by Tracy Sumner
Hence, the Brothers Alexander—Julian, Finn and Simon—were known as the least mercenary of men to own a club in the city. Julian, a viscount, was embraced by society, and his bastard brothers, Finn and Simon, were mainly accepted, wealth and good looks paving a moderately smooth path. When in actuality, the tale of them being brothers was a ruse. A story invented by Julian, one he’d also used with Finn years prior, created to provide a legacy where there was none. The deceased Viscount Beauchamp, Julian’s father, thought to have slept with half of London and sired them all—due to Julian’s diplomatically indiscreet remarks at this ball, that club. Epsom. Ascot. The narrative had been bandied about for so long that Simon believed it himself most days.
Only with the occasional nightmare did the old world intrude dreadfully upon the new.
To the dismay of his family, Simon hadn’t been able to leave the past behind.
The ton would be appalled if they knew the vile depths he’d crawled from to stand on the perimeter of their ballrooms and think, how did I get here? There was only one person aside from his brothers who would understand the experience of living that life.
And his heart had given up on Emmaline Breslin long ago.
A refined disagreement erupted by the hazard tables, a shove turning into a shout, and Simon stepped back, ready to act. Ready to fight. When he had men patrolling every nook of the gaming hell, brutes more vital than he prepared to handle these skirmishes. Still, he longed to ‘plant a facer,’ as the rookery urchin inside him would have called it. The fury of an abusive childhood was still a raging river beneath his being, never far from reach.
He felt the presence of another person before he’d had a chance to unearth who’d sneaked up on him. A rare occurrence, that. Usually, it was only the haunts who got the better of him. And less of that over the years, as he’d encouraged them to return to their own worlds.
“Steady there, little brother. Your men will take care of this.” Finn leaned over the balustrade, gazing out over the club he and Simon had spent years building until it was the finest in the city. Memberships were incredibly hard to obtain but were democratically awarded to those from fishmonger to prince. A title didn’t get a man into the Blue Moon. “You went down last night to break up a scuffle, and where did that land you? Why in the hell are we employing a platoon of able beasts if you run in instead of letting them handle it?”
Simon rolled his shoulders, dug a half crown from his pocket before turning to face Finn. “A fist in the face is what it got me. As you well know.” He ran his knuckle lightly over the bruise on his cheek, stretching his jaw with a pop. “However, I was able to reciprocate, which felt bloody marvelous, shoving that earl’s smirking face into the Axminster carpet, my favored pursuit of the week. The lessons in warfare are finally paying dividends. I cut that pompous dandy off at the knees, just like my friend the duke taught me to when I was no more than ten years old.”
“I don’t think that’s what Ashcroft had in mind with his training sessions. More the plan to use those skills to protect yourself. And the League.”
“Huh,” Simon murmured, holding back a grin, the coin catching the light from the sconce as he flicked it between his fingers. He was starting to enjoy this. A loving wife and adorable children had made his older brother no fun at all. Finn wanted to run his business, then return home as promptly as possible. No blood-stained collars or bruised jaws involved. “Those lessons are not meant to give me the ability to smash an earl’s face into costly carpeting? I must have misinterpreted.”
“With the way you’re behaving of late, I can’t imagine a fight with an earl is your preferred pastime. What’s on tonight’s agenda? A countess? An actress? The gossip rags have you connected to both.”
“You’re forgetting Baroness Blithe. Been sending me notes, asking when I’d like to have tea.” Simon laughed and dipped his head to press the sound into his sleeve. “Her version of tea? Tangled in her sheets, tea optional.”
“Don’t laugh, Si. That journalist was by earlier today, the snoop from the Times. Hargrave. Hard, nasty eyes for a writer. Heard about the earl whose charming visage you so kindly rearranged. He wanted a quote for a piece he’s doing on vice and villainy in London. The Blue Moon to be featured, lucky us. Free promotion, when none is needed.” Finn buffed his fist over his stubbled cheek and sank back on the desk with a groan. “I have a bad feeling. Hargrave’s thoughts are unfettered when I read them. Scattered. And never, ever, about the topic he says he’s writing about. He’s baiting me. Talking about one subject, his thoughts racing along down another. I caught you in those thoughts, with heated emotion backing it. Then he led me in another direction.”
