by Tracy Sumner
Simon glanced back at her, love, if she could believe it, looming in his eyes. Like Hargrave had said he’d seen coloring them. Strangely, Simon didn’t try to hide his feelings from anyone but her. Maybe he wasn’t trying to hide anymore. “It warmed the closer I got to you. Pulsing a blinding blue, like your gaze in the moonlight. Almost led me right here.”
“You’re a bloody poet, Alexander.” Hargrave jammed his cheroot out on the wall, the stench of burnt wallpaper traveling across the room to sting her nose. “That trinket isn’t going to help her. Because she’s staying here. She can keep the damned stone. A treasure from a lost time. A memento from her lost love. Under her pillow like your gloves and that stained handkerchief. I’m even thinking, such a crafty girl being wasted in this hole, that she could help me bring back others who travel. Be trained to do my job, so I don’t have to do it. With a little persuasion, of course. Threats, you’d call them.” He flicked his fingers dismissively. “All just semantics.”
“I would never,” Emma said, rage riding her voice.
Simon strolled across the room, planks creaking with each step, until he stood a slender pace away from Hargrave. Close enough to touch. Insult in his bearing, provocation in the challenging smile he released to the world. Her man liked to show his temper, he did. She’d be more fearful if she weren’t impressed by his masculine show of bravado. She was weak for him, weak. “You don’t know much about the League, do you, Hargrave? It’s not wise to go into battle without understanding who you’re fighting. Confidence above skill is never a successful combination.”
“You insolent mongrel.” Hargrave thumped the heel of his hand against Simon’s shoulder, knocking him back a step. An exchange Simon didn’t try to defend himself against, his clenched fists never leaving his sides. Emma choked back her cry, not understanding why he hadn’t reacted until she watched the time tracer’s face pale to the color of ash. “What the—?” Hargrave opened his fingers in a calculated roll, staring as if he’d never seen them before.
Simon snaked a tarnished half guinea from his trouser pocket and flipped it between his hands in a cheeky act sure to further infuriate Hargrave. When she knew it was merely his way to calm himself. “Why did I touch him, and he’s still standing, you ask? Have you ever heard of a blocker, Hargrave?”
“Victoria? You brought someone with you? But…how?” Emma breathed and stumbled away from the window, halting when Simon gave her a furious, arresting look. Finn’s wife could suspend supernatural gifts. Emma had yet to meet her but knew the League planned to see if she could travel while Victoria was close. When the expected answer was no.
“Who the hell is Victoria?” Hargrave growled, dusting his hand through the hair scattered thinly atop his head, a signet ring on his pinkie catching the candlelight.
“My sister-in-law. She’s in the hack outside, as is my brother, Finn. Her husband, who’ll kill you if you so much as gaze at her unkindly. If Victoria’s within, oh, a hundred yards or so of one of the insanely gifted, their power is reduced to ash, like that cheroot you rudely snuffed out on Miss Breslin’s wall.” The coin flashed as it snaked between his fingers. “Go ahead, touch me again. Throw a punch and see how vicious I’ve become, learning to protect what’s mine. Gaming hells aren’t known for civility. Neither is the supernatural world.” He tossed the coin in the air and caught it. Then it disappeared up his sleeve. “I’ll tell the haunts to step aside. Man to man, this bout, no mystical gifts involved. But you look a tad worse for the travel, so you’d better consider the situation carefully. I’m well-rested, my friend.”
Hargrave spat on the floor and gave his mouth a bruising buff with his forearm. “If you think I’ll let you take the girl back without a fight, you’re crazier than they say.”
Simon tipped his head back and laughed. “Crazy, am I? Society, once again, has a man pegged incorrectly. It’s talking to empty rooms that aren’t empty that confuses them. Initially, I considered insanity myself. Truly.”
Emma took a step closer, silently pleading. Simon, stop this; play the game.
He must have felt her because his hand shot out, his jaw tightening. His warning. “To borrow an American expression from my dear friend, Delaney Tremont, the Duchess of Ashcroft, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? I came eighty years for proper negotiation. Equal trade. Fair-minded, both sides.”
