Page 30 of The Rake is Taken

She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want him to know his gift had affected her. Maybe because thisonething—that he couldn’t read her mind—set her apart from the parade of women in his life. Which was foolish pride talking when she wasn’t a woman in his life at all. Unless two errant kisses placed her there. “I haven’t told him everything,” she admitted. About the dreams, about her gift. That she was starting to feel herself obstructing mystical lines of communication, turning down the glow on mental gaslamps all over the estate.

Because she didn’t trust him. Or rather, she didn’t trustherself.

She’d never responded to a kiss with everything in her.

Falling in love with the Blue Bastard would be an unadulterated disaster. Worse than marriage to a man she not only didn’t love but was repulsed by. At leastthatsituation she had control over. When she had control over little else.

“Maybe sharing isn’t the best route, at least at first. I told Julian absolutely everything, and it took me years to land him. Our love story could aptly be titled ‘Chasing the Viscount’.”

Victoria gathered a pine needle and tied it into a tidy knot. “You misunderstand. I don’t want to land anyone. He has his pick of women, and I’m betrothed to—”

“The Grape, yes, I know.”

“It’s a financial obligation.” Victoria felt the need to stress this when most marriages in the ton were based on a business arrangement, not love. But Lord and Lady Beauchamp had a legendary connection, if the gossip was factual, which after seeing them together, she wholeheartedly believed it was. “I was baiting Mr. Alexander, and he accepted the challenge. What you witnessed is the unfortunate result. Both of us, I’m abashed to admit, are known for tossing out kisses like we would dirty bathwater. It’s an insignificant occurrence, I promise you. One and done.”

“You being at Harbingdon is momentous. There’s no need for a kiss to make it more so.”

“I’m only here so Finn can interpret the dreams. And now, so Lord Beauchamp can pick my brain like a lock.”

“The dreams. Is this what you’re keeping from Finn?”

Victoria came up on her elbow, dusting at the dirt clinging to her bodice. She yanked a piece of straw from her hair and sighed. If Aggie should come upon them rolling around in the grass like children…

She turned her head to hide her smile. Piper was a radical influence when Victoria needed no incentive to misbehave. However, she felt a heartfelt zing of affection that surely meant she’d found a friend. “I’m going to tell him,” she promised. Piper likely thought she’d kept quiet to protect herself when the dreams were going to change Finn’s life, not hers. It felt like protectinghimto keep them to herself. Plus, she was a little worried about his reaction.

“Perhaps you should wait until tomorrow,” Piper said with a yawn.

Victoria glanced anxiously over her shoulder, wondering where in the dickens that field cart might be. She couldn’t very well carry the lady home.

“Time enough to let your lips cool off, that is.”

Victoria clapped her hand over her mouth with a hoot of pure delight. “You are unlike any viscountess I’ve ever encountered.”

“I’m recreating the role one uncouth deed at a time. For the betterment of society, of course.” Piper clutched her belly and groaned softly. “He or she is kicking in agreement. Oh, my. Would you like to feel?”

Victoria stilled, joy and dread racing through her. “Oh, well, I don’t know…”

Piper glanced at her from the corner of her eye. A mischievous peek through long lashes that let Victoria know exactly how Julian had come to be wrapped around his wife’s pinkie. “It’s quite beyond the pale. Outside the bounds. Vulgar. Isn’t that how an old crone sitting in a Mayfair townhouse would describe it right this very minute? Who do you want to side with, Victoria, that withered shrew or the eccentric daughter of an esteemed American actress and a debauched viscount?”

“When you put it that way,” Victoria murmured and grazed the back of her hand across Piper’s stomach, as cautiously as she’d touched the butterfly that had landed on her arm earlier. During the charged instant when she’d felt Finn’s focus seize her as surely as his lips had. When she’d begun to sense him tap, tap, tapping on the entrance to her mind.

“Here,” Piper said, and repositioned Victoria’s hand.

The kick against her palm was harder than she imagined it could be, and she sucked in a breath, releasing it with a marveling sigh. “My, how remarkable.”

“Isn’t it? Lucien was the calmest thing, a little gentleman like his father, so this baby’s vigor has been a surprise. A girl I’m guessing, the tiny imp. I sound proud, don’t I? Which proves why I should live very far from the decorous inhabitants of London, that withered shrew included.”

“A tiny imp like her mother,” Victoria concurred and shyly removed her hand. She’d never had a friend to discuss female things with. No sister, and a rather taciturn mother. No family to speak of in any way that counted aside from Aggie and her brother, and Charles was gone. This intimacy, while delightful, was also distressing, sending a pulse of longing through her.

One that made her feel lonelier than she had in ages.

A shout from the house sounded, dispatching a flock of starlings in the alder tree above them. Piper wrestled to a sit with an oath no respectable woman would ever utter. “That’s Humphrey’s bellow. We’d better go, or he’ll come looking for us. Should he find me down in the dirt in my delicate condition, he won’t be happy. You think Julian is protective, my word, is that man dictatorial. We’re like his fledglings, everyone on the estate. He needs his own family to worry about, but that is a project for another day.”

Victoria scrambled to her feet and held her hand out to assist Piper, again wondering where that field cart might be. But they got the job done without issue, the two of them in minutes headed back with the sun sliding low and throwing subdued shadows across their path. There was a decided chill in the air as they lost the light, and Victoria shivered. She’d left her shawl and her spectacles in the library—and she might never be able to return to that room, a space Finn had taken over with his language books and his ledgers and his kisses.

As they started up the pebbled path leading to the front door, Piper halted her with a light yank on Victoria’s wrist. Again, a sense of peace overtook her, and she could see why someone would long to have Piper work her magic and make the chaos slip away. The understanding sent a chilling pulse of recognition through Victoria. Someone could also, she was beginning to see, long to haveherblock their gift. Or block another’s gift—with very despicable intent.

Victoria turned to find the viscountess gazing at her with an expression solemn enough to have her taking an apprehensive step back. “What you said earlier, about Finn, isn’t quite true. He has his pick of women if you believe the broadsheets. And the gossip.” She laughed softly, her eyes glowing the color of the grass beneath their feet. “Has his pick because he’s near the loveliest man in England. But I know him better than anyone, or I used to before he grew up and starting hiding things from me, and those women he has his pick of are for one night.” She shrugged a slim shoulder beneath soiled, wrinkled silk. “Men can’t always resist the tempting offers thrown their way. But he doesn’t want that. Finn wants someone for a lifetime. Wants a love to last a lifetime because that’s what he’s seen his brother obtain happily with me. Someone to match him in intelligence and wit and kindness, someone to deal with his temper because he has one though he hides it well. Someone to help navigate the mystical world he’s been unjustly forced into, a world he paid a horrific price as a child to enter.”