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A listair swore when he looked into the mirror, then clawed at the misshapen knot of his cravat. He’d tied and untied the damn thing half a dozen times already, and what little remained of Mrs. Swetley’s starch was on the point of giving up the ghost. “Good God, man. What’s the matter with you?” he muttered sternly at his reflection. “You don’t care about this picture, remember?”

But he did care, too much, for the artist.

He closed his eyes, tied another knot without watching himself or without checking his success afterward, and finally pulled on his most elegant, most carefully tailored coat of blue superfine. Miles had selected it last spring. He’d paid for it, too, after insisting that Alistair couldn’t possibly squire Freddie and Georgie about Town in the drab sort of thing he usually wore. Alistair tried not to think about what any of his sisters would say if they happened to see him as he crossed the house.

Why had he taken Constantia to his father’s studio? He never acted on whims, and that had been a whim of the worst sort.

Or had it?

Truth be told, he’d been thinking of it since the day they’d arrived.

He couldn’t help but think of it whenever he was at Rylemoor, of course. Couldn’t help but think of his father. Memories of him were like a smudge in the corner of his vision that he couldn’t blink away.

But as much as he would like to tear down the entire west wing, to bury that room and its contents and its history in the rubble, he had hated the thought of Constantia toiling away in the schoolroom with a box of cheap crayons when he knew a proper art studio was just a stone’s throw away.

He scoffed to himself as he trotted down the steps. As if anything his father had ever done could be described as proper .

The entry hall was empty as he crossed it. As were the cloisters, though given where they led, this was hardly surprising. In spite of the bite of the late-November air, he paused when he reached the door at their end. The padlock hung open. Constantia must already be inside. Picking his way across the stones, he made his way to the stairs and went up, then hesitated two or three steps from the top. A mixture of dread and eagerness stewed in his gut.

There was a word for men who took pleasure in torturing others. Was there a word for a man who was willing to torture himself? For the pleasure of a woman who regarded him with distrust and even contempt?

Fool.

For just a moment, as he stood on the threshold of the studio, he wondered whether he’d mistaken his way and ended up somewhere else. The light streaming through the west-facing windows was almost the only familiar thing left about the room.

He wasn’t surprised to discover that she had rearranged a few things. He hadn’t expected her to clean, however. To brush away cobwebs and polish jars of pigment until they shone like gems. He’d always thought of her as a bit...well, scattered. Disorderly. Weren’t all artists? But in her case, perhaps his judgment had been skewed by the accident, the jumbled contents of her valise, the muddied shoes, the worn and wrinkled dresses.

Here, certainly, she had instilled order. She had sorted and stacked the canvases, tucking the spoiled ones neatly away in a corner. She had even covered that wretched orange chaise with a sheet.

The transformation was almost enough to make him forget the awful history of the room.

He dragged in a shuddering sort of breath, and with it a lungful of air spiced with the sharp tang of mineral spirits. His sputtering cough alerted her to his presence.

“Ah, Lord Ryland. I was just beginning to wonder.” She stepped from behind the open door of the cabinet, her dress covered with a pinny apron made of coarse osnaburg, which he suspected her of having borrowed from the scullery. Her wrist was no longer bandaged. “I apologize for the smell, but I found some brushes that needed to be cleaned.”

“That may be a lost cause.” Surely whatever sort of animal hair they were made of had deteriorated over time.

“It may,” she agreed. “But I thought it would be worth a try to salvage them. They were excellent quality, once.”

Of course they were. My father insisted on the best.

She had looked him up and down as she spoke, so he stretched out one arm to his side. “Do I meet with your approval?”

Her mouth popped open and he caught a glimpse of the pink tip of her tongue pressed against her teeth. He could almost read the retort on it. But then she pressed her lips together instead and gave an enigmatic smile. “My approval is hardly relevant, my lord. Won’t you sit down?” She gestured toward the covered chaise.

He took a circuitous route toward the center of the room, past the now-empty table. “You must have worked for hours after I left yesterday.”

“Mm. Yes.” She was looking for something now, first peeking into the depths of the cabinet and then feeling in the pockets of her apron. “I wanted to be prepared. And drat it all, what have I done with my pencil? Oh.”

With a self-deprecating little laugh, her fingertips went to the knot of hair piled on the top of her head, and she tugged free the implement that must have been strained with the task of holding all of those curls in place. Locks of fire tumbled over her shoulders and down her back.

He stood there for a moment, mesmerized at the sight, weak-willed as a moth when it spied a flame.

“Sit, please.” She twitched her fingers at him, motioning him toward the chaise again. In the afternoon light, her hazel eyes were bright, a sort of golden brown flecked with green. “Make yourself comfortable. I’d like to get a number of sketches today, different angles and expressions. They will make it easier for me to finish the details of the portrait without requiring you to sit for hours. And most of all, they will help ensure that the final product is true.”