Hargrave peeled his coat off, one graceless arm at a time, and flung the garment to the floor. “I’m not a wagering man, Alexander. I don’t trade when I own the property outright. Law of our world, you see. I track, I bring back those who travel. You’re sluggish on the uptake, boy, when you should appreciate the significance of our unique situation. Let’s see what your girl thinks of being bartered like a—”
“Heloise Murphy,” Simon said with a lazy yawn thrown into his fist. “Sorry to blurt it out like that, but I was getting bored. You have mine; I have yours.”
Hargrave’s breath seized as if he’d taken a healthy punch to the chest. His startled gaze shot to Emma, and he staggered forward, calculating his strategy.
“Don’t think to touch her. Ever again.” Simon dragged his shoulder against his chin like he scratched an itch and stepped between her and Hargrave. “My promise, if you hold to yours? That the League’s men, watching Miss Murphy this very minute, won’t act. They’re stationed outside her charming abode on New Street, her business on Royal Mint. The route she walks every morning through Whitechapel Market. The Duke of Ashcroft, more warrior than aristocrat as you may have heard, has an endless supply of able-bodied soldiers in need of work. And killing, come to think of it. Talk about a melancholic group, now that there’s no war to wage. In any time you place Miss Murphy, we'll continue watching you, should you think to spirit her away. I’m guessing she doesn’t even know about you, so your chances of getting her to leave 1882 are limited. My haunts will take me to her in seconds. Seconds. After Finn reads her mind, and yours, of course.”
Hargrave stooped to yank his coat from its haphazard crumple on Emma’s worn planks. “You bastard.”
“I prefer to think of this as clever design. We’ve already established a relationship between Miss Murphy and the duchess. Every modiste wishes to style a member of the ton, don’t you know? We have others with gifts that I could call upon. But I think the plan in place is enough for now. You see, I don’t want to drag an innocent woman into this…but love is your burden to manage. I already have mine.”
Emma’s heart sank, her throat closing. Burden. Simon thought his love for her, if that’s what he was finally admitting, a burden.
“You’re not going to win,” Hargrave ground out in a guttural whisper. But he backed away until his boot heel smacked the doorjamb.
Simon’s gaze went to Emma and held. “I already have.”
They watched Hargrave give a final, malicious glance around the cramped dwelling, then he was gone, opening her cage and letting her, for the first time in her life, fly free.
Simon turned to her, his eyes black in the amber light cast from the candle. “Emma, breathe, please,” he murmured and reached to caress her bruised cheek with his calloused fingertip. Touching her so gently, as if he feared she’d disintegrate like an ember on his skin.
She let out a gusting exhalation she hadn’t realized she’d held, her vision spotting, the floor beneath her wobbling. Finally, after hours without sleep or food, giving in.
“Burden,” she whispered and fell toward him as darkness overtook her.
Chapter 17
The sky blanketing London shone pink and battered blue in the hour before sunrise.
A dull wash spilled across the paint-spattered planks in the St Giles warehouse no one knew he owned. The top floor, Simon’s private accommodation. Or, rather, it would be someday. A yawning expanse running the length of the building, with few fittings aside from a shipping crate housing bottles of gin and a towering sleigh bed that he’d found in Julian’s attic and had moved before Piper noticed it was missing. He
’d refurbished the space one rotting timber at a time by his own hand. It’s why the work was taking ages and looked reasonably amateurish.
A skilled laborer, he wasn’t.
But he loved the place with a fervor that shocked him.
Sometimes, love didn’t follow design.
He was learning to accept this fact.
Drawing a breath scented with ale from the public house next door, he let the bitter fragrance calm him. This place, his place, a decrepit building five short blocks from where he’d been born, calmed him. Coming back, coming home, when he could now afford to buy half of Mayfair from sellers up to their armpits in debt, was ironic, he supposed.
The deal was, he’d left part of his soul on these jammed streets, affection in his heart for the neighborhood and the people. The hawker selling fish for sixpence on the north corner, the costermonger selling exotic nuts and pineapples just off the ships for five on the south. The Irish contingent selling onions and oranges, the watercress vendors packing baskets of greens and striding down the alley to start their day.
