by Tracy Sumner
“Minnie, please, no lady, no Elizabeth. Just Piper. And I, well—” She slid off the bed, gaining her feet. If frankness were part and parcel of living at Harbingdon, she would fit in quite nicely as being blunt had never been a problem. “My mother died in Philadelphia when I was three, leaving me with a father with a disturbing penchant for gambling, not parenthood. I grew up above or near whatever gaming hell he was frequenting that month, minded by a hired attendant who often cared even less for children than he did.” Walking to the wardrobe, she stroked the sleeves of the dresses hanging there, the scent of starch and lemon drifting to her. Her heart clenched to imagine Julian ordering clothing for her.
“Oh, miss,” Minnie lamented. “My mother, strumpet she is, has a heart of gold. Pure gold. I was loved, no doubt. And protected as much as a woman in a man’s world can be. But my talent was causing such problems at the brothel. Then that awful Mr. Tupps, a regular client of my ma’s, the bootlicker, wanted me committed because I sent a glass flying into his face after he made a grab for me when he realized I was not on the menu. I may have sent a drawer flying at him, too. I can’t quite recall.” Minnie fluffed the pillows, snapping and tucking until the bed looked pristine. “Anyway, Mr. Julian heard of me and my specialness, so here I am.”
Piper turned, dress in hand. “How did he hear about you?”
Minnie glanced away as her aura dimmed. A cardinal’s call sounded, the rustle of the curtains as a gust ripped in the window. Finally, she whispered, “Men be men, miss.”
Piper turned to the wardrobe lest her face reveal too much. Jealousy shot through her before she shoved the senseless emotion aside with the dress.
The world was unjust.
Men were encouraged to obtain what they wanted, confess desire, yearning, attraction, while women were left to ache and burn, forced to hide their feelings where no one could see them.
And she had never been good at hiding anything.
Finn waited by the servant’s kitchen entrance, slouched against a coster cart piled high with vegetables and fruit. When he saw her, he took a bite of his apple and pushed off the cart with an agile kick and a jaunty wave. Piper marveled that a boy abandoned at a rookery orphanage managed to carry himself with the grace of a duke. His innate sophistication worked to his advantage as his existence as the bastard half-brother of a viscount was a figment of Julian’s imagination. They no more shared a drop of blood than she and Humphrey did. Although the heartfelt love that flowed between them was brotherly in every way.
A kitchen maid lingered by the cart, a head of cabbage held forgotten in her hand. Piper smiled into her gloved fist. There was no denying, Finn’s magnificent looks staggered.
When she reached him, she noted his sagging shoulders, the lines of exhaustion streaking from his eyes. His aura shone the color of chalk. “Finn, are you well?”
“Of course,” he murmured. But he turned to lead them across the carriageway before she could reply, two hulking footmen falling into step behind them. At the end of the drive, a pebbled path was tucked between a swath of high grass, meandering away from the house and down a gently rolling slope. “This way to the village, my lady,” he said and gestured for her to go before him. “Don’t mind our chaperones. You know Julian. He won’t allow us to explore without them.”
She smiled and shot Finn an amused side-glance only to find a similar smile aimed at her. She had missed him, missed them both, her only family. Maybe she’d even missed Humphrey a little. Not knowing how long they’d allow her to stay at Harbingdon brought all the old abandonment issues to life.
She, Julian, and Finn had exhibited disparate reactions to being deserted.
“You’ve finished at Rugby?” she asked to change the subject, remembering that with Finn, her thoughts may not be her own.
“Thank Christ. Adieu to Warwickshire.” He sent the apple in a mock salute. Covering a yawn with the back of his wrist, he continued, “But Julian wants more. Education, knowledge.” Finn kicked a bleached stone that sat in the middle of the path. “Oxford.” The word dropped like a lead ball between them.
She smothered amusement that would go unappreciated. “You could say no.”
He shook his head and took a resigned bite. “You say no enough for both of us.”