“I don’t think my aunt is aiming for truth.” He eased onto the edge of the cushion. He’d always imagined it would be more comfortable—such an ugly thing ought to have some redeeming quality. “She wants...an advertisement, of sorts. Something that will make eligible misses—or really, their doting papas—open up their purses and buy what’s pictured.” She turned her face away so that her hair hid her expression from him, but he heard some small noise of disapproval. “But I forget, you do not like my little jokes.”

“I—I did not believe you to be joking.” She paused to fiddle with something he could not see. “You cannot imagine how I regret my part in making this portrait necessary.”

Was she so reluctant to spend this time with him, then? She might have refused his aunt’s request.

But he was absurdly glad she had not.

“Is that what she told you? That your cartoons are the reason I have not yet found a wife?”

She made some noncommittal sound that he took for confirmation.

Silently cursing Aunt Josephine, he rose and took a step toward her. “Don’t believe it. The truth is, my romantic woes date from my inheritance of this crumbling abbey and, with it, a mountain of debt. Of course, that did happen in the same year I grew six inches taller and, according to my dear sister Bernie, became ‘an awkward, insufferable prig’—the man Miss C. captured so well. So perhaps my flaws have worked in tandem to make me unlovable.”

“You are not—” Her head whipped about, and a few strands of her hair swept across his face. Pear blossoms again. “You are not sitting down, my lord,” she said, pointing with her pencil toward the chaise.

Reluctantly, he acceded to her wishes and returned to his seat. The chaise creaked beneath him as he turned his body first one way, then another, and finally draped one arm over the curved side. “How shall I—?”

“Doesn’t matter. Today, I simply intend to make a few rough sketches of your face.” With the pencil she traced an oval in the air around her own head. “Eyes, nose, mouth.”

Had any words ever been calculated to make a man more self-conscious?

But at least her intent study of him gave him license to study her in turn. She had pulled over a chair and now sat across from him with her sketch pad propped on her knee. While she worked, a charming little frown of concentration wrinkled the space between her fair eyebrows. Occasionally, she paused and rested the unsharpened end of the pencil against her lips.

Mentally, he traced the constellation of freckles across her nose, then spied a pair of them near her collarbone, and another at the very edge of her bodice. Dear God, that was a dangerous discovery to make.

She wasn’t classically beautiful—that red hair, those freckles, the pertly upturned nose, the slightly crooked smile. Her tall, almost angular frame. And yet, when he looked at her, it was like looking at one of those Grecian sculptures, all the more extraordinary for its supposed imperfections.

And like a schoolboy at the museum, he fairly burned to run his hands over every inch of cool, smooth marble—perhaps because he knew it was strictly forbidden.

“You may talk if you wish,” she said. “It won’t disturb me.”

If she knew the present direction of his thoughts, she would not make such a claim.

“What shall I talk about?” he asked.

“Oh, anything.” As she spoke, her pencil flew across the paper, and he wondered which bit of him she was capturing with those bold, unhesitating strokes. “What qualities do you hope for in the woman you wed?”

“Other than a vast fortune?”

The pencil stopped and she lifted her eyes from the paper to frown at him. “Other than that.”

Unable to bear her scrutiny, he directed his own gaze toward the windows.

“Hold there, please. You have a strong profile,” she said. He heard the pencil move again.

“Do I?”

He fought the urge to reach up and inspect the angle of his own jaw. For God’s sake, didn’t he know it well enough already? He’d scraped it with a razor just that morning. Or perhaps her remark had been a euphemistic reference to his nose, which he’d always considered overlarge for his face...

“She must be kind to my sisters,” he blurted out, desperate to change the direction of his thoughts, and perhaps hers as well. “A suitable chaperone for them in Town—which, as you have no doubt discovered, will require patience, determination, and a certain degree of cunning.”

Constantia chuckled softly at that, and he only narrowly resisted turning his head to look at her, to see the way her laugh lit up her face.

“I should like her to be an excellent household manager,” he went on. “Neat. Well-organized. Firm but kind with the servants. A good hostess.”

She made a little hum to show she was listening. For a few moments after that, there was no sound but that of the tip of her pencil sweeping across the paper. Then silence. His neck was starting to feel stiff.

“That’s quite a list,” she said. “Rather...businesslike, though. Is there nothing you want for yourself, to promote your own happiness?”

“Shouldn’t a well-run home be enough to make a man happy?” he countered.

She didn’t answer.

After another quiet moment, he said, “Very well. I should like her to be intelligent. Well-read. Capable of carrying on interesting conversation.”

“My goodness. You do not ask for much. Pretty, too, I suppose?”

“Not...unappealing,” he conceded.

That earned him another laugh. “So, pretty.” A few more sweeps of the pencil, then, “Turn this way now, please. Thank you.” As he shifted to face her, she moved her hand to a different spot on the paper. “Anything else?”

“Well, I suppose it would be remiss of a man in my position not to think of finding a wife who was willing and eager to bear him sons.”

