by Tracy Sumner
The lot of them, Simon’s family, wished to file away the rough bits that made her Emmaline Breslin. They did, indeed. Every dreadful, jagged edge. The lips that opened and allowed cockney to tumble free. The hands roughened by labor and desperation. The red hair. The freckles. The scowl they said made her beautiful when turned to a smile. The curse words and the ribald jokes not suitable for a woman of standing.
Every chatty chit in his family had surrounded her since Simon ditched her, promptly disappearing with a duke, like a dog with a nagging wound to lick. And they hadn’t shied away from telling her how wonderful he was. Selling her on an item they didn’t realize wasn’t for sale. Not to her. Not for a blimey second had they quit shoving his agreeable qualities before her like a dripping slice of tipsy cake.
Gentle, calm, strong.
Intelligent, handsome, witty.
As if she didn’t know these things about him.
The year they’d spent together when she was fourteen and he fifteen, her popping in and out of his life, his time, had been magical. A reprieve from poverty and despair. An effort to control a mystical talent that had been nothing but a hardship from birth. Even if she couldn’t find a way to destroy the barrier separating them and touch him, talk to him, she’d been enthralled. Fascinated, charmed, attracted. Boosey with him, like the time Winsome Sally had challenged her to a gin match on her birthday, and she’d promptly lost both her dinner and the wager. But it had been grand fun before the muddle.
Back then, she’d studied Simon with—
Emma scrunched up her face and searched for the word…
Diligence. She’d studied Simon Alexander with more diligence than the books her ma had borrowed from that posh family in Berkeley Square she’d worked for before she died. This months-long investigation had allowed Emma to witness his undying love for his brothers, men not in actuality his brothers at all, his struggle to deal with his magical gift and all the ghosts who surrounded him, and the distance he held himself apart. She’d desperately wanted to reach him, had wanted to change his life, too. Had wanted to be a part of it.
Though she belonged in his world less than a rodent in a ballroom.
But no one in this splendid Mayfair townhouse grasped her motivation back then—and he’d forgotten. Or convinced himself that the way they’d talked without words had been a—
Emma sighed and hunted for the phrase she’d read in the duchess’s book last night, shifting from foot to foot, her new slippers pinching her toes worse than the intricate twist her maid had wound her hair into was pinching her scalp. She snapped her fingers when it came to her.
Simon had convinced himself their feelings had been a figment of his imagination.
He was angry with her for leaving and not coming back. When she hadn’t been able to come back. Not for ages, due to pitiable circumstance and weak command of her gift, and when she had, five years ago, he’d broken her heart without knowing it. And that, friends, was that. He wasn’t going to forgive her—and perhaps she couldn’t forgive him. Even if she learned to speak without dropping her Rs, which she’d done quite right with on her own. Wore exquisite gowns and prissed around like a princess. Held out her pinkie when she sipped tea. Sipped, not slurped, being the goal, according to the duchess.
No, Simon had dropped her like a lump of flaming coal, taken himself off to his frantic city life, ignored her all week after thrusting her into a situation that pinched more than the slippers.
The boy she’d left behind had turned into a full-fledged man. His soulful brown eyes were the same. His hair was a shade darker, now the color of dying sunlight, curling around his face just so. Made a woman want to push the strands aside, give them a neat tuck behind his ear.
But everything else, changed.
When he’d brandished that knife like no sharper she’d ever seen, his long body bent over Jonesy, she’d been reminded of a fighter she’d seen once in a Shoreditch market, muscles in his arm bulging, broad shoulders tensing beneath a shirt made to look ragged when it was tailored sleek as a cat to his form.
Simon Alexander fought like no posh toff should, that’s for sure. Skills she didn’t imagine he got to use often in Mayfair.
Emma glanced around her assigned bedchamber with a frown, her gaze snagging on the velvet curtains, the silk counterpane in shades of cream and violet, the gaudy rug that was worth more than anything she owned or would ever own. It was, without a doubt, the most fetching chamber she’d ever seen, much less stepped into. Or been given.
Given by Simon. Saint Simon.
While spouting off about his many fine qualities, his family hadn’t mentioned his astonishing skill with a blade. His bloodthirsty bent when he heard the call to bring the sentiment forth. His fast flashes of temper, what her ma would have called getting his breeches in a twist.
