Page 57 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

“Family portraits, Dutch and Italian masters, medieval tapestries, that sort of thing?” he suggested with false airiness. She nodded. “When the creative impulse struck, he was known to paint over them, give them away, use them to wipe his boots, even toss them in the fire.” And if he had not, Alistair would have been driven to sell them, to put a price on those invaluable pieces, to pay down the man’s debts.

He saw her stiffen with shock, heard her sharp intake of breath.

In a slightly mocking voice, he reminded her, “He was bold, just as you said.”

“I might better have said selfish,” she countered, clearly horrified by the thought of such destruction and desecration.

“Oh, that too. You told me once that it was a rare artist who was not subject to the whims of a patron. Well, my father was such an artist. He painted only for himself.”

Alistair pushed to standing and began to pace in front of the chaise, heedless of how the motion drew Constantia’s eye. “Regardless of the fact that his wife was often in poor health or that he had a houseful of young daughters, he would invite his artist friends to stay for a month, or two, or six, to paint, to indulge their . . . passions.” He sent a baneful glance around the studio. “Things here rarely looked so neat.”

“Creation can be messy, chaotic,” she reminded him, and he was not sure whether she was defending herself or making excuses for his father.

“Yes,” he agreed, having already made such arguments to himself. “But sometimes it is also decadent. Dissolute. Mad. It would have mattered less, this selfish, self-destructive bent, if he hadn’t also been an earl. But he had a nobleman’s responsibilities and obligations.” He wandered now toward the window and stared out across the barren moor. “When he came into the title, the earldom included thousands of acres of farmland in Wiltshire and Somerset, the source of generations of prosperity for not just my family but the hundreds of families who lived on it.” Swiftly he turned back to see her still watching him. “Upon learning that the land was not entailed, and having no interest in agriculture, he sold it for a pittance, probably to buy paints”—he waved an arm toward the cabinet—“or canvases”—the other arm shot out toward the half-finished paintings she had stacked in one corner—“or to fund one of his lavish parties. My mother died of a fever following Harriet’s birth. I was away at school. She breathed her last, all alone, while he sat here, not a hundred yards away. Six months later, he fell down the stairs and broke his neck.” Then, suddenly drained, he made his way back to the chaise and sank onto it, propped his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head into his hands. “All of my life has been spent cleaning up after him.”

He did not realize she had stepped from behind the easel and approached until he saw the tips of her shoes peeking from beneath her skirts, not quite toe-to-toe with him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Sorry to learn that your father was such a man. Sorry you have been weighed down with the burden of making things right. Sorry most of all that my art was the cause of your having to relive such pain. Reopening this studio, making those sketches . . .” She flicked her fingers backward, in the direction of the easel. “None of this would have been necessary if not for the drawings I did in London.”

“Miss C.’s cartoons, you mean?” He lifted his shoulders, part shrug, part wry laugh. “I won’t say I liked them, but you weren’t wrong about me. I’ve had to be dull, prosaic, stern to countermand everything he did, everything for which he stood. Though I have wondered from time to time . . .” He lifted his face to hers. “How did I happen to fall under the point of your pen?”

A flicker of unease passed across her features, masquerading as a tight smile. “I rented a room from a modiste who calls herself Madame D’Arblay.” The name tickled some remote corner of his mind, but he couldn’t stir a memory to the forefront. “Your sisters placed a rather substantial order with her shop early last spring. You came to speak with the modiste one afternoon, and I happened to overhear . . .”

His recollection of the day burst from wherever it had been hiding. “Oh, God.” He dropped his head forward again. “I quibbled over the bill, did I not?”

“And the styles your sisters had chosen, yes. I had been searching for a subject for the next edition of ‘What Miss C. Saw’ and it suited my purposes perfectly to cast you in the role of hypocritical peer, miserly with your sisters and puritanical in your tastes—except, of course, for your taste in friends.”

“Miles again?” Alistair could only laugh. He lifted his head and flung himself backward on the chaise, tipping his head against the arm. “As if my lack of funds and execrable taste in clothes weren’t damning enough.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, now with a slightly incredulous tinge to her voice.

Perhaps she wondered if he weren’t mad too.

“Don’t be. You amused my sisters, Miles, and half the ton with those cartoons.” He dropped his voice as if imparting a great secret. “Sometimes even me.” And then he laughed again at the sheer ridiculousness of the turn his life had taken.

“Amused?” She looked affronted. “I intended them as a biting satire on the duplicity of the nobility. Noblemen especially. But perhaps my efforts were lost on such a facile audience. Perhaps we should return to the portrait.” As she spoke, she lifted one hand and reached for him.

Instinctively, he shot out his hand to stop her. She was, no doubt, simply intending to smooth his now-unkempt hair. But if she touched him, she who had glimpsed his soul even before he’d laid it bare, he knew he would not be able to walk away.

He failed, however, to consider what would happen if he touched her.

He had intended merely to brush her away, to ward her off. Instead he caught her hand in his, his fingers curling lightly around her wrist, his thumb nestling in the curve of her palm. He made no effort to hold her.

She made no attempt to pull away.

“I’m no rake,” he insisted in a harsh whisper. “I never have been.”

“I know it. I think I always have.”

“Yet I want you”—ever so slightly, he tightened his grip, and she shivered as he drew the pad of his thumb twice across the tender heart of her hand—“even though I shouldn’t.”

Her pupils flared and she took a step closer, into the space between his spread knees. “Yes.”

A single word. Acknowledgment and agreement all at once.

“But,” she continued when the next words wouldn’t come to him, “you’re afraid that if you give in to what’s between us, if you indulge your desires”—she raised her other hand to spear her fingers through his hair, then slid her palm over his stubbled jaw—“you’ll be no better than your father.”

Yes. That was exactly what he thought—what he knew to be true.