Page 54 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

“I—I did not believe you to be joking.” She paused to fiddle with something he could not see. “You cannot imagine how I regret my part in making this portrait necessary.”

Was she so reluctant to spend this time with him, then? She might have refused his aunt’s request.

But he was absurdly glad she had not.

“Is that what she told you? That your cartoons are the reason I have not yet found a wife?”

She made some noncommittal sound that he took for confirmation.

Silently cursing Aunt Josephine, he rose and took a step toward her. “Don’t believe it. The truth is, my romantic woes date from my inheritance of this crumbling abbey and, with it, a mountain of debt. Of course, that did happen in the same year I grew six inches taller and, according to my dear sister Bernie, became ‘an awkward, insufferable prig’—the man Miss C. captured so well. So perhaps my flaws have worked in tandem to make me unlovable.”

“You are not—” Her head whipped about, and a few strands of her hair swept across his face. Pear blossoms again. “You are not sitting down, my lord,” she said, pointing with her pencil toward the chaise.

Reluctantly, he acceded to her wishes and returned to his seat. The chaise creaked beneath him as he turned his body first one way, then another, and finally draped one arm over the curved side. “How shall I—?”

“Doesn’t matter. Today, I simply intend to make a few rough sketches of your face.” With the pencil she traced an oval in the air around her own head. “Eyes, nose, mouth.”

Had any words ever been calculated to make a man more self-conscious?

But at least her intent study of him gave him license to study her in turn. She had pulled over a chair and now sat across from him with her sketch pad propped on her knee. While she worked, a charming little frown of concentration wrinkled the space between her fair eyebrows. Occasionally, she paused and rested the unsharpened end of the pencil against her lips.

Mentally, he traced the constellation of freckles across her nose, then spied a pair of them near her collarbone, and another at the very edge of her bodice. Dear God, that was a dangerous discovery to make.

She wasn’t classically beautiful—that red hair, those freckles, the pertly upturned nose, the slightly crooked smile. Her tall, almost angular frame. And yet, when he looked at her, it was like looking at one of those Grecian sculptures, all the more extraordinary for its supposed imperfections.

And like a schoolboy at the museum, he fairly burned to run his hands over every inch of cool, smooth marble—perhaps because he knew it was strictly forbidden.

“You may talk if you wish,” she said. “It won’t disturb me.”

If she knew the present direction of his thoughts, she would not make such a claim.

“What shall I talk about?” he asked.

“Oh, anything.” As she spoke, her pencil flew across the paper, and he wondered which bit of him she was capturing with those bold, unhesitating strokes. “What qualities do you hope for in the woman you wed?”

“Other than a vast fortune?”

The pencil stopped and she lifted her eyes from the paper to frown at him. “Other than that.”

Unable to bear her scrutiny, he directed his own gaze toward the windows.

“Hold there, please. You have a strong profile,” she said. He heard the pencil move again.

“Do I?”

He fought the urge to reach up and inspect the angle of his own jaw. For God’s sake, didn’t he know it well enough already? He’d scraped it with a razor just that morning. Or perhaps her remark had been a euphemistic reference to his nose, which he’d always considered overlarge for his face . . .

“She must be kind to my sisters,” he blurted out, desperate to change the direction of his thoughts, and perhaps hers as well. “A suitable chaperone for them in Town—which, as you have no doubt discovered, will require patience, determination, and a certain degree of cunning.”

Constantia chuckled softly at that, and he only narrowly resisted turning his head to look at her, to see the way her laugh lit up her face.

“I should like her to be an excellent household manager,” he went on. “Neat. Well-organized. Firm but kind with the servants. A good hostess.”

She made a little hum to show she was listening. For a few moments after that, there was no sound but that of the tip of her pencil sweeping across the paper. Then silence. His neck was starting to feel stiff.

“That’s quite a list,” she said. “Rather . . . businesslike, though. Is there nothing you want for yourself, to promote your own happiness?”

“Shouldn’t a well-run home be enough to make a man happy?” he countered.