Page 19

“H igher.”

“This is as high as I—”

“I said , higher,” Evelyn instructed as sweetly as she could manage. Which was a challenge, when shouting across Green Park. “Just for a few minutes longer, please, Leopold!”

It wasn’t pleading. It wasn’t begging. Her tone was somewhere in between, and she hated it, but there it was. When one asked for a favor such as this, one had to prostrate oneself occasionally.

Her cousin, Lord Leopold Chance, grimaced. He was a broad man with the look of a spaniel when confused, which he clearly was in this moment. “When I said that I would assist you, Evelyn, this is not what I had in mind!”

“And yet you look so fetching!” she said with a smile as her gaze darted between the leather pleats of his skirt and the representation she was attempting with watercolors. “Honestly, I don’t imagine you’ll have any trouble attracting a lady now.”

“ Evelyn !”

“Well, I am sure this will be the latest in gentlemen’s fashions in a few years,” she said vaguely, her attention meandering from his words to the way the sunlight caused shadows just under his knees. “Don’t you think?”

“You think the gentry and nobility will be dressed as ancient Greeks next Season?”

Evelyn did not reply. She couldn’t—not only because she was concentrating very closely on the knees she was now painting, but because she had placed one of her other paintbrushes in her mouth. Her teeth gripped the long handle as she narrowed her eyes.

It had been a wonderful idea of her Aunt Alice, and once the suggestion had been made, Evelyn would brook no arguments.

Her cousin Leopold had been volunteered to be her model for the painting, and it had not been too difficult to find a theater who had been willing to let one of their costumes go for an extortionate fee.

That reminded her. She really would have to ask her father for an extension on her allowance for the month after next now. She was in debt to Lucy up to her eyeballs, and Percy would soon wonder why the ten-pound note that he had once had in his wallet had somehow transformed into an I.O.U.

She’d signed it. At least. She wasn’t like Percy, lying about a mistress, sneaking about the place, worrying their mother half to death—

“Evelyn, I’m freezing!”

“Nonsense,” she said vaguely, tilting her head as she examined the knee she had just completed before glancing up at her real-life model. “I said, keep that bow up!”

“You honestly cannot think I can hold a bow and arrow up like this for hours at a time, do you?” Even as his teeth chattered, Leopold’s pinched face took on a sour expression. Evelyn could not think why. “Evelyn, it’s agony on my arms!”

“But I’ve just about finished your knees, and they are almost perfect!” she said excitedly.

For some reason, the narrowed-eyed look on her cousin’s face was mutinous. “Do you mean to tell me that for the last hour, I have been burning my arms to hold up my bow and arrow, and you haven’t even been painting them? You’re painting my knees ?”

Evelyn smiled weakly. Well, when he puts it like that… “You would be amazed at the difference having one’s arms up makes in the shadows that fall down one’s body, the tension in one’s legs…”

Leopold’s lips became a thin line. He did not look impressed. “Look, Evelyn—”

She groaned. “I know this speech. Every one of my models has given it to me!”

All but one.

She did not say that latter part aloud. How could she?

Richard was not entirely a secret, but he was hers.

She had no wish to share him with the rest of her family—not least of which because then Laurent might crumble under the pressure and admit she had not been chaperoning their sessions.

Even if she stood firm and gave Evelyn some cover, the Chances were so nosy, they would be ferreting out every single detail of his life, even the ones he did not want to reveal.

Evelyn considered her formidable aunts and adjusted her thought. Especially the details that he did not want to reveal.

It was irritating in the extreme that Leopold was being such a bad sport about this, however. After all, he’d always said he liked archery!

“But you practice with a bow and arrow all the time,” Evelyn said aloud. “I thought, well, what is the difference?”

“The difference,” said Leopold petulantly, coloring as another group of giggling ladies walked past them, “is that when I’m practicing archery, I’m moving my arms so they don’t get stiff.

And I’m at home, in private, or at the London Archery Club, without people gawping at me.

And I’m wearing normal clothes, Evelyn, not this ridiculous getup! ”

Evelyn grinned. He did look a mite ridiculous, but only because he was standing before the Temple of Peace in Green Park on a casual Tuesday wearing an approximation of what Philoctetes, the Greek mythological hero, wore, while other people in perfectly normal clothing walked past him, staring curiously.

