The Duke is Wicked (League of Lords #3) - Tracy Sumner Page 0,9

who’d accompanied the duke earlier in the day trailing just behind, hovering in the doorway. Delaney rose and stepped aside as the group put a plan they’d apparently discussed on the carriage ride over into motion.

“He’s had a sleeping tonic,” she murmured as the blaze in the hearth inexplicably dulled to ash. “And a poultice I researched as being beneficial for bee stings. He has a nasty rash on his neck and chest, and there was some vomiting initially. I replaced fluids as best I could. He wouldn’t let me summon his doctor.”

“Simon.” Finn gestured to the weapons. The young man crossed the room, slipped the knife and pistol beneath his coat in an impossibly elegant transfer. There one moment, gone the next.

Victoria drew a velvet satchel the color of a bluebell from her reticule and shook a small, glittering gem into her hand. Moving close to the bed, she placed it in the duke’s palm and wrapped his long, slim fingers around it. His fist clenched, his arm shifting, shooting vibrant rose prisms across the floor and ceiling.

Closing her eyes, Delaney sketched a mental picture, then entered her attic to thumb through the occult digest. What they called the chronology. She searched for fluorite. Stone. Page 683. Soul Catcher. Thought to alleviate the power of a mystical gift. A newer notation, the ink still dark: especially powerful for a firestarter. When she looked back to the bed, she found Finn Alexander’s brilliantly famous gaze fixed on her, his expression thunderstruck, as if they’d shared every line of text she’d read.

“How many fires?” he asked and placed his hand on the duke’s brow. His wife gasped at the question, like he’d gone entirely off-script by allowing a stranger into the discussion, into their world.

Delaney swallowed and steadied herself on the escritoire, the beveled edge biting into her skin. “Just the one.” She nodded to the burnt counterpane. “And the hearth, I suppose, as I didn’t have a servant set it.” She stepped forward, feeling a sense of distress from an undefined source. “You can’t move him. His breathing is shallow, his respiration weak. He needs to regain his strength.”

Finn, Victoria and Simon looked to each other, then to her. They were a team, a unit, a family. With a melancholy pang, she wished for her brother, who was off carousing, proving with inspired vigor that he was, indeed, part of the Terrible Two.

“He’s safe here,” she added, because he was.

Until she was forced to tell her blackmailer everything she knew to save herself.

Simon’s gaze touched her before he looked away. “She kissed him in front of the whole group of chattering ninnies. On the lips. Everyone in the city knows by now.”

Victoria covered her cough with her fist while Finn stared, his frown growing, doing absolutely nothing to ruin his raw beauty.

Delaney shrugged and backed into the shadows, relinquishing care of the duke to his friends. As far as scandalous consequences over what had happened in Hyde Park earlier today…

She wasn’t English. She didn’t care about titles. Didn’t care about Finn Alexander being a late viscount’s by-blow, and for that matter, the boy, Simon, being one, too. Didn’t care about having the best modiste or being invited to the ton’s preeminent events, when being cut on the street was a frequent occurrence. They called her peculiar, eccentric, vulgar, things that weren’t necessarily untrue.

She’d only come to this country to escape a disaster in her own.

She wanted peace, her horses, her brother. She wished to solve riddles and obscurities in the way, for some odd reason, only she could. To use the brain that had proved both blessing and curse.

“My good luck charm.” The duke’s weak whisper circled the room.

They turned to him, all four of them, but he’d fallen silent, answering the immediate question of what to do about this mess, then returning to oblivion. Undoubtedly, they believed he referred to the stone he clutched like a lifeline.

But he’d been looking directly at Delaney when he’d whispered the declaration.

“It’s all over Town that you felled a duke with a kiss. The unconscious one down the hall.”

Delaney looked up from the note she’d received from Scotland Yard about a perplexing case, to find her twin lounging in the study’s doorway like a cat who’d had his fair share of cream, and then some. At times like these, when he looked sleek and contented, and she felt harried and unbecoming, she marveled that they shared so much—nose, hair color, sense of humor—and