by Tracy Sumner
Silent, she turned a full circle in the shaded clearing. A cushion of discarded blossoms littered the ground, a lacey, white border surrounding the blanket Julian had secured as neatly as if it were nailed down. Piper lifted her hand to her brow and peered into the distance. “Is that Murphy sitting atop the rise?”
“Yes.”
“Groom or chaperone?” she asked as she knelt, wrapping her arms around her knees in an indelicate perch.
“Guard,” Julian replied, a container of strawberries balanced in his hand.
He opened the container as she removed the others, placing them on the sea of linen. Sliced chicken, asparagus, walnuts, cheese. Stilton, she guessed from the aroma. Lastly, he pulled out a corked bottle. With a turn of his lips, he shrugged. “I worried I might need reinforcement.”
“How ridiculous.” She twisted her legs to the side, doing a visual check to ensure she was, except for a minute glimpse of stockinged ankle, covered. Ripping her remaining glove off, she brushed him aside when he would have served her and reached for a plate. “So, that’s why Murphy had a knife in his boot.”
“And a pistol in the other,” Julian said, slipping off his coat and making a neat fold of it, the gloves dangling from the pocket the only hint of disorder. He squatted, knee pressed to the blanket, the other rising high in delicate balance. His waistcoat, a somber but very fine pewter, played off his eyes as if a well-paid valet had planned it when she understood this was not the case. The wind, picking up as wrathful clouds moved in, pressed silk against his muscled upper body, and she again marveled at his physical maturation.
Repairs at Harbingdon were evidently not sourced to workmen.
Taking a bite of a strawberry, she licked at the crimson streak on her palm as the puzzle pieces fell into place. “They’re coming for us.” The hat brim slipped over her eyes, and she knocked it back. “For me.”
Julian’s gaze lit on her effort to clean her skin, and she watched his aura spark at the edges. “What happened between you and Finn, before you arrived in the churchyard? Your hair was unbound as if you’d run a race, and Finn looked”—Julian grabbed the wine bottle, uncorking it with a flip of his thumb—“Finn looked stunned.” He drank deeply, his throat pulling. Plainly, Cook had neglected to pack glasses. “That smile he never leaves home without hidden deep.”
“I have no idea what you’re referencing,” she whispered, the denial as fragile as one spun with gossamer thread. She could hear the lie ringing between them like the village’s church bell.
He laughed, razor-sharp, an uncharitable retort. Tapping the bottle against his forearm, he took another sluggish pull. “Your bravado is admirable. I know few men who possess it, but you scare the hell out of me with the risks you take. Leaving Gloucestershire the latest in a string of them.”
Piper squeezed her hand into a fist, found she still held the half-eaten strawberry and tossed it to the grass. Juice ran down her wrist, staining her sleeve. “You hide me away when I cannot deny who I am, any more than you or Finn. Maybe the risk, to you, is acceptance. When there is no choice but.”
With a curse, he jammed the cork in the bottle and tossed it aside. Before she read his intent, he palmed the ground alongside her hip, his long body looming over hers. His intimidating stance shocked even as she leaned into it. Julian rarely moved close enough for her to study him. “The healer’s gift is so rare, scholars suspect it’s illusory. The chronology lists only three in our world since the 1500s. Only the power to arrest one’s gift completely, something your grandfather crudely called a blocker, is rarer. Power like yours in the wrong hands…I’ll die before letting them possess it. Possess you.” His eyes flashed, catching like dry kindling.
And his aura…glorious.
Resting back on his heels, he dragged his hand through his hair, sending the strands into disordered coils. “I’m simply trying to protect you. Protect them.” He nodded in the direction of the house. “But you make it very difficult, Piper. You always have.
“Why, then? Leave it. Leave us.”
His gaze snapped to hers. “Do you think I haven’t considered running? Going to one of my estates and hiding behind this blessed title? I tell myself I stay because of the promises I made to your grandfather when I know”—he thumped his chest—“I stay because it’s my destiny. My choice. I couldn’t leave you, Finn, anyone I’ve asked to join the League if I tried. I wouldn’t make it to the end of the drive.”
