another night.” With a creak in the floorboard, Victoria stepped closer, reacting to the edge of panic in his voice. That she was so attuned sent an ill-tempered rush through him. “Don’t argue with me, any of you,” he said in a voice he rarely found the opportunity to use, except when pitching a drunken sod out the back door of the Blue Moon. It was Julian’s voice he emulated, a rigid tone offering no room for negotiation. He had learned from a master.