Page 35 of An Offer By the Beastly Duke

“Doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on inside.” She shifted closer, her shoulder almost touching his.

Her offer was straightforward. A clean transaction with no history attached, nothing he would have to carry out the door or account for in the morning.

He knew exactly what this was. He looked at her, at the softness of her mouth and the uncomplicated invitation in her eyes.

And then the memory of the garden arrived, uninvited and overwhelming. The phantom weight of Lady Romwich’s hand against his chest, the heat of her heartbeat under his palm. The image of her standing at the lake’s edge, her spine a rigid line of ice that he had seen melt into fire. The way she had tasted, of cold air and desperate, hidden longing.

He wanted that. He wanted the specific, agonizing difficulty of her. He wanted the argument and the defiance and the way she looked at him as if he were a storm she couldn’t decide whether to flee or embrace.

Not this. Never this.

He reached into his coat, his movements sharp. He laid enough coin on the table to be more than decent and stood up.

“I appreciate the company,” he said, his voice raspy and final. “Good night.”

She looked at the coin, then up at him. There was no resentment in her gaze, only a professional understanding.

She nodded once.

He stepped outside, and the cold air hit him straight in the face. It was sharp and clean, smelling of damp earth and the promise of rain. He stood by his horse for a long moment, one hand resting on the animal’s powerful neck, looking at the dark silhouettes of the trees against the sky.

He had kissed a woman who hated him and then paid a perfectly agreeable woman to leave him alone.

The facts of his evening were not flattering, and the hollow ache in his chest was becoming a permanent fixture.

He mounted and rode home into the dark, the rhythm of the horse’s hooves echoing the name he wasn’t supposed to be thinking.

Penelope Romwich.

Two days later, Penelope’s studio smelled of linseed oil, turpentine, and the dry, papery warmth of canvases stacked like silent witnesses along the walls.

The morning light, filtered through the high, north-facing windows, was cool and clinical. She had been at her easel since nine.

The orchard painting she had meant to finish, a study of dappled light and soft fruit, was turned toward the wall, abandoned. The canvas currently on the easel held a small, still lake. It was a study in brooding grays and dark greens, with flat light skimming a surface that looked like cold glass. Reeds huddled along one edge, and a low stone wall sat in the middle distance, half-hidden by overgrown shadows.

She stared at it until the shapes began to blur.

With a sharp, frustrated motion, she set her brush down on the palette. She pressed two fingers against the bridge of her nose, the scent of oil paint clinging to her skin.

She was not thinking about him. She was certainly not thinking about the way the lake water had looked beaded on his skin, or the specific, devastating heat of his mouth.

She picked the brush back up, looked at the canvas, at the wall she had painted with too much memory in her strokes, and set it down again.

The door banged open with Nicholas’s particular brand of enthusiasm, the kind that stopped just short of taking the hinges off.

“Can we go for a ride?” He was still wrestling his arm through his jacket sleeve, his face flushed. “Mr. Calloway finished the lesson early. I have been sitting since breakfast, Mama. I might actually turn into a chair if I stay still any longer.”

“Yes.” Penelope was already reaching for the rag to scrub the pigment from her hands. The room felt suddenly too small, too quiet. “A ride is a very good idea. Yes.”

Nicholas didn’t move toward the door.

Instead, he began to drift through the room, hands shoved deep into his pockets, examining the studio with an unhurried, terrifyingly sharp attention. He moved toward the north wall where the newer canvases were leaning. He tilted his head, his brow furrowing.

“You have been painting a lot of lakes,” he said.

Penelope folded the cleaning cloth with precise, trembling fingers. “Have I?”

“That is a lake, Mama.” He pointed at the easel. “And that sketch by the window is a lake. And those two at the back.”