Page 16 of The Lady is Trouble
She blinked to find him leaning over her, his cheeks rosy, the dark slashes beneath his eyes no more. He cursed and dropped his hands, throat working as he swallowed. It was at that moment, she guessed, when Finn comprehended the compulsion her gift demanded.
With a nod to the footmen, who stared at them as if nothing strange had occurred, Finn turned on his heel without another word.
They continued the walk in silence, the path spilling out into the village green. To recover the ease of the morning, Finn gave a brief tour in a strained voice, pointing out a sarsen stone King Alfred blew through to summon the Saxons and the bricked public house occupying the western corner. They halted at the mercantile, where he burrowed in the pocket of his waistcoat and produced a miles-long supply list. “We can have everything delivered to Harbingdon later today. Shop all you’d like.”
A parade of activity was reflected in the mercantile window. The market town was prosperous, nothing like the decaying little village in Gloucestershire. She gazed around the green, anxious to explore. “No shopping. Can I meet you back here in a bit? I’ll take my protectors.”
“No shopping,” he repeated as if he’d never heard a woman utter those words.
Piper crossed her arms. A member of the house staff could have arranged for supplies. The proposed walk had been nothing but a ploy to separate her from mischief until they could figure out what to do with her. Minnie had practically handed her off to Finn.
This wasnota suitable start to her partnership with Julian.
Finn raised his arm in supplication. “Now, Piper, calm down.”
“Where is he?” Hardly cricket to skim her thoughts, but Finn was welcome to these. “If you’re spying, you know you better tell me.”
Finn’s face took on the cast of the sarsen stone at her back. “He’s helping thatch the church roof. Leaked last month, coming down on Mrs. Gladstone like a sieve. Nearly washed her into the aisle, and that’s saying something. Julian’s placed responsibility for this village on his shoulders, along with his family seat and the entailed properties and everything else.”
She searched, catching sight of a steeple. Her skirt spanked her ankles in time to her heartbeat as she stalked in that direction.
“Devil take it,” she heard Finn utter as he fell into step behind her.
She caught sight of Julian as she turned off the square, her step slowing with her catch of breath. She placed her hand on her stomach to contain the beating pulse, but it overtook her.Block,she warned herself in desperation, a version of self-healing that sometimes worked.
The carnal thoughts entering her mind were not ones Finn could witness.
He stood next to a secured bundle of Norfolk reed, stripped to the waist save for a thin linen shirt. He gestured to the men pegging the reeds in place as he took notes in a leather folio, muscles in his forearm shifting beneath his bunched sleeve. With a smile, he jammed the pencil between his teeth and the folio in his armpit, grasped a thatch, and demonstrated to a towheaded boy standing by his side. After the transfer of the rod to the lad, Julian’s hand came out to tousle the boy’s hair, the affectionate gesture melting the little of her unaffected at seeing him.
Shadowed jaw. Cheeks dented to hold the pencil. Hair a dark twist about his head. More mister than lord. Closer to the boy she’d fallen in love with while watching him exit a carriage in her grandfather’s drive than the man he had been forced to become. Prying her gaze away, she spotted Julian’s coat and waistcoat folded neatly over the railing of a spanking-new fence. Freshly whitewashed cottages and an industrious village on the mend surrounded them. She suspected the man standing twenty paces away, face streaked with dirt and sweat, was part of the reason.
“He only shipped me off when I was close to getting what I wanted,” she murmured.
“What was that?”
Heat lit her cheeks as she waved Finn away. “Nothing.”
“Everything we were building was ruined that night, Pip, and he’s just trying to create something secure. For us, for the League, for himself, I guess.”
That nightbeing her grandfather’s last. She recalled it well, often in nightmares. The shouts and the mayhem, the smell of blood, the gumminess of it beneath her slippers. Their desperate race into a new future, a new life.
Apart from each other.
It had been an unclimbable mountain of loneliness, at least for her. And here she was, hoping Julian would solve that problem as well when he had no intention of getting near her again.
A burst of panic hit her square in the chest. “This was a mistake, Finn. Let’s go.”
And that’s when Julian noticed her.
His words fell away, mid-sentence, his lips going slack. He took a step forward, and for a brief unguarded second, she swore on everything worth a damn to her—basically, the two men standing in the churchyard—those remarkable eyes of his filled with pleasure.
Please, let it be.
The folio slipped from its home beneath his arm. Julian bent to pick it up and was grossly recovered on the return, his expression stark, determined. Like a flame cut by the wind, his aura deepened to a hue that, if she were smarter, would have had her running in the other direction.
Five long strides and he reached them, his open collar dancing with the movement. Instead of meeting his gaze, she focused on the taut line of his trouser brace, a dark slash holding his billowing shirt to his chest. Shifting the folio, he dragged his hand through his already disheveled hair and said something beneath his breath. Weakly, she wondered what it would be like to have his fingers trail over her skin, delve, record, take.
They had not made it that far before but,my, how she’d wanted to.