Victoria halted at the woodland boundary, the hum in her ears increasing in volume until it sounded like a train roaring down uneven tracks. Closing her eyes, she let the disturbance overpower her senses and shove everything else out. Her skin tingled as a feeling, a force, rocked her where she stood. She was falling before she realized she’d lost her balance, landing on her hands and knees with a jarring thud.
Piper gasped and dropped beside her in an awkward half-kneel. The viscountess’s hands were covering hers as she murmured soft words of comfort. Of healing. A calming rush swept Victoria, lowering the muddled drone, the sensation of a knife scraping her skin until it was raw. A flash of perfect, wondrous ease.
“I’m fine,” she said in a hoarse voice she barely recognized. Forcing herself to a shaky sit, she wondered what, exactly, had happened. Shoving her hair from her eyes, she blinked into the bright sunlight. One moment she’d been recalling riding through fields like this with her brother, the next, she’d felt someone opening the door to her mind. An invasion she’d forcefully rejected, which had caused the world to tilt.
Finn. Sneaky, adorable scoundrel.
Piper groaned and flopped to her bottom next to Victoria. “Oh, goodness, I may not be able to get up.” She wrapped her arm around her protruding tummy and balanced her chin atop it. “This baby is getting too big for me to manage. You may have to summon the field cart to bring me back to the house.”
Victoria turned, horrified. “Are you well, Lady Beauchamp? I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have thought to tumble down here with me.”
“Piper, please. I’m fine. Fat, but fine.” Sprawling back in the grass with a sigh, she stacked her arm beneath her head. “And I love tumbling. Ask Julian.”
Victoria sputtered a laugh and waved her hand before her face, the wobble in her knees finally starting to retreat. If she waited a moment, she’d be able to stand. “You’re far from fat. I’d go with ungainly. Lovely but cumbersome?”
“Dashed if that doesn’t sound worse.”
“You were able to heal me,” Victoria murmured, recalling the tranquility Piper’s touch had brought, the instant stillness. “When I thought I blocked your gift.”
“I tried, but I didn’t know it got through. Though I can’t see your aura, which is most unusual, I must be able to partially reach you.” Piper plucked a cornflower from the ground and twirled it between her fingers. “Wait until we tell Julian. He’ll record about a thousand pages of notes in his excitement.”
Victoria laid back as well, grass tickling her cheek as she turned her head toward the viscountess. “Don’t tell Finn. About my fall, I mean. I felt him intrude, and when I pushed him out, the world just spun on its axis. For a second, it was like we were out of rhythm with each other, and I had to run to catch up. I wonder if I didn’t do my little parlor trick on myself, stealing time, just enough to recalibrate.”
“That makes sense, I suppose.”
“I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel…more here. At Harbingdon. It’s like tiny abrasions on my skin. A prickly sensation, no, more a vibration. All these abilities flowing through me, leaving bits and pieces like flotsam caught on a branch in the river. I’m not sure how much control I have or that I even know how to channel this.” She shrugged her shoulder against the ground. “I don’t understand how I’ll be able to help anyone when I can’t help myself.”
“We’ll work on that. It’s going to take time. You’re powerful, and you don’t realize it.” Piper pointed with the cornflower to a hawk circling overhead. “Supernatural talents require exploration. There are no easy answers, often no answers at all. Julian is extremely focused on providing them through the chronology, but it’s not always that simple. There are so many variables that come into play. Which is frustrating if you want conclusive evidence, as my husband does, exhilarating if you consider life an adventure, as I do.”
“Opposites attract,” Victoria said, wondering how long she’d have to wait before Piper asked about the kiss. “You and Julian, I mean.”
“So, you plan to keep this little episode from Finn?” Piper asked when the silence had begun to chafe.
Here we go.
She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want him to know his gift had affected her. Maybe because this one thing—that he couldn’t read her mind—set her apart from the parade of women in his life. Which was foolish pride talking when she wasn’t a woman in his life at all. Unless two errant kisses placed her there. “I haven’t told him everything,” she admitted. About the dreams, about her gift. That she was starting to feel herself obstructing mystical lines of communication, turning down the glow on mental gaslamps all over the estate.
Because she didn’t trust him. Or rather, she didn’t trust herself.
She’d never responded to a kiss with everything in her.
Falling in love with the Blue Bastard would be an unadulterated disaster. Worse than marriage to a man she not only didn’t love but was repulsed by. At least that situation she had control over. When she had control over little else.
“Maybe sharing isn’t the best route, at least at first. I told Julian absolutely everything, and it took me years to land him. Our love story could aptly be titled ‘Chasing the Viscount’.”
Victoria gathered a pine needle and tied it into a tidy knot. “You misunderstand. I don’t want to land anyone. He has his pick of women, and I’m betrothed to—”
“The Grape, yes, I know.”
“It’s a financial obligation.” Victoria felt the need to stress this when most marriages in the ton were based on a business arrangement, not love. But Lord and Lady Beauchamp had a legendary connection, if the gossip was factual, which after seeing them together, she wholeheartedly believed it was. “I was baiting Mr. Alexander, and he accepted the challenge. What you witnessed is the unfortunate result. Both of us, I’m abashed to admit, are known for tossing out kisses like we would dirty bathwater. It’s an insignificant occurrence, I promise you. One and done.”
“You being at Harbingdon is momentous. There’s no need for a kiss to make it more so.”
“I’m only here so Finn can interpret the dreams. And now, so Lord Beauchamp can pick my brain like a lock.”
“The dreams. Is this what you’re keeping from Finn?”
Victoria came up on her elbow, dusting at the dirt clinging to her bodice. She yanked a piece of straw from her hair and sighed. If Aggie should come upon them rolling around in the grass like children…
She turned her head to hide her smile. Piper was a radical influence when Victoria needed no incentive to misbehave. However, she felt a heartfelt zing of affection that surely meant she’d found a friend. “I’m going to tell him,” she promised. Piper likely thought she’d kept quiet to protect herself when the dreams were going to change Finn’s life, not hers. It felt like protecting him to keep them to herself. Plus, she was a little worried about his reaction.
“Perhaps you should wait until tomorrow,” Piper said with a yawn.
Victoria glanced anxiously over her shoulder, wondering where in the dickens that field cart might be. She couldn’t very well carry the lady home.