Another skill needed by a portrait painter. The ability to set a subject at ease. Find a less sensitive topic. She jerked her chin towards the table, to the book he had given her. ‘Where does your brother live?’
‘I have no idea.’ His face grew hard, his eyes shuttered. Were there no safe topics for this man?
She let some time elapse, worked on his shoulders, the line of his neck, before trying again. ‘Where did you g-go this evening.’
‘To the Bull.’ The muscles in his face relaxed.
‘Oh. What kind of drink do you prefer?’
‘Brandy.’ His answer came swiftly, then he shot her a sharp look. ‘And ale.’
While he answered her questions, she sketched his hand in rough on a separate piece of paper. It would take too long to complete now. Fingers were hard. She moved on to his feet. Large feet at the end of long well-formed legs. ‘Do you dance?’
‘I do, when required.’
‘What kind of dances?’
‘Country dances, cotillions, waltzes.’
‘Waltzes? You know how to waltz?’ She stopped drawing and looked at him.
His mouth thinned as if he thought he had said too much. He took a breath and deliberately eased his jaw. ‘Do you like to dance?’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘All ladies love dancing,’ he scoffed as if challenging her indecision. ‘For me it was always a means to an end.’ His expression darkened to that of a brooding angel staring into the depths of hell. An expression that brooked no further questions. And fired her artist’s imagination.
Perfect. While he lost himself in his own thoughts her pencil flew.
A long time later she became aware of his gaze on her face.
‘Almost done,’ she said, looking down at her sketch. The lantern above his head flickered and died. ‘Oh, we need more oil.’
‘That was the last of it,’ he said, his tone resigned. ‘I have one or two candles in the dresser.’
Guilt washed through her. Absorbed in her work, she had forgotten all about him as a person. No, not true. She had never been so aware of any individual in her life; her senses were awash with his mood, his physical presence, and, while she worked, he became part of her, intrinsic to her being, as if they were one.
And as a result she had used up all his oil. She would beg some from Snively and bring it to him tomorrow.
Stretching her back and rolling her shoulders, she felt the pull of muscles. He must also be stiff from remaining still for so long. ‘I am finished.’
‘Good,’ he said.
Her gaze flew to his face. No longer brooding, it exuded determination. And he had not asked to see the work. Afraid he might find it hopeless, perhaps, and not want to lie?
Frederica stared at the paper in the light from the candle on the table, at his face, his body, and saw the likeness and more. The drawing resonated with his dark persona, a simmer of anger beneath the outward calm. It was the best thing she’d ever done. At least she thought so. It still needed work. When she got back to her room and daylight she would touch it up from the memory branded on her brain.
Sadness sat like a rock in the pit of her stomach. She often felt that way when she completed a work. But this felt worse—a sort of emptiness, because he’d been kind and she would one day leave and never see him again. There weren’t many kind people in her life.
‘I suppose I should go,’ she said in a hoarse breathless voice.
He looked at her sharply. ‘I’ll walk you.’
‘Oh, no. I wouldn’t like you to go out in the rain again. I’ll be perfectly fine.’ She got up and packed up her papers and pencils.
He got up, came around the table and grasped her shoulders in his big strong hands. Hands she would later draw, while she remembered their pressure on her skin and the flesh beneath. ‘Don’t be stubborn.’
She looked up at him. At the worry in his face. At the firm set to his lips. Earlier, she had thought he might kiss her. But he’d pushed her away. He didn’t find her attractive. Of course he didn’t. A man like him would have his choice of women. And he would not choose a plain, skinny female like her.
But he wasn’t completely immune. Of that she was sure. There had been too much heat in his gaze when he’d stared at her earlier.
He must have thought she was awfully bold coming here at night. Wanton. Like her mother.
Prickles of shame ran across her shoulders. ‘When we were children, S-Simon said my speech was enough to put any man off.’
‘Whoever this Simon is, he’s an idiot,’ he said harshly.
He strode across the room, gloriously naked. She watched him avariciously, like a miser might watch his pile of gold glint in the firelight. He moved with a grace and an economy of movement one didn’t expect from such a large man. It was like watching a sonnet, muscle and sinew moving in perfect harmony.
She wanted to draw him crouched at the fire, the warm glow bronzing his skin and casting shadows over muscles and sharp angles. She wanted to draw him with the flicker of the candle making his dark axe-like features seem almost satanic as he set the candles on the rough-hewn table.
She wanted to touch him.
He opened the lid of a battered chest in the corner.
She came up behind him. “He is a sort of cousin.”
He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Sort of?’
‘We are distant relations.’ As in on the other side of the proverbial blanket. Didn’t he know? She was sure the servants gossiped about it. She looked down into the chest. It held a couple of neatly folded shirts, trousers and some woollen stockings.
Unable to resist, she ran a fingertip over his shoulder blade and down the knobby protrusions of his spine as she visualised the skeleton beneath, the supporting ribs, the narrow hip bones…
He froze, mid-movement, the trousers in his hand.
She snatched her hand back as he whirled around. His eyes blazed anger, or some equally dangerous emotion that left her breathless and trembling like the aspens in Wynchwood churchyard.
He closed his eyes as if in pain. ‘Innocent, gently bred females do not go around running their hands over naked men.’ He pulled on the trousers, the fabric hiding his beautiful body from her hungry gaze.
He cursed. ‘Any men. What do you think your family would say?’
‘I’m no innocent. And I don’t care what Uncle Mortimer thinks.’ She had tried for years to make him think well of her, to no avail. And now he was going to marry her off to Simon.
‘Not innocent?’ he scoffed, but there was a glimmer of hope in his expression, like a small boy eying a biscuit barrel.
With a mother like hers, how could she be innocent? She certainly wasn’t ignorant. A book by a woman of pleasure and caricatures by Thomas Rowlandson found hidden in her uncle’s library, both deliriously explicit, had stirred illicit sensations in her body, just as his nearness induced the ache of arousal.
‘W-would you like to find out?’ Her words came out in a breathy rush, too eager, too desperate.
‘No,’