Page 13 of The Rake is Taken

Finn choked as gin shot down his windpipe. “What?No.” He dropped to the chair opposite Julian and thumped his chest, coughing. “I’m dreaming…about her, Jule.”

Julian uncoiled from his slouch, his focus razor-sharp, Finn’s foolishness of late blessedly forgotten. “Come again?”

“They started just after Freddie died. Dreams like those I had when Piper was in danger, every night, over and over and over. In living, breathing color.” He let his head fall back, his gaze going to a streak of yellow paint on the ceiling he wondered how had ended up there. “Surrounded not by danger but lack of knowledge. No, no…” He closed his eyes, pulling the visions to the forefront of his mind. Victoria Hamilton in blinding brilliance, a nightly assault on his senses. “Lack of awareness. Solitude, this vast expanse of chilling solitude. Someone tied to me in a way I can’t deny,won’tdeny, because I’m not losing another person. They weren’t nightmares, like those with Piper and Sidonie years ago. These were almost calming, visions arriving just before you wake but gone by your first stretch. But they were relentless. A challenge, an appeal within them. So, I searched London high and low until I found her.”

He’d been drawn to her long before he saw her across the ballroom that first night, in a dazzling lavender concoction that sent the room into sluggish rotations as dreams and reality collided. A connection existed between them—and not a trivial one. Imprinted like lines on his palm. Although he had no idea why. “I’ve been following her for weeks, and I’m telling you, she’s trouble. Piper, and then some. Restless and unhappy.” Desperately lonely, if he had his guess.

“A troublesome package but not a lover. Interesting. For you, anyway.”

“She doesn’t need a lover, she needs a husband,” he growled, though his belly tightened as he imagined Baron Rossby touching her. Any man touching her. And he’d watched quite a few try. When no good could come from feeling possessive about a woman you could never possess. “I don’t need the complication,” he thought he should add in the event Julian was getting romantic ideas, as his intense love for Piper sometimes made him do. Complications, love specifically, made one vulnerable, and Finn wasn’t up to the battle. He had enough people to worry about to last a lifetime.

Besides, he was a bastard, she a lady. End of story.

“You think you can trust her?” Julian exhaled sharply, his curse riding the air. “I don’t have to tell you the complete and utter fear I felt months back, finding someone on the estate, someone who had a gift that reasonably brought them here, who wasn’t our friend. Someone with incredibly brutal aspirations, to obtain the chronology despite any cost. Any harm.” He tipped his glass high, his throat working as he swallowed. “He got close to Lucien, Finn. Near myson. I could have killed the man a hundred times over, although I only had to do it once.”

“You can trust her, Jule.” He tapped his tumbler against his thigh. “As well as you can trust me.”

“You say this because you’ve invited her into your life, involved yourself in hers.” Julian tapped his tumbler on the desk. Three hard pops while he ruminated. “Her gift, as I assume she has one?”

This was where Finn paused, trepidation, the same he’d felt since the debacle on the docks, seizing him. He was no good to anyone if he let fear manage him…but the enormity of Victoria’s gift frightened him. Their enemies often had incredible abilities, a talent to see into the future and the past, their desire to use their gifts for nefarious means the difference. The League could never slumber, never rest, never disregard. “She seems able to erase memories. Short-term, brief, I’m not sure how far back it goes—minutes, hours, days—but erasure just the same. When she touched me, I took a mental stumble before I could right myself. I’ve never felt the like.”

Julian slid his hands across the desk, scattering ledgers and sketch pads, paintbrushes and ink wells. “Something odd occurred when I entered the house after talking to you on the lawn. I touched the doorknob and saw nothing, Finn. Which has not happened to me ever. Notoncein my life have I touched an object and not seen images of a person who touched it before.” He drew a shaky breath, his fingers flexing into fists. “Is that because of this girl?”

Finn stared into his tumbler, wishing like hell more gin would magically appear. Why couldn’t any of them havethatgift? “I can’t read her. Nothing. When she’s around me, my ability to grasp her thoughts snuffs out like a flame in the wind. And it mutes what I receive from others. Sometimes more than mutes. She shuts me down.”

“A blocker,” Julian murmured in wonder.

Finn gave his empty tumbler another wistful glance. “Blocker?”

“Piper’s grandfather detailed it in the chronology, long passages from a German contact we have yet to translate. He believed a blocker cloaked supernatural ability. Lessened or halted outright. Dulling the shine, he called it. A gift he considered more powerful than Piper’s. There was believed to be another with the ability two hundred years ago. In Berlin, as I recall, hence the German texts. But nothing since.”

Finn closed his eyes, a headache ripping through his temples.More powerful than the healer. Of course. After they’d barely been able to safeguard Piper when their enemies found out about her. Should their enemies discover someone with the ability to block a psychic gift, protecting that person would pose an impossible challenge.

Unbearable, Finn thought as his heart dropped to his knees.

“Her dreams?” Julian asked.

Finn squeezed the bridge of his nose, shook his head. I don’t know.

“Will she work with you? With Piper? To test her ability, then cross-reference against what’s written in the chronology? You can translate the text.” Julian yanked a scrap of foolscap from beneath a ledger and starting scribbling notes across the page. “Does she need to touch someone to curb their gift or only be near them? Does one’s ability simply diminish or completely fade? How far away from you is she before you’re able to read minds again?”

“You think I know the answers to any of these questions?”

“We’ll have to increase security at the gates, the main house, the perimeter. Employ the Duke’s mercenaries in full force. You’ll have to make Lady Hamilton understand why she can’t go anywhere on this estate without someone with her. Not until Ashcroft and I have a chance to put a plan in place. It could be years, but at some point, she’ll need protection. At some point, theywillfind out about her.”

“She doesn’t trust me,” he whispered, loathe to imagine protecting her when the mere thought of losing someone else was intolerable.

Julian issued a brittle, humorless laugh. “With your shenanigans of late, would you?”

Finn spun the tumbler in his hands, shooting crystal prisms across the paint-stained Aubusson rug. He could tell Julian he was bored with the women, the drinking, the gambling. His pointless existence. By his own hand, he’d reduced himself to being an aimless commodity. “Do you know I’ve never had an honest relationship with a woman? One undertaken without knowingexactlywhat she’s thinking? Fairly easy to manage expectations when there are no surprises.” His encounters felt forged, crafted by knowledge he shouldn’t have, didn’t want, couldn’t prevent from slipping through the cracks of his mind.

Now, he felt out of sorts because he’d met a woman he couldn’t read as cleanly as the copy ofThe Mystery of Edwin Droodshoved in his portmanteau. For once, he’d been assigned a level playing field. Finn Alexander had no advantage in this game.

“Maybe she can help you experience a normal relationship. But be warned, you often have to give up one way of life for the chance at another. I speak from experience.”

“Normal,” Finn murmured, the word as foreign as the texts he translated.

Julian sighed. “Without reading her mind, Finn.”