Page 17 of The Lady is Trouble
She flushed in places profound and hidden as he towered over her. Julian was fearsome on a good day, but onthisday, with perspiration adhering mud-spattered linen to the defined muscles of his chest and belly, and his long, slim fingers repeatedly flexing about the folio, he was impressive for reasons only a woman fascinated could appreciate.
Before her stood a very tall, very handsome, deeply aggrieved man.
The changes since they’d last been together made her stomach do a little flip-flop, a rather unwelcome reaction when she’d found him tremendously attractivebefore.
His gaze, dispassionate as frost coating a winter heath, swept her from head to toe, then shifted to Finn. “You’re doing a dashed good job, boyo.”
“Impossible mission,” Finn muttered and crossed his arms over his chest. “I brought the bloody footmen.”
She opened her mouth to unleash a scathing retort, but Julian chose to respond by catching a lock of hair escaping her dejected chignon between his fingers. Her scalp tingled at the gentle tug, a flurry of goosebumps sprinkling her arms.
Oh, to be touched again by him, even as incidentally as this.
His aura flickered as he studied the strand before releasing it and turning to Finn. “What happened?”
The scent of sweat with an overlay of citrus carried to her, diminishing her temper and her focus. Julian always, always smelled good. But now was not the time to let his tantalizing aroma derail her objections to, well,everything.
How could she think clearly when he’d stepped close enough for her to see the flecks of amber in his eyes, his lashes so thick she could almost count them? He had a shaving nick on his jaw, and she forced her hand into a fist to keep from running her finger over it. Being this near brought the brief taste she’d had of him years ago roaring back, sending her heart on a race.
Again, he asked with more impatience, “What happened?”
She glanced at Finn, ticked her chin.Respond. Finn tightened his arms, giving a one-shoulder shrug. Guilt rode high in the pea green shimmer framing his aura. As sheltered as any lad due to Julian’s high-handed management, he’d abandoned his gambling face when they left the rookery and had not gotten it back just yet.
With an irritated exhalation, Julian adjusted the folio, exposing a streak of paint on his forearm. A pale blue, it brought to mind the hydrangea bush sitting beneath her bedchamber window. Entirely without design, she reached to touch.
Startled, Julian stepped back, drawing his arm to his side and rubbing it over his ribs.
Piper met his gaze.What is this, Jules? Secrets, when at one time, he’d held little from her.
A bead of sweat rolled down his cheek, and he shouldered it away without removing his focus from her. If he thought to intimidate her like one of those silly paragons of virtue who cowered and stooped, hoping for a crumb of his lordly attention, he was going to be disappointed.
Unlike Finn, she’d been raised in a gaming hell and had an extremely trustworthy poker face.
And layer-upon-layer of clothing to hide her trembling knees.
“We’ll talk. Later. And don’t think of losing your guards, not for one moment,” Julian warned, then presented his back in an unmistakably aristocratic dismissal.
“She stared me down as boldly as a longshoreman, daring me to cross her,” Julian said, descending the ladder leaning against the masonry wall of the gardener’s cottage.
He flipped the hammer to Humphrey, who placed it in the dented toolbox at his side. Using his tools lessened the visions, and Humphrey had been kind enough to deliver them as Julian had come straight from the church to review the cottage’s aging slate roof. Another structure on the estate for which modest maintenance wouldn’t hold much longer. The corresponding slate came from Wales by train, then cart, as the village had no station. Bloody expensive to purchase and a lengthy wait, too.
Julian gave the toolbox a hard knock when he met the ground, due more to the way Piper had looked this morning in crisp yellow silk—lovely and untamed—than the damned roof. “Only as high as my chest and eight stone, or I would have been utterly disconcerted.”
A gust whipped across the field, pressing damp linen to his back and cooling his blistered brow. Sighing, he tilted his face into the welcome caress. Exhaustion rode hard, and a storm was brewing, one he hoped this roof and the church’s new one could withstand. The leaden air held a wrathful promise when his own tempest raged. Since their rash encounter, visions of Piper—hair unbound and lit with streaks of sunlight—had tormented. After all this time, she still made him feel like he stood on the edge of a cliff and was deciding whether to jump.
“You’re taking on too much. We could bring in more men. Faster repairs.” Humphrey held his silence a beat, then suggested, “We have funds, what with the successful investments. And your titled estates are sound.”
Julian turned to find his friend loading cracked slate into the rather pathetic field cart that had come with the property. “My thoughts haven’t changed on this subject. We risk exposure if anyone living or working at Harbingdon lacks a supernatural gift or at the very least, a direct familial connection to the occult. It’s the easiest method to ensure we protect each other. Julian frowned as he remembered Finn’s dream and how shaken the boy had been. “Security is paramount. Much due to your efforts, our reach is growing with new contacts in Wales and Scotland. I’m not a patient man, but we’re building a foundation, and the simple answer is, it takes time. My dream to have an underground network for those in need is still years away, let’s be honest. A place to harbor them is the first step.”
Humphrey stepped away from the cart and mopped his brow with his sleeve. “You saved my life by pulling me out of Seven Dials, Jule. Giving me a future, a path to follow when I never had one, not once in my life before I met you. So, you’ll have to pardon me for worrying like hell about the breadth of what you’re taking on, building the League beyond what Piper’s fool grandpa thought it should be. Though I admire your strategy and on my life will do anything to see it prospers.”
Humphrey had savedhim,not the other way around. But it was an old argument between friends—one he’d never win. “Tomorrow’s arrival?”
“Pickpocket. Maybe mudlarking, too.” Humphrey grunted as he shouldered a decaying timber they’d removed from the cottage. “Mighty dangerous business, that.”
“Mud-what?”
Humphrey dumped the timber in the cart and propped his hands on his hips, stretching until his back cracked. “Mudlarking. Stealing from the barges. The boy was living with a gang above the flash-house where they sold their goods. Silk scarves, reticules, the like. Maybe a pocket watch on a blessed day. We were unable to find any family, and we searched every inch of St Giles. Not a single soul caring for or about the poor bugger.” Grasping a piece of slate the size of a washbasin, he tossed it in the cart where it landed with a thud. “Word of caution. He’s an angry little bastard. Shrewd enough to realize a warm bed and food from those you can’t trust is better than living in squalor with those you can’t trust. Will likely steal us blind.”