Page 4 of The Rake is Taken
“Quite right,” he agreed and dug through the stack. The baron was a toad with alleged tendencies one did not discuss in polite company. Not at all a good match for this gorgeous hellion.
Finn considered asking for more detail about this investigation as he replaced the letters and circled the desk, dropping to his haunches to loot the drawers. He had no compunction, absolutely none, about robbing the man hosting this tedious soiree blind. Much of his moral fiber had been beaten out with fists, sticks, and the blunt end of a pistol before Julian and Humphrey saved him when he was little more than a five-stone lad. They’d gotten there too late to polish everyrough surface. Rugby, and the later years at Oxford, hadn’tquitekilled the filching, wrathful ruffian inside him.
A foreign emotion, one he couldn’t for the life of him place, crowded him as he glanced up to find Victoria Hamilton tangling with the baron’s files, tongue peeking between her lips, her focus one of complete and utter resolve. He’d witnessed a disturbing episode with her father at the Marshton ball two months prior and assumed the knife pressed to her back was paternally placed.
Familial weapons were, after all, the trickiest to disengage.
“There’s nothing here but promissory notes. Letters of debt.” She tossed a scrap of foolscap to the desk with an oath he was surprised she knew. “Threats from creditors. Similar to my father’s correspondence because, yes, I searched those as well. Samuelson introduced my father to Rossby, put the idea in his head for the marriage, I suspect. I don’t know what they hold over each other, but I’d hoped to find something. A way to negotiate myself out of an unwelcome entanglement. Provide another solution, gain an element of control when I have none. If it’s a liability, who is it owed to? And how much? I’m desperate, as you can see. Or rather, my father had placed his desperation on my shoulders.” She sighed and blew a wisp of hair from her cheek. “Why I’m telling a virtual stranger this, I can’t say. Perhaps I’m going the way of my great Aunt Hermione, who began her journey to Bedlam by talking to herself.”
“Samuelson’s up to his neck at the gaming hell, hence my invitation this evening. Keep your enemies close, as the saying goes. As if a glass of champagne and a puff pastry will keep me from his doorstep if I need to be there.”
Interest, the first she’d ever directed his way, coated him like a ray of sunshine, the pleasure he felt proving he was an idiot. “So you do own it? The Blue Moon. The rumors—”
“A gift from my brother, Julian Alexander, Viscount Beauchamp. The rumors”—he dipped his head, hair sliding over his eyes and hiding anything he might want to conceal as his betting face, unbelievably, was not impenetrable—“I likely earned by honest means.”
Curiosity raced across Lady Hamilton’s delicate features as she recorded the emotions he couldn’t control crossing his, her hands squeezing the life from the sheet of parchment she held. In the end, she let it go, curiosity and parchment, society miss conquering sticky-fingered termagant. Finn felt a smile crack the solid set of his cheeks, a rare occurrence these days. Disconcerted, he took a breath that was all her, exotic but agreeable, a fragrance to fall into, when every verbena-scented bosom in the ballroom pushed one away. “Maybe you’re wasting your time looking for a reason for the proposal. Maybe the baron simply wantsyou.”
“Oh, he does want me.” She hesitated, her cheeks losing color in sluggish degrees. “My brother’s gone. Almost ten months. I’m the only remaining asset not milked to the bone, and without a financially rewarding marriage, my father will be in debtors’ prison before year’s end. Or so he tells me. Heavens, what would some passionate fumbling in the dark add tothatequation?” She exhaled on a gust, her chest rising and falling, and he couldn’t help but track the movement.
Fumbling in the dark, indeed.
“Rash and reckless female. Unappreciative, puerile. I can read your thoughts,” she said, slightly breathless as she uttered it at the close of the next exhalation.
But I can’t read yours,he marveled with astonishment and not a little apprehension.
She palmed the desk, leaning down until he noted a tiny freckle on her cheek, as tempting a topping as a cherry on a cupcake. The urge to rest his thumb there, draw her close and roll the dice, was palpable.
The fierce shot of yearning was unexpected. Unwanted, truthfully. Her eyes, he noted at this distance, because he couldn’tnot, weren’t brown at all but a deep, deep green. The color of lake bottoms and forest floors, nothing spring-like or effervescent.
Like his, nothing easy to forget.
“I’ve been thinking,” she whispered after a charged pause.
From his position crouching on the floor, he gazed up at her, keeping his smile in place because it’s what Finn Alexander did,but he could only think,please don’t.
“You were standing by the drink cart at Braswell’s dinner party when the glasses went down like a pyrotechnist’s display. Affording me a handy escape from unwelcome mischief.” She deflected, brushing at her own bit of sleeve-lint. “Strange that. Although itwasentertaining to watch the Countess fling herself at you to avoid the shards.”
Finn paused, hand buried in the baron’s erotic curiosity drawer, if the contents—a garter with a dangling rosette, a scrap of pink lace, one aromatic stocking, and a scandalous daguerreotype, Finn turned it upright, of an actress currently housed at the Adelphi—were any indication. Two things occurred to him in rushed succession.
One, Victoria Hamiltonhadnoticed him—although the accompanying dart of gratification had him shoving to his feet in exasperation with himself over theneed.
Two, he was out of practice. At talking. To women. Using his brain, that is. He had loads of experience with conversations governed entirely by his cock.
Finn scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck, emotion simmering beneath the surface. Desire was misplaced in this godforsaken townhouse in a soot-soaked city he had no wish to inhabit. And he didn’t believe in premonition. Though he’d never, notonce, dreamed of anyone unconnected to the League. Anyone who wasn’t, at some point, in danger.
He hated mysteries, was not a problem-solver.
He likedfacts. Handed to him via nefarious means. Like reading minds.
His weeks of surveillance had taught him one thing: Victoria Hamilton was a nuisance. Truthfully, this whole caper wasbollocks. But as much as he longed to, he couldn’t remove himself. Not when he was dreaming about her.Bloody hell.He braced his hands on the desk, completely out of sorts, a headache beginning to pulse in his temples.
“Welcome to the party.”
He glanced up to find her crimping her plump, darker-than-rose lips to contain what could only be a smile. He straightened to his full height, usually a lucrative intimation tactic, questioning what she found so amusing. “What?”
She lifted a slim shoulder beneath ice-blue silk. “This is the first time I’ve seen you look like anything aside from frosting set to top a cake.”
He tossed the baron’s garter to the floor and slid his hands along the desk until they rested next to hers. In an inspired show of courage, she issued a measured blink behind spectacle glass but didn’t move so much as a pinkie. A gust blew through the open window, sending the scent of coal ash between them and a strand of hair from her limp chignon against his cheek. Their gazes locked as muted gaslight buffed the tips of her hair amber and gold, a kaleidoscope coloring the potent awareness claiming his mind, his body.