Page 128 of The Ladies Least Likely

“I don’t want a queue.” The posture she’d put him in was, surprisingly, not uncomfortable.

He sat erect, but his body was relaxed, the humiliations of recent memory fading in their sting.

“My mother, of course, wants me to reach as high as possible. But none of those young ladies—” His throat tightened, steering him away from a confession he didn’t want to pursue.

“I see you still carry your porte crayon everywhere.”

She held up the small brass cylinder she’d produced from a pocket.

“The great Sir Joshua Reynolds says an artist should never be without her porte crayon.” She sat on the stool, her skirts settling in a soft nest around her, and pushed up her wide sleeves.

She flipped open the pad across her knees and pointed at one of the oils propped against the wall.

“Look there, at Mama, and wear the expression you had in the ballroom last night. That ‘I don’t want to be here but I will suffer these fools with patience’ countenance. ”

He curbed a smile. He’d been suffering from something much different last night, mostly a wealth of confusion and dread at being exposed to strange eyes, mixed with debilitating desire over how luscious Harriet Smythe had become. “How is your mother?”

“Gracefully ailing and beset by nerves, as usual. She’s grown increasingly ill and bitter in the past years.

She spends hours complaining to Mrs. Demant and anyone who will listen how unpleasant it is to be dependent on a merchant’s family, when she was raised in a castle with hundreds of servants, a whole realm at her feet, or so she says.

Frankly it was a relief to leave her for school, and I’m afraid I’m not the dutiful daughter I ought to be.

Mrs. Demant took her on fancying to have a forlorn princess under her roof, and Mrs. Demant can keep her.

My aunt and I send money. That’s enough. ”

“But if she is noble, Rhette, that would change things for you, wouldn’t it?”

“Doubtful.” She paused, debating her next words.

“She might go back to Silesia, and in truth I don’t know why she hasn’t, if she had it so much better there.

I think my aunt receives communications from the old country, but even if my mother does return there, I don’t see why I should.

Turn your chin a hair to the left—no, your left. ”

Ren studied the elegant oil of Harriette’s mother, in which she had captured the air of lost nobility and softened the woman’s habitual sour expression.

Harriette’s lack of loyalty to her mother didn’t bother him.

He felt no loyalty to his parents, either, only a sense of duty.

But he sensed Harriette would walk on live coals for her aunt, and he understood that feeling.

“Amalie is coming to visit,” he remarked, looking for ways to bring her into his life.

“Lady Amalie? Your sister?” Harriette lowered her crayon. “I’ve never met her. She’s coming to see you?”

“I suppose that is her purpose. I meant to travel up to Bolton Abbey when I had things in order here, but she wants to visit London. She’s never been.”

“But she’s coming at the end of the Season. Your mother won’t be able to launch her until the fall.”

“Oh, Amalie doesn’t want to be launched, and my mother won’t do it.” At Harriette’s surprised look, he attempted to explain, and found the words lacking. “Amalie is—like me. There are…imperfections.”

Harriette shrugged. He didn’t understand how she had never cared about his physical limitations, or anyone else’s, when the rest of the world regarded these as outward signifiers of inward lack. “Surely not enough to prevent her from being introduced to Society.”

“I don’t think she wishes it, and Mother wants to spare herself the talk.” And stares of pity. And speculation about what, exactly, the Countess of Renwick had done wrong to spawn not one monstrous child, but two.

“I want to meet her.” Harriette went back to work with her porte crayon. “Is this why her ladyship wants you to marry well? Because she supposes your sister won’t?”

“That, and I am the heir. I have to pass on the noble name and all its burdens,” Ren said bitterly.

She paused and considered him from a new angle. “Don’t you want children?”

“I do.” The firmness of this declaration surprised him. He’d always known he was obliged to produce offspring. When Harriette asked him, he found he wanted to. But he still felt the old dread about what any child he sired might inherit.

“I find, though, I have a sentimental vein. I want to raise my heirs with a woman who adores me. I want my children to have an indulgent papa and a doting mama.” Figures he had never had in his life, certainly. “You think that silly?” he asked when she raised her brows.

