Page 20 of The Lady is Trouble
“Rebirth will be mine at any cost,” she vowed and dropped her head as tears soaked the bodice of her dress.
Chapter 7
Those who make us feel, must feel themselves.
~Charles Churchill
Piper wokewith the sun and shoved aside the bed curtain to find her maid prowling the chamber like a restless feline. Disconcerted but forced to suppress it—after all, this relationship had been forced upon them both—Piper asked Minnie for assistance with dressing. It was just as well as she’d left her front-fastening corsets at the hotel. Piper refused a breakfast tray, deciding to face Julian and the discussion he’d threatened her with in the church courtyard. Why hide under the bedcovers or in scented bathwater when he’d run her down soon enough? She grabbed her folio in the unlikely event the conversation moved to her research and headed from the room with Minnie’s keen gaze heating her back.
Her luck did not hold, as she found only Humphrey in the dining room, patrolling the mahogany sideboard with a menacing expression. They exchanged the requisite hello-good mornings, then settled across from each other at a table seating fourteen by her count. Family portraits lined the wall opposite her, a morose group Piper guessed had come with the house.
They looked on disapprovingly.
Unsurprisingly, Humphrey finished eating quickly, as if a master stood behind him with a pocket watch and a whip. He instructed her to wait for Edward to arrive, a footman in need of a healer. After their mystical consultation was complete, Julian would fetch her.
She wrinkled her nose in displeasure.Fetch, as if she were his wiry little dog.
Directive delivered, Humphrey strode from the room, ducking at the doorway to avoid hitting his thick head, leaving her to snap her mouth shut lest this morning’s well-prepared eggs fall from it.
Julian was fulfilling his promise to bring her back into the League.
From a polite distance, of course.
While Piper pondered the change in strategy, Edward stumbled in, slumped shoulders and bowed head, little more than an overgrown boy. Alargeboy, as was typical for his position, another absurd fixation of society when most did nothing but open doors and serve meals. She observed the dark crescents beneath his eyes when he fixed his gaze on her as if searching for a miracle and expecting to find none.
Piper made notes as he told her about his dreams—ones that foretold truths. Like most, he had begun to disclose his abilities when he was too young to understand he should hide his gift. Because, sadly, no one but another forced into their world understood. His parents, servants in a modest household in Portman Square, had gained him employ with a baron’s family through a connection. Partly to remove him from their residence. They feared Edward’s condition could infect his seven brothers and sisters. He’d come to Julian’s attention after a minor incident in a public house, emphasizing how the organization’s network had grown since her grandfather’s death.
Piper grasped Edward’s hands and focused her entire being on his rasping inhalations, the pulse skipping beneath her fingers. “Calm your mind. Learn to control your gift and redirect,” she whispered. Her heartbeat leapt to match his, so she struggled to calm her own mind, visualizing a mantle of snow blanketing a sallow field. The verdant woodlands bordering Harbingdon bathed in a foggy haze. Julian’s face, which always, even if she denied it deep in her heart, quietened her. Although she didn’tseeEdward’s dreams, his terror flowed through her, pricking her skin like she’d run through a patch of nettles. A rainbow exploded behind her closed lids, the scent of oranges, cinnamon, vinegar.
She absorbed his discomfort until her lungs felt near to bursting. A roar, like a wave crashing over her, filled her ears. “Enough,” she gasped and dropped his hands.
Blinking hard and coming back to the present, she found Edward sitting straight and tall across from her, the crescents beneath his eyes expunged. His scarlet cuffs matched the startling rosiness of his cheeks. His eyes were as wide as her teacup’s saucer. “M’lady,” he murmured and swallowed.
“Every morning at this time, meet me here. You have the strength to manage this. I’ll help you find that strength, the ability to channel and release. You’re letting your gift govern you whenyoumust govern. Or face being torn apart at the seams.”
She pressed her hand to her chest at the sudden thought: Like Julian was being torn apart.
With a mumbled agreement, Edward bowed and exited the room with a lively step, much restored.
Piper groaned and dropped her head to her hand. No wonder sleep had been difficult as traveling the boy’s mind had been like trying to cross a crowded London thoroughfare while blindfolded.
An iridescent shimmer of awareness slipped past like a warm sigh.
She lifted her head to find Julian propped against the doorjamb, light from the window high above his head waterfalling over him. Attired for the country, his open collar revealed a patch of sun-dusted skin; his informal breeches clung to his muscled thighs. He dressed with purpose, with subtle restraint. From their first encounter in her grandfather’s study, when he’d worn tattered cast-offs but still looked the part of a young man not to be taken lightly.
He flipped a wide-brimmed hat between his hands as he studied her. There was a coiled stillness about him today. His jaw clenched, and she suspected he kept himself from crossing to her.
“Healers must heal,” she said, each word deliberate like she traversed a ballroom floor littered with shards of glass.
Their gazes locked and held. The hat stilled in his hands. Desire sparked and erupted as his aura brightened to a crisp, sharp blue. She clasped the back of the chair to keep from accepting her body’s challenge, a ridiculous impulse to finish what they had started years ago. An impulse Julian would soundly reject. A clock somewhere in the house ticked off the seconds as she slipped under a spell she knew he didn’t seek to cast. Her blood rioted through her veins, and she marveled that he could still stun and enthrall.
She came to her senses first, gesturing to the chair and the hulking footman no longer there. “I must do it. If I’m to be accepted in the League, I must.”
Shoving off the doorjamb, he sent her an enigmatic look. He beat his hat against his thigh in a tight rhythm. “I’m not going to fight you.”
She sat up straighter. “Well, good…because I’m not going to fight you, either.”
“That, Yank”—he jammed the hat on his head—“would be a first.”