“Is that what you promised the earl? What he died whispering to you? Is that why—”
“One time,” he grit through clenched teeth. “We’ll discuss this one time, then never again. It hurts us both to remember.”
Hurts us both. She swayed, her hand sliding off the blanket, her fingertips sinking into moist earth.
All this time, she had assumed it only hurt her.
“I touch a ring, a cup, a bloody fork, and suddenly parts of a life, someone’s life, are flashing before me so furiously I fear for my sanity. I step into another world, one I’m connected to and not. It’s like being pulled by each arm in vastly different and painful directions. It feels impossible even as I’m living it.” He lifted her hand from where it lay nestled in the stalks of grass. “When one touch from you”—he circled her wrist—“has the ache in my head seeping away like steam shooting from a kettle. The visions dissipate, as if they were never there, though my gift remains. I gain control. I seize your strength and am stronger for it.” Releasing her, he backed away in a graceless shift so unlike him, his gaze lifting to the branches above their heads. “Do you realize I was practically going mad, begging for an escape from my mind, until your grandfather found me and brought me to you?”
“I know this, Jules. But—”
“No,” he whispered harshly. “You don’t know. There were times you healed me when…when I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t physically release you. Like coercion, a momentary lapse, not allowing you to come back to yourself. I wanted to keep you. Have you purge the images running through my mind forever, not just the transitory slice of healing you’d offered. Your grandfather warned me away on his dying breath because he knew I wanted to use your gift to lessen my own. Which makes you incredibly vulnerable, Piper, because it’s what everyone wants from you. He knew I was equally compelled.” His gaze sliced through her like a hot knife through butter when the emotion propelling it was cold resolve balanced on a razor blade. “And for all the wrong reasons.”
Her breath arrested in her lungs. “The wrong reasons,” she repeated, three hammer blows. The wrong reasons. Wrong meant right was not part of the equation. It made their age-old kiss seem contrived, trivial, her feelings before and after an impassioned instant of feminine nonsense or worse yet, misperception. Like a sandcastle washed away by the sea, what she hoped she had with Julian or could have in the future was, in reality, no reality at all.
She had waited years for absolutely nothing.
Reaching blindly, she grasped the bottle, popped the cork as he tried to snatch it from her and took a long drink, the wine scorching a path down her throat. The. Wrong. Reasons. Dropping her brow to her hand, she began to laugh, sending Julian’s hat tumbling from her head, releasing her hair about her face like a funeral shroud.
“Stop it, Piper.” He wrestled away the bottle; it hit the ground with a thunk. “Would you rather I continued letting us get closer when I couldn’t interpret my motives? Confusing my desire for you with my desire to be free from this bloody curse? My need for you muddled with my need for your gift.” He gripped her chin, tilting her head high. When she refused to open her eyes, he gave her a gentle shake, but she only shut them tighter, the suppressed emotion in his quivering fingers flooding her with sorrow. “I feared consuming you. Until there was nothing left.”
Breathless, he released her, a storm-promise breeze sliding in to widen the gulf between them. A gulf she’d thought she could breach if she tried hard enough. If she loved him enough.
“I still do,” he said, v
oice breaking.
She dragged her hair from her face, singed from his touch and his words. Clouds had gathered in anticipation of the approaching downpour, cloaking the day in a leaden stench. Julian rose to his feet, his back to her, palm flattened against the tree trunk as if it held him up. The wind tugged at the dark strands curling over his starched collar. She denied the urge to straighten his twisted waistcoat ties, dust off the blades of grass clinging to his trousers. Those were things a wife might do, a lover perhaps, not someone connected for all the wrong reasons. She closed her mind to his aura, healing herself. Watching him struggle only brought her lower.
For the first time since Julian stumbled from her grandfather’s carriage and into her life, she had absolutely no entitlement.