“Don’t worry,” Simon said and wedged his shoulder against the column securing the balcony, a long-legged sprawl he used to hide his unease. The coin was a comfort in his hand, silver warming against his skin. Although he, too, was concerned about E.L. Hargrave’s interest. Not in the Blue Moon. That they could handle. But in what he and Finn both feared, interest in the League. Who wanted to write about a gaming hell when one could expose a group of clandestine supernaturals living amongst society? Going so high as a duke who blew fire from his fingertips. “Someday, someone—”
“Is going to find us. We can only hide for so long.” Finn pinched the bridge of his nose with a ragged exhalation. “I know this. We all know this. But now, there are children involved. Julian and Humphrey, two each. Ashcroft, four in another month or so. My three. Some inheriting gifts, some only living with the guilt of not inheriting. I want, with everything I am or have, to protect our families from a precarious future. Lucien is giving Julian fits. Asked to leave Rugby with no hope of a return. The boy will be working with us soon. Another Alexander sent to London to bedevil society.”
“Like we were any better. Didn’t Rugby ask you to leave a hundred or so years ago?” Simon pulled himself out of his negligent posture, closing his hand around the coin. “And can you stop reading my mind, please? I can see from your expression that you’re doing it.”
Finn grimaced and brought his hand to his temple, rubbing. “Sorry, the baby was up all night. I’m exhausted. I can’t control it right now. And Victoria’s not around to block. Your thoughts are slipping like mist through my mind. Everyone on the street, a cacophony of speeches, pleas, desires.” He released a labored sigh. “It’s grueling. Trust me when I say, I wish I were a normal man.”
“If you quit having them, babies, that is, you’d get more sleep.” Finn and Victoria had been married for ten years and had three children to show for a hideously loving union. They were devoted to each other, and the marvelous benefit for Finn, aside from a beautiful woman who loved him more than any woman should, was his wife’s ability to block his gift when she was near. Block almost everyone’s gift, except Simon’s. The haunts paid her little mind and closed in on him with confidence. It was only with maturity that he’d been able to force them aside. Talk them home, as he called it. Reason triumphing over will. Most of the time.
He suddenly wondered if Victoria would be able to block Emma’s ability to travel through time, keeping her locked in 1882, where Simon wanted her.
A fly in amber. Stuck until he figured out what to do with her.
Though he wasn’t going to admit this desire to keep her close.
Not ever.
“I don’t know if Victoria can block her. We’ll have to test it and see,” Finn said. “Part of Julian’s plan is to do just that, and soon, as you bloody-well know. Better prepare her for an Inquisition to rival Spain’s.”
Slapping the coin on the desk as he passed it, Simon took a lingering stroll about the study, filched a deck from the sideboard and worked the cards between his fingers, a matchless sequence unlike any the dealers on the floor below could accomplish. Of course, he wasn’t allowed in any club in London but his own, due to his particular talent.
“Have you been by Sebastian’s this week?” Simon kept his gaze on the cards in his hand, his che
eks flushing. Goddamn it to hell. If Finn read these thoughts, he was going to smash his brother’s face into the carpet.
“The Duke of Ashcroft’s? This week?” With a lioness yawn, Finn kicked his legs out to cross them at the ankle, linking his hands over his belly and settling in for what looked like a nap. The man could sleep in the middle of a typhoon. “Now why would I—”
“Dammit, Finn.”
Finn held up his hand and smiled with only partial humor, his legendary cerulean gaze snagging Simon’s. “I bring good news and bad. Which would you like first?”
Simon gave the cards a furious shuffle that had the ace of hearts flipping to the top of the stack, as he’d planned. He’d had a nagging itch between his shoulder blades since he’d dumped Emma at Ashcroft’s five days ago. Five days that felt like twenty. The way time slowed when he was a boy, and he wanted to do something he knew was blinking mad.
