“Mmm, that one turned out well. She hasn’t decided if she wants to be standing before the ruins of Pompeii or the sack of Rome, so I will finish the background once she has chosen.”
There were smaller canvases of the one they called Princess in various seductive poses, all of them showing a great deal of skin that looked soft enough to touch. He wondered at the woman’s age, though she was older than Harriette; the visage in the portrait held cleverness, mockery, and a hint of wistfulness.
“Her expression is so beguiling,” he remarked. “These are very good.”
“You sound surprised,” she said with amusement, coming to stand beside him. He smelled again that blend of turpentine and chalk, her painterly preparations. Something more complexand earthy beneath that called to him. The scent of her body, warm and luscious. She wore a loose morning gown, a heap of wispy fabric that clung to her waist and those delicious, shapely breasts.
“I knew you liked to draw, but this—this takes a great deal of skill.”
She walked with him along a line of pastel portraits of the Russian woman she had called Natalya, in a variety of poses and levels of light.
“The year you left Shepton Mallet, my aunt—my great-aunt, properly, that’s the Countess of Calenberg—she contacted my mother and said she had found a girl’s school that would board me, and she would pay for everything. My mother agreed, and so I went to Miss Gregoire’s Academy in Bath. My drawing mistress introduced me to watercolors, and from there to oils and pastels, and I was in heaven. That’s her, Miss Gregoire.”
She moved aside some other portraits to show Ren a lovely, fine-boned woman with a cloud of blonde curls, a simple ruffled gown, and an expression that combined knowing, humor, sadness, and mystery. Ren stared, sensing he looked not just upon a likeness but the inner character of the woman, brought to life on the canvas.
“These are astonishing. These are good enough for exhibition, Rhette.”
“Someday, I hope to.” She nodded. “I take lessons from Angelica Kauffman, and she wants me to do a portrait I can exhibit at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She is one of only two female members, but she wants there to be more of us. I’ve been attempting my mother,” Harriette went on, moving past two versions of a darkly lit, brooding figure Ren recognized as Mrs. Smythe. “But you, Ren.” She tossed her arms into the air with a dramatic flourish. “You could be my masterpiece.”
He snorted. “A tongue-tied cripple.” He peeked at her table and saw papers scattered across it, all bearing a very familiar face. “I see you’ve already begun.”
“Yes, I didn’t sleep well last night, so I made some initial sketches. I’ll do much better now that I have you in person. Give me a moment to prepare.”
She went to the sitter’s corner and with a few whisks and tugs she rolled up the Turkish carpet, draped a large linen sheet over the couch, and replaced the claw-footed ornament with a tall bronze stand with hanging lamps in antique style. She laid down a woven mat patterned with a geometrical mosaic and tossed a tasseled pillow upon the couch, and suddenly the corner was transformed into the boudoir of a Roman emperor.
“I’ll decide later if I want you standing or sitting. For now, come here, and stop calling yourself a cripple.” Her eyes moved down his body as he started toward her, and his blood heated. “You were wonderful last night. Very commanding.”
When he thought hard about it, he could move easily, or with something passing for a measured gait. He’d been taken off guard last night. “I nearly fell on my face. And you heard me stammer. It was awful, Rhette, after you left. The looks of pity and all the stares—” His throat closed, his tongue swelling. “Don’t leave me like that again.”
“Did you talk to that very interesting girl in the corner? She was watching me as if she knew me. I want to find out who she is.”
She guided him as he sat, studied his posture, and then her hands were on him again, pushing at a shoulder, pulling a thigh forward, rearranging his neckcloth. Heat coursed through him from every place her hands touched. He couldn’t help but respond to her nearness, to the whisper of fabric, to the sight of her dusty-red curls falling against her sleek neck. She smoothed his hair, tightening the strip of fabric he’d used to tie it back,which brought her bosom directly before his face, close enough to kiss. Ren stifled a groan and hoped she wouldn’t notice his cockstand.
He didn’t want her pity, either. He was the sodding fool who wanted a woman who didn’t want him back, not in that way. Her touch held nothing coy or loverlike, and her expression held the calculation of a professional as she went to the window and adjusted the curtain until the light fell exactly as she wanted. The light also outlined the shape of her through the white fabric of her gown, and she was more perfect than he’d imagined. Ren adjusted his seat slightly so the fabric of his breeches didn’t pull quite so tightly across the straining volume in his crotch.
“Everyone wanted to know more about you,” he said. “The ones who didn’t talk to me out of sheer pity were quizzing me for information on you.”
“There’s little to know about me.” She went to her table and sorted through the papers until she found her sketchbook. “Harriet Smythe, painter to the Earl of Renwick. I’ll make you so appealing that young ladies will be forming a queue.”
“I don’t want a queue.” The posture she’d put him in was, surprisingly, not uncomfortable. He sat erect, but his body was relaxed, the humiliations of recent memory fading in their sting. “My mother, of course, wants me to reach as high as possible. But none of those young ladies—” His throat tightened, steering him away from a confession he didn’t want to pursue. “I see you still carry your porte crayon everywhere.”
She held up the small brass cylinder she’d produced from a pocket. “The great Sir Joshua Reynolds says an artist should never be without her porte crayon.” She sat on the stool, her skirts settling in a soft nest around her, and pushed up her wide sleeves. She flipped open the pad across her knees and pointed at one of the oils propped against the wall. “Look there, at Mama, and wear the expression you had in the ballroom lastnight. That ‘I don’t want to be here but I will suffer these fools with patience’ countenance.”
He curbed a smile. He’d been suffering from something much different last night, mostly a wealth of confusion and dread at being exposed to strange eyes, mixed with debilitating desire over how luscious Harriet Smythe had become. “How is your mother?”
“Gracefully ailing and beset by nerves, as usual. She’s grown increasingly ill and bitter in the past years. She spends hours complaining to Mrs. Demant and anyone who will listen how unpleasant it is to be dependent on a merchant’s family, when she was raised in a castle with hundreds of servants, a whole realm at her feet, or so she says. Frankly it was a relief to leave her for school, and I’m afraid I’m not the dutiful daughter I ought to be. Mrs. Demant took her on fancying to have a forlorn princess under her roof, and Mrs. Demant can keep her. My aunt and I send money. That’s enough.”
“But if she is noble, Rhette, that would change things for you, wouldn’t it?”
“Doubtful.” She paused, debating her next words. “She might go back to Silesia, and in truth I don’t know why she hasn’t, if she had it so much better there. I think my aunt receives communications from the old country, but even if my mother does return there, I don’t see why I should. Turn your chin a hair to the left—no, your left.”
Ren studied the elegant oil of Harriette’s mother, in which she had captured the air of lost nobility and softened the woman’s habitual sour expression. Harriette’s lack of loyalty to her mother didn’t bother him. He felt no loyalty to his parents, either, only a sense of duty. But he sensed Harriette would walk on live coals for her aunt, and he understood that feeling.
“Amalie is coming to visit,” he remarked, looking for ways to bring her into his life.
“Lady Amalie? Your sister?” Harriette lowered her crayon. “I’ve never met her. She’s coming to see you?”
“I suppose that is her purpose. I meant to travel up to Bolton Abbey when I had things in order here, but she wants to visit London. She’s never been.”