A strange sensation settled over her as she rose unsteadily to her feet. Strangely, it felt like strength. Breaking the charged silence, she released an admission that created an impenetrable barrier between them: “I wanted you to consume me.”
His shoulders stiffened as the air crackled like the lightning she’d seen in the distance. As she stood there shivering, she set fire to her memories, her hopes, watched them blacken to ash, swept away by the wind. Sound finally intruded over her thundering heartbeat: horses snorting at the approaching storm, and the short rein Julian had tethered them with, grass whipping into a frenzy. A raindrop hit her cheek and rolled down her face, bringing her neatly to the bleak present. “But, of course, this comes as no surprise.”
His head dropped; a punishing breath sounded through his teeth. When he finally turned to her, stark lines of restraint chalked his face. His hair lifted as a violent gust pushed her toward him when she’d decided moments ago never to be pushed in his direction again.
They stared across a grassy plain, agreeing to disagree as hell’s fury raged around them.
Finn woke with a gasp, his heart racing, his body tangled in sheets drenched with sweat. The dream arrived in distorted vignettes, glistening and sharp-edged, slicing his mind as shards of glass would his skin. The woman, her body bent over a book, her hair wild about her head, her eyes…lost to madness, anger, pain. There would be no negotiating with this mislaid soul, should Julian assume there was. She had looked at Finn with hatred and disgust, plunged a knife through his chest in her hallucination and laughed as his blood pooled at her feet.
She’d linked to his feelings for Piper, his love for her. He squeezed his head between his hands. There was more…
“Home,” he murmured on a low hush, the words coming out in accented English.
She had seen something to connect the League to Harbingdon. The village. His mind was an ingress—and a colossal breach in their security. For one panicked moment, Finn considered packing a valise and running, hiding in the rookery he knew as well as the lines on his palm, at least until the threat was over. But he could never leave his family, and Julian would go to the ends of the Earth to track him down.
Because it was quite simple.
Though she’d stepped into his mind and taken, he could fight back and step into hers.
Chapter 8
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
~Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Six days later, Julian lingered by the lodge’s front window, watching a storm gather resources in clouds the color of graphite. The cottage stood at the perimeter of the estate’s vast woodlands—carefully chosen isolation on his part—but the feeling of remoteness, usually soothing, stung this evening. The moon shone in bursts, tossing intermittent streaks across his desk and the spattered Wilton beneath his feet. He had soaked a canvas and the scent of linseed oil married with the metallic tang of paint. Bolstering aromas in his favorite dwelling in all of England, a place of creative solitude and modest expectation. A place he allowed himself to be nothing more than a humble artist, the supernatural and the aristocracy forbidden company.
Why, then, the tangle of emotion?
With a muted sigh, he cocked his hip on the ledge, his hand dropping from the velvet sash. Piper had ruined rainy days for him—in a country with too goddamn many of them—because all he remembered as the storm gathered was her, drenched from head to toe, her gown clinging to her body. In the downpour that had suspended their impromptu picnic, her eyes had flooded green like the bottom of a lake in winter.
Unblinking regard. Challenging.
Her reaction to him, unveiled, raw, fierce, had been a substantial chip to the jaw.
He realized the paradox as he glanced around a room scattered with paint and brushes, remnants of his private life. He hid his secrets when Piper hid little. Her fearlessness exposed his vulnerabilities. Not even his memories of the atrocities experienced in Seven Dials held power to bring him to his knees. Not anymore. Nor those brutal beatings at the hand of his father. They visited him, yes, but in nightmares from which he awakened, choking on air, but awake.
He knew no way to wake from dreams of Piper.
She recognized him for who he was at his core, stripped of artifice. Even as he dodged, lied, coerced. He’d gotten so bloody used to hiding. To manipulation. To the trappings of wealth, the idiocy of society. This cerebral knowing they shared, combined with his desire to join his body with hers in a purely elemental way, left him no room to maneuver.
No room to hide a damn thing. Not when she owned him, mind and body.
