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“I suppose.” In truth, Richard had never thought about it. He had never known his father beyond the impression of a child. Sometimes he could not recall his face, not without the family portraits. “I hope I am. He was a kind man. A good man. He was much mourned and sometimes I wish—”

His voice gave out and he took a moment to collect himself. He would master himself. He would not give in to weakness.

“The pocket watch reminded you of him.”

Richard smiled wistfully. She did have a knack of making statements that drew truth out of him. Questions would have felt like an interrogation—and he’d had enough of them to last a lifetime.

“His pocket watch was very precious to him,” he said aloud.

“It was far too heavy for a child, too bulky, too weighty. It was put away and I only found it again this year. Whenever I look at it, I don’t see him.

I see the man I think he would have wanted me to be, and I wonder… I wonder if I am that man.”

Silence fell between them, but it was a contented one. One Richard had not known since he had returned from France.

“Thank you.” Her voice was soft, and genial, and Richard wanted to sink into it. He never wanted the evening to end.

“I suppose the evening has to come to an end,” Evelyn said.

Was there a sadness in her voice? Perhaps Richard was only wishing to hear it. The idea of stepping out into the cool, night air, without this woman who had the ability to look not only at his skin, but into his soul and draw it on the page, was most unpleasant.

“I can stay.”

What had possessed him to say such a thing?

Clearly, Evelyn had not been expecting such a statement, either. Her brows rose, her lips parting silently.

“If you want me to,” Richard added hastily, hating how uncertain he sounded. “If you want to draw me again. One more drawing.”

“Are you sure?”

You think I can deny you anything? Those were the words that almost fell from his lips.

Fortunately, he was able to keep most of his dignity and prevent the words from being spoken. Still. If Richard did not know any better, he would have said Evelyn could hear the unspoken words, anyway.

Her smile was far too knowing. “I would prefer a different view of you. To challenge me, you see.”

Richard stiffened. “A different view.”

Lord, right at this moment, he could not have taken his trousers off. There was a… Well. An obvious indication of his attraction to the beautiful, young artist.

Try as he might, Richard was not going to solve that in a matter of moments.

“Yes, I think… I think I would like you to turn the chair around by ninety degrees,” mused Evelyn, tilting her head to one side as she examined him.

Now it was not discomfort, but panic roaring through his veins. “‘Turn’?”

“Yes, to face the window,” she said quietly. “Is that suitable?”

Richard swallowed.

Suitable? Perhaps it would have been, for anyone else. But there was a reason that he had required Evelyn to close her eyes each time his shirt had been removed. Even that simple movement would swiftly reveal…

And if he turned like that, his right-hand side to her, she would see…

“You know I will never ask you to do something that you don’t want to do,” said Evelyn, with a subtle yet fiery look in her eye.

Richard gave a laugh. It was a reminder, as if he had needed one, of the way he had spoken to her mere days ago. God, this woman could tie him in knots without so much as a word—and when she spoke…

Well, it would be foolish to think that he could avoid this forever. He would just have to avoid all her questions, that was all. If worse to the worst, he would simply have to lie.

“Right,” he said tautly.

Evelyn had disappeared behind her easel, the light of the single candle behind between them shimmering in the sudden rush of air, and so Richard hoped for a moment that she would coincidentally not be looking at him as he picked up the chair and moved it.

It was not heavy, the movement done within a moment, but of course, that was all it took. When Richard straightened, it was to see Evelyn peering out from behind the canvas, her breath hitching and her eyes wide in horror.

Ah. Yes, it often took people that way.

“Richard,” she murmured.

“What?” he snapped before he could stop himself.

This had been a mistake. He should never have—the shirt should always have stayed on. He should have stood his ground, made it clear to her that he wouldn’t do it.

“It’s nothing,” he said stoically, ignoring as best he could the way her attention followed him as he settled back into the chair, this time not looking directly at her.

“It’s not nothing. It’s… Richard, where on earth did you get all those scars? Not the burns, I mean, the… from a blade ?”

The odd thing was, Richard himself hardly ever saw them.

Oh, Doctor Walsingham had made him take a look at them once or twice, when he had returned to England and finally given in and sought medical attention.

The looking glass had made them look garbled, distorted as they were over the top of his burns, and he hadn’t liked to look since.

In his memory, the lines in his flesh were still raw.

“I’ve lived a busy life,” he said quietly.

There it was—the scrape of charcoal across canvas. She was drawing him, then. Good. That would hopefully cease all her discussion of it.

“It looks as though you were bound.”

Richard swallowed, his mouth now dry. Damn her and her observance. Damn her and the way she could look and truly see. Damn the way his heart was fluttering.

Hearts didn’t flutter. They pounded.

Oh, hell, now it is pounding.

“You don’t have to tell me about it, if you don’t—”

“I don’t,” Richard said shortly, forcing his mind away from the thin, straight scars, the mottled burns.

Was that smoke? Could he smell smoke?

No, man, get a grip on yourself. That was always the trouble, whenever he started thinking about his time in France again. It was all too easy to get lost in the memories, the fear, the nightmares, lose sight of what had actually happened.

The trouble was, not telling Evelyn the truth now felt far more like lying than anything had before. An omission, that was hardly a lie. No one could be expected to tell everyone everything.

But she was asking now, and she could probably gain an accurate idea of what had happened just by looking at him. Richard sometimes felt the rough edges of the scars when he put on a shirt. He couldn’t ignore them, even if he couldn’t see them.

