Page 21 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

With one exception: the ring Barrows had given him.

He was still wearing it on a chain around his neck.

He’d tried to shut it in a drawer a few times, but it made him too sad.

Barrows did not care for him, perhaps, but Matty could not shut his own foolhardy attachment off so easily.

So round his neck it stayed, and would remain, he supposed, until he either succeeded or failed to get the promotion it was meant for.

Then he would wear it as a reminder never to lose track of who was friend and who was coworker again—that the promotion was a promotion, not a succession—or else give it back to Barrows in a final farewell.

When class came back around the next week, Matty put on his patchy coat and dragged his sketchbook, his lumpy scarf, and the ring talisman back to Buttersnipe’s School for Artistic Enrichment, where, in all the enthusiasm he’d cultivated during the week, he had nearly forgotten the trials that awaited him there.

Trials like, for instance, Warren Bakshi’s smile at seeing him. His friendly wave. The way he hesitated before returning to the spot beside him again, saying, “D’you mind?”

Matty ought to tell him yes, but he couldn’t. He nodded instead, and Warren took the spot beside him. There was something uncomfortably easy about it.

“Have you gotten any better?” Warren reached quite rudely for Matty’s sketchbook to flip through it. “Actually…looks like you have.”

“Indeed,” Matty said dryly. “And isn’t the fact that this is an improvement the most pathetic thing you’ve ever heard?”

Warren laughed. He had such a lovely laugh, and so freely given. He passed the book back. “Nah.”

“You’re just being nice.”

“Not at all.” Warren opened up his own sketchbook to a clean page, rolling up his sleeves and settling his workstation much as he probably did at the bar.

Not that Matty would ever get to verify that.

“You know how I spend my nights. You wouldn’t believe the pathetic things I hear on a daily basis.

Your drawing…seven out of ten pathetic. At worst.”

Matty was grinning before he could stop himself. “You’ve got a real biting sense of humor on you.”

“Certain way of life will do that to you. You mind?”

“No,” Matty said. “I think it’s brilliant.”

Warren looked like he wanted to say something, but their attention was taken before he could manage it, as someone unfamiliar came before the class with the instructors.

Matty’s figure modeling replacement had been found.

The class being focused on the face, it was not nearly so salacious a position as Matty had expected, the fellow full-dressed and settled down upon a stool to look straight ahead and not move too much.

He thought he might feel wistful at seeing just how easy this case might have been in other circumstances, but strangely, he did not.

He was, in fact, more relieved than he would have expected that there were no strange artists prodding and posing him, that he could do something with his own hands and chat amiably with Warren here and there while he kept an eye out for evidence and built up his inroads by doing something, anything , but sitting there looking nice.

Aside from the live model, class was very similar.

They were still in the line-drawing phase, though Mr. Buttersnipe hinted that shading would be introduced sooner than Matty was comfortable with.

Once they’d taken some time to find the shapes of the model, assembling them into the basic outline that could eventually comprise a portrait, they were told to pair up and do the same thing with a partner.

“Portraiture is about capturing individuality , those little things that make a person unique,” said Mrs. Buttersnipe languorously. “Those differences are in the details, yes, but also in the larger shapes of a person. If your two proto-portraits look the same, you have failed this exercise.”

Matty couldn’t help but think she eyed him particularly skeptically, but before he could ascertain for sure, a few loud claps (and a matching yip from Miss Martha) told them to get drawing.

Nervously, Matty glanced up at Warren, half-hoping the fellow would go off in search of a better partner. But he was looking right at Matty like he hadn’t even considered looking elsewhere. A confident, automatic selection that warmed Matty straight down to his toes.

While he knew his picture would embarrass them both in the end, he didn’t mind having an excuse to stare at Warren as much as he liked.

The bloke was devilishly handsome, the sort of effortless handsomeness that made one wonder how much effort the effortlessness had really taken.

In a world of specialized hair oils and manicured mustaches, his warm brown face was clean shaven, his hair falling soft and lightly processed, worn just long enough to give an impression to the right people without raising the hackles of the wrong ones.

