Chapter 4 #2
She halted at the refreshment table, her exquisitely rounded hip bumping it and sending it rocking. “That was certainly the show,” she murmured, reaching for a seed cake.
“Nesbit always was a haughty prick,” Ren said around a mouthful of a ratafia biscuit.
Georgiana turned to him with the most alluring laugh he’d ever heard. “Oh, well.”
Ren faced her, leaving his hard-bitten persona behind, something he hadn’t done in ages. “There might have been a young lady at Oxford. And I might have filched her from a certain still-vexed earl when he wasn’t looking.”
“The story matures,” Georgiana said, her tongue grazing her lower lip to catch a crumb.
“Indeed,” he whispered, praying she couldn’t see what she was doing to him on a scoundrel’s lawn at a guileless summer party. If his body didn’t settle, he was going to have to sit and place a napkin atop his lap.
Her smile was pure delight, the brightest illumination on the estate, perhaps in all of England.
Her eyes shone more gold than hazel in the sunlight, a shade darker than her hair.
And her lush form called to him as no other had.
He admitted he was taken with every aspect of this unexpected find, his body and his mind in a fevered pitch.
It was a cruelty of fate that he was past the phase of life Georgiana was only now entering.
To keep himself from removing the blade of grass from her bodice, Ren returned to the matter that had brought them together.
“Ask Anthony to seat Hopeforth next to Lady Amelia at dinner, and place yourself close by, the official start of your matchmaking endeavor. I believe they’re interested but shy.
When I left them, they were only beginning to discuss the coming rain.
The man’s charm unfortunately knows too many bounds.
Though he’s considered honorable, financially stable, and free of any known deviant tendencies, so you’re steering the girl in a sound direction. ”
Silent for a beat, Ