Page 32 of The Rake is Taken

“Tori,” he whispered, his heart breaking all over again, knowing she’d taken his nickname and claimed it as her own.Fuck, this friendship business was killing him.

She brushed her wrist across her brow, trying to contain the wisps of hair that had escaped her chignon and clung to her moist skin when she only succeeded in sending a streak of flour across her cheek—adding to the one on the tip of her nose. His gazed lowered to her breasts, straining against the bleached apron she’d slipped over her dressing gown as she coaxed the dough into submission. Lowered again, all the way down, his body heating to the tips of his toes to see hers peeking from beneath fluttering silk, wiggling in time to her movements. Lovely ankles he would give a year of his life to press his lips against as he worked his way north, not stopping until she begged, and he meantbegged, him to. Loving this idea, his cock sprang to life, a painful press against his trouser close.

A bit of boredom.

That’s what he’d told Julian, and he needed to guarantee the sentiment stayed true. It usually was. But his fierce desire for this woman wasn’t easily defeated. There was a way to have his mind overcome his longing, he realized. He had only to think about the secrets she—Tori—had been keeping from him for fury to deflate his erection like a needle stabbed into a balloon.

“Who is she?” he asked, pleased his voice sounded wrathful rather than wistful because his mind wasn’t quite sure which path to take.

Victoria startled, the dough in her hand flopping to the wooden block and sending a cloud of flour into the air. She coughed, dragging her hand over her chin, leaving another tantalizing trail on her skin as her eyes made a lingering sweep from his tousled hair to his partially exposed chest. In his haste, he hadn’t completed buttoning his shirt, and it hung open, the wrinkled ends batting his hips. Her gaze caught on his scar—he just knew that’s what she was looking at—before skipping away. “I had trouble sleeping and baking…it, I…it calms me.”

He stepped into the room, the scent of vanilla and butter rolling over him like a wave. So this is why she always smelled like biscuits. Halting at the chopping block, he mocked his spineless character. It didn’t matter if he was vexed as all hell, knew her to be a swindler, a charlatan, he still wanted to shove her against the wall and lick flour from her skin. Wrap her legs around his waist and get as close as he possibly could while standing up. He also wanted to dash from the room and never see her again. Each an avenue of escape. “Who is she?” Gripping the block, he leaned in until he could make out the flecks of green in her eyes, golden brown in the hushed gaslight. A mix of colors magnificent enough to adorn one of Julian’s canvases. “The woman in the dreams. Yours and now mine.”

Her chest rose on a stunned breath. “I didn’t lie.”

“You didn’t tell, either,” he said between clenched teeth. His cheeks heated, and he knew everything was spilling like ink across his face while she stood there, pressing her knuckles into the dough and looking good enough to eat. Like her blasted pastries. “When you knew it affected me quite personally. Knew for months, I’m guessing, while you let me rescue you from one debacle after another, as I tried to gain insight into my dreams about you. Mine brought me to you when yours pushed us away.”

“That’s not—”

“Who, Tori?”

Victoria blinked at his harsh tone, her lashes staying low to hide the changes her eyes would make, coloring to her mood. Sadly, he’d never look at her again and think of her as anything but Tori, a nickname he’d created on a whim. Not when she’d repeated it to herself in that soft, dreamy voice.

Tori worked quite well with Blue, should it have come to that.

“I’ll wait another minute, then I’m coming around this battered slab of wood, and you may not like the result. We haven’t tested what happens when I touch you and very diligently try to steal your thoughts. I’m willing to take them by force if I have to. I’ve scrambled minds when I’ve pressed too hard, left people in a state for days, and I would hate for that to happen to you. But as I see it, how I, in truth, saw it this evening, your dreams are rightfullymine.”

Her head lifted, her gaze scalding him where it landed—belly, chest, shoulders—before settling on his face. Hers was dusted with flour and flushed with remorse. “I didn’t know how to tell you. What to tell you. This dream interpretation business is more involved than a simple parlor trick where I make someone forget a foolish thing I’ve done behind a potted fern. I’m still feeling my way here, whether I’m given leave for that or not.”

“Who is she?” The whisper was low and furious. One second. He was one second away from demanding she release his life to him, demanding she kiss him as she’d done in the library. As if it were the first of her life, the only that had ever mattered to either of them.

Get the information and be done with her, push her away, stay safe.

He held up a finger. “One.” Another. “Two.”

“Your sister! I think she’s your sister!”

The kitchen fell deadly quiet, apart from the ragged breath he took and the clipped one she released. “I don’t have a sister. I have no one from the past.”

“Did you see her eyes, Finn? And how young she was? There could be no one else in the world with eyes exactly like yours so close to our age who is haunting our dreams.”

“I don’t have a sister,” he repeated in a gruff voice, the words sounding like they’d been rendered on the edge of a blade. His heartbeat gained speed, cracking against his ribs until he feared pitching to a lifeless heap at her feet. There was no sister. There was nothing before Seven Dials. Before Julian and Humphrey. Piper. Simon. Ashcroft. Harbingdon. And if he’d once recalled a girl reaching for him as tears streamed from eyes exactly like his, he couldn’t endure admitting it.

“I’ll tell you everything,” she whispered hoarsely. “I’ve seen enough, perhaps, to find her. She has a slight accent. French? Light hair—and those eyes. And she’s in London. This I have witnessed. This I know.”

Finn stumbled back, out of reach. If Victoria touched him, he would go up in flames. Turn to ash and blow away in the breeze, an eloquent end to the Blue Bastard.

Sister.

A headache had started to thump, and he pressed his hand to his brow in agony. Victoria’s answering look of pity shot a crimson haze across his vision.

Her fingers grasped his sleeve as he stormed past, out the servant’s door, and into the walled side garden. The grass was damp and chilly beneath his bare feet, a crescent moon casting muffled light and shadow across his path—and before he had time to formulate a plan he was running. Past the clump of unpruned rose bushes, past the gardener’s cottage, the conservatory, the potter’s shed, the lake. Running until his lungs burned and his skin stung, until sweat coated his face and trickled into his eyes, through fields and forest he’d traversed as a young man, every nook and valley as familiar to him as the lines on his palm.

He ran until he got far enough away from Victoria Hamilton for his gift to return in full force, bringing with it the torment of his life, hearing too much.

When his legs finally gave out, he locked his hands on his knees, hung his head, and gulped in sputtered breaths, stunned to find he’d made it to the Stone Fortress, the dwelling receiving its name when the Duke of Ashcroft lived there when he first joined the League, the lone structure on the estate impervious to fire.

The sound of the front door opening didn’t shock Finn.