Page 8 of The Rake is Taken
She sighed and gave her skirt a yank, two times before releasing it from his dogged boot heel. “I have what is required: a pulse.” Wading into his gaze, she prepared for the impact. “Tell me why you’ve engineered our association, and I’ll accept the kind invitation to your family’s country manor without dispute.”
“You speak like an instructor I had at Rugby. An unforgiving crank.” He flexed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Makes me fear for a ruler striking my knuckles.”
She leaped to her feet, finished with his blasted nonchalance, his cavalier teasing. If he was going to tell her nothing, then to hell with him! And to hell with his blasted summons.
Mirroring her, he was up in an instant, his face, his eyes, ablaze. “I’ll throw this in the hearth”—he crushed the envelope in his fist—“crisp it to a forgotten memory if your answer to the next question is ‘no’.Dreams. Have you had them? Unusual, fantastic. If you have, I don’t need to elucidate. You’ll know.”
Startled, she crossed to an escritoire desk shoved in a corner, as if work were a neglected duty. But evidence of effort lay in the open ledgers, books with pages bent to call the reader back to the location, the cloying odor of ink splashed across aged parchment. “I’ve used my parlor trick twice to make Baron Rossby delay our wedding. I told myself his submission was due to his desire to make me comfortable if not happy, not the pressure I was exerting on his wrist. Pressure that made him lose himself just long enough for me to slip from reach. Confuse him about the date we’d planned, the details of our arrangement. Etcetera.” She glanced over her shoulder to find Finn standing in the same spot, watching her, his gaze intent, his famed smile absent.
The pronouncement was finalized right there: he was nothing like the man he presented to the ton.
The surety of the judgment chilled her to her toes.
She turned back to the desk, her gaze falling to a wooden box the size of her palm buried amidst the ledgers. It was lovely, geometric designs circling an escutcheon on the front. Bringing it close to her face—the only way she could read the inlaid script without her spectacles—she immediately located the hinge on the back and the lid popped open. She frowned. Nothing inside.
A floorboard squeaked as he stepped closer. “How did you…?”
“Puzzles are my passion,” she answered. “I have a collection of boxes with secret compartments. One almost identical to this.” She blinked, trying to decipher the text. “Is this Russian?”
He grimaced and streaked his hand through his hair. “My time at Oxford, before the expulsion, revealed a marginal gift for languages. French, in particular. But I also speak a little German, Russian, and Italian.”
“Hmm….” She turned to him, propping her bottom on the desk. Better to face this challenge head-on. Victoria Hamilton was no coward. “Intelligence isn’t the first trait you disclose. I can see why. Attractiveness is a reliable prop and presents no compulsion to dig deeper.” She tilted her head, felt the internal shift as she placed Finn Alexander in the basement of her brain, where she kept puzzles, people, books she was interested in exploring further.
“It’s a skill, posing as someone else. A skill I’ve worked hard to master. Not inborn, I assure you. Although it’s made easy when you’re surrounded by people lacking in self-awareness.”
Fascinatingwas all she could think.
His jaw clenched, a muscle in his cheek jumping. “Let’s get something straight, my lady. I’m not one of your damned puzzles.”
She flipped the puzzle box lid open and shut, open and shut, before returning her gaze to him. “So, I’m to travel to Oxfordshire to summer holiday with a group whose acquaintance I have not previously made, without a rationale behind the invitation presented to me? Sounds delightful.” She secured the box with a snap. “I think not.”
He stabbed the crumpled envelope against his thigh, and she tried, valiantly, to evade tracking the move. Her heartbeat tripped against her better judgment. “You didn’t answer my question. Therationale, as it were. Dreams. Have you had any?”
She knew the moment her face betrayed her—as his betrayed him.
Dreams, yes.Inexplicable, vivid, though none she was willing to share.
Not yet.
The flash of dismay that twisted his features had her sinking against the desk. He was across the room before she caught her breath, the invitation arriving in the hearth with a shockingly violent lob. It sizzled and popped, catching fire. The scent of burned vellum circled them as the muted tick of a clock, and Agnes’s periodic sniffles rode the silence.
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” he whispered, “but at Harbingdon, being there will make everything clear at—”
A soft thump and a giggle behind the closed door to his bedchamber arrested his explanation. He had the good grace, for an all-too-brief second, to look nonplussed. At the very least, his anger trickled out like water from a splintered pail as discomfiture trickled in.
So, he had just crawled from bed, the cad.
Victoria flipped the puzzle box between her hands, this embarrassing insight entirely what she deserved after showing up on the doorstep of a man who’d purportedly leaped from a second-story window to escape a marquess intent on doing him bodily harm for bedding his mistress. Who did he have in there, she wondered with the faintest throb of what she feared was envy.
The clock ticked off a minute, two. She found if she remained silent during a standoff, calm struck worse than words, and her opponent stumbled into a senseless explanation that typically led to her winning the argument.
Alas, there was nothing typical about Finn Alexander.
Halting before her, he took the box and placed it on the desk, his body brushing hers as he shifted. He radiated heat and smelled,ah…her nose twitched. Sandalwood and something dark, like chocolate but not quite. A hint of brandy. And ginger. His exhalations a gentle, consistent caress against her cheek, he held her hand for a lingering moment, his thumb sweeping the row of pearl buttons at her wrist. “It’s not like I haven’t seen you in a compromising position. Or three. Ruined a new coat with the spill I created so you weren’t discovered behind that pillar, lips locked to Selby’s.” He halted over a pearl, and she had the panicked notion he was considering popping it free, seeking bare skin. “I wonder, does your intended know about your penchant for kissing strange men? Or the unhappiness that forces you into such perilous positions?”
She stilled to nothing but breath as he flipped her hand over and continued the caress, this time to her palm, a part of her body she’d had no comprehension of until this moment. Even though kidskin, she burned, awareness fluttering, shooting jolts down her arm and from her fingertips like a moonbeam.
“Victoria,” he said very softly and shook his head, sending that tousled hair of his tumbling across his brow. “Victorias don’t cause unbelievable amounts of trouble and glare at you like a boxer stepping in the ring. Tori has a nice hum to it. Toris are, conversely, quick-witted, surrounded by mayhem, and utterly enigmatic. A more interesting, if impudent, set. My choice, as it were.”