Page 49 of The Hellion is Tamed

Finn brought the tumbler he still held to his lips and polished off the contents. Then he paused, dipped his fingers in his waistcoat pocket and came out with a green poker chip, which he shoved into Simon’s hand. “I read Hargrave’s. There were too many voices, too many thoughts, excited and scattered, aroused and uncontrolled, I couldn’t read them all. However, strangely enough,hisrose above the rest like yeast floating to the top of an ale barrel.”

Simon grasped his brother’s lapel and gave him a fierce jerk. “What did he say?”

“I have a possible way out of this mess.” Finn unwrapped Simon’s fingers from his coat, turned his tumbler upside-down, letting a drop of brandy stain the straw beneath their feet. “There’s a woman.”

Finn shook his head, clearing it, doing fast magic with the chip in his hand. “What?”

“Ah, we’ll reclaim your weakness by attacking his,” the Duke of Ashcroft said in his nobly ruthless way, his hand going to his jaw as he strategized. Simon could see the wheels spinning. “A cunning strategy for the softest Alexander. Nothing brings a man to his knees like threatening the woman he loves.”

“I’m missing something,” Simon murmured, wondering why he was the only one missing something.

“Soft.” Finn chucked his tumbler at the wall, barely blinking as crystal exploded against brick. “We’re going to neutralize the bloody bastard. Using his woman as leverage, with no harm done to her person, of course. We’re not those types. But Hargraveis. Fortunately, while he was fantasizing about his lover moments ago, he told me everything. Her name. Location. White Chapel. He visits her in this time, hisadoptedtime. A milliner. Lucky stroke, that. We station men outside her flat, her shop, make sure she’s watched every second, then Simon travels to Emma. Negotiates with Hargrave, who’s waiting for him to show. He longs for this confrontation. I read that in his thoughts, too.”

The Duke of Ashcroft brushed his coat aside to caress the butt of the knife jammed in his waistband. “Terms of the negotiation?”

Finn slashed his hand out as if to say,I have this. “Emma is untouched, lives in whatever time she chooses to. We allow the same with his piece. His sweet milliner will never know any of it. Secrets safeguarded on all sides.”

“He didn’t exactlytakeMiss Emma.” Henry flickered into view like a heat stain shimmering in the distance. “She left willingly, if you call curses no fine woman should utter willing. That Hollingmark fellow had gone off to get refreshments, and Hargrave stepped in. She did the leaving to protect you, lad. He didn’t want to hurt her, he said. Didn’t use his trick of making her faint; didn’t have to. Only wants her to stay in her world. Get out of yours.You’rethe one he said he’d harm. Splash the truth about your peculiar group of mystics all over theTimes. Expose every one of you to the light of day.” Strolling to the wall, he prodded the remnants of Finn’s tumbler with a tsking sound. “Claimed he’s a correspondent or some such, so he knows how.”

“She went willingly? To save me, to save the League?”

Finn and Ashcroft shared a familial look Simon caught out of the corner of his eye, a look he astonishingly felt no ferocity over. The youngest in the close circle of men at the highest level of the League, they were protecting him, as they always had.

“We shield our own. You know that,” the duke murmured and began to crack his knuckles, his expression growing less ducal by the second. Ashcroft loved nothing more than the occasional skirmish to keep his skills tight. “I’ll send someone to find Hollingmark and make apologies for my dear cousin to explain her disappearance. Let’s go with a blinding megrim from being in the sun all day.”

Simon tossed Finn’s chip from hand to hand, his mind spinning, possibilities rife. Then, a dead weight settled in his gut. He couldn’tgetto Emma. His portal was gone, destroyed.

And, if she thought he was in danger, she’d never come back to him.

“I see that melancholy glance.” Henry grinned, the gap in his front teeth wide enough for Simon to slide Finn’s half crown through. “I can take you back, boy. And not like your young miss, getting the day wrong, the month even. I can drop you in the exact sodding second of the exact sodding day you tell me I should drop ya’. Light as a canary feather striking snow. None of this bilious feeling like you get withhertravel. Sick and sleeping for days. But she’s breathing, so her gift is what it is. Cozy time travel is one benefit to dying.”

Simon curled his hand around the chip, the beveled edge scraping his palm. Relief and rage bubbled in his chest, sending his heart into a dizzying rhythm. “You mean I can travel through time? As long as I take a haunt with me?”

Henry scratched his nose, his watery gaze dropping. If a ghost could blush, this one did. “In a loose manner of speaking, yes. Roundabout way to describe my bequest to ya’. But seems factual enough.”

“Bequest. I’ll tell you where you can shove your damned bequest. I’ve shared a life with those on the outside edge of hell since I prowled the streets of St Giles in short pants. I paid an extraordinary price for being different, talking about my mystical tendencies before I knew to keep my mouth shut, and suffering greatly for it. But that ismyburden to shoulder. However,noneof you”—Simon stalked to Henry, stabbed a chest that wasn’t solid, his finger passing through the haunt’s misty image to brush the sun-warmed brick—“thought to tell me? When I spent years trying to find a way to get to her? When I’ve been surrounded by haunts my entire bloody life, every one of you jabbering dawn to dusk until I thought I’d go mad? And you never once thought to tell me you could take me to her?”

“Weren’t allowed to tell. Weren’t allowed to take ye. We have higher direction, you know.” Henry shrugged, lining up a neat row of crystal shards with the toe of his boot. “Alas, I’m no rule-follower, but it was the suitable decision as you weren’t ready.” He grinned at the response his advice garnered from his charge, his image flickering like a flame caught in a gust. “Bah, look at that irked face. Consider the cheery side of this, lad of mine. Two time travelers, so-called, joined in this barmy world. Perfect as one of them paintings of your viscount brother’s hanging in the National Gallery, ain’t it?”

“What’s he saying, Simon?” Finn asked in exasperation. “We can’t hear the conversation if you recall. If they’ve passed to the great beyond, I can’t read their minds for shit.”

Simon glanced at his brother, then tipped his head to stare at the sky when he saw the hawkish way Finn studied him. God knows what embarrassing emotions were written across his face.

Surrender, Simon, just let her in. Let themallin.

Amid his agony over Emma stepping eighty years into the past, so far away he couldn’tfeelher, sunlight pierced the frothy, smut-stained clouds to strike his skin. To thaw the ice encasing his heart. Perhaps the future wasn’t as bleak and grimy as the street where he’d grown up, after all.

“We going to get your girl or wot?” Henry asked from behind him, still kicking at the shards of glass, from the sound of it.Whistling softly between that gap in his teeth.“You’re mooning, you are. I can always tell when a man is done for. And you, my boy, aredonefor. Roasted like a Christmastide goose. Cooked. No use fighting it another minute unless it’s from sheer stupidity. Which many a man has been known to do.”

Simon hauled a shallow breath into his lungs, tasting the acrid dust surrounding the race track and, somewhere miles beneath it, hope. Closed his eyes and decided, right then and there, to follow the guidance of his haunt. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’d saved Piper’s life with the assistance of a long-gone ghost, and since then, for some reason, he’d tried too hard to live life without help.

Even from his family.

It was time he changed. Accepted. Loved.

He could let go of the past—with Emma beside him.

Embrace a new life built on the somewhat precarious remains of the old. The rest? Let it smolder and fall into the ashes of his existence, be blown away on a ripping gust, never to be considered again.