Page 8 of The Hellion is Tamed
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’mnotgoing 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, wasallshe 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 locatedinsidethe house. Superb plumbing was enough to make Emma smile for the rest of herlife. “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? Doyou?”
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 whoshouldbe giving it to you?”
“Looked for you until he was mad with it.Fou d’elle,” 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 one. “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. Womenwaitfor 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 anynumberof inadvisable things. Two, Simon was notherman. “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 atvingt 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.
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.
Thetonwould 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 livingthatlife.
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 tofight. 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?”