But there weren’t breeches in this modern world, only trousers. Oh, they’d told her that, too.
“Rester immobile. Stand still,” Madame Herbert, the modiste whispered, her French accent muscling her suggestion into an authoritarian area Emma both admired and feared. “You need contemporary clothing, and you need it today. I’m going to jab you if you keep moving. You’ll bleed, and then where will we be with this exceptional linen I had my assistant retrieve right off the ship this morning?”
Emma fidgeted as Madame Herbert yanked a needle from the pincushion attached to her wrist and slid the metal sliver into the material she’d bunched at Emma’s waist.
Glancing back at Delaney Tremont, the Duchess of Ashcroft, Emma sent a pleading look across the room. “Duchess, how many do I need? This is the fifth gown we’ve altered, and I only had two day dresses before. How am I to pay you back if you keep ordering more items than I can ever pay you back for?”
“Proper address is ‘Your Grace’,” the modiste supplied, giving her hip a little squeeze.
“Call me Delaney, please. And these clothes are my gift to Simon, darling time traveler. And to you. If you hadn’t stepped in front of my horse that day ten years ago, a stunning apparition, and caused me to land on my rump, my duke might have waited years to realize he loved me,” the duchess murmured from her sprawl on the chaise lounge, her hand covering her rounded belly, her eyes closed in near-slumber. She was expecting her third child and seemed to sleep most of the day away.
Poor thing, had been Emma’s first thought.
Until she’d seen the duke’s lovesick expression when he looked at his wife and changed that to, lucky girl.
“Rags, what you had before,” Madame Herbert muttered around the needle she’d thrust between her sharp teeth. “And your shape is quite lovely. Quite. Curvaceous, but not too. Too many curves ruin the contour. Deserving of my talent, this figure. But showcased by tatters such as the ones you arrived in will not serve.” She tucked and pinned, mumbling beneath her breath, pinching harder than necessary to gather the pleat. “Men will drop at your feet, a blind spiral, when they see you in my creation. With that scarlet hair, ah, la, and those sapphire eyes, the colors I’ve chosen, it will be a triumph like none London has ever seen.”
“I’m done to a cow’s thumb,” Emma said, dread growing like ragweed through stone in her belly. Simon and his band of mystics wanted to pass her off as a distant relation of the Duke of Ashcroft, the duke such a close friend that Simon had immediately dropped her at Ashcroft House upon their arrival in 1882. Like he would a dog they were watching while he traveled. All the while, telling her she would soon be a valued member of this League he kept mentioning, as if she cared about the occult.
She hated her gift, hated being extraordinary more than she hated being poor.
They thought the solution to her problem was to create a fresh history for her. She plucked at a stray bit of fabric with a frown. Maybe the magic surrounding these people was twisting their senses. Time travel had made her unafraid of living in a different era. But this? Country cousin to a duke? A backstory of isolation and modest associations allowing her to step into a
life she’d neither earned nor felt comfortable accepting. Allow for the social gaffes she was sure to make at every turn.
Society, no matter what year you chanced to meet them in, was a poisonous bunch.
“Done to a cow’s thumb,” Madame Herbert whispered, appalled, her gaze skating over Emma then back to her task. “We can’t parade you through a ballroom in one of my marvelous gowns without improvement of your speech, chéri. Like slapping paint on a decaying building.”
“It means I’m tired, exhausted, worn plum out,” Emma said, her temper flaring. Moving out of range of the modiste’s questing grasp, she stalked to the window, gazing at the tumult that was the city of her birth. Chaotic, just like it’d been when she left. If this French crow thinks to belittle me and me stand for it, she has another think coming.
The duchess groaned and lumbered to her feet, her arm curled low to cradle her belly. “I’m a transplant here as well, Emma. A filthy American, as you can hear from my speech. Not exactly someone the ton wanted to filch one of their dukes. But filch him, I did.” She shuffled across the room, perching her hip on the escritoire by the window, her crimson silk gown a delicate flutter around her. She appeared a duchess in every way, except for the accent. “I had to learn to fit in, too. It can be done. Easily. Your enunciation is very good, considering. I imagine you’ve been filtering out the impurities all along. Anyway, you’re a member of the Duke and Duchess of Ashcroft’s family. And society pays attention to anyone with even a hint of blue blood racing through their veins.” Delaney tapped the windowpane and smiled. “But better yet, you have the League’s support.”
