‘That is quite good,’ he said finally, handing it back to her.
The casually delivered comment finally woke her to the peculiarity of the situation and her confusion faded in annoyance at the very mild nature of his compliment on an issue of some importance to her.
‘It is very good, for a rough, impromptu sketch,’ she corrected him and his eyes narrowed and she could not tell if he was amused or annoyed by her correction.
‘So it is. I apologise for not showing the proper degree of appreciation. It is certainly well outside the usual fare of young ladies’ sketches, which are usually just a sight more bearable than their endeavours on the pianoforte. Do you play?’
‘Even if I did, I wouldn’t dare admit to it now,’ she replied primly. ‘Do you? Or are we proceeding on the assumption that only young ladies are expected to be execrable in artistic endeavours?’
‘I have no artistic skills whatsoever. The difference is I don’t try.’
‘Is that an observation about yourself or a suggestion to me?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘I wouldn’t presume. I did say the sketch was quite good, didn’t I? You are overly sensitive.’
His voice was deep but without inflexion, but something in the narrowed slate-grey eyes that were watching her made her wonder if he was laughing at her. It was like looking into the night, trying to make out shapes in the varied shades of black. It was easy to imagine monsters in the dark and she wondered if she was imagining that echo of amused warmth in his eyes. Probably. But it still teased at her, like a late summer breeze, disorienting her. She would never be able to capture that particular grey, a shade lighter than the sea off the bay in winter. But she would love to try to sketch his face, with its strongly chiselled features, all definite lines and planes, and the tightly held mouth that she wished would relax into the smile she had seen the day before.
‘May I sketch you? You have a very sketchable face,’ she blurted out before she could stop herself.
She had not thought his face could get any stonier, but she had been wrong. There was a flash of surprise in his eyes, like a glimmer of faraway lightning, then his brows drew together, accentuating the resemblance to a very annoyed deity.
‘No, you may not!’ he said curtly and she turned away with a shrug, leafing through her sketchbook to mask her mortification.
‘Fine,’ she said as indifferently as possible, fully expecting him to get up and leave, but he didn’t move. She came to the sketch she had made yesterday of his wife and stopped. The lovely, smiling face was a sobering reminder that she should not be looking at a married man or frankly at any man in quite that manner. Though to be fair, he was an amazing specimen. She had thought him handsome but rather cold yesterday, but now she realised it was much more than that. He was utterly, utterly male. And utterly out of her sphere. Augusta would have made mincemeat of her had she been present and probably rightly so. Sophie breathed in resolutely, determined to redeem herself with a gesture of goodwill.
‘I made a sketch of your wife, though. She has a lovely face. In fact, she looks like you a little. I find that married couples often look a little alike. Perhaps it is because we try to find people who remind us of ourselves so we can love ourselves better. Here it is. It is quite like her, don’t you think?’
She forced herself to look up at him with all the calm unconcern she could muster, trying to mirror his lack of expression. He stared at her and then down at the sketch, a three-quarters’ face of a woman and part of the shoulder of her gown. Sophie had sketched her smiling, which had been hard, but that was all she could remember. She waited, peculiarly tense, for his reaction.
He took the pad from her again and she didn’t resist. She watched his profile, trying to memorise its strong lines so she could sketch him later, but she found it hard to focus on the whole, distracted instead by the details she usually considered later when doing a portrait—the way the skin stretched taut from his cheekbone, the small groove at the side of his mouth, the shadow below the strong line of his jaw. Her hands tingled with the need to reach out and touch his face as she might a sculpture. She clasped them tightly and forced herself to look down at Marmaduke, now snoring calmly at their feet.
‘May I have my drawing pad back, please? I should go back.’
He looked up at her and there was something in his gaze as the dark eyes moved over her face that increased her already significant discomfort by a notch. And then his mouth relaxed slightly into a smile that brought to the surface the warmth she had glimpsed the day before.
‘Would you consider giving this to Hetty? I think she would love to have it. And she is my sister, not my wife, by the way, hence the resemblance.’
Sophie felt her face heat with a sudden burning blush and she pressed her hands to them unconsciously.
‘Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. I always say more than I ought. And of course you may give it to her. In gratitude for the collar and leash, which I was so impolite as to forget to thank you for. Here.’
She pulled the sheet from her pad and held it out to him, wishing the blush would fade.
He reached out to take it just as Marmaduke awoke with a snort and she started and dropped the sheet. Marmaduke, his eye catching the fluttering page, readied himself to leap, but before he could move she managed to capture it just as the man grabbed for it as well. His hand closed half on the page, half on her hand and she drew back abruptly, slightly shocked by the heat of his touch. The contact had been only for a second, but her arm felt like it had been dipped in hot water and her skin tingled uncomfortably, retaining the imprint of his fingers. She clasped her hands together again, as if she could blot it out. He merely regarded the sketch and stood up.
‘Thank you for this. Good luck with... Duke.’
She nodded and busied herself with her pad and with Marmaduke. The man hesitated for a moment and then strode off without another word and she could finally breathe. She picked up Marmaduke and headed back to Huntley House rather blindly, forcing a man driving a tilbury to pull up sharply and bark out at her as she almost stepped directly on to the road in front of him. She glanced up at the angry driver, mumbled an apology and rushed across the road and into her temporary home. Once inside she deposited Marmaduke on his cushion and hurried up to her little nursery-like room on the third floor. In its small quiet space there was nothing to come between her and her disturbing thoughts, and the memory of that moment in the park kept recurring, of his hand, strong and firm and warm, grasping hers and the way her nerves had flared, a striking of a tinderbox. It was absurd and unwanted. This abrupt, unpredictable man came from a very different world from hers, no matter how respectable her birth. Everything about him spoke of wealth and influence and a degree of comfort in this foreign world that she would never understand. She should not be foolish enough to let herself be drawn to him simply because she was lonely and he and his sister were the only people who had treated her with any degree of sympathy, though on his part quite a cold and sardonic sympathy.
This was not the first time she had been attracted to a man, after all. Why, she had spent three whole months thoroughly enthralled with the squire’s middle son John when he had come down from Cambridge before realising he was a pompous, oily snake, hardly any better than Cousin Arthur. Her fascination with him had then sputtered and faded pretty quickly which had been very lucky since he had actually considered offering for her until he, too, had come to accept his parents’ viewpoint that she was completely