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Lia remembered how she’d shivered, nearly insane with excitement when David had her sit on the edge of the bed and tied the black sash over her eyes. She had to sit so still and say nothing as he studied her from all angles, trying to decide the best way to pose Psyche on the bed. In profile? Full face? From behind? He’d chosen to paint her hair a deep dark chestnut color. Otherwise everyone, he said, would know he’d used Lia as a model if he gave Psyche the same gingerbread-colored hair as her. “Our secret,” David had said, and then gave her a wink.
“That was the day I decided I was going to marry him,” Lia said. She heard the sadness in her voice, the regret. “I was such an idiot.”
“Human, Lia. And we’ve all been human,” he said. “Even me.”
Lia heard real regret in his voice. She knew the feeling all too well. So much regret... She didn’t tell August this was the first time she’d looked at the mural since her nasty falling-out with David. She tended to give her parents’ bedrooms wide berth, anyway, but also she thought it would hurt too much to see David’s fingerprints in her mother’s room, so to speak. But it didn’t hurt. The mural was stunning. Truly. The colors vibrant and the scene so vivid Lia thought she could climb a ladder and step into the ceiling and live in the golden palace of Eros.
David said that was his goal with the mural, to make anyone lying in the bed look up and wish they could float to the ceiling and live inside his painting. He wanted to, he’d said. He would have given anything to step foot into one of his own paintings, and Lia had known exactly what he meant. She’d felt the same way when she’d read about Pan’s Island inThe Wind in the Willows. All she wanted was to dive into the pages and live and breathe those words like air.
Such a pity. If David hadn’t started up their war again, she might have forgiven him just for his talent alone. They could have shaken hands, apologized for how badly they’d both behaved—meanwhile, each of them secretly thinking the other had behaved so much worse—and gotten on with their lives. It did give her a thrill of pleasure to think that while David might paint Eros’s golden palace and his wedding night with Psyche, Lia could live it.
If August would agree to play it with her.
She pointed upward. “Can we play that game?”
“Eros and Psyche?” he asked, and it seemed for the first time she’d managed to shock him.
“You don’t want to?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Wow,” she said. “Didn’t imagine I could find your limits. Sex in the dark too weird for you? The man who made love to a cloud?”
“The cloud started it.”
“What is it?” she asked. “Did I hit a nerve?”
August shoved his hands deep into his pockets and shrugged.
“I was married,” he said.
“You were married?” Lia knew she shouldn’t laugh at that, but she couldn’t help it. She wasn’t laughing at him so much as laughing at the idea of a free spirit like August being married to anyone.
“Long, long, long ago... Brief marriage. Young love.”
“When you were a teenager?”
He nodded.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Much like this,” he said, nodding up at the ceiling. “I didn’t tell her some very important things about me. There are some people you’re not allowed to keep big secrets from—spouses, for example. But I did. She found out and left me. When I wanted to get her back, my mother talked me out of it. This all—” he pointed his finger up at Psyche in the bed “—hits a bit too close to home.”
“I’m sorry,” Lia said.
“I was a selfish little ass,” he said. “I’m the one who ought to be sorry. But if you want to play the game, we’ll play it. It would be good for me.”
“You know, I could play Eros,” Lia said. “And you could play Psyche as a young prince instead of a princess. I wouldn’t mind seeing you in a blindfold.”
He smiled that mischievous smile, the one that made her toes clench inside her shoes.
“Now that,” he said, “does tempt me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
August left her for the day with a kiss and a promise to see her that night. In the meantime... Lia couldn’t put it off any longer. At three in the afternoon, Lia called another meeting of the Young Ladies’ Gardening & Tennis Club of Wingthorn Hall to order.
As it was a fine late-May afternoon, the young ladies of the YLG&T Club were mostly wearing gauzy floral print summer frocks. Georgy wore silver cowboy boots with hers, of course. Rani was the exception in a white skirt and pale pink polo shirt.
