Page 18

T wo days later, Alistair once more donned his blue coat and returned to what he had come to think of as the scene of the crime. Not his crime, to be clear.

At least, not yet.

He’d spent part of the morning in the library with Edwina, going over the household accounts. If he’d needed another reminder of why he’d asked his aunt to find him a wife of means, his sister had supplied it—not only with proof of how she had scrimped and saved, but also in her soft-voiced retelling of the curate’s, her curate’s, efforts to help those on the estate who were in far worse straits.

If Alistair’s thoughts had tended to wander into forbidden territory now and again since leaving London, that meeting had been a spur to his conscience.

He was the Earl of Ryland. He had certain obligations, which he intended to fulfill.

Constantia must remain off-limits.

“Is all well with you, my lord?” she asked when he stepped into the studio.

She was clad much as she had been the day before, the heavy apron pinned over her light woolen dress. Her hair was once more down around her shoulders, but this time, it was tied back from her face with a length of cream-colored ribbon. She looked ready for work.

An easel sat ready with a blank canvas upon it. Nearby stood the wooden chair with another canvas propped on its seat. On that canvas, she had pinned some of the sketches she’d made two days before. Points of reference as she worked, he supposed.

“Why would you ask?” He approached, but not near enough to view the sketches of himself clearly.

Mischief twinkled in her eyes as they grazed over his face. “I do not think that scowl is one you would wish to have immortalized in oils.”

His efforts to clear his visage only succeeded in making a muscle leap in his jaw. “Surely you could use one of those faces for your purposes?” He nodded toward the collection of sketches.

“That is the general idea, yes. It lessens the need for you to sit in one pose or maintain one expression for hours. Do you wish to see?” With a fluid wave, she motioned him closer.

Reluctantly he examined the dozen or so renditions—some partial, even a single feature, as he’d imagined, but not as unsettling as he’d feared; others in profile, which drew rather more attention than he liked to his nose. Just three captured his entire face, and of those three, one in particular drew his eye. The strokes of which it was composed were starker, somehow, and there was a hint of wildness in his gaze.

It cut him to the quick to learn that she saw him thus.

It was not a picture—not a version of himself—he wanted anyone to see.

“I had not realized there was so much of my father in my face.” He knew his voice was rough, but he hadn’t a prayer of softening it.

Constantia seemed to recognize that this was dangerous ground. With a light touch to his shoulder, she motioned him toward the chaise. “I daresay there is a bit of him in all his children,” she said in a brusque, businesslike voice. “Lady Harriet’s love of drawing, for example.”

“Pray God that’s all they share,” he barked. But he seated himself on the chaise as she wished, angling his shoulders and turning his face toward the light. “Like so?”

“Look here, if you please.” She held up her pencil at the level of her nose, giving him something to focus on that thankfully was not her penetrating eyes. “Yes, that will do.”

While she applied herself to her work, his thoughts churned so loudly through his head that she could surely hear them. They drowned out the soft scritch-scritch of her pencil sweeping across the paper.

“You’ve seen some of his paintings, I know,” he blurted out when he could stand it no longer. “You must have done, when you straightened up this room.”

The movement of the pencil slowed but did not stop. “Yes.”

Despite the obvious reluctance embedded in her reply, the way she stretched the word to avoid having to say more, he couldn’t keep himself from asking, “You are a skilled artist. What is your expert assessment of his work?”

For a long moment, she said nothing. All of her attention appeared to be focused on some detail of her sketch as she frowned at the canvas, erased some errant line, and lightly drew another in its place.

At long last, she laid the pencil on the ledge of the easel, but still she did not look at him. “Some of the paintings were...extraordinary,” she said, in a voice that confessed she would rather have found them otherwise but refused to lie. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. There’s a—an unusual quality to the brushstrokes. A boldness. He had a way of capturing light...”

Even having steeled himself for praise of his father, he hadn’t expected the wistful, almost covetous, look in her eyes. As if the man’s abilities were something to be envied. But he knew just what she meant.

