Page 10 of What a Lord Wants

Instead, understanding seeped over her, and she changed before his eyes.

Like an actress assuming a new role, she softened into the pliant, lithe figure he wanted. The stiffness in her melted into a relaxed and warm posture. She shifted to turn more fully toward him. The tiny movement was barely noticeable, yet the result was an unwitting invitation as her back arched ever so slightly. The hand at her bosom now tangled in the ties, not to clasp them closed but to untie them at only a word from him, and the hand that rested at her side now clutched at the skirt as if to scandalously pull it up.

Sweet Lucifer.

But it was the expression on her face that had his gut twisting into knots. The surprise hadn’t lifted completely but was now tempered with nervous excitement, and a bright wonder lit the honey-gold depths of her eyes. Curiosity. Vulnerability. Innocence. All of it tantalizingly displayed in a look of yearning that took his breath away.

“Like this?”

“Just like that,” he rasped as he shifted back onto his heels and pushed up to his full height, his eyes never leaving her.Good Lord, exactly like that. “Don’t move.”

He grabbed up his sketchbook from the chair, but instead of sitting, he stood beside her and quickly sketched out her form with the charcoal. He applied line after line to the paper, doing his best to capture her sensual yet innocent look, her vulnerability, her energy. Thelifeexuding from her. He smudged the charcoal with his thumb to soften the elegant line of her neck, the gentle slope of her shoulders and curve of her left hip rising temptingly into the air…Bolder strokes to represent the tension in her fingers, still clutching at the dress, as if ready to bare herself at the slightest encouragement.

“Beautiful…” As he sketched, his eyes moved ceaselessly between her and the paper. The line of her body, the emotions playing on her face…beautiful, indeed.

As her form began to take shape on the page, so did a tempting plan to free himself from the prison he’d been thrust into when he’d inherited the marquessate.

He needed to paint the same way he needed to breathe. Yet since he’d inherited, he’d had no choice but to paint in secret. Revealing himself as Vincenzo was not an option, not with his artist’s libertine—and largely apocryphal—reputation that flew in the face of the esteemed Ellsworth title.

But if he could present under his own name a painting of such virtuosity and masterful technique that no one would dare question its brilliance, perhaps he could leapfrog into the midst of England’s best painters. He would be able to paint freely in a way he’d never been able to do before. Not even in Italy.

An uncertain smile teased at her full lips. “So I’d make a good model?”

He bit back the answer poised at the tip of his tongue. That she might just make the best model he’d ever worked with. Even better than Elena. The perfect model for the painting that now consumed his thoughts, all because of that heady mix of innocence, anticipation, curiosity…

A challenge? No, this woman might just prove to be his salvation.

“You’ll do,” he answered, hoping nothing in the tone of his voice gave away his true thoughts or the excited pounding of his heart.

She smiled, not the delicate expression of before but one of beaming joy.

A pang of regret stabbed him that he couldn’t capture that emotion as well. Perhaps another day, when they had more time. And hewouldhave time, as he expected her to be here for months to come. No matter how much he had to pay her, no matter if the gel continued to vex him by arriving late every day, he wasn’t letting her go until he finished his painting.

She began to sit up—

“Don’t move,” he ordered, freezing her in place.

He dropped the charcoal to the stone floor and began to color in the shadows and textures with the piece of red chalk, creating the illusion of flecks of gold in her eyes and honey-warm tones in her skin, layering in the subtle shades that gave a touch of fire and heat in contradiction to the innocence he’d managed to capture. The sketch was beautiful before. Now it was downright exquisite.

A sudden thought struck him. He paused, the chalk resting against the paper. “Take down your hair.”

When she hesitated, he suspected she might refuse.

But then she sat up, pulled out the pins, and set them aside on the end of the chaise at her feet. She shook out her locks and let them fall in a silky curtain over her bare shoulders.

A heated excitement sparked inside him. In the muted light filtering through the window above her, her hair—

Titianred.

She eased down into her original position. “Like that?”

“Exactly.” The strokes of chalk and charcoal that mimicked the softness and vibrancy of her hair were a poor imitation of the reality.

“You’re awfully young to be a famous artist,” she commented softly, which he realized was an attempt to break through the sudden intensity that had gripped him and was making her nervous.

“You know a lot of famous artists, do you?”

“Dozens.”