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“Miss Vaughn,” Honoria said. “It’s a pleasant surprise to see you here as well, considering how many times you’ve also refused my invitations. One wonders why you changed your mind.” A coy smirk pulled at her lips as if the answer was obvious. “But now that you’re both here, when am I going to see these secret paintings?” Her gaze shifted to Margot. “Unless it’s not portraiture you’ve been sitting for, all these weeks.”
“You’ve been spying on me?” Margot said.
Honoria waved a dismissive arm at the chilly tone that would have made a lesser person quail. “Of course not, I was at the opera house meeting with the director and saw your coachman two weeks in a row. Do credit me with some modicum of intelligence, darling. And Miss Vaughn’s…charm is hard to resist.”
The inference was not subtle. “It’s not like that,” Margot said, unwilling to have their precious time together sullied into something that it wasn’t. “I loved the first painting and desired another. The artist was available.”
Honoria’s stare glimmered with calculated interest. “I really would love to see them sometime. Perhaps you might even consider a showing at my new gallery?”
Margot opened her mouth to decline without insulting her best friend, but Ara nodded graciously and said, “When they’re finished, perhaps.”
Which would be never. Margot couldn’t imagine any of those portraits seeing the light of day beyond the studio. They were openings into her soul, unadorned by nothing but Ara’s artistic genius. To show them would be to expose herself, and that, Margot would never agree to. Being here was enough of a risk to the life and persona she had built, and she still didn’t know what had driven her to agree.
Pleasing Ara.
Margot swallowed, pulse fluttering like a nervous butterfly. That had been the least of it. She’d agonized for hours, and in the end, it had come down to one single, irrefutable thing: for just once, Margot wanted the both of them to be on neutral ground. Silly her.
She watched as a svelte blonde garbed in a form-fitting silver jester costume approached them, and Ara shot Margot an apologetic look before allowing herself to be dragged onto the dancing floor where a rousing Scotch reel was in progress. The hand on Ara’s back resting there so familiarly made Margot stiffen for no reason at all.
“That’s her former lover,” Honoria supplied much too helpfully. “She’s an actress at the Covent Garden Theater. A good one, too.”
Former lover. Those two words punctured her lungs like bullets.
“Why should I care? It has nothing to do with me,” she replied, despite the acid churning in her stomach.
Her friend shot her a skeptical look. “You’re not even a little curious as to who she’s kept company with? Or who your competition for her attentions might be?”
Was she? Such a thought had never truly entered Margot’s mind. Well, it had, but in the context of friendship. Friends don’t feel the way you do. Nor did friends fantasize in the darkest hours of the night of how Ara’s lips might feel against theirs, or dream of long slender feminine thighs intertwined in carnal pleasure, and of whispered moans and sensual sighs.
Setting her jaw, Margot lifted a cool brow. “No. I’m not interested.”
The lie tasted like soot in her mouth, and the jealousy that roared its wrath when the pretty jester spun Ara in her arms and kissed her on the mouth at the end of the reel was more than she could bear. Even for the invulnerable Marchioness of Waverly who had ice in her veins. Her lungs squeezed, eyes falling closed, as her stupid chest ached.
“Keep fooling yourself.” Honoria had always been able to see right through her, but Margot couldn’t afford to telegraph the wrong message, no matter what her body felt. She’d always been adept at burying her true emotions and this, too, could be overcome.
Her words emerged like whetted blades. “She’s an artist, paid to do a job, Honoria. Do not confuse the two.”
A hushed gasp was the only signal that Ara had returned just in time to hear the ruthlessly spare sentiment, but perhaps that was for the best. Margot kept her face carefully blank. Rose-colored glasses and girls with smiles brighter than sunlight did not belong in her frozen, barren world.
Chapter Four
What felt like an eternity later but was only really a fortnight, Ara cleaned her brushes for the third time and studied the last of the paintings she’d arranged around the perimeter of the studio. She exhaled as the images of the woman who had obsessed her every waking thought surrounded her from all angles. It was a particular brand of self-inflicted torture, knowing just how out of reach Margot truly was.
Did this version of her even exist?
She’s an artist, paid to do a job, Honoria. Do not confuse the two.
The precise diction, the terse snap of each word had sunk into Ara’s bones like the warning they’d been. Even now, she could still feel the painful jolt of each. She let out another ragged exhalation. She had hoped that during the party something might finally give between them, but if anything, Margot had become even more distant. Even Lady Rawdon had been taken aback by the marchioness’s abrupt departure.
“I’ll talk to her,” she’d said to Ara. “She’s been through a lot.”
Ara knew. Or at least she’d guessed because she’d noted it in every infinitesimal flinch, seen it in those mercurial eyes that told their own flawed story, sensed that complex history as the beating, living heart in every single one of these paintings. Ara had likened her to a rose covered in thorns, but what Margot didn’t realize was that those very thorns weren’t protecting her. They kept things out…but they also kept things in. They were strangling her.
Ara had replayed the events a thousand times, and the change in Margot had come after Sandrine, her former partner, had asked her to dance. Despite their turbulent history, they’d ended their ten-month relationship on an amicable note. Sandrine was much too possessive and had used copulation as a form of control, which had never sat well with Ara. But relationships were like puzzle pieces—some people melded better with others—and as far as she knew, Sandrine had moved on happily with lovers who met her needs.
It wasn’t even that Ara had permitted the kiss, chaste as it was; Sandrine had just taken it, perhaps in hindsight, to do exactly what she’d meant to do. She’d coyly asked Ara, after all, who her delectable companion was, and Ara, besotted fool that she was, hadn’t thought to conceal her feelings.
Had Margot been jealous? Still, most people did not shut down and turn into an ice block simply because of a fleeting sentiment. No, if Ara had to guess, Margot had closed herself off because she’d been petrified of whatever she’d discovered beneath that feeling…all those raw emotions that were present in every single one of these paintings, even if she wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge them herself.
