The Duke is Wicked (League of Lords #3) - Tracy Sumner Page 0,7

timepiece, tugging on gloves that were already firmly in place. From beneath his hat brim, he watched her tiger climb down from the rear dummy board situated between the springs and offer to assist her down. They bowed their heads in discussion once she met the ground, then she shoved the leads in the tiger’s hand and moved to check her horse’s bridle with a frown of concentration.

What luck.

The eccentric American, part of London’s Terrible Two, was having trouble with her tack, a genuine problem this time, rather than the false narrative she’d posed to get inside Julian’s house. When Sebastian got closer, he noted the streaks of dirt on her skirt, her sleeve, the grimy boots peeking from beneath a mud-spattered hem. She truly raced this cabriolet. No simple trek through Hyde Park performed to garner attention from fawning admirers.

Which, as an untouchable, she wasn’t going to garner.

When he reached her, she swiveled slightly to the side and yanked her right glove off, finger by finger, with her teeth. Sebastian halted in place, his cock springing to life in a way it hadn’t in months. Possibly years. Maybe forever.

He must have made a noise, a faint, very faint whisper, from lips clenched to hold sound back—because she turned, her eyes flaring before her lids slid low. But he’d seen them, without a silly damned bonnet to protect her. A gaze the diaphanous color of ash, of smoke dissipating in the wind until it was nearly colorless. When he recognized the color of ash and smoke like no other.

She was searching. For whom he was. And how she knew him.

He relaxed, thrilled she didn’t immediately recall, when anyone in this park could have told her.

Then she did something strange, closed her eyes, and stepped away from him. He felt the shift even though she stood in the same spot, didn’t move an inch except for the fingers of one hand fluttering as if turning a page. After a long moment, she soundlessly murmured, with lips that were not her best feature, but were plumply beautiful just the same, not his title but his middle name. Fitzgerald.

He seized her hand then, the one that held the crop, unable to help himself. His fingertips had begun to simmer, and nothing good would come from a raging inferno in the middle of Hyde Park. “How do you know that?”

She blinked, her gaze finding his and holding with more courage than most men of his acquaintance. Her scent washed over him on a gust—peony, traces of lemon and earth—overriding London’s stench. She didn’t smell like an English miss, and when she spoke, she didn’t sound like one. “Like everyone else, I read it in Debrett’s,” she replied, her sultry accent sticking a dart in the map of her origin. One across the ocean from where they stood. Stepping back, she yanked her arm from his hold with only a slight tremor to show she’d finally realized he knew who she was.

The sneak with the ugly bonnet from Oxfordshire.

Then his luck, when dukes were usually lucky, ran out.

The sting was swift, painful, and located somewhere above his starched shirt collar. Before the venom glided through his bloodstream, Sebastian smelled the flowers. Roses, maybe azaleas. And the buzzing registered.

A bloody bee.

Which was dreadful indeed.

“Not good,” he whispered thickly and went to his knees. Fires ripped across his vision, flames filling his lungs and choking him. He couldn’t breathe. Could. Not. Breathe. His world began to spin, collapse and bleed black at the edges. Scenes from India scrambled from the locked box in his mind. Memories of his father. The fountain, next to which he’d nearly died of exposure when he was a boy. The day his mother died.

The ground was muddy and cold, and years gone. Late spring in the city disappeared in a smoke-filled, frozen terror.

Delaney Temple dropped beside him and yanked the stinger from his skin with a tenderly persuasive touch. “Easy there,” she murmured in that dreamy voice of hers.

“Find Finn Alexander,” he whispered on a ragged gasp and rolled to his back.

“The Blue Bastard?” Puzzled, her sweet breath danced across his cheek. “The owner of the Blue Moon? What about your doctor? I can look up what to do, but it will take a moment. There was a medical article I read about assisted breathing with allergic reactions…”

“Finn,” he repeated, having no idea what she meant. Look up what? And how? “Now, go…before…I burn…something.”

Assistance requested, the duke fainted quite regally on the