“Done.” Warren lifted his pencil with a flourish and gave Matty a look of playful challenge. “Want to see?”

“Done?” Matty repeated. His face heated up. There’d been a lot more staring than drawing so far and he wasn’t even close to finished. “Um. Sure, let’s see it.”

Warren turned his sketch pad around. Matty’s immediate impulse was to call him out for going beyond the assignment to make himself look good, but in truth, he really had just done the shapes.

Still, it didn’t look anything like Matty’s or even the better examples the Buttersnipes had shown at the beginning of class.

Sure, Warren’s page was circles and rectangles and a few lines to connect them, but there was also enough sense of poor posture, awkward movement, and the silly patches on his jacket that it made Matty self-conscious.

“Do I really look like that?”

Warren examined his work. “Sometimes,” he said. “When you’re giving me that blank look, anyway.” Warren tapped the empty, oval head. Matty felt himself collapse into the blank look in defense. “See? Spitting image. Let’s see yours.”

“It’s not done.”

“Come on.”

To be fair, everyone else in the room seemed to be finishing up, examining their partner’s work with compliments or laughter and comparing them with the sketches they’d done of the model. Reluctantly, Matty turned his sketch pad around.

Warren nodded solemnly. “Brilliant.”

Matty raised a skeptical brow.

“I mean it.” Warren said. “If Scotland Yard ever starts you drawing the wanted posters, I hope you do mine.”

The joke could have been cruel, but there was something so oddly soft about the way Warren teased him. It made him happier than he could remember being in a very long time. A smile crossed his face before he could help himself.

When it did, Warren’s eyes lit up.

It occurred to Matty, then, something that he’d been missing this week.

An artist’s work could be solitary, but they generally ran in packs anyway.

It would be dull and limiting indeed to browse galleries alone forever.

The art community wasn’t Scotland Yard—a real artist had real artist friends, and frankly, it wouldn’t hurt if those friends were especially good with a pencil.

It was a risk, the idea he had. A massive one.

Though, perhaps, not quite so bad as the risks he’d taken with this chap already. With that in mind…

“Warren.” He fidgeted anxiously with the ring, the sparkle of the moment and the looming absence of Barrows nipping his heels like Miss Martha’s misbehaved cousins until he could withhold the question no longer.

“Would you care to grab a pint after class today? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about. ”

Something crossed Warren’s face. Reluctance?

“Not if you don’t want to,” Matty added hurriedly, smile dissolving as embarrassment washed over him.

“I want to!” Warren clarified, all honesty and a shocking hint of…

desperation? “It’s just…” He glanced around and lowered his voice.

“It’s Mr. Forester. I think he’d be uncomfortable enough knowing we’re in a class together.

Taking it beyond that might get me in trouble.

And my job. I need—” He paused, swallowing hard as he rethought his words.

“Well, I suppose I don’t need it, actually.

But it still means something to me. What did you want to discuss, anyway? ”

While it was, technically, a rejection, it was not a particularly convincing one. His question was filled with hope that whatever Matty wanted could be justified somehow. His clear desire to say yes was galvanizing.

“Well,” Matty said, thinking through his next words carefully, “what I wanted to discuss is nothing scandalous. I just need more help with my shapes before we get into shading next week. I fear such an addition will take my work from shoddy-wanted-poster to site-of-a-stabbing. I meant nothing more by my invitation, of course.”

“I see,” said Warren slowly. “The pint would be an extension of the class itself, then, wouldn’t it?”

“Exactly.”

“And the class, of course, was a coincidence from the start. No fault of our own.”

“Not by any reasonable measure.”

Warren nodded, and though he bit his lip for an anxious moment, it didn’t last long. “One condition.”

“Name it.”

“Smile for me again.” He picked his pencil back up. “For the portrait. The first one didn’t last long enough for me to get it down.”

Fortunately, it was pretty easy, just now, for Matty to let that particular expression stretch across his face.