Stung, she halted. The scent of hay and turned earth came to her on a fast inhalation. “Are you saying I can make it easier on Julian with my compliance? By following every one of his rules, the thousands of them! When he forced me from the League, created because of my grandmother’s gift, a gift I inherited, by the by. When I should be a part of it. You know it, and so does he!”
Finn paused just ahead, sighed, then took a tentative step back. Another bite of the apple was his only reply.
“Because, if you’re advising acquiescence, Finn, I must tell you that I know going along with Julian’s plans without dispute is the easiest course of action. But maybe not the best. Has anyone ever considered that? Or not the best for me.” She scowled at one of the footmen, and he turned away. “He doesn’t trust me to make a sound decision. He never has. But then, history has proven that I make horrible ones, so I almost can’t blame him.”
“Pip, I’m not sure he trusts anyone to make a sound decision. Having control calms him. So everyone who loves him goes along with it for the most part. And with the danger surrounding you—” Finn took a fast breath and grasped her hand, pulling her with him as he continued down the path. “It’s a simple theoretical principle. If you didn’t cause such trouble, I could cause a little. Julian only has so much patience for that sort of thing.”
“Why, you rascal!” She tucked a strand of hair that had come loose beneath her bonnet. “What trouble could a young man of eighteen possibly want to concoct?”
Finn laughed, but it was forced, laborious. The fingers laced with hers quivered.
“Finn.” She stopped, squeezed his hand. “What’s wrong? Should we consider resuming our sessions? I’m being brought back into the League. Julian promised—and it’s his decision to make.”
“Do you wish your grandfather had bequeathed the League to you instead of Julian? I sure as hell don’t.” Taking another bite, he let his gaze drift, blue eyes, blue sky, absolutely striking. “I’m exhausted. A bad night.” He circled the apple in a loose loop. “The whispers were strong. My gift has gone beyond reading the mind of someone I touch. If I’m connected in some way, I have vivid dreams. It’s often so tangled up, I can’t quite bring meaning to them. But they feel unspeakably real while they’re happening.”
“Does Julian know?”
He glanced at her, then away. Color seeped from his cheeks as a muscle in his jaw flexed. “He knows.”
She fought to recall where they’d been with Finn’s coaching when she’d fled to Gloucestershire. Closing her eyes, she placed her thumb over the pulse at his wrist. Her heartbeat raced to match his, a bracing rhythm in her ears and behind her lids. His aura came to her, a wash of blue and gold. His skin burned, flooding her with heat.
Then all slowed as she set the pace.
The images weren’t clear. As indistinct as gazing through a windowpane covered in ice. However, the vibrations were vibrant. Dread, terror, insanity. Blood on worn stone steps. The scent of turmeric and smoke.
She swayed and heard Finn’s apple hit the ground.
He jerked her close, his sweet breath batting her neck. Then, with a groan, he wrenched his hand away. The impressions evaporated like mist, but her lungs felt tight and airless. Grasping her shoulders, Finn shook her. “Piper, stop.” Another shake had her bonnet slipping from her head, her hair spilling from the loose chignon neither she nor Minnie had known how to fashion. “Come back!”
She blinked to find him leaning over her, his cheeks rosy, the dark slashes beneath his eyes no more. He cursed and dropped his hands, throat working as he swallowed. It was at that moment, she guessed, when Finn comprehended the compulsion her gift demanded.
With a nod to the footmen, who
stared at them as if nothing strange had occurred, Finn turned on his heel without another word.
They continued the walk in silence, the path spilling out into the village green. To recover the ease of the morning, Finn gave a brief tour in a strained voice, pointing out a sarsen stone King Alfred blew through to summon the Saxons and the bricked public house occupying the western corner. They halted at the mercantile, where he burrowed in the pocket of his waistcoat and produced a miles-long supply list. “We can have everything delivered to Harbingdon later today. Shop all you’d like.”
A parade of activity was reflected in the mercantile window. The market town was prosperous, nothing like the decaying little village in Gloucestershire. She gazed around the green, anxious to explore. “No shopping. Can I meet you back here in a bit? I’ll take my protectors.”