They were his people. Like the haunts were his people.
Therefore, he’d decided, against what was going to please Finn and Julian, that he would live here. In St Giles. Be a part of his Mayfair family, of the League. Run the Blue Moon. But he’d walk these often dismal streets coming home every night. This community was his to improve. He was already in talks with the local magistrate about sanitation, roadways, healthcare, wages.
He had lots of ideas.
Like the women he and Josie were moving not out but up. Creating opportunities, as Julian and Finn had for him. But in their hamlets, haring off to a locale they’d no affection for not part of the deal.
It was mostly money that opened doors and slicked the palms providing the prospects, a fact Simon had long ago made peace with. Easy to forgive when he was a player now, too, able to slick as many palms as were thrust at him. He could walk into any drawing room in London—looking like them, talking like them. He’d danced in their ballrooms, woken in their beds. Sipped their champagne and laughed at their jokes. Gone to school with them, even.
Enough that they thought he was one of them.
When he wasn’t.
However, he wasn’t above realizing this was his way of paying back his good fortune. Of letting his tortured soul heal.
His family, his good fortune. His profession, his good fortune. Even his supernatural gift, his good fortune. His love—he glanced to the bed and the slumbering figure tucked beneath her mother’s tattered quilt—his extreme good fortune.
He knew, in what fortune tellers liked to call the look back, that he’d never have been able to share his life with anyone except a woman who understood what survival and desperation on the mean streets was like.
His heart being taken by a rookery girl made all the sense in the world.
Simon left his inspection of the waking city to check on Emma. She’d been sleeping for—he slipped his watch from his pocket and checked the time—going on thirty hours. Henry had returned them to the minute in 1882. The only issue with the trip being that his brothers now knew he owned a lumbering former paint mill overlooking the worst section of New Oxford Street. Unfortunately, Julian and Finn weren’t the kinds to linger before popping by to check out his investment. The security of the neighborhood, the safety of the dwelling…and so on.
However, he loved them. Consequently, their behavior was tolerable.
Love brought all manner of disturbance into one’s life.
He wasn’t up to fighting it anymore.
Swiveling the chair sitting next to the bed around with the toe of his boot, a spindly, fragile effort he’d also pinched from Julian’s attic, he looped his arms along the high back and settled in. The button he’d lifted from Finn’s coat for kicks in hand, fingers occupied, mind resolved. She had to wake soon for food and drink and to use the utilities, which were admittedly sparse. But this woman, he knew, would see promise in the space, in his plans, in his life.
She’d seen promise from the very beginning, when he’d seen little promise himself.
“Something stolen, I imagine, that you’re shuffling between those talented fingers,” Emma whispered minutes later from the depths of fine bedding. Everything else in the loft was rough, like her mother’s quilt, but the bedding he’d made sure was fit for a queen. The same maker Victoria used. So when he slept here, he slept well. And alone. Never having brought anyone to this space.
“You’re not a burden,” he said, diving in before his idiotic side, incorporating a man’s hesitant reasoning, kept him from divulging the truth. Burden. The wrong word, although love was burdensome if one felt it strongly enough.
He felt it strongly enough.
The quilt lowered, and her eyes found his. In her bright blue gaze, he read all kinds of things. Affection, exasperation, offense. The last chilling and putting him on guard. “I spoke without thinking. Apologies for what rolled out of my mouth.”
She scooted high, coming up and out of the tangle of silken sheets, in a shift but nothing else. Victoria had undressed her, but now, he was benefitting, his blood racing through his veins to see her nipples, dark pink and pebbled beneath thin linen. The gentle curve of her breasts. Collarbone, slender neck. Tongue sliding along her lips to moisten them.
He’d undressed to his trousers and shirt and slept beside her, listening to her soft breaths. Nothing but his heart involved.
Now, his cock was stepping into the mix.
When her gaze met his, he found a complementing hunger, emotion sizzling, stinging him where he sat.
