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“Unsolicited advice,” she added.

“I was stuck out here once myself,” he said. “That’s why I mentioned it.” He scowled. Nothing like justifying your condescension with a testimony to your idiocy. “I’d the idea to paint a picture, of the sirens from the Odyssey. We stayed out too long and had to swim for it.”

“We?” She rolled up onto an elbow. From this angle, he could see her eyes, dark and assessing.

“Me. And the models. I had to go back later for my easel, and the harp and the robes.”

The crests of her cheeks grew rosy.

“Let me guess,” she muttered. “The models. Josephine, Annabelle, and Violet.”

He bit back a smile. “I’d no idea you were so lyrical.”

“You are the one who paints sirens.” She lay flat again and lowered her face over the pool. “Seaweed is too homely.”

Her telling blush had warmed the air between them. Now, he felt a distinct chill.

“I sought you out today for a reason.” His mouth was gritty, as though he’d swallowed sand on his walk over the dunes. “I thought perhaps we could talk.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about.” She tugged up her sleeve, dipped her bare forearm into the water, and scooped a flat pink plant toward the surface.

He leaned forward to watch and caught a floral scent. Her scent. No primroses grew on this patchwork of wave-lashed granite.

He’d sought her out for several reasons, and it grew harder by the moment to rank or disentangle them. Winning the wager with Deighton. Surely that was primary. But if he could find his way back to art, by painting differently, and to a different end, for Muriel and her cause—that might matter even more. And if both goals could be attained with near simultaneity while he eluded his past? While he seduced and was seduced in turn?

A most favorable outcome indeed.

He breathed deeper, the air both salty and sweet. A loose lock of Muriel’s hair was drifting in the pool, the dark filigree not unlike a marine plant itself.

This woman. She teased his senses, heightened his awareness. She distracted him from brooding over Lucy, but she also appealed to him in part because she reminded him of Lucy: frank and uninhibited, with a rough-and-tumble way of carrying herself, and eyes so sharp her glances could slice.

If there was a contradiction there, he didn’t feel inclined to ponder it.

He studied her as she studied the narrow branchlets of the tiny plant.

“That was last summer,” he said. “When I painted the sirens. This summer, I haven’t painted a midge. A dot on canvas is more than I can manage.”

She let the scrap of seaweed slip away. She withdrew her arm from the pool, rivulets running down her skin. “I don’t understand.”

“Something shifted.” He shifted, on the rock, which dug uncomfortably into his sit bones, and looked out at the bay, rough with last night’s rain.

He could sense her waiting and tried to find the words.

“The urge to paint used to seize me. It used to drive me out of bed in the middle of the night. I was determined to make great art. To be a great artist.”

“You do. You are.”

He looked over. She’d risen to her knees and seemed much closer, her face near to his. The wet lock of hair had tangled in the top buttons of her gown.

Her eyes were very bright. “That columbine study was just something pretty, you said. But I thought it much more than that.”

Admiration of this sort used to puff his chest. Now he slouched, resistant.

“Do you know what all great artists have in common? The ones considered truly great?”

A line appeared between her brows.

“They’re men.” He answered his own question. “The exceptions prove the rule. Why is that?”