“No shopping,” he repeated as if he’d never heard a woman utter those words.
Piper crossed her arms. A member of the house staff could have arranged for supplies. The proposed walk had been nothing but a ploy to separate her from mischief until they could figure out what to do with her. Minnie had practically handed her off to Finn.
This was not a suitable start to her partnership with Julian.
Finn raised his arm in supplication. “Now, Piper, calm down.”
“Where is he?” Hardly cricket to skim her thoughts, but Finn was welcome to these. “If you’re spying, you know you better tell me.”
Finn’s face took on the cast of the sarsen stone at her back. “He’s helping thatch the church roof. Leaked last month, coming down on Mrs. Gladstone like a sieve. Nearly washed her into the aisle, and that’s saying something. Julian’s placed responsibility for this village on his shoulders, along with his family seat and the entailed properties and everything else.”
She searched, catching sight of a steeple. Her skirt spanked her ankles in time to her heartbeat as she stalked in that direction.
“Devil take it,” she heard Finn utter as he fell into step behind her.
She caught sight of Julian as she turned off the square, her step slowing with her catch of breath. She placed her hand on her stomach to contain the beating pulse, but it overtook her. Block, she warned herself in desperation, a version of self-healing that sometimes worked.
The carnal thoughts entering her mind were not ones Finn could witness.
He stood next to a secured bundle of Norfolk reed, stripped to the waist save for a thin linen shirt. He gestured to the men pegging the reeds in place as he took notes in a leather folio, muscles in his forearm shifting beneath his bunched sleeve. With a smile, he jammed the pencil between his teeth and the folio in his armpit, grasped a thatch, and demonstrated to a towheaded boy standing by his side. After the transfer of the rod to the lad, Julian’s hand came out to tousle the boy’s hair, the affectionate gesture melting the little of her unaffected at seeing him.
Shadowed jaw. Cheeks dented to hold the pencil. Hair a dark twist about his head. More mister than lord. Closer to the boy she’d fallen in love with while watching him exit a carriage in her grandfather’s drive than the man he had been forced to become. Prying her gaze away, she spotted Julian’s coat and waistcoat folded neatly over the railing of a spanking-new fence. Freshly whitewashed cottages and an industrious village on the mend surrounded them. She suspected the man standing twenty paces away, face streaked with dirt and sweat, was part of the reason.
“He only shipped me off when I was close to getting what I wanted,” she murmured.
“What was that?”
Heat lit her cheeks as she waved Finn away. “Nothing.”
“Everything we were building was ruined that night, Pip, and he’s just trying to create something secure. For us, for the League, for himself, I guess.”
That night being her grandfather’s last. She recalled it well, often in nightmares. The shouts and the mayhem, the smell of blood, the gumminess of it beneath her slippers. Their desperate race into a new future, a new life.
Apart from each other.
It had been an unclimbable mountain of loneliness, at least for her. And here she was, hoping Julian would solve that problem as well when he had no intention of getting near her again.
A burst of panic hit her square in the chest. “This was a mistake, Finn. Let’s go.”
And that’s when Julian noticed her.
His words fell away, mid-sentence, his lips going slack. He took a step forward, and for a brief unguarded second, she swore on everything worth a damn to her—basically, the two men standing in the churchyard—those remarkable eyes of his filled with pleasure.
Please, let it be.
The folio slipped from its home beneath his arm. Julian bent to pick it up and was grossly recovered on the return, his expression stark, determined. Like a flame cut by the wind, his aura deepened to a hue that, if she were smarter, would have had her running in the other direction.
Five long strides and he reached them, his open collar dancing with the movement. Instead of meeting his gaze, she focused on the taut line of his trouser brace, a dark slash holding his billowing shirt to his chest. Shifting the folio, he dragged his hand through his already disheveled hair and said something beneath his breath. Weakly, she wondered what it would be like to have his fingers trail over her skin, delve, record, take.
They had not made it that far before but, my, how she’d wanted to.