Emma looked to the crate acting as a bedside table. The Soul Catcher glowed in a puddle of amber light. A soothing pulse, like a heartbeat, because it was where it should be.
With her.
“You’re trusting me with the swish stone now, is that it?”
He shifted on his rump, thinking the chair felt harder than it had seconds ago. She was still irked. Women. “I’m trusting you with everything, Emma.”
“More than you trust Josie?”
He cursed and vaulted to his feet, leaving the chair rocking on its frail legs. Ate up the distance to the window, braced his arm on the iron frame and gazed out at the bruised horizon. “You’re going to fight me at every step. Damned if I shouldn’t know that already.”
The coils squeaked as she crawled from the bed. An issue he’d have to repair if they were going to use it like he wanted to. He forced aside a frantic urge to swallow his pride, stride over to her and kiss her senseless. Seduce her while destroying those luxurious sheets, until there were no words to be spoken. “I’m sorry for not giving you the Soul Catcher in the first place. It’s yours. The League agrees, if you care about that piece.” He traced a jagged gash on the frame with Finn’s button. “Is this what I’m supposed to say? Josie is—”
He exhaled and tunneled his hand through his hair, thinking it’d been ages since he’d had it cut. Overlong, which he liked. He wondered which man Emma preferred. Unkempt scoundrel or London toff. “Josie is a friend. And never more than. While you’re…”
Her arms circled his waist from behind, sending his pulse spiraling. Then, after a moment, she laid her cheek on his back and squeezed tight. “The thought of you with anyone else, those women, the gossip rags. I can’t stand it. I won’t stand for it. I won’t. Even if you did give me the loveliest violin I’ve ever seen.”
Simon released a relieved whistle through his teeth. She loved him; she did. Hanging his head, he placed his hand over both of hers, trapping her, should she think to leave him. Ever again. It was going to be fine, somehow, all of this. He and Emma were going to find their way through a complicated world. Protect each other, love each other, and go on.
“Em, there’s never…will never be another woman for me. How could there be?” He shrugged a shoulder, brought her hand to his mouth, brushed his lips over her palm, the veins running along the inside of her wrist. “When you’re
all I want, all I’ve ever wanted. Ask anyone in my family. Piper, Victoria, Delaney. Julian, Finn, Humphrey. Since that moment in Oxfordshire when you stepped out of a dream and into my life, I’ve never wanted anyone else.” He laughed against her skin, power coursing through him when she trembled. “They worried greatly because not finding you meant my life was over.”
“Simon,” she whispered, her breath streaking through his cambric shirt to warm his skin, “stop.”
“No, never again,” he vowed and turned, enclosing her in his arms, lifting a hand to cradle her head as he seized her mouth. Her surrendering sigh parted her lips just enough to let him in.
Where he poured every ounce of love, desire, fondness into the kiss, the most important of his life. Of hers, perhaps. Catching her hard against his body, he brought her into the nook created for her and her alone. Lemon and the faintest hint of lavender drifting free, tempting him with every breath he took.
Bouncing up on her toes, she offered herself with a ragged moan that blazed like one of Ashcroft’s fires through his body. Her hand snaked into his hair, tugging the strands until his knees threatened to buckle and send him to the paint-splattered floor.
His cock stiffened, a rigid presence she surely felt against her hip. Grasping her shoulders, he inched her back enough to witness her undoing. Her eyes wild, the color of the sea before a storm. Her hair, absent of order and tumbling past her shoulders. Her lips parted, moist, pink.
Lewdly, it made him wonder what other parts of her were moist and pink.
Then she called him back, her mouth hard and hot. A kiss born of freedom, passion, possession. Telling him what she wanted, what she needed. He was backing her in the direction of the bed when he remembered, his brief glimpse of the blistering sunrise reminding him.
He hadn’t asked her yet.
He’d never told her how he felt.
“Come,” he murmured against her lips. Taking her hand, he led her across the room, her stumbling step twice his to keep up. “I’ll make love to you until you can’t compose a suitable sentence, can’t think, can’t breathe. I’ll put us both under, days spent in slumbering recovery. I promise, dear God, I promise. But first, this. What I should have said already.”