Page 141 of The Ladies Least Likely

Ren, with a gentlemanly flush of embarrassment, stepped away from Harriette’s table and turned toward the canvas she’d been working on all morning.

Even more absurdly, Harriette felt heat climb her cheeks.

He was within his rights to look at what she’d done so far; he was the one paying her to produce it.

But she felt intensely shy about his seeing how she saw him. It felt too revealing.

More revealing even than the sketches of him in simply his shirtsleeves, waistcoat and neckcloth discarded, lounging on her couch with an insolent, amused expression curling his excessively well-shaped lips. Those prints were selling faster than Mrs. Darly could make them.

Harriette stepped in front of the canvas and turned it away from his inquiring gaze.

“I’ve not done enough yet for you to get a look proper.

” That wasn’t true. She’d gotten the most important part: his face and its remote, thoughtful expression, the beauty of his strong features, and the suggestion of honor and strength that were such an integral part of him.

But she didn’t have his full body outlined yet—she would have to rely on her sketches to complete his figure, and then hours more to fill in the background. She didn’t have enough time .

“Did you tell him yet?” Princess, with a yawn, settled herself on Darci’s couch.

“Not yet.” Harriette’s heart squeezed. “I’ve, ah, been working up to it.”

“Tell me wh-wh-what?”

Ren’s face was a needle piercing her chest. He looked like he could not handle one more blow. Even his mighty shoulders would bow under her desertion.

How could she leave him now? And how could she ask for her commission to be paid if she hadn’t completed the portrait before she left?

She knew he would grant her the funds in a moment, if he had the means and he knew it would help her mother, but it felt dishonest. Stealing from him, when he had already given her so much.

“The Duchess,” Princess said unhelpfully. “Of Lowenburg. Harriette’s mother?”

“What about her?”

“She’s failing.” Harriette set her brush in its cup so he would not detect how her hand trembled. “I must go to her soon. Mrs. Demant thinks she may not last the week.”

“You are leaving?” Ren whispered.

“I have a place on a coach departing from La Belle Sauvage Inn in Ludgate Hill tomorrow.” She raised her eyes to his. “At eight of the clock.”

“An ungodly hour, when all decent folks are still asleep in their beds,” Princess remarked.

“When will you return?” Ren’s voice was hoarse.

“I do not know. It may be that Franz Karl will want to leave directly from Portsmouth once he comes to collect me. I have sent him a letter, though who knows what condition she will be in by the time it reaches him, if it reaches him at all.”

“This is our last day together?” All the color left Ren’s face as he absorbed this blow.

“I am afraid it may be such for a good long while. I cannot say what the future holds.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “I wish it were different. I wanted time to finish this portrait. Time to introduce Amalie to London. Time?—”

Time with him. That was all. Endlessly unrolling days together, like the summer they’d spent roaming the meads and hills of Shepton Mallet under blue-gray skies, treading land full of ageless history and claiming it at their own.

Time to stand by and watch him court and marry another, devote himself to her, build a life with her, and spare a moment now and then to talk with an amusing friend from his childhood?

No, thank you. The one blessing of her unanticipated change of circumstances was that Harriette would not have to see Ren take a countess and his position in society and know she had no place in his life, and never could.

The turnabout that had suddenly elevated her and made her a possibly worthy equal—daughter to a duke, destined to be a duchess in her own right—had at the same time snatched any hope that she could claim Ren for her own in any respectable fashion.

He gave her such a look of disbelief and betrayal that her stomach flipped. It was fortunate she had not been able to take any breakfast, or the contents would have been going arsey varsey about her insides.

“You are leaving.” He concentrated on forming the words. She knew his difficulties increased when he was agitated. “Just like that.”

He’d left her without warning eleven years ago, shipping off to school when she had finally, for the first time in her life, found a friend. But this was not the same, and she knew it.

She forced a smile that did not reach across her face.

“I’ve done what I could. I’ll finish the portrait in Shepton Mallet and ship it to you before I leave.

I gave you the face paint to give your sister, and I’ve helped you to find you a bride, haven’t I?

Every tea shop and milliner in London has copies of your print, and every woman who can afford it has bought a copy for her private collection.

