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Blinking, Emily shook herself out of her reverie. She could spot her canvases over in the corner with the rest. She had already made a start on the first painting of the series, which was, of course, the Prince’s birth.

“There are many paintings of the birth of famous people,” she explained. “They’re generally very grand. An ornate bedroom, packed with people, with a beautiful woman lying in the bed and her attendants around her, while somebody else holds the baby. I didn’t want this to be like that.”

The pencil outlined a woman lying in a rumpled bed by an open window. She was tired, and her brow glistened with sweat. At the edge of the canvas, where the penciled sheets dropped off the edge of the penciled bed, there would be a faint, pinkish smudge. In Emily’s opinion, these great paintings of birth scenes tended to gloss over the actual process of childbirth, which was apparently extremely bloody and rather horrible.

Of course, she could hardly present the Prince Regent a painting of his mother lying in a blood-spattered bed, but still, Anon was supposed to tread the boundaries of what was proper and what was not, and Emily was determined to deliver.

The woman—Queen Charlotte, of course—held a tiny bundle in her arms, staring down at it with wide-eyed amazement and disbelief. A man—King George the Third, naturally—sat about an arm’s length away.

“I only lightly penciled in the king’s expression,” Emily murmured, tracing the lines with her fingertip, “but he will be afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes, afraid. Aren’t new parents always afraid at the birth of their first children? See, here, he’s reaching out as if to touch his new baby, and the newborn’s arm is escaping from its swaddling as if reaching back. It’s a rather domestic and simple scene. I do not know what the birth of the Prince was really like, but I suppose I’m allowed a little poetic license, am I not?”

She glanced up to find Cassian staring down at her, a faint smile playing on his lips.

“Delightful,” he murmured, the word slipping out as if by accident. Before Emily could say a thing—and she was not entirely sure what shewouldsay—he spoke again, more briskly this time. “And what about the other four paintings?”

“Well, the second one is of the Prince receiving his establishment and moving into Carlton House. I shall make him very grand—it’s to be a large and complicated painting. The third one depicts the birth of Princess Charlotte, his daughter. The fourth one shows him receiving the honor of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford. And the fifth one portrays his ascent to the Regency.”

Cassian’s eyes were still on her, making her skin prickle all over. It wasn’t unpleasant by any means, but Emily found that there was a lump in her throat that would not disappear, no matter how hard she swallowed. She stared down at her canvas, the odd blotches of color and blocked-in shapes making the picture look gaudy and almost childish. It took a while, after all, for a painting to truly come together. One never quite saw its perfection until the very end.

She reached out, almost but not quite touching the fine pencil lines that sketched out King George’s fingers, outstretched towards his first child and eldest son, tentative and longing all at once.

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” she murmured. “How a painting, a simple picture, can make one feel. And then, the same painting that changes the life of one person hardly affects another. Is it not odd?”

“It is odd,” Cassian responded, missing a beat. “But then we humans are rather odd too, are we not? It only makes sense that our art reflects such a thing. Art must be imperfect because humans are imperfect.”

Emily dragged her gaze away from the half-finished painting, meeting his eyes. A familiar warm sensation ran through her, waves of heat rushing up and down her spine. Her breath caught in her throat, and she imagined it, nonsensically, tangled in a knot at the hollow between her collarbones.

Cassian’s gaze darkened, his pupils dilated.

Does he feel it too?

“Cassian,” she began, tentative and more than a little afraid. “Cassian, I?—”

He straightened up abruptly. “I had better go,” he said shortly, not looking at her. His hands twitched at his sides, as if he longed to fidget with his cuffs or tug at his cravat, but would not quite allow himself to do so. “You’ll want to get on with your work, won’t you? You have five paintings to complete. Will you be able to do it?”

“Yes, I think so,” Emily responded mechanically, feeling as if the breath had been knocked out of her.

He gave a brisk nod, not meeting her eyes. “Very well, very well. I shall take myself away. To my club, you know. I’m meeting Richard there. And I shan’t be back for supper. You don’t mind dining alone, I hope?”

Emily swallowed. “Would it matter if I said that I did?”

He did meet her eyes there, just for an instant, then turned on his heel and strode away without a backward glance.

CHAPTER26

“It’s been a week, Cass,” Richard said testily. “You can’t avoid the woman forever.”

Cassian pursed his lips. “I don’t intend to. And this is none of your concern, Richard. Why do you insist on speaking about Emily constantly?”

Richard gave a too-loud hoot of mirthless laughter. Several gentlemen in the club threw annoyed glances their way.

“You cannot be serious, Cassian,” he snorted, shaking his head. “Youare the one who brings her up at every turn. They served trout for supper here yesterday, and all you can talk about was how much Emily hated trout, how she hated fish altogether and despised the smell.”

“It was a relevant comment.”