Page 17

T ry as he might, struggle as he would, Richard could no longer fight it off.

He yawned.

“I saw that.”

“No you didn’t,” he said hastily, trying not to smile.

He could still recall the pained look on the young woman’s face when he had moved last time.

Apparently, he had ruined her finger study.

Why shifting his shoulder had done that, he did not know.

“You did not see anything because nothing happened.”

When he looked up, it was to see Evelyn rolling her eyes. “You do know that I am watching you very carefully, don’t you, Richard?”

A shiver of something Richard was not, most definitely not, going to investigate flickered across his shoulder blades.

His shirt, along with his waistcoat and coat, lay beside him on a stool.

He was nude from the waist up once again.

Once again, he had instructed Evelyn to close her eyes as he’d disrobed.

It was perhaps the only time she had not been staring.

Yes, he knew Lady Evelyn Chance was often watching him very closely.

Part of that was because she was an artist. There was no denying it; the woman somehow had the ability to look around the world and see beauty, even where there was none.

The way she captured that inelegance or awfulness on a page was truly transformational. He did not know how she did it.

But it was more than that… wasn’t it?

Everything had changed with that kiss. Richard was certain he should not have done it, and perhaps if it had been with a different woman, the memories would not have lingered as they had.

And oh, they had. Every waking moment, and almost all of his unwaking ones, there was the image of Evelyn, shocked and wide-eyed in his arms, lips pink from his kisses, staring up at him.

He could still taste her. Still see the desire in her eyes…

Unconsciously, Richard crossed his legs.

“Blast it all too—”

“Evelyn?”

“I mean, bother.”

Richard stifled a laugh even as he hastily rearranged his legs to their previous position. “Now that’s something I haven’t heard you say before.”

“I know.” Evelyn’s pink face appeared from the other side of the canvas. “I am usually very good at keeping words like that on the inside, but it’s difficult when you are being so disobliging.”

And that is the trouble with Evelyn , Richard thought as heat crackled through his chest. She’s a complete mess of contradictions.

An earl’s daughter who would rather spend her pin money on charcoal sticks than earbobs.

A beautiful woman who had a smudge of paint across one cheek that she evidently had not noticed.

A refined young lady who said “blast” with the vehemence of a sacrilegious curse. Who seemed to think almost nothing of sitting with him alone, without a chaperone.

An innocent who looked at him sometimes like that…

Richard endeavored to keep his head high, but it was a challenge. Sitting for Evelyn had been something to entertain him, an opportunity to do something a bit different. If he was only going to sit around all day, why not do it with someone else?

That someone else he had presumed would have been a gentleman…

Oh, no. Here it comes again.

This time, the yawn was so violent, Richard could do nothing to hide it.

“You’re yawning!”

“Not on purpose,” he said hastily. “Though I challenge you to keep your mouth shut when you’re yawning!”

There was silence on the other side of the easel for a moment, then the strange gulp and clatter of a paintbrush being dropped unceremoniously back into its water pot.

Odd. A month ago, he would never have been able to pick out that particular sound.

“I have been most selfish,” said Evelyn, stepping out from the easel and looking sheepish. “I have been so absorbed by my work, I have not noticed the time.”

“‘Time’?”

She pulled out what appeared to be a gentleman’s pocket watch from her apron. “Yes, it’s past eleven o’clock.”

Richard stared. It can’t be . He had arrived here just past six in the evening for a short session. Evelyn had said the day before that another hour would do it. The study was almost completed and she was eager to get it done…

He could not have sat here for five hours. Where did her parents think she was?

In her studio, perhaps. Though certainly not alone with a man.

Despite Walden’s warnings, Richard found the Chances most trusting, indeed.

“Yes, I did not notice the time going, either,” said Evelyn conversationally, shaking the pocket watch by her ear carefully as though ensuring that it was still running. “Percy usually winds this up pretty well, so I would hope it is still running to time.”

“Your brother winds your watch for you?”

It was a banal thing to say, but Richard could not help it. He was desperate, craving any information about this woman that she would spill. Even the inconsequential was fascinating.

That was perhaps the most challenging thing about this posing business.

Oh, sitting around and doing nothing, that was hardly a hardship.