“His work used to hang in every room of this house,” he told her. Ordering it taken down had been one of his first acts as Earl of Ryland. He could not bear to look at it, so he’d had it wrapped up and stowed away. He ought to have had it destroyed.

“Given his choice of colors and subjects, I can certainly understand how being surrounded by it might be overwhelming.” She glanced toward him but did not hold his gaze. “But to leave the walls bare? Surely there must have been other artwork that could have taken its place. Something must have been there before.”

“Family portraits, Dutch and Italian masters, medieval tapestries, that sort of thing?” he suggested with false airiness. She nodded. “When the creative impulse struck, he was known to paint over them, give them away, use them to wipe his boots, even toss them in the fire.” And if he had not, Alistair would have been driven to sell them, to put a price on those invaluable pieces, to pay down the man’s debts.

He saw her stiffen with shock, heard her sharp intake of breath.

In a slightly mocking voice, he reminded her, “He was bold, just as you said.”

“I might better have said selfish ,” she countered, clearly horrified by the thought of such destruction and desecration.

“Oh, that too. You told me once that it was a rare artist who was not subject to the whims of a patron. Well, my father was such an artist. He painted only for himself.”

Alistair pushed to standing and began to pace in front of the chaise, heedless of how the motion drew Constantia’s eye. “Regardless of the fact that his wife was often in poor health or that he had a houseful of young daughters, he would invite his artist friends to stay for a month, or two, or six, to paint, to indulge their...passions.” He sent a baneful glance around the studio. “Things here rarely looked so neat.”

“Creation can be messy, chaotic,” she reminded him, and he was not sure whether she was defending herself or making excuses for his father.

“Yes,” he agreed, having already made such arguments to himself. “But sometimes it is also decadent. Dissolute. Mad. It would have mattered less, this selfish, self-destructive bent, if he hadn’t also been an earl. But he had a nobleman’s responsibilities and obligations.” He wandered now toward the window and stared out across the barren moor. “When he came into the title, the earldom included thousands of acres of farmland in Wiltshire and Somerset, the source of generations of prosperity for not just my family but the hundreds of families who lived on it.” Swiftly he turned back to see her still watching him. “Upon learning that the land was not entailed, and having no interest in agriculture, he sold it for a pittance, probably to buy paints”—he waved an arm toward the cabinet—“or canvases”—the other arm shot out toward the half-finished paintings she had stacked in one corner—“or to fund one of his lavish parties. My mother died of a fever following Harriet’s birth. I was away at school. She breathed her last, all alone, while he sat here, not a hundred yards away. Six months later, he fell down the stairs and broke his neck.” Then, suddenly drained, he made his way back to the chaise and sank onto it, propped his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head into his hands. “All of my life has been spent cleaning up after him.”

He did not realize she had stepped from behind the easel and approached until he saw the tips of her shoes peeking from beneath her skirts, not quite toe-to-toe with him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Sorry to learn that your father was such a man. Sorry you have been weighed down with the burden of making things right. Sorry most of all that my art was the cause of your having to relive such pain. Reopening this studio, making those sketches...” She flicked her fingers backward, in the direction of the easel. “None of this would have been necessary if not for the drawings I did in London.”

“Miss C.’s cartoons, you mean?” He lifted his shoulders, part shrug, part wry laugh. “I won’t say I liked them, but you weren’t wrong about me. I’ve had to be dull, prosaic, stern to countermand everything he did, everything for which he stood. Though I have wondered from time to time...” He lifted his face to hers. “How did I happen to fall under the point of your pen?”

A flicker of unease passed across her features, masquerading as a tight smile. “I rented a room from a modiste who calls herself Madame D’Arblay.” The name tickled some remote corner of his mind, but he couldn’t stir a memory to the forefront. “Your sisters placed a rather substantial order with her shop early last spring. You came to speak with the modiste one afternoon, and I happened to overhear...”

His recollection of the day burst from wherever it had been hiding. “Oh, God.” He dropped his head forward again. “I quibbled over the bill, did I not?”

