Free Prince of Hearts by Margaret Foxe Page B

for rain.
    And he liked the fact that England was about as far away as he could imagine from Russia. In England, it had proved easier to forget who he had been and what he had lost.
    He sighed and rested his head against the window of his steam carriage, watching the rain drip down the glass and the gas lit streets of London pass by, impatient to reach his townhouse and see for himself that Finch was unharmed. She’d yet to answer any of his tickertexts, which was most odd. But he’d been assured she was unharmed by Matthews himself, who was still guarding her. Though from the tone of Matthews’ tickertexts, Finch was not entirely happy he’d been gone for so long.
    His mood improved in anticipation of the pending reunion with a sulking Finch. No doubt his prim little English secretary would be waiting for him inside with a list of some sort, hiding her exasperation with him behind her spectacles.
    He’d not met another like her in three hundred forty two years of life. She was the most fragile human he’d ever met, unenhanced in a world where even the street urchins of her generation had been fitted with Iron Necklaces. How she’d survived to adulthood with her condition was a testimony to her obstinacy. All five foot two inches of her was filled with a proud determination and a fierce wit he’d never encountered before. Hiring her had been the smartest thing he had ever done.
    And he enjoyed having her around. After his long life, it was rare for him to find a human whose company he could still tolerate. He liked to provoke her, to test her mettle, and she never failed to delight him when she thwarted his assaults with one of her pointed, schoolmarmish glares. She was immune to him. No other woman was. It was refreshing.
    But his little secretary was hardly the pillar of perfection, which made her all the more entertaining. When he discovered her gambling addiction, he couldn’t quite credit it at first. She seemed so proper, so excruciatingly scrupulous, that dabbling in such a torrid pastime seemed as unlikely as a pig sprouting wings. But it was one she must have developed in the years she’d lived with her eccentric uncle in St. Giles.
    He paid his secretary quite a hefty salary, but he suspected she gambled away most of it on a regular basis. Which would explain why, in the five years he’d known her, she’d not scraped together the funds to buy a single new dress.
    Not that he cared what she wore. But, bloody hell, mud had never been a good color on anyone.
    Finch was a full-fledged addict, courting all sorts of trouble in her visits to the stews. He’d put a stop to that, however, before he’d left for Paris. Matthews’ tickertext this morning had informed him of Finch’s recent revelations on her last trip to St. Giles.
    Finch would no doubt be spitting mad at him for his interference in her private affairs, but she would have to get over it. She’d nearly succeeded in losing much more than her money to that voracious bookmaker.
    The Black Market dealt in other things besides automata. She’d no clue how rare she was, or that there were predators out there who craved that rarity. The Clean Air Act did not pass until 1880, so there was a dearth of adults over the age of sixteen who’d managed to survive the Fog without enhancement.
    Sasha’s old friend, Aloysius Finch, had known his niece’s value, and he’d known Sasha could protect her as few could, which was why he’d asked him to hire her in the first place when he knew he was dying. Not that Finch was aware her uncle had ever known Sasha. She’d thought her employment agency had sent her to his door.
    Finch had an even bigger secret that, again, wasn’t a secret to him at all. It seemed in her voracious quest for more funds to gamble away, she’d taken up another profession. He’d discovered Finch's double life as a sensational novelist quite accidentally while thumbing through the Post-Dispatch several years ago.
    Drawn in despite