He and Emma hadn’t spoken on the return to 1882, the entire journey taking perhaps a minute. But what a journey. Fantastic, like being awake during a dream and surrounded by every color you recognized, and some you didn’t. Drunk, but not. Lucid, but not. The experience had left him so fatigued that after leaving her, he’d slept for forty hours straight.
When he’d checked with Delaney, afraid Emma was in a similar state, he’d been told she’d suffered no ill effects. Instead, awoken the following day fresh as the proverbial daisy. It scared the life from him to realize that she could travel eighty years, seemingly at will, without even the slightest tinge of a megrim.
Though she’d landed them three months later than he’d asked her to.
But she’d gotten the year right, thank God. And the country.
Thoughts of that hellion suddenly making him cross, Simon jammed the cards in his waistcoat pocket, moved to the sideboard and poured a generous measure of gin. “Start with the good,” he muttered and knocked the liquor back. “By the time you make it to the bad, I’ll have another drink in me, and I should be better able to acknowledge the news.”
Finn cracked his knuckles, each one a dull pop, an activity set to keep him from doling out brotherly advice. “Julian and Piper arrived in town last night.”
Julian’s wife Piper, Viscountess Beauchamp, was the League’s healer. Over the years, she’d helped Simon negotiate with his haunts and send them back where they were supposed to be, which was often not with him. The League had summoned Piper to assist Emma. Perhaps, she wouldn’t arrive three months late on her next journey. Simon took a deliberate sip, wondering where this conversation with his brother was heading and how furious he was going to be when Finn got them there.
“You looked for her for ten years, Si. Researched how to find a portal to travel back and get her, until we worried you would never find it, would never forgive yourself for having to leave her to her destiny. The risk you took, you don’t know the sleepless nights I had worrying about you. Now, she’s here, in the Duke of Ashcroft’s townhome. Another forlorn waif joining the League’s ranks.” Finn yanked the cuff of his pressed sleeve taut and threw Simon a quelling glance, his personal tell to straighten already pristine clothing. “You’re restless, more than usual. The fights, the women, the drinking. Can’t a brother worry?” Finn knocked his knuckle on the desk, three hard taps. “How’s Emma going to help you? A person we don’t know, aside from her visits years ago, when no one could actually speak to her. Is she going to quench the blaze inside you? Finally, is someone going to be able to do that, I wonder?”
Simon drained his drink and reached for the decanter to pour another. “Oh, here we go. Next, you’ll start spouting off about true love. Wives extinguish blazes, is that it?”
“Or light them, in my case. Simon, this girl you were fixated on—”
“I’ve never been fixated on a woman in my life, brother. My interest is perfunctory, at best,” he growled, slamming the decanter on the sideboard. “Don’t make this out to be more than it is. I knew Emma was in trouble, was trouble, from the first moment I laid eyes on her. She couldn’t step out of the bubble she was in and talk to me, but despair was splattered all over her like Julian’s paint across a canvas. Despair I”—he thumped his chest with his glass—“recognized. The kind of poverty and desperation that drives you to madness. You must remember what that level of hopelessness is like. I wanted to save her from that world like Julian saved you and me. Give her a new life. And maybe assist our supernatural band of misfits along the way. We don’t, at current, have a time traveler in our ranks. Could come in handy.” Tipping his glass, he drained the contents in one swallow. “I’ve handed her over to the women of the League. There, my debt ends.”
Although, and he hoped like hell Finn didn’t read this thought, he’d started looking for her, in some obscure part of his soul, before he knew. Before he even knew her, he’d known someone was out there. Waiting for him.
A secret he planned to take to his grave.
“So,” Finn theorized with another knuckle tap on the desk, “she’s starting lessons meant to turn her into a society belle. A duke’s charming but solitary cousin, a chit no one’s ever heard of, debuting at a spring ball he’s throwing in two weeks in her honor. A mad scramble to school a woman born on the streets. Rookery streets, remember those? Elocution. Literature. Watercolors. Proper cutlery placement. Dancing. I can see it now. Victoria, Delaney and Piper, three extremely delightful examples of feminine decorum, guiding the way.”