No, it was being seated opposite a woman he could not fathom. A woman who seemed to have almost no interest in him as a person yet had asked a few leading questions that suggested to Richard’s mind that she may have been regretting her decision to leave him as ‘a blank slate.’

“My brother winds his own watch for himself, then I borrow it,” Evelyn said vaguely, tapping at the glass of the timepiece. “He never usually notices. He’s not one for being on time, anyway.”

Richard stifled a smile. “So you’ve stolen it.”

“ Borrowed it,” Evelyn corrected, glancing up with a wry smile. “I always put it back. When it needs winding.”

He could not help but laugh at that, and she laughed with him. God, this is intimate.

Richard had never known anything like it.

A month ago, he would have said intimacy was what happened when two people took their clothes off together.

Granted, one of them was partly naked, but it was not the one of the two of them he would have preferred to have been that way.

He could never have imagined something like this: a closeness that was still growing, learning, developing.

A need to be together. A heat he only felt when he was with her .

Steady on , he told himself sternly, reining back on his internal nonsense. She knows almost nothing about you. You hardly know her. It’s a dream you’re attracted to, the idea of her.

Well. And certain parts of her he could see.

Quick, think of something else. The pocket watch. “My father always—”

Oh, damnation. That is the trouble with trying to make sure your thoughts don’t meander off into a foolish direction , Richard thought bitterly. It leaves one’s mouth totally unattended.

Evelyn had looked up from her stolen—sorry, borrowed —pocket watch. “Your father?”

Richard hesitated. He had never… There never had been anyone to talk to about his father. Walden may have listened, but Richard could never have brought himself to speak of the man. He had grown so out of the habit of it, he wasn’t sure he knew how to do it.

“You miss him,” she said softly.

“How do you know that?”

“Your eyes. They were full of sadness—but a warm sadness, not a cold one,” Evelyn said, her voice low and tentative. “Two people who have left on bad terms cannot look like that when remembering the other.”

Richard’s jaw dropped. “How… How did you…?”

“Artist, remember?” Her smile was wry as she shrugged. “I look at people, really look at them. I notice things. It’s the same look my father has about his own father. There was love there, as well as difficulty. But the love is what has remained.”

It was astonishing. He had never wanted to speak of his father.

His mother had buried herself in her grief and when she had emerged, she had never wished to speak her husband’s name again.

And Richard… Well. He had been the new viscount.

Viscounts were not supposed to dwell on the loss of a father he could not help but mourn.

“Tell me about him,” said Evelyn softly. “Unless… Unless you have to leave?”

“No,” Richard said quickly.

Too quickly. He shifted in his seat and wondered what on earth this woman was doing to him.

It shouldn’t have been possible, should it, to draw such things out of him against his wishes? After all, he hadn’t really said anything about his father, yet Evelyn seemed to know so much about him, about the two of them.

She was bewitching. He was bewitched.

“So, tell me about him,” came her gentle voice. There was movement behind the easel.

Was she putting down the study she had been working on and picking up a new piece of paper?

“‘Him’?”

“Your father.” There was just a hint of mirth in her tone—not merriment at him, but rather, around him. It was most peculiar.

Richard heaved a breath. Right. He could do this. How hard could it be?

“My father was… I mean, he died a long time ago. I was a child, not even ten years old.”

“You were very young.”

“I was.” Richard tried to think back to that moment, that terrible morning when his mother had sat him down, her eyes red and her voice hoarse, to tell him the news. “I did not believe it in a way because he had been so… so full of life. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so.” Evelyn’s face did not appear from the other side of the easel, and in a way, that made it easier.

“He always had something interesting on his mind. A topic of conversation that would never have occurred to me that filled our days with vibrant discourse,” said Richard, a smile slipping across his lips, despite himself.

“Politics, often, but also religion, or geography, or literature. He encouraged me to read books far advanced for my age.”

“And you managed it.”

“I look back and wonder whether we should challenge our children more,” Richard mused.

Evelyn’s flushed cheeks appeared. “‘Our children’?”

Oh, hell . “The children of—of this generation,” Richard amended hastily.

Her eyes met his gaze, just for a moment, then she disappeared again. “You are like him, I suppose.”