Page 55 of What a Lord Wants

“No.” He dropped the brushes into a jar of turpentine. “There are lines we cannot cross.”

“That youwon’tcross, you mean.”

“Same thing.” The weight of her stare on him followed his every move as he put away his supplies. “You’re a shipping heiress who—”

“I’m not an heiress.”

“—who is yet an innocent—’

“That doesn’t signify.”

He finished pointedly, “—who is related to the Carlisles. Men the size of mountains who would pulp me into oblivion if they ever found out.”

“Then don’t let them find out.”

He shot her an irritated glare over his shoulder, but she only gazed back unrepentantly, her hands folded demurely in front of her. Somehow, in that satin robe with her hair lying in mussed waves down her back and satisfaction still flushing her cheeks, she was even more appealing than when she’d been lying naked across the velvet cushions.

In frustration, he threw an unused vanishing brush onto the worktable, where it landed with a loud thump. “You’ll be ruined.”

“After Burton’s poetry reading, I’m already ruined.”

“Notlike that.” He threw a second brush, letting it smack hard into the wall and fall to the floor. “I am the Marquess of Ellsworth. If I claim a young lady’s innocence, I’m expected to marry her.”

“I don’t expect that. No one else would either.”

“Your future husband will.”Hecertainly would.

“I’m the daughter of a shipping merchant who grew up around sailors and dockworkers.” Her voice emerged as a soft challenge. “Do you really think the man who marries me will expect me to be innocent?”

She was right, damn it. And whoever that man was, Dom hated the bastard already.

“What do you want from me, Eve?” he half snarled. All this talk of sex and innocence had his blood boiling.

“You.”

Desire flamed through him so fiercely that it was all he could do to remain where he was, to not have her on her back right there on the chaise. And for more than just physical release. Unlike every other woman he’d ever met, she inspired him, challenged him, impassioned him to his core—

Thatwas the problem. The same fires she flamed inside him might very well consume him. Because a man couldn’t lose himself in a woman like her and then expect to ever find himself again once he was out of her arms.

Biting down a curse of frustration, he shook his head. “You can’t have me.”

For a long moment, she didn’t move, only stood where she was, staring at him through the shadows and silence. Suspicion prickled at his nape that she was seeing him for the first time as he truly was—not as Vincenzo, whose wild reputation was the stuff of legend, and not as Ellsworth, whose own staid reputation stood in polar opposition. But as only a man.

And found him not at all what she’d hoped.

“You’re refusing me because I’m Evelyn Winslow, and you’re Dominick Mercer?”

Knowing how she inspired him as an artist, how she flamed his passions as a man—how she could destroy both parts of him—the brutal truth tore from him. “Yes.”

“Why? Surely you—”

“Because of that!” He jabbed a finger at the canvas and the image he’d rendered of her lying so delectably naked. “I cannot create if I’m confusing lust for inspiration. For Christ’s sake!” He sucked in a mouthful of air through gritted teeth and expelled it with a curse so ferocious that she flinched. “How do I paint innocence when I’m stealing it like a thief?”

“Not theft,” she persisted. “A gift.”

“Ruination.For both of us.” The harshness of that reverberated through the silent studio. “And I willnotlet you ruin me.” Not his position as a trusted peer, and certainly not his art. “No matter how enticing you are.”

“But I’m not your model anymore.”