His lips hovered a fraction over hers, just long enough for her to have a premonition of melting, a premonition of what it would be like to cede, to unleash whatever it was he kept restrained. Just long enough for Cressie to come to her senses.
She yanked herself free. ‘How dare you!’ It sounded very unconvincing, even to herself. She was struggling to breathe, praying that the heat which flooded her cheeks, which was surely mortification, was not too apparent. The nerve of him! He was outrageously attractive and he obviously knew it. Also, he was Italian. Everyone knew that Italian men were quite unable to control their passions. Obviously, it was not such a cliché as she had thought.
‘To return to your point, signor, I concede that my mouth is too wide to be considered beautiful,’ Cressie said, relieved to hear that her voice sounded almost composed.
‘Beauty, Lady Cressida, is not exclusively about symmetry. Your mouth is very beautiful, in my humble opinion.’
Giovanni di Matteo did not look the least abashed. ‘You ought not to have kissed me,’ Cressie said.
‘I did not kiss you. And you ought not to have spoken so scathingly of my work, especially since you have never seen it.’
‘Do not assume that I am so ignorant as my father. I have studied it, and I did not speak scathingly! I merely pointed out that you—that painting—that any art—’
‘Can be reduced to a set of principles and rules. I was listening.’ But even as he curled his lip, Giovanni had a horrible suspicion that this wholly unorthodox female had somehow managed to get to the root of his dissatisfaction. In the early days, when he painted for the simple pleasure of creating something unique, he had channelled that tangible connection between canvas and brush and palette and blood and skin and bone, painting from the heart and not the head. It had earned him nothing but mockery from the so-called experts. Naïve. Emotional. Lacking discipline and finesse. The words were branded on his heart. He learned to hone his craft, eradicate all emotion from his work. To his eye it rendered it soulless, but it proved immensely popular. The experts acclaimed it, the titled and influential commissioned it. He chose not to disillusion any of them. Giovanni made his bow. ‘Much as I have enjoyed our discussion, Lady Cressida, I must go and continue with the more prosaic task of capturing the likeness of my current client. I bid you good day.’
He took her hand, raising it to his lips. As he kissed her fingertips, the spark of awareness took him by surprise. Judging by her shocked expression, he was not the only one affected by it.
Chapter Two
Giovanni leapt down from the gig as it drew to a halt in front of Killellan Manor, the country estate of the Armstrong family, airily dismissing the waiting footman’s offer to escort him to the door. He had travelled to Sussex on the mail, which had been met at the nearest posting inn by Lord Armstrong’s coachman. It was a cold but clear day, the clouds scudding across the pale blue sky of early spring, encouraged by the brisk March breeze. Pulling his greatcoat more tightly around himself, he stamped his feet in an effort to stimulate the circulation. There were many things about England he admired, but the weather was not one of them.
Lord Armstrong’s impressive residence was constructed of grey sandstone. Palladian in style, with the main four-storey building flanked by two wings, the façade which fronted on to the carriage way was marred, in Giovanni’s view, by the unnecessary addition of a much later semicircular portico. Enclosed by the high hedges into which the gates were set, the house looked gloomy and rather forbidding.
Wishing to stretch his legs after the long journey before announcing his presence, Giovanni followed the main path past a high-walled garden and the stable buildings to discover a prospect at the front of the house altogether different and much more pleasing to the eye. Here, manicured lawns edged with bright clumps of daffodils and narcissi stretched down, via a set of wide and shallow stone steps, to a stream which burbled along a pebbled river bed towards a watermill. On the far side of the river, the vista was of gently rolling meadows neatly divided by hedgerows. Despite the fact that the rustic bridge looked rather suspiciously too rustic, he couldn’t help but be entranced by this quintessentially English landscape.
‘It is a perfect example of what the poet, Mr Blake, calls England’s green and pleasant land, is it not?’
Giovanni started, for the words came from someone standing immediately behind him. The rush of the water over the pebbles had disguised her approach. ‘Lady Cressida. I was thinking almost exactly that, though I am not familiar with the poet, I’m afraid. Unless—could it be William Blake, the artist?’
‘He is more known for his verse than his art.’
‘That will change. I have seen some of his paintings. They are …’ Giovanni struggled to find an appropriate English word to describe the fantastical drawings and watercolours which seemed to explode out of the paper. ‘Extraordinary,’ he settled on finally and most unsatisfactorily. ‘I find them beautiful, but most certainly they would fail your mathematical criteria.’
‘And this?’ She waved at the landscape. ‘Would you consider this beautiful?’
‘I suspect your father has invested rather a lot of money to ensure that it is. That bridge, it cannot possibly be as old as it appears.’
‘There is also a little artfully ruined folly in the grounds, and you are quite correct, neither are older than I am.’
It had been more than two weeks since their first meeting in London. In the interval, Giovanni had replayed their conversation several times in his head, and that almost-but-not-quite kiss too. It had been a foolish act to take such a liberty with the daughter of the man who was paying his commission, and a man of such palpable influence too. He couldn’t understand why he had been so cavalier. Attempting to recreate Lady Cressida feature by feature using charcoal on paper had proved entirely unsatisfactory. He had been unable to capture the elusive quality that had piqued his interest. Now, as she stood before him, the sun shining directly behind her, making a halo of her wild curls, the dark shadows under her startlingly blue eyes, the faintest trace of a frown drawing her brows together giving her a delicate, bruised look, he could see that it was nothing to do with her features but something more complex which drew him to her. It puzzled him, until he realised that her allure was quite basic. He wanted to capture that ambiguity of hers in oils.
‘You look tired,’ Giovanni said, speaking his thoughts aloud.
‘My brothers are—energetic,’ Cressie replied. Exhausting would be more accurate, but that would sound defeatist. Two weeks of shepherding four small boys intent on making mischief had taken their toll—for the twins, though not formally included in her lessons, insisted on being with their brothers at all times. Until they had become her responsibility, she had been dismissive of Bella’s complaints that the boys wore her down to the bone. They were mere children—all they required was sufficient mental stimulation and exercise, Cressie had thought. She realised now that her contempt had been founded on blissful ignorance.
Her evenings had therefore been spent making a guilty effort to become better acquainted with a stepmother who made it plain that her company was welcome only in the absence of any other, for Cordelia had hastened to London the day after Cressie’s arrival at Killellan, fearful that either Lord Armstrong or Aunt Sophia might change their minds about her impending coming-out season. Cressie was alone for the first time in the house without any of her sisters for company. She was becoming short-tempered and grumpy with the boys, which in turn made her annoyed with herself, for she wanted to like her brothers as well as love them. She tried not to blame them for the lack of discipline which made them unruly to a fault. Every morning she told herself it was just a matter of trying harder. ‘I fear I rather underestimated the effort it takes to keep such active minds and bodies occupied,’ she said, smiling wanly at the portrait