Emma grunted and gave the tassel wrapped around the velvet curtain a yank. She’d heard this one before, all week long.
“Everyone in this residence is special. Did Simon tell you this?”
Infuriation swelled, emotion flooding Emma’s cheeks when she thought of the way Simon had dropped her like a bag of rubbish at the duke’s door. “Honest to heaven, he told me nothing.”
“Such a foolish man, but then, aren’t they all?” Delaney murmured, her smile growing. “Then I shall tell you, since he has not. You aren’t alone. Every person we employ has a supernatural talent. From maid to footman to duke to duchess.” She wrestled herself into the chair sitting before the desk, kicked a rubbish bin upside down and stacked her slippered feet on top. Elegant, though, the entire production. Bloody impressive. “Even our Madame Herbert.”
Emma turned in a flurry of half-stitched linen, her mouth falling open. Madame Herbert glanced up from her sketch with a slight bow of her head, a blisteringly graceful rejoinder.
“You must learn to see past what is presented, chéri.” With a wrinkle of her nose, her thimble floated from her reticule, drifted across the room and into her waiting hand.
Emma blinked and stumbled back, plunking her bottom on the window ledge. “Why, you have a cursed rum touch.”
Delaney covered her mouth to hide the laugh that blessedly came out sounding like a cough. “A ‘cursed rum touch’ that made her vulnerable as a woman living alone in Lyon. As you know, our gifts do not endear us to, well, to anyone except each other. So Madame Herbert came here ten years ago to be a part of the League after hearing about protection with a supernatural group in England. She made my wedding dress. And every stitch of clothing since then.”
“I don’t even know what a League is,” Emma grumbled, picking at a loose thread on her skirt.
“The League is a group of people with gifts, like you and me. Madame Hebert. My talent is knowledge.” She tapped her temple. “I have an attic of material at my disposal, enough to fill a thousand libraries. It’s been useful to us on occasion. Carrying important information to our contacts in other countries, for example. Not a letter someone could confiscate, but rather, reams of research tucked in the dark corners of my mind. I’ve learned to manage it, this gift. Not let it suck the marrow from my bones. That will be part of the agreement if you join us. That we research this ability you have to travel through time, then help you better control it.”
Use me when you need it, Emma guessed, was also part of the deal. She scratched her shoulder, an unfinished seam pricking her skin. “I can control my skill fine enough with the swish stone in my possession. The Soul Catcher.” But she reckoned that picking an exact day to appear when she strolled through time would be better than the random arrivals she now directed. She’d dropped herself and Simon like a stone three solid months past when he’d disappeared, an incident he’d said nothing about. But she could tell, aside from his noticeable relief that she’d landed them in the correct year, he’d not been impressed by her overcalculation. “I suppose we could barter, a swap of sorts. I might be willing to play, depending on the terms.”
The duchess tilted her head in thought. “Swap?”
Emma sighed. God save her from the aristocracy. “You pick me apart like a bent timepiece, study all the bits and pieces close-up like, and I get to keep the swish stone. Until I figure out how to go along without it. It’s yours, of course, the League’s. I ain’t”—she huffed a breath, let it go through teeth the duchess had claimed were straight and white as pillars—“I’m not going to steal it. And I will stay in 1882, for now.” She fluttered her hand down her chest and made an X over her heart. “You have my word.”
Madame Hebert snorted.
“My word is as true as a newly-minted guinea, duchess,” Emma whispered, tears stinging her eyes. It was. And her word, her honor, was all she had.
The duchess groaned and rose to a shaky stand, crossing to Emma before another poignant confession could be uttered. Another dressmaker’s rebuke issued. “Delaney, please. I haven’t been called duchess this much since the day I married Sebastian.” She took Emma’s hand in both of hers and squeezed, the affection behind the gesture sending fresh tears swimming across Emma’s vision. “How long has it been? Since you lost your mother?”