Simon jammed the top in the decanter with a clang. “I know it doesn’t sound like the keenest plan…but it’s the one I came up with.”
“It sounds risky,” Finn murmured. “The women you’ve picked to tutor your little wanderer determined harridans themselves.”
“Emma only has to make enough of this experience to fit in, the League a protective buffer surrounding her. Enough comfort in life, so she doesn’t want to…”
Finn hummed, smoothing his broad palm over the desk. “So she doesn’t want to go back.”
“No more meandering from one decade to the next,” Simon whispered, speculating on the likelihood of that. Emmaline Breslin didn’t seem the type to listen to anyone’s counsel but her own.
“Not even local meandering? Jumping from, say, one city dwelling to another?”
Simon slowly lifted his head, remembering Finn had come bearing bad news as well as good. “Where is she?”
Finn ran his tongue over his teeth, trying, Simon could see, to hide his smile. “The spare cloakroom, the one where we keep the misplaced items. You know, we need to donate those clothes. The rag and bone man was by last month, and no one’s going to claim a pair of drawers they lost in a linen closet whilst swiving.”
“Finn,” Simon ground out between clenched teeth.
Finn held up a hand in apology. “She’s shoved herself between a frock of some scratchy material, I’d guess wool, and a velvet dinner jacket reeking of bergamot. Planning to wait out the close of the establishment, then find you. You owe her, I believe she said. Nonverbally, of course. What, exactly, you owe, I haven’t been able to detect.”
As a calming gesture, Simon yanked the cards back out of his pocket and began to shuffle. “You’ve been reading her mind all this time, knew she was here, and you’re just getting around to telling me?”
Finn shrugged a broad shoulder. “You picked good news first.”
The cards fell still in Simon’s hands, the six of diamonds floating to the Aubusson carpet. “She just showed up, is what you’re telling me? Not through a door? When we had a deal?” With a curse and a rising temper, he bent to retrieve the card. It wasn’t often one escaped his charge. That’s how much this chit was affecting him. “Did you check if they let her in the main entrance? What about the alley door?”
Finn picked a piece of nonexistent lint from his sleeve, a typical ploy when he was assembling either his words or his expression. “She didn’t come through one of the Blue Moon’s doors. Or a window. This, I have confirmed. I’ve had a guard posted in the
alley every second since my darling wife showed up the two times when we were, well, um, courting. It doesn’t pay to let a woman surprise you.” One of Finn’s devilish smiles split his face, thickening Simon’s ire. “Unless it’s, say, a naked surprise.”
Simon tossed the cards on the sideboard. “This woman is going to be the death of me.”
Finn gave another loose shrug. “A time traveler will travel, now, won’t she? And you didn’t even leave her with the Soul Catcher.” He tilted his head in thought, his eyes sparkling. “She’s pretty good without it. Imagine what she could do with.”
Exasperated, Simon crossed the room and took the stairs to the main floor at a run. He hadn’t trekked to every library in England, Scotland and Wales, made one trip to Germany and two to France, researching each notation regarding time travel or a portal to the past to let this female fiend slip through his fingers.
Although, he’d no clue what to do with her now that he’d found her.
Shouldering through the throng hovering around the hazard and vingt et un tables like London’s impenetrable fog, Simon ignored the shouts of patrons deep in their cups, the grasping hands of mistresses men liked to have by their side while they squandered their time and, often, their birthright. He disregarded the impulse to steal, then sighed and paused to swipe a half sovereign resting on the baize before a boozy baron who had his hand tucked inside his paramour’s bodice. Sliding the coin beneath his sleeve, he waved off his guards with a rigid shake of his head that said, I have this. Like he’d handled the episode last night, though this time, he wasn’t expecting a fist to his face for his trouble.