Pensive, he rolled the hairclip he’d found jammed inside the lining of his hat between his fingers. Piper’s visage washed over him, sending his blood pulsing through his veins. He’d touched it so frequently in the past week, that the visions were fading. However, one was still distinct. Minnie assisting Piper with her coiffure, a skill she and her mistress lacked. This image he was able to join like an unseen apparition. The choice was his. To step into the otherworld or watch through murky glass. A somewhat recent experience, the option to go deeper, both remarkable and frightening.
Remarkable because it represented a heightening of his gift.
Frightening because he was not always able to step out.
Piper could help him refine the ability to cross that mystical bridge as easily as Harbingdon’s village footpath.
If he let her.
“You idiot,” he whispered and tapped the hairpin against the windowpane. Tick, tick, tick like the mantle clock counting off minutes behind him. He played an excruciating game. He should return the hairpin, posthaste. It carried not only images but feelings that twisted his heart, clouded his mind. Instead, he kept it like some sorrowful token of Piper’s affection.
When the affection between them was scarce.
They’d avoided each other in the past week, exiting and entering rooms as if connected by a pulley, which was for the best. Wasn’t distance from Piper Scott what he’d always wanted? Another four taps of the hairpin. He. Was. Not. Sure. Astute fool that he was, he recognized the hollow ache in his gut. The enticing taste he’d gotten of her during their ride across the estate had recalled those candlelit discussions during his time home from Rugby and, later, Oxford. Conversations lasting into the wee hours, bare feet and laughter, scandalous freedom allotted due to her grandfather’s advancing age, a remote locale, dwindling lack of funds and servants, and the degree of risk Piper was willing to take.
Which was much.
Nevertheless, he’d been her friend. And she his when he counted few as such.
And he’d not been a threat in that way, her best interests entirely at the forefront of his mind. Except for the slip up on her nineteenth birthday, he had been positively angelic, denying impulses at every turn when he’d wanted her—or felt supremely linked—from the first moment he set eyes on her. That kiss, ah, he thought and released a tortured breath through his teeth. A tempestuous spot of youthful abandon, that night the only instance where he’d chosen to ignore reason and consequence. Where he’d let his body rule, obstructing sound judgment and his obligation to protect.
He rapped the glass hard enough to s
hatter. In a mocking twist, protecting Piper also meant protecting her from himself.
In any event, with the transitory exception of an aged earl who had left her life too suddenly to make plans, no one cared to step in regarding her care. He was the only taker. Her cousin, Freddie, who’d inherited the Montclaire title, had proven useless, callous even.
Julian slipped the hairpin in his waistcoat pocket, questioning his promise to assist with her research. Bloody hell, if he hadn’t dug himself in deep there. Relighting the lamp’s wick, he returned to the desk and the stack of ledgers awaiting his attention, the joyous weekly accounting of his properties. Letters from stewards, secretaries, and solicitors cross-referenced against Humphrey’s notes from recent visits; records on repairs and tenancy issues; checks and balances on bank drafts and deposits. Evaluation of his contributions to the village schools, the churches. Knocking his spectacles high, he knuckled his stinging eyes.
It was astonishing they were in the black.
If he cherished any of the fading relics, felt a familial connection to just one, his heart would have been in the management, but most held appalling memories of a troubled youth spent hiding who he was, evading a father with a loathsome temper. With a heavy heart, Julian glanced at the corner of an envelope peeking from a stack of mail Humphrey had delivered earlier. Scented paper. Roses. He preferred the smell of oil, paints, Piper. With the tip of his finger, he edged Marianne’s dispatch further beneath the pile.
Frustrated to have two women battling in his head, he pulled Lady Coswell front and center, as she’d looked the night in Mayfair, his robe hanging off her body, waiting for the coil of heat to dart to his mind, belly, or cock.
Nothing arrived aside from a faint, fond glimmer.
Conversely, all pathways tensed in anticipation when he thought of Piper, the one woman he did not want to want.