Every marriageable girl dreams of the Earl of Renwick. ”

“P-pity the men don’t,” Ren said roughly. “Someone called me Runtwick at Almack’s yesterday.”

“To your face?” Harriette asked, aghast. His face kindled with emotion, and she reached for her Prussian blue pigment to capture the exact, intense shade of his eyes.

“V-very nearly. Behind my back, of course, but within my earshot. They were passing a print back and forth between them. ‘D-don’t make Runtwick any more appealing, if you ask me,’ they said. ’Can’t see what the l-ladies are in a stew about,’ they said.”

“They see not with the eyes of a lady,” Princess said, studying Ren.

Harriette set aside her brush, satisfied she had captured the hue she wanted, that precise cobalt blue, pure and light, calming and stimulating at the same time.

“I’ve a mind to make a sketch that will make the gents eat themselves up with jealousy,” she said.

Outrage and wickedness tugged at her, twin imps.

“Something that will silence the mockery, once and for all.”

Princess twitched her black brows. “Strip him down to the altogether?”

Harriette snorted to cover the quick, hot flare of desire that suggestion fired in her. “I doubt Mrs. Darly would print something that scandalous. And it might make the ladies perceive him as a roué rather than heroic.”

“Sketch him in a heroic pose, then.” Princess shrugged and rose with a languid ripple of skirts. “I wish to write some letters, but I find I have neither paper nor ink. You two won’t be naughty while I fetch my supplies, will you?”

“Rhette, naughty?” Ren said, but Harriette hardly heard him.

She reached for her sketchbook and crayon while her eyes roved over the many studies she’d done of her subject.

She had his face, all those memorable slopes and angles, and she’d achieved just the right blending of colors to capture the smoothness of his skin and the tone of his complexion, deepened by exposure to the sun.

She had a sense for his torso, but only because she’d sketched him in his shirt and understood the build beneath.

And because she’d been held against that firm chest and felt the play of the muscles she’d drawn, she understood with her body how tendon and flesh and the masculine structure of him all worked together.

“It’s rubbish because I haven’t got your full anatomy yet,” she blurted.

“I beg your pardon.” Ren glanced toward the doorway as Princess sauntered out with a silken swish.

“We were never allowed to have nude male models at school.” Heat rose to her cheeks at the very thought of asking him to disrobe.

She’d asked him to strip before and had been both professional and lascivious about it, knowing she ventured into improper territory.

She’d pressed herself against his nether regions, for goodness sake.

So why was she being kittenish now about the thought of stripping him down to his skin?

Because now she loved him . Not as a friend, but as a woman loves a man she wants to possess, to know, and to knit her life to.

Her crayon skated across the fresh sheet of paper as Harriette drew herself up in surprise. That line marked a division in her life: the time before she understood that she loved the Earl of Renwick, and the time after.

She’d loved him for half her life and would continue to love him for the rest of it, the boy he’d been and the man she’d come to know.

Something had chimed in her when she climbed that tree to watch him pacing his dressing room in Renwick House; she’d felt then some nudge toward a knowledge that had grown and flowered in just a short time but had nonetheless shot down deep roots.

He made sense to her on some basic level. He was for her.

And she had to leave him.

Her emotions must have shown on her face, because Ren stood as still as if he were posing, staring at her with wordless wonder.

Heat flared again in his eyes, but she couldn’t bear to look directly at it.

She felt newly vulnerable to him, laid bare by this knowledge—she, who had made herself vulnerable to no man, ever.

She knew he desired her; many men had. But she also had heard the stories of the courtesans he’d kept across Europe.

Those weren’t tales that marriage-minded mamas told their genteel daughters over the dining parlor table, but they were tidbits that the members of the Countess of Calenberg’s household reveled in.

He had a man’s appetites, and he liked the shape of Harriette.

That explained his interest. Being a man with means and freedom and the God-given right to claim anything he wished, it made perfect sense that he would pursue her if he wanted her.

And as soon as she gave the gossip mill a reason to think she was another of his conquests, any power she had to demand respect from her future husband was gone.

But if he were willing to offer his body to her—she had use for it.