He thought her cheeks pinked at that. Her head was tipped downward, though, so he couldn’t be sure. It had been an outrageous thing for him to say.

But if she had been bothered by it, it didn’t distract her from her work. She began yet again in another corner of the paper. He imagined a sheet covered with disembodied eyebrows, noses, and ears and screwed shut his eyes to drive away the thought.

“Eyes open, please,” she instructed in a mild, impersonal voice, such as a physician might use while conducting an examination. “And your bride-to-be...have you given any thought to what the young lady might like? What is it you hope she’ll see in this portrait of you?”

Another horrible vision rose in his mind of haggard women at the marketplace, examining a cartload of gaping-mouthed, glass-eyed fish, ever wary of being cheated, giving this one a poke and that one a sniff.

But better that, perhaps, than marrying a girl who’d fallen for a flattering picture and then watching the stars fade from her eyes once she saw...all this.

“I haven’t thought about it, no.” And frankly, I’d rather not. What one wanted and what one got were almost always very different things. “She’ll see whatever you choose to show her, I suppose.”

The pencil paused in mid-stroke as she lifted her gaze to him. “That’s giving me a great deal of power, my lord.”

Abruptly, he stood. “Yes, well. See that you don’t abuse it. Again.” He jerked his chin toward her sketchbook. “You must have enough to be getting on with. I can’t spend all afternoon sitting about.”

“No, of course not. I understand. And yes”—she lifted the sketchbook as if to show him, but at this distance he could make out nothing but a series of stark and faint lines—“I have enough here to begin my work.” She rose from the chair and stepped aside so he could pass. “But you will need to come again, say the day after tomorrow, to pose for the portrait itself. And at least a time or two after that.”

“Very well.” And before he could do or say any more rash things, he hurried away.

Constantia knew she’d struck a nerve. She was only surprised it had taken so long. Heaven knew she’d been probing hard enough.

Those little almost-witticisms of his, they weren’t chinks in his armor. They were defensive barbs, designed to keep others at a more comfortable arm’s length. She wanted to make him lose that calm, composed, always proper demeanor. In a string of dubious decisions, it might be the least wise thing she had ever done.

But, oh, she was determined to see him crack.

For the portrait, of course. Because it wasn’t art if it wasn’t true—and hang Lady Posenby’s wishes in the matter. Constantia had agreed to ply her skills reluctantly. Regretfully. But since she had agreed, why not at least paint the real man? Alistair, not some caricature of an unfortunate earl in search of a wife.

A clever, capable, interesting, eye-catching, eager wife.

She nearly snapped her pencil in half.

She had others now. Not just the stub she’d had to wheedle from a disgruntled publican in some nameless village. But those others were back in the schoolroom and she had work to do here.

After dragging her chair over to the table, she spread out her unfinished sketches—hardly more than suggestions—chose one, and began to fill in the details. The determined shadow of whiskers along the turn of his freshly shaven jaw. The perfect symmetry of his cheekbones, made more interesting by the way the hawkish bridge of his aristocratic nose divided his face. The lock of dark hair that persisted in falling over one brow.

And those eyes...a shade somewhere between the rich brown of coffee and the unfathomable blackness of ink. The way they sparkled when he spoke of his sisters—even their misdeeds. Especially their misdeeds. The way they narrowed with worry when he thought no one would see.

The way they had looked at her. Through her. Aggravation and pity and something she desperately longed to believe was desire.

Bending her head to her paper, she set about filling in the details of each fragment. Sunlight began to fade from the room, but rather than fetching a lamp, she only worked faster, coaxing light and life from each sketch.

At last she finished the final one. With a sigh of something like relief, she gathered the pages and rose from her hard wooden seat, tipping her head and stretching her back. She was exhausted, and the chaise beckoned.

Pictures in hand, she sat down where he’d been, then reclined, wishing she’d thought to bring a pillow. Head against the arm, she held the sketches above her in one hand and tried, in spite of the increasing gloom, to judge her success.

His eyes bored into hers, just a hint of wildness in their depths. That flash of...something he’d shown just before striding from the room. It made her pulse tick faster and sent a rush of warmth through her core.

She tilted her head one way, the picture another. Her free hand, which had been resting at the base of her throat, slid lower, almost of its own volition, caressing the hollow at the base of her throat. After another moment, her fingertips plucked one peaked nipple as they passed. Lower...lower. Closing her eyes, she pressed the heel of her hand against the aching spot at the joining of her thighs. It wasn’t enough.

It would have to be enough.

The chaise creaked as her spine arched upward. No one ever came here. No one would see if she...

Her thready gasp pierced the silence as her fingertips sought and found her damp, needy quim. Not a ladylike word, but what did it matter? She wasn’t a lady, certainly not the sort who fell in love with a portrait and begged her doting papa to buy her an earl. She was merely the artist.

And if she kept one sketch to herself—for herself—no one need ever know.