Page 24 of The Lady is Trouble
“I touch a ring, a cup, a bloody fork, and suddenly parts of a life, someone’slife, are flashing before me so furiously I fear for my sanity. I step into another world, one I’m connected to and not. It’s like being pulled by each arm in vastly different and painful directions. It feels impossible even as I’m living it.” He lifted her hand from where it lay nestled in the stalks of grass. “When one touch fromyou”—he circled her wrist—“has the ache in my head seeping away like steam shooting from a kettle. The visions dissipate, as if they were never there, though my gift remains. I gain control. I seize your strength and am stronger for it.” Releasing her, he backed away in a graceless shift so unlike him, his gaze lifting to the branches above their heads. “Do you realize I was practically going mad, begging for an escape from mymind, until your grandfather found me and brought me to you?”
“I know this, Jules. But—”
“No,” he whispered harshly. “You don’t know. There were times you healed me when…when I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t physically release you. Like coercion, a momentary lapse, not allowing you to come back to yourself. I wanted tokeepyou. Have you purge the images running through my mind forever, not just the transitory slice of healing you’d offered. Your grandfather warned me away on his dying breath because heknewI wanted to use your gift to lessen my own. Which makes you incredibly vulnerable, Piper, because it’s whateveryonewants from you. He knew I was equally compelled.” His gaze sliced through her like a hot knife through butter when the emotion propelling it was cold resolve balanced on a razor blade. “And for all the wrong reasons.”
Her breath arrested in her lungs. “The wrong reasons,” she repeated, three hammer blows.The wrong reasons. Wrong meantrightwas not part of the equation. It made their age-old kiss seem contrived, trivial, her feelings before and after an impassioned instant of feminine nonsense or worse yet, misperception. Like a sandcastle washed away by the sea, what she hoped she had with Julian or could have in the future was, in reality, no reality at all.
She had waited years for absolutely nothing.
Reaching blindly, she grasped the bottle, popped the cork as he tried to snatch it from her and took a long drink, the wine scorching a path down her throat. The. Wrong. Reasons. Dropping her brow to her hand, she began to laugh, sending Julian’s hat tumbling from her head, releasing her hair about her face like a funeral shroud.
“Stop it, Piper.” He wrestled away the bottle; it hit the ground with a thunk. “Would you rather I continued letting us get closer when I couldn’t interpret my motives? Confusing my desire for you with my desire to befreefrom this bloody curse? My need for you muddled with my need for yourgift.” He gripped her chin, tilting her head high. When she refused to open her eyes, he gave her a gentle shake, but she only shut them tighter, the suppressed emotion in his quivering fingers flooding her with sorrow. “I feared consuming you. Until there was nothing left.”
Breathless, he released her, a storm-promise breeze sliding in to widen the gulf between them. A gulf she’d thought she could breach if she tried hard enough. If shelovedhim enough.
“I still do,” he said, voice breaking.
She dragged her hair from her face, singed from his touch and his words. Clouds had gathered in anticipation of the approaching downpour, cloaking the day in a leaden stench. Julian rose to his feet, his back to her, palm flattened against the tree trunk as if it held him up. The wind tugged at the dark strands curling over his starched collar. She denied the urge to straighten his twisted waistcoat ties, dust off the blades of grass clinging to his trousers. Those were things a wife might do, a lover perhaps, not someone connected for all thewrong reasons. She closed her mind to his aura, healing herself. Watching him struggle only brought her lower.
For the first time since Julian stumbled from her grandfather’s carriage and into her life, she had absolutely no entitlement.
A strange sensation settled over her as she rose unsteadily to her feet. Strangely, it felt like strength. Breaking the charged silence, she released an admission that created an impenetrable barrier between them: “I wanted you to consume me.”
His shoulders stiffened as the air crackled like the lightning she’d seen in the distance. As she stood there shivering, she set fire to her memories, her hopes, watched them blacken to ash, swept away by the wind. Sound finally intruded over her thundering heartbeat: horses snorting at the approaching storm, and the short rein Julian had tethered them with, grass whipping into a frenzy. A raindrop hit her cheek and rolled down her face, bringing her neatly to the bleak present. “But, of course, this comes as no surprise.”
His head dropped; a punishing breath sounded through his teeth. When he finally turned to her, stark lines of restraint chalked his face. His hair lifted as a violent gust pushed her toward him when she’d decided moments ago never to be pushed in his direction again.
They stared across a grassy plain, agreeing to disagree as hell’s fury raged around them.
Finn woke with a gasp, his heart racing, his body tangled in sheets drenched with sweat. The dream arrived in distorted vignettes, glistening and sharp-edged, slicing his mind as shards of glass would his skin. The woman, her body bent over a book, her hair wild about her head, her eyes…lost to madness, anger, pain. There would be no negotiating with this mislaid soul, should Julian assume there was. She had looked at Finn with hatred and disgust, plunged a knife through his chest in her hallucination and laughed as his blood pooled at her feet.
She’d linked to his feelings for Piper, his love for her. He squeezed his head between his hands. There was more…
“Home,” he murmured on a low hush, the words coming out in accented English.
She had seen something to connect the League to Harbingdon. The village. His mind was an ingress—and a colossal breach in their security. For one panicked moment, Finn considered packing a valise and running, hiding in the rookery he knew as well as the lines on his palm, at least until the threat was over. But he could never leave his family, and Julian would go to the ends of the Earth to track him down.
Because it was quite simple.
Though she’d stepped into his mind and taken, he could fight back and step intohers.
Chapter 8
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
~Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Six days later,Julian lingered by the lodge’s front window, watching a storm gather resources in clouds the color of graphite. The cottage stood at the perimeter of the estate’s vast woodlands—carefully chosen isolation on his part—but the feeling of remoteness, usually soothing, stung this evening. The moon shone in bursts, tossing intermittent streaks across his desk and the spattered Wilton beneath his feet. He had soaked a canvas and the scent of linseed oil married with the metallic tang of paint. Bolstering aromas in his favorite dwelling in all of England, a place of creative solitude and modest expectation. A place he allowed himself to be nothing more than a humble artist, the supernatural and the aristocracy forbidden company.
Why, then, the tangle of emotion?
With a muted sigh, he cocked his hip on the ledge, his hand dropping from the velvet sash. Piper had ruined rainy days for him—in a country with too goddamn many of them—because all he remembered as the storm gathered washer, drenched from head to toe, her gown clinging to her body. In the downpour that had suspended their impromptu picnic, her eyes had flooded green like the bottom of a lake in winter.
Unblinking regard. Challenging.
Her reaction to him, unveiled, raw, fierce, had been a substantial chip to the jaw.
He realized the paradox as he glanced around a room scattered with paint and brushes, remnants of his private life. He hid his secrets when Piper hid little. Her fearlessness exposed his vulnerabilities. Not even his memories of the atrocities experienced in Seven Dials held power to bring him to his knees. Not anymore. Nor those brutal beatings at the hand of his father. They visited him, yes, but in nightmares from which he awakened, choking on air, butawake.