“A fantasy, rather,” she murmured. She looked at him intently, drew a few lines on her pad, looked up at him, and used the side of her hand to rub out a line and try again.

Her concentration, even though she was merely analyzing the shape of him and not peering inside his soul, made his breeches stir anew.

“What you’ll find is a well-mannered and well-trained woman who marries you to secure her station in life,” she said, her hand moving as she spoke.

“She’ll decorate your home and bear the requisite children.

You will provide her pin money and hope she will be discreet about her affairs, and you will look elsewhere for passion and amusement. ”

Elsewhere. Did that mean her? His chest tightened at the thought. “Don’t you want a husband who adores you?” he asked. “Children who think you the center of their world?”

“Bah,” she answered. “I can think of nothing less conducive to my art. A doting husband and children shall be ever wanting my attention, when I could be drawing or painting. And they shall expect me to do things like make puddings and sew buttons, and take trips to the spa, and make a fuss over birthdays and Christmas. I should have no liberty to do as I pleased.”

His throat ached at the thought of Harriette at the center of such a pleasant domestic scene. “What if you had a husband who let you do as you pleased?”

She paused, the porte crayon and its black chalk hovering above her paper. “Does such a creature exist?”

He would let her do as she pleased. He would allow her anything, in return for the gift of Harriette under his protection, under his roof. In his bed. If only he could marry her. “What about passion?”

“Fine for a night, or three. I’ve found infatuations fade quickly.”

Her look was that of the trained artist, her gaze tracing his brow and examining his eyes.

He wanted to take the pencil from her hand and lace his fingers with her slim, capable ones.

He wanted to make her remember how she’d pressed shamelessly against him, her mouth open to his seeking tongue, the low moans of pleasure that had escaped her throat.

That memory was doing nothing to ease his cockstand, either. He couldn’t be at attention the entire time she sketched him, which might be awhile, as she tore one page from her book, moved her stool a few inches to the other side, and began again.

“I find it di-difficult to believe any man’s infatuation with you would fade.”

“Oh, you darling. My first patron, my very first commission when I came to London, a corpulent old squire, I thought he was sincerely interested. But his attentions were not very—mmm, flattering, shall we say? And after I allowed it, because I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about, I found he expected I would reduce my fee because I had enjoyed his favors.”

Ren was both fascinated and outraged at the thought of another man touching Harriette, gaining access to her delectable body. The thought of a fat, self-satisfied squire churning away atop her, taking the pleasure Ren wanted for himself, made his cock harder.

He was filthy and wrong. He’d often thought so.

“Have there been others?” he growled.

“There was a military man. He was going to a posting abroad and wanted to take me, but I didn’t want to leave my aunt, and Mrs. Kauffman had just consented to tutor me.

I would have gone to Paris, where I might meet élisabeth Vigée Le Brun or Adelaide Labille-Guiard, who is portrait painter to the royal family.

But he was going to Madrid, and I know of no female painters working in Madrid. ”

“And then?” Ren asked miserably. He didn’t want to hear that other men had known Harriette Smythe, had the liberty to touch and pleasure her. And yet he wanted to hear every detail, because the torment of not knowing was worse than the torment of knowing.

She shrugged. “A German margrave—not the Graf von Hardenburg, I knew he was married when he arrived. But the margrave was a mistake, and I’m old enough to have learned my lesson.”

Ren smothered a strangled sound. Harriette was all of one-and-twenty, four years younger than he. But as always, her knowledge of the world and her self-command made her seem older.

She ripped a page out of her pad and held it up, comparing the sketch to his face. “You look appalled. Surely you left a string of lovers scattered across several countries. The papers were keen to report on the beautiful courtesans you kept company with.”

Courtesans, not lovers. He had to pay women to touch him, and the experience had been, collectively and individually, so awful that the very thought of attempting to make love to a woman gave him a cold sweat and shaking hands.

Any woman, that is, but Harriette Smythe. In her case, he could imagine making love to her all too vividly. It was causing him extreme discomfort.

“And your lover now?” he asked, assuming that was the reason she was not trembling and sighing and giving him looks of open longing, as he was her.

“No more mistakes. No more indulgences. I intend to focus on my art.” She flipped to a fresh page in her sketchbook.