Page 35 of The Rake is Taken
He frowned, his arm tightening around her. “Trust you to do what? That’s never worked well before.”
“Engineer a little magic?”
“Will you still respect me if I admit I’m scared?”
She slid her hand behind his neck and brought his lips to hers. “Love is always dangerous, darling. Don’t be frightened.”
Chapter 11
The plink of a stone striking her bedchamber window pulled Victoria from a restless slumber. Dazed from half-sleep, she wondered at the hollow ache in her chest. In a flash, the look of stark betrayal on Finn’s face returned, an image she’d had no success wiping from her mind, even with the tray upon tray of pastries she’d baked after he stormed from the house. To find that this sophisticated man, admired beyond measure although for wholly superficial reasons, had a heart she could injure surprised her as nothing else this remarkable summer had.
Even with honorable intent, she didn’t like knowing she’d hurt him. Banter, parry, thrust, the teasing game of trading insults and innuendo was all well and good, but throwing a dart that wounded was unacceptable to a woman who urged her staff to release spiders into the wild. A killer of insects or feelings or hope, Victoria Hamilton was not. She was, in truth, not quite the misanthrope she portrayed herself to be.
Not deep in her heart anyway. A place she invited no one.
The second dink sounded, and she slid from the bed, grabbed a dressing gown, and slipped it over her night rail as she crossed the room. Her feet were bare, the floorboards chilled from the draft seeping through the panes, and she shivered as she raised the window high and leaned out, squinting to get a better view.
Of course, she thought, the hollow ache in her chest receding.
Finn stood just below her window, light glinting off the gray streak in his hair, sparking off an expression she couldn’t make out clearly without her spectacles. His shirt was untucked, though properly buttoned, his feet bare as they’d been when he left the house. He looked impossibly tall, handsome, young. While she…
Grasping her dressing gown at the neck, she clenched the material tight, confirming her suitability. Covered, albeit not in the most appropriate manner, but covered. While he looked ethereal, a statuette gilded by moonbeams and mist, his gaze chronicling her in fascinated silence.
Theywerefascinated, she realized with a dull thud of dread.
Both of them.
There wasn’t cause to admit it, oh, that way lay danger, but she felt comprehension radiating from him and guessed he felt it radiating from her. There was precision in the dictum that you didn’t choose who made your heart race, your pulse pound, your skin heat.
Who made you wish for things that could never be.
Breaking the spell, Finn shifted from one foot to the other, tunneled his hands in his trouser pockets and shrugged. As if he’d given himself instructions he wasn’t sure he could follow. After a moment, he exhaled and glanced at her, humility curling his lips if an assessment made with less than perfect vision stood correct. An unpretentious smile. Real. Nothing like the fraudulent efforts he showcased in London, intimate disclosures she was coming to covet in a hazardous-to-her-heart way.
He shrugged again, and she almost made it easier on him by diving into the conversation, a typically feminine reaction to ease the tension. Although his discomfiture was utterly appealing, blast the man, she simply raised a brow and remained silent.This should be good, she thought with a smile she tried valiantly to contain, wishing she had her opera glasses handy.
He caught her faint grin and laughed beneath his breath with her. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. Looking away, he scratched his chin with his shoulder without taking his hands from his pockets. “For my indignant display this evening. And for the kiss earlier today.” His jaw clenched; she could see that clearly in the moonlight. “For thekisses. I let us fall into a pattern I’m comfortable with instead of striving to establish a pattern I’m not. Which is why I’m standing down here instead of up there. I don’t like that you kept the dreams from me, but I accept the reasoning for why you did so. I’m annoyed but…” He kicked at a bramble by his feet with a muttered curse that drifted to her. “I’ll get over it.”
She slid to her knees, balancing her elbows on the dew-moist ledge. She needed a hushed moment to gather her composure. Her father had never apologized to her mother, to her. Not once. When there were many times he should have. “I’m sorry for keeping the dreams from you,” she returned when her voice was steady.ButI’m not sorry about the kisses.
I will never be sorry about the kisses.
His gaze snagged hers, and she squinted, trying to record his expression. She expected mockery, but he looked frightfully sincere standing there, staring up at her. “Yes, I know.” He tugged a hand from his pocket and shoved it through hair already spiked about his head. “That’s why I’ll get over it. Friends often muddle it up, don’t they? Like family.”
“I suppose they do,” she whispered for her ears alone. Then, louder, a safe topic, “This couldn’t have waited until breakfast? I made enough blueberry pastries for everyone on the estate and the village. Penitence brings out the enthusiastic baker in me.”
He smiled, another of the authentic ones she was coming to cherish. “I’m still feeling the effects of a whiskey and advice session with Humphrey, liquid courage as it were. Also, I’m leaving for London at daybreak, off to enlist the Duke of Ashcroft’s aid as he has endless contacts in Town.” He paused, cleared his throat, snaked that hand back in his pocket. “I didn’t want to leave without telling you. Apologizing, that is. Until I return, you’ll be fine here with Piper, busy fulfilling Julian’s grand plan to record your every interaction in the chronology.” Seeming to deliberate, he then said in a gentle voice, “There’s a perfectly calm but spirited mare waiting for you at the stable. Harmony. It’s time to return to doing the things you love, Tori darling. If I may be so presumptuous, I think your brother would want that for you.”
Victoria swallowed past the sting of tears, the thought of this complicated man riding down the graveled drive and away from her more painful a thrust than she had any right to feel. A thrust proving how deeply she’d waded into a turbulent sea. On impulse, she leaned further out the window, an errant gust whipping her hair against her cheeks. The horizon was streaking crimson and gold as sunrise closed in upon them. “You’re going to try to find her. I understand this, but I haven’t told you all I dreamed.”
Finn glanced at the sky, the first hint of impatience stiffening his shoulders. “Humphrey will be right on my heels. Tell him everything before he leaves. Once I clear your shielding boundary, I’ll read his mind and know everything he knows. Including how far behind me he is.” He yawned into his fist. “It isn’t even a fair chase.”
She shrugged, puzzled. “Why not wait for him then?”
“Because,” he said, the word shooting from his mouth with an edge that could slice leather. “Julian’s high-handed management vexes, as does Humphrey’s, so I’m childishly giving them the slip. Jule can’t leave Harbingdon with Piper soon to deliver. He won’t, that is. Almost any husband in the ton would gladly accept a reason to escape the confines of an expectant wife’s clutches, but you’ve seen them. He can’t stand to be away from her. So, he’ll send Humphrey trotting after me while I wait in sophomoric anticipation.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s a brotherly game we play. Let us have our fun.”