Emma stiffened, drew her hand away and tucked it by her side. “Did he say something?”
“Simon?” Delaney ironed her hand over her belly, amusement curling her lips. The duchess smiled more than anyone Emma had ever seen. It musta been from having running water shoot from pipes located inside the house. Superb plumbing was enough to make Emma smile for the rest of her life. “Does he know anything to tell?”
Emma lifted her hand to chew on her thumbnail. Simon had admitted the League spent years trying to find her—but had admitted little else. How much they knew, she’d no idea. Her whole bloody story, perhaps. “I don’t know. Does he? Do you?”
Delaney nodded, pleased in some way. “If I said I helped research the gift of time travel for a young man desperate to find a young woman named Emma who’d stepped into his world and then suddenly left it, would that suffice? Until you get the tale from the person who should be giving it to you?”
“Looked for you until he was mad with it. Fou avec ele,” Madame Hebert murmured without glancing up from her sketch. “And now, the boy’s lost to the charms of that obscene gaming den. Amidst the lightskirts and the—”
“Madame Hebert!” Delaney interrupted, sending her index finger in a slicing motion across her neck.
“Men be men, in any century. Shameless,” Emma confirmed, wishing she could call the declaration back when Madame Hebert arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow, an explicit acknowledgment that reforming Emmaline Breslin was a waste of everyone’s time.
Emma would never admit it, but the emotion pressing like a fist between her ribs wasn’t one she could fib about. Not to herself, anyway. Jealousy. She remembered that slow burn in her chest from when she’d returned. Simon Alexander and his mob of women were nothing new to her. Boy, could she shock the ladies in this room with what she’d seen five years ago in a countess’s murky bedchamber. Burned into her skin like a brand, the scene was.
Delaney twisted a ring with a diamond sizable enough to choke a horse topping it, round and round on her finger. Emma knew a blatant, nervous tell when she saw o
ne. “Simon owns a gaming hell, true. A quite successful venture. Very respectable, comparatively, in a scandalous line of business. My husband is even an investor. As to the women, well”—she gave the ring a final spin—“boys will be boys.”
“Gaming hell,” Emma murmured. “So that’s where he is.”
“The Blue Moon,” Madame Hebert helpfully supplied. “He and his brother, Finn, run it. Tight as thieves, those two. The boy lodges in the suite of rooms above or at the family townhome just down the lane. Or in several beds throughout the city. The gossip sheets love writing about the Alexander boys, enough indignities to bleed all the ink in London dry.”
“Madame Hebert,” Delaney said with an edge bending her voice and her smile. Her ring making a series of fast loops around her finger.
“Oh, la.” The modiste tapped her pencil against her cheek, gave Emma a sweeping glance, and then looked back to her design. “Not as if our little termagant is going to race over there now that she knows where he is. Track him like a starving hound. Simon will turn up sooner or later. Women wait for their men. And, goodness, even a gutter rat wouldn’t sneak into a betting den.”
Emma laughed, the sound inviting two sets of eyes to swing warily in her direction. One, gutter rats were known to do any number of inadvisable things. Two, Simon was not her man. “I would never dream of going to some filthy gaming hell,” she murmured with all the humility she could summon, crossing her fingers behind her back.
Because, when the moon arrived this very night, she’d dash into it.
The man she sought was a gambler, and she was calling in her stake.
Chapter 2
Simon stood on the Juliet balcony overlooking the gaming floor of his beloved hell, the clink of crystal and dice, coarse laughter and brash conversation, rising like smoke to contentedly circle him. The scent of brandy and American tobacco, perfume from the few ladies present, drifting along as well. This night presented a diverse mix of gamblers. Politicians, society gents, soldiers, even a poet of considerable renown trying his luck at vingt et un. Interspersed with croupiers dragging coin and dreams across dark green baize. From midnight to dawn, fortunes were won and lost at the Blue Moon, although his principled brother, Finn, read minds when he was in residence, ensuring the worst tragedies emerged in other dens. If a bloke came to the Blue Moon thinking, my life is over if I lose this bet, Finn made sure they didn’t make it, tossing them out on their portly asses with a spot of advice about solvency thrown in.