It was going to look totally natural in her painting. After all, it was a scene from Ancient Greece.

“Unless your father has built a ruined temple in your garden, there was only one place I could paint,” she called out.

“You couldn’t use your imagination?”

Evelyn scowled. He was not to know just how challenging she found it to create these vistas in her mind. It was far easier to create them in reality than immortalize them on the canvas.

That was why they had to be in Green Park, where the Temple of Peace had adorned the place for generations. Much to her cousin’s chagrin.

“Ten more minutes,” she said firmly, returning to her canvas.

“Five!”

“This isn’t a negotiation, actually,” Evelyn said brightly, stifling a laugh. “Besides, you know what your mother will do to you if you wander off before I’m finished. You are supposed to be my chaperone as well as model today.”

There was a loud snort from the other side of the easel, and Evelyn clamped her lips together. Aunt Alice was formidable. Kind, yes. Gentle, if she wished to be. But not to be crossed.

“You do know it’s ridiculous that you’re doing this, don’t you?” her cousin said conversationally.

“You do know it’s ridiculous that you love archery so much that you agreed to be immortalized as Philoctetes, don’t you?” she quipped back.

Leopold’s laugh was, this time, more good natured. “I suppose so.”

Approximately three minutes later, by Evelyn’s reckoning, there came a plaintive complaint. “Are you finished yet?”

“I’ll tell you when I’m finished,” Evelyn muttered.

“What did you say?”

“I said , I’ll tell you when I’m finished!”

Honestly, I never have this trouble with Richard!

The thought warmed her, burning her cheeks as she attempted to convey the sense of Greek sandals on the painted version of her cousin. Richard was, of course, the perfect model. He never disagreed with her for long, was perfectly happy to sit and not move for hours at a time, and was…

Well. Delicious. Handsome. Brave. Mysterious. Dark and dangerous.

Evelyn shook her head slightly to see whether that would dislodge the ridiculous thoughts. Unfortunately, it did not.

She had been forced to put off Richard today. The light was simply perfect outside and Leopold had said Tuesday would work for him. The note she had sent around had not received a reply.

Evelyn bit her lip. It was still entirely unclear to her whether Richard had to work for a living or not, and she had, rightly or wrongly, stood by her decision from their very first encounter to never ask any personal questions.

Had she deprived him, today, of some much-needed income? Was he angry about that?

“You know, we Chance cousins are supposed to be beyond reproach,” came Leopold’s voice.

“I suppose my brother is no longer a Chance cousin, then?” Evelyn had not meant to say it. She often thought her bitterness toward her brother had finally melted away from her, but then it slipped out.

“I beg your pardon?”

Evelyn grinned brightly as she glanced at him around the corner of her easel. “And your point is?”

“I suppose my point is that we’re probably not supposed to stand in Green Park in such a ridiculous getup,” Leopold said with a mock sigh. “I suppose I shall have to read about this in the scandal sheets.”

The thought had not occurred to her. “Perhaps.”

“Beyond reproach will have to be our watchwords tomorrow. I suppose the parents will be expecting us to find potential spouses and marry soon—make up for lost time.”

Evelyn snorted a laugh. “What, like Thomas and Lilianna? They weren’t beyond reproach.” In fact, both had set Society’s tongues wagging during their courtships.

“I suppose neither are we, me with my archery and you with your painting,” shot back Leopold. “So we’ll have to—hullo there. May I help you?”

Evelyn blinked. It was not like Leopold to speak to a stranger, especially when he was dressed as if Hercules had gotten lost on his way back to Olympus. Placing her second paintbrush back in her mouth, she glanced around the easel with a vague sense of curiosity.

The vague sense of curiosity solidified in an instant. Richard was standing right beside her cousin—his face reddening and his lips flattening. He looked furious.

Not Leopold. His eyebrows squished together, his eyes blinking rapidly, evidently bewildered at the fact that a stranger would approach him and apparently be asking some odd questions.

But then he was such a good-natured chap, Evelyn thought with a racing heart, it probably had not occurred to him just how unusual it was that his approach to life was so mellow.

But Richard was not, at this moment, a mellow man.

He was saying something to her cousin in an undertone, the words rushing from his lips like water, and when he saw Evelyn looking over at him, he snapped something to Leopold and started marching toward her.