And now Evelyn could see them.

“I suppose you once worked at some docks. Fires often happen at docks.”

“I’ve spent time in docks.” Well, it wasn’t a lie.

“It’s a hard life, working with your hands.”

And your wits, and your bravery, and nothing else. “I’ve always managed to make my way through the world.”

And she looked at him with such curiosity, as though she had never met a working man in all her life.

Perhaps she hadn’t, Richard realized with a strange twist in his gut.

Other than her own servants and the shopkeepers, the only men she would have interacted with were gentlemen.

To her, you are a strange, exotic butterfly.

A man who works with his hands.

Though, technically, he was a gentleman, much like the rest of them, he supposed.

“You have traveled, of course.”

“My… My work has taken me to new places, yes,” said Richard quietly, shifting slightly. It wasn’t lying. It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t a lie—everything he was telling her was true.

Evelyn’s eyes sparkled. “It’s rather intoxicating, isn’t it? Not knowing anything about each other.”

Quite to the contrary , Richard wanted to say. I know something about you. I can see you. You’ve shown yourself to me, and every part of you is precious. It is I who remains unknown, and that always felt safer, until… until now.

“You were brave.”

“You can’t possibly know that,” Richard muttered, not looking around.

The gentle soar of the charcoal on the canvas. A pause. Another smooth marking made. “You survived. It would take a brave man to do that.”

Richard tried his best not to preen. This is not a chance to gain her pity, man! Or her approbation. Just sit there and wait until all this is over.

“Was the pain truly great?”

“It was agony,” Richard said before he could stop himself.

He glanced over, but the easel still hid the artist entirely.

Somehow, that made it easier to talk. “I… I thought I was going to die. At times, I wished I had. You’re right.

I was bound, and thrashed with a—” Hang fire, man, she doesn’t need to know that.

“I was left for dead and there were times, as I waited for the flames, that I wished I had done so.”

Had he ever said those words before? Had he ever revealed to anyone what he had seen, what he had experienced?

“But you lived.”

Her voice was gentle and encouraging, and Richard found himself unfolding to her as he had done to no other.

“I had too much living left in me,” he said with a laugh. “When I managed to leave France—”

“So it was while serving in France, then?”

Richard whipped his head around. Evelyn was peeking out from around the easel with a knowing smile on her face. “How did you…? What did I say to…?”

“Oh, there are only so many places that a man of England goes to get beaten like that,” she said airily, returning to her drawing as if she regularly discussed the maiming of a gentleman.

“And I thought I noted your face paling at the sound of Laurent’s accent when I introduced the two of you.

” Damn. He hadn’t meant for either woman to notice.

“Thank you. For serving your country, I mean. Being a soldier. You have paid a very great price.”

She met his eyes and Richard felt the weight like a boot kicked into his stomach.

She… She meant it. Evelyn looked at him and saw not a man who had failed, who had been punished by fate for failing, punishment eked out on his very body… but a man who had tried. Sometimes trying was the most important part.

The moment of connection passed. It had been heady, and delicious, and Richard could not permit it to continue.

He could not permit this to continue. He had to tell her—tell her who he was, his name, that he was perhaps not a man on her father’s level, but a man worthy of her.

Dear God—‘a man worthy of her’? Where had that come from?

“There.”

Richard blinked. “There… What?”

“There, I have finished,” Evelyn said briskly, wiping her hands on a damp cloth as she surveyed her work. “Do you want to see it?”

Absolutely not , Richard wanted to say. He’d had enough trouble avoiding the real thing, studiously ignoring the edges of his whipping scars as they crept around his side. So it was therefore completely inexplicable that he had risen from the chair and walked toward her.

Evelyn blushed, as he had known she would. Part of him hoped that it was because she felt the intoxication of his male presence, that having a tall and shirtless gentleman walking toward her was having some sort of effect on her.

It was probably only because he was about to see some of her art.

Richard steeled himself for seeing the disgusting evidence of his weakness and saw instead…

“Oh, Evelyn.”

Somehow she had transformed all his pain, all that suffering, into something truly beautiful.

Clean lines and rugged shading created a picture of…

himself. But not himself. A Viscount Sempill who looked proud and yet rightly so.

Who held himself with a straight back, despite the scars.

Whose marks in fact made him a far more interesting specimen to behold than most.

Richard swallowed hard. Oh.

“I shall have to have another go,” Evelyn was saying from a long way away. “I haven’t quite got the nape of your neck right, and the shading is a mite rudimentary, but—”

“Thank you.”

He had not intended to say it. He had not intended to say anything. The scrape of his voice belied the pain and yet it was not the sharp, self-loathing pain of a man who could not bear to face the man he had become.

It was a different sharpness. The breath of new life.

Evelyn was smiling and she touched his arm gently. “You can keep it, if you want.”

‘Keep it’?

And the logical conclusion of that rushed through Richard’s mind and he recoiled. Keep it—keep even more tangible evidence of what had happened? Be forced to look at it, the poor, misshapen, cruelly altered skin he bore?

“No,” he said curtly, stepping away from Evelyn and pulling on shirt and waistcoat in quick succession. “I should go.”

“Richard, I—”

“I do not wish to speak of it,” Richard added as he strode to the door, hating his bluntness, hating that he could not face himself for more than a moment. He stopped, glancing over his shoulder with what he hoped was a smile. “I will see you tomorrow, or the day after.”

The expression on Evelyn’s face was entirely unreadable—but then, he did not have her skill. “Very well. Until then.”