Page 39 of What a Lord Wants

“Both. Who are you?”

“Eve.”

He clenched his jaw. “Your real name.”

“Eve,” she repeated with a bit of pique. “Evelyn Winslow.”

Winslow. How did he know that name? Then it smacked him with the force of a brick. Winslow Shipping and Trade. Oh good God…“You’re ashipping heiress?”

“I am not an heiress,” she corrected. “But my father does own a shipping company. If you knew Papa, you would understand the difference.”

“You let me believe you were an actress.” Although looking back now, that notion had been ridiculous from the start. An actress would never have been that well-educated and cultured. And one that modest would have starved long before Eads found her.

He grimaced inwardly. He’d been so fixated on painting her that he’d never let himself consider the truth. That the innocence he’d glimpsed in her wasn’t an act.

“I told you that I wasn’t, that day in the rain,” she reminded him. “You said it didn’t matter to you.”

He slid a long, condemning glare at her for throwing his words back at him, but she kept her eyes straight ahead on the painting and wisely refused to meet his gaze. “You know damned well what I meant. That I didn’t care if you came from the Foundling Hospital or the stews. But this—” He waved a hand at the luxurious townhouse around them, then fought down the urge to run it through his hair in frustration. “Christ.”

Dark claws reached into his chest and snatched his hopes away—Ruined, all of it.

Weeks of work bringing his vision to life, hours upon hours of painstaking brushstrokes applied one slow stroke at a time…all for nothing, wasted on a painting he could never finish or sign his own name to. A painting he couldn’t enter into the exhibition, and now it was too late to start another. A masterpiece that could never seen the light of day because Eve would be recognized at first glance. Her reputation would be ruined right along with his career.

She’d destroyed his only chance to escape the prison his life had become since he’d inherited, and the only certain way to escape Constance’s threats to expose him.

She might as well have cursed him to hell.

“For God’s sake, Eve,” he rasped out. “Why did you lie to me?”

“I never lied. I simply hid my last name. I was never more myself than when I was in the studio with you.” She studied his face, as if she’d never seen him before. That critical gaze only aggravated him more. “And you let me believe thatyouwere Domenico Vincenzo.”

“IamVincenzo,” he growled.

She lifted her brow silently in such a cold, accusatory stare that she would have done a nun proud.

Then she turned back toward the painting, twisting her fingers in her sapphire necklace. Which only served to draw his attention to the delicate curve of her neck.

How many times had he drawn that line? How many hours had he spent staring at her? With long white gloves that stretched up above her elbows to the edge of her capped sleeves and the sweep of the skirt that fell down to the toes of her matching slippers, she now wore more layers than he’d ever seen on her before. Every one of them ironically reminded him of how beautiful she was beneath.

How close she’d come to being his salvation, only to turn it into ashes.

“There was a mistake.” A furrow marred her brow as she tried to find the words to explain. “I’d gone to Mercer House to collect a painting, one you’d given to my sister Mariah and her husband Robert Carlisle for their wedding.”

She was related to the Carlisles? Good God, this kept getting worse! Forget being found out as Vincenzo. If anyone in her family discovered what they’d been doing, he’d be tied to a stake and used for target practice.

“But the house was in an uproar, with men carrying things in and out. When I asked about the Vincenzo painting, your man sent me to Chelsea.”

The day the porters had collected his paintings for display at the Pall Mall. The day she’d entered his life…“So you went to the studio.”

“Still attempting to collect the painting, yes.” She folded her hands demurely in front of her, although more than likely because she was growing nervous and didn’t know what to do with them. Or because she wanted to slap him. Knowing Eve, it could have been either. “But you thought I was there to be your model.”

“You said you were.”

“I never said. You assumed. I simply went along with it, because it was all too exciting to stop.”

Bitterness formed on his tongue. She’d ruined his only chance to save his career because she’d beenbored? “Was it nothing but a joke to you? A lark to fill the afternoons of a bored society lady?”

“The furthest thing from it,” she assured him somberly. “It was survival.”