“And the styles your sisters had chosen, yes. I had been searching for a subject for the next edition of ‘What Miss C. Saw’ and it suited my purposes perfectly to cast you in the role of hypocritical peer, miserly with your sisters and puritanical in your tastes—except, of course, for your taste in friends.”

“Miles again?” Alistair could only laugh. He lifted his head and flung himself backward on the chaise, tipping his head against the arm. “As if my lack of funds and execrable taste in clothes weren’t damning enough.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, now with a slightly incredulous tinge to her voice.

Perhaps she wondered if he weren’t mad too.

“Don’t be. You amused my sisters, Miles, and half the ton with those cartoons.” He dropped his voice as if imparting a great secret. “Sometimes even me.” And then he laughed again at the sheer ridiculousness of the turn his life had taken.

“Amused?” She looked affronted. “I intended them as a biting satire on the duplicity of the nobility. Noblemen especially. But perhaps my efforts were lost on such a facile audience. Perhaps we should return to the portrait.” As she spoke, she lifted one hand and reached for him.

Instinctively, he shot out his hand to stop her. She was, no doubt, simply intending to smooth his now-unkempt hair. But if she touched him, she who had glimpsed his soul even before he’d laid it bare, he knew he would not be able to walk away.

He failed, however, to consider what would happen if he touched her .

He had intended merely to brush her away, to ward her off. Instead he caught her hand in his, his fingers curling lightly around her wrist, his thumb nestling in the curve of her palm. He made no effort to hold her.

She made no attempt to pull away.

“I’m no rake,” he insisted in a harsh whisper. “I never have been.”

“I know it. I think I always have.”

“Yet I want you”—ever so slightly, he tightened his grip, and she shivered as he drew the pad of his thumb twice across the tender heart of her hand—“even though I shouldn’t.”

Her pupils flared and she took a step closer, into the space between his spread knees. “Yes.”

A single word. Acknowledgment and agreement all at once.

“But,” she continued when the next words wouldn’t come to him, “you’re afraid that if you give in to what’s between us, if you indulge your desires”—she raised her other hand to spear her fingers through his hair, then slid her palm over his stubbled jaw—“you’ll be no better than your father.”

Yes . That was exactly what he thought—what he knew to be true.

And still he lifted his other hand to her waist and dragged her down into his darkness, beside him on the chaise where no doubt a hundred other conquests had been made.

“I can’t marry you,” he whispered against her throat.

“I know that too.” A soft groan escaped her as his lips sought and found the delightful pair of freckles above her collarbone. “Please. Don’t stop.”

He had, God help him, no intention of stopping. She sighed with apparent satisfaction when he eased her back onto the raised end of the chaise and rose above her to claim her mouth in a searing kiss.

When had he become the sort of man who seduced the woman he’d sworn to protect? Even Miles in his rakish heyday would have drawn the line at that.

But such philosophical inquiries would have to wait until a time when all his blood was not directed somewhere other than his brain.

Between them her hands moved to slide beneath his coat and curl around his ribs. But he did not immediately accept her invitation to snug their bodies together. Instead, he levered himself onto one knee and one arm, while with the other he smoothed the tangle of red hair away from her eyes so that he could look deep into their gold- and green-flecked depths.

“You’ve been driving me mad for a fortnight, Constantia. No, months,” he corrected. No point in dishonesty now. Her cartoons had irritated and fascinated him in equal turns, and when he had finally seen her in person last spring? Well—suffice it to say, he had never forgotten.

She stared up at him from beneath eyelids already drowsy with desire. But her lips quirked in a crooked smile, not at all chagrined by his chiding. “And I suppose you mean to show me how it feels?”

He cupped her cheek, traced his fingers over her parted lips, bit back a growl when her tongue darted out to taste him. He let his hand slide lower, over her chin, down to her throat, where he could feel her pulse race. “I’m not sure I have the patience for that.”

He felt rather than heard her sigh. “Please?”

It was tacit admission of a truth they both knew. They had an hour—or a handful of them, if they were weak—to explore what might have been between them, if he were not duty bound to marry another and she were not a wild thing determined to fly free.

They had to make the afternoon last.