She flushed in places profound and hidden as he towered over her. Julian was fearsome on a good day, but on this day, with perspiration adhering mud-spattered linen to the defined muscles of his chest and belly, and his long, slim fingers repeatedly flexing about the folio, he was impressive for reasons only a woman fascinated could appreciate.
Before her stood a very tall, very handsome, deeply aggrieved man.
The changes since they’d last been together made her stomach do a little flip-flop, a rather unwelcome reaction when she’d found him tremendously attractive before.
His gaze, dispassionate as frost coating a winter heath, swept her from head to toe, then shifted to Finn. “You’re doing a dashed good job, boyo.”
“Impossible mission,” Finn muttered and crossed his arms over his chest. “I brought the bloody footmen.”
She opened her mouth to unleash a scathing retort, but Julian chose to respond by catching a lock of hair escaping her dejected chignon between his fingers. Her scalp tingled at the gentle tug, a flurry of goosebumps sprinkling her arms.
Oh, to be touched again by him, even as incidentally as this.
His aura flickered as he studied the strand before releasing it and turning to Finn. “What happened?”
The scent of sweat with an overlay of citrus carried to her, diminishing her temper and her focus. Julian always, always smelled good. But now was not the time to let his tantalizing aroma derail her objections to, well, everything.
How could she think clearly when he’d stepped close enough for her to see the flecks of amber in his eyes, his lashes so thick she could almost count them? He had a shaving nick on his jaw, and she forced her hand into a fist to keep from running her finger over it. Being this near brought the brief taste she’d had of him years ago roaring back, sending her heart on a race.
Again, he asked with more impatience, “What happened?”
She glanced at Finn, ticked her chin. Respond. Finn tightened his arms, giving a one-shoulder shrug. Guilt rode high in the pea green shimmer framing his aura. As sheltered as any lad due to Julian’s high-handed management, he’d abandoned his gambling face when they left the rookery and had not gotten it back just yet.
With an irritated exhalation, Julian adjusted the folio, exposing a streak of paint on his forearm. A pale blue, it brought to mind the hydrangea bush sitting beneath her bedchamber window. Entirely without design, she reached to touch.
Startled, Julian stepped back, drawing his arm to his side and rubbing it over his ribs.
Piper met his gaze. What is this, Jules? Secrets, when at o
ne time, he’d held little from her.
A bead of sweat rolled down his cheek, and he shouldered it away without removing his focus from her. If he thought to intimidate her like one of those silly paragons of virtue who cowered and stooped, hoping for a crumb of his lordly attention, he was going to be disappointed.
Unlike Finn, she’d been raised in a gaming hell and had an extremely trustworthy poker face.
And layer-upon-layer of clothing to hide her trembling knees.
“We’ll talk. Later. And don’t think of losing your guards, not for one moment,” Julian warned, then presented his back in an unmistakably aristocratic dismissal.
“She stared me down as boldly as a longshoreman, daring me to cross her,” Julian said, descending the ladder leaning against the masonry wall of the gardener’s cottage.
He flipped the hammer to Humphrey, who placed it in the dented toolbox at his side. Using his tools lessened the visions, and Humphrey had been kind enough to deliver them as Julian had come straight from the church to review the cottage’s aging slate roof. Another structure on the estate for which modest maintenance wouldn’t hold much longer. The corresponding slate came from Wales by train, then cart, as the village had no station. Bloody expensive to purchase and a lengthy wait, too.
Julian gave the toolbox a hard knock when he met the ground, due more to the way Piper had looked this morning in crisp yellow silk—lovely and untamed—than the damned roof. “Only as high as my chest and eight stone, or I would have been utterly disconcerted.”
A gust whipped across the field, pressing damp linen to his back and cooling his blistered brow. Sighing, he tilted his face into the welcome caress. Exhaustion rode hard, and a storm was brewing, one he hoped this roof and the church’s new one could withstand. The leaden air held a wrathful promise when his own tempest raged. Since their rash encounter, visions of Piper—hair unbound and lit with streaks of sunlight—had tormented. After all this time, she still made him feel like he stood on the edge of a cliff and was deciding whether to jump.