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D enbigh had always been rather good at putting on a show.

He’d often worn a smile for his younger brothers’ and late mother’s benefit to compensate for all the suffering the previous earl had inflicted.

When Exmoor tasked him with rescuing Alice—an assignment Denbigh committed to the moment he discovered where she was living—he’d gone over in his head their first chance meeting.

Upon seeing her, Denbigh was hit with absolute shock, surprise, confusion, and horror at finding her vigorously and passionately painting a scene that would’ve made any virgin reader of the Kama Sutra blush. He discovered that no pretend disbelief had been necessary on his part. My God!

If Exmoor knew what Alice was doing, he’d have dragged her away from this hell, where London’s worst gentleman played, and not sent Denbigh to do his dirty work.

Despite the noble work that brought Denbigh here, he found himself weak as the rest of the sinners in this place.

He stared wide-eyed and unblinking at the Bacchanalian orgy.

With the deities’ mouths slick with lust and their thick, voluptuous, thighs spread for both the God Bacchus and viewers on the outside, the fevered scene was evocative enough to get a cock rise from most mature men, himself included.

Heat slapped his cheeks.

Get yourself in order, man! This was Alice’s artwork.

Flabbergasted, he managed to blink slowly and bring his gaze to Alice. It had been too long since he’d seen her.

He’d missed her.

“What happened to your hair?” he asked quietly.

His was a peculiar detail to mourn, given all the changes that had been wrought to her and her lifestyle and her very existence.

And yet something about the loss of those exquisitely long, lush, sun-streaked blonde locks left him hurt somewhere inside.

At what and for what reason, he couldn’t say or understand.

Stricken, Alice touched her cropped curls.

They nearly brushed her shoulder and framed her diamond-shaped face. Though slightly fuller, her high cheekbones possessed a magnificent, pronounced sharpness that caused a terrible best friend’s attention to linger on her face—and then linger longer on her lush crimson mouth.

“Laurence?” she whispered.

Rattled, he shook his head wildly.

“What are you doing here?” Her quavering question cut through all the noise of confusion, horror, and sorrow.

New heat climbed his neck and filled his cheeks.

He spoke as calmly as he was able. “Me?”

He needed to be calm. He needed to be the affable, charming, brother-like fellow who reminded her of how good she had it back with Exmoor and the rest of the Mastersons so he could whirl her back home.

Now, it just remained to be seen how to handle that now nearly impossible and dangerous feat with fury stirring inside him.

He gritted the back of his teeth. “Me?” he repeated, hardness creeping into his tone. “You ask me what I am doing here, Alice,” he hissed.

So much for patience. Fortunately, his agitation chased away that wounded doe expression she wore and restored the fiery-tempered spirit to the mink’s pretty blue eyes.

“You have no place being here,” Alice said in clipped, crisp tones he’d never before heard her use with him or with anyone. And that was saying a lot, considering the fact that they’d bickered and quarreled on and off throughout the whole of their lives.

My God. She was looking about as if his getting caught here was the scandal and not her actually working here.

“You have to go,” she whispered.

Denbigh was still recovering from the shock of her artwork—work that the lady’s older brother most definitely did not know anything about—when her words reached him.

Heat slapped his cheeks.

“Laurence, are you listening to me? I said you have to leave.” Alice wrapped her paint-stained fingers upon his sleeve, leaving streaks of crimson and gold upon his tan jacket.

Since seeing Alice this morning, he’d been besieged by a host of volatile emotions.

Rage.

Disbelief.

Fear for Alice.

Now, Denbigh found himself swallowed up and consumed by a far greater, more overwhelming, and even more dangerous emotion.

Desire .

Denbigh looked to where Alice’s fingers curled about his bicep.

The muscles bunched and rippled and came alive in ways that were heinous and unforgivable, but also undeniable, as it had been some four to five years ago when he’d realized Alice Masterson was no longer a girl.

Scorched by her touch and shamed by the feelings eclipsing his senses, Denbigh wrenched away.

Alice’s eyes bore the same startlement as his. She too had sensed something charged in the atmosphere, but she could have no idea, and never would, of the feelings her slightest touch roused within him.

“You cannot be here, Laurence,” she said, this time more earnestly and less angrily. “Dynevor will be livid. These are private quarters. He doesn’t want patrons wandering about. It isn’t good for his family who lives and visits here.”

Denbigh brought his eyebrows together. “I’m not worried about Dynevor,” he whispered silkily. “I am wondering what the hell you are doing here and what you’re working on.”

Her confused gaze followed his over to the half-filled canvas she’d crafted with her talented fingers.

She’d always been a master with a brush.

When she’d been a girl, he’d delighted in trying to distract her from her projects.

He’d often failed. Her revere and love of painting and sketching proved far greater than her annoyance with him, which was saying a great deal indeed.

But this… Her work here, now…

It was evocative. Vibrant. A sight to behold—it stole one’s breath and drew one into the painting. Alice had centered Bacchus amidst a bevy of voluptuous, adoring, subjects who existed for the primal god’s pleasure.

Denbigh’s eyes bulged. “This…is what you are doing here?” His voice came out thick and guttural. A product of his desire at the realization that in Alice’s head, she’d conjured up and crafted this carnal masterpiece.

Denbigh had to take in a slow breath.

“How do you know of such—?” He stopped himself.

It’d be prudish of him to complete the thought, and also hypocritical. After all, he’d had lovers. He’d kept mistresses. It seemed that Alice, to create such a real rendering of carnality, had as well. Her work said as much. The jaded guardedness in her eyes only lent further confirmation.

Alice arched an impertinent blonde eyebrow. “Were you going to ask how I know about such things?”

Denbigh wanted to toss his head back and hurl and rage and snap and hiss. For surely there’d been many lovers. Even one was too many.

He’d always known what she was thinking, or he thought he had. Unfortunately, she’d always known the thoughts in his head too. It proved inconvenient at this moment, especially when he remained wholly at sea, confused and disoriented around her, when she was a rock of steadiness.

“Forgive me,” he said stiffly, “if it is not my place to put that question to you.”

“No, it isn’t, Laurence.”

She needn’t explain and didn’t have to. He deserved neither an answer or an explanation. Either way, it was abundantly clear. In the same way men sowed their oats and explored freedom, Alice proved no different.

The one difference being that she was a lady and always had been unlike any other woman he’d known.

The fact remained true now and also accounted for why one such as Alice should be in this place.

She was a bohemian. Now it made sense. He didn’t hate it any less.

If anything, he despised it down to every last fiber of his resentful being.

Everything within him urged him to try again, to make her see reason. He opened his mouth to do just that when his gaze caught on a painting farther down the hall. The appeal died on his lips.

Pulled by the delicate golden figure centered in a portrait at the opposite end of the hall, Denbigh found himself moving toward her.

It was a painting, and yet Alice’s works had always possessed a feeling of humanity and vivid realness.

They weren’t just things like the watercolors and floral paintings all the other ladies in London did. He stopped before her.

The woman in the red rendering possessed pale, shimmering, silvery-white blonde hair that hung about her naked frame.

She stood poised in the Garden of Eden with her body half turned towards the artist and partly concealed with her knee brought up at a slight angle.

She shielded enough of herself to hint at modesty, but the beginnings of sexual awareness.

She was a mix of shy, tender, innocent with experienced Aphrodite, Goddess of Love.

He stepped closer and closer until his nose nearly kissed the canvas. There was a familiarity to this goddess, a girl dancing on the cusp of mature woman and vital innocence.

“She was my first one.” Alice’s murmuring brought him reeling to the present.

Dumbfounded, he was still lost in the artwork and confused by Alice’s words.

“Here,” she clarified. “It was the first piece I painted at the Devil’s Den.”

He looked over in consternation.

At some point, Alice had drawn next to him, where he’d examined her work with reverent eyes. She stared with critical ones at the masterpiece.

“The problem is I didn’t commit,” she explained with regret.

Alice gestured at the creation, pointing out its flaws, or rather what she perceived to be imperfections.

“See here,” she pointed. “I have her gaze downward, but the look in her eyes seductive. She does not know whether she wishes to be a temptress or a tenderhearted innocent. There was a lack of commitment on my part, and it shows completely.”

Forgetting the real discussion, he should be having with her and engrossed with her perspective and discussion about the canvas, he attended Alice. Denbigh hung on her every word, fully part of the exchange and unwilling to let her disparage that masterpiece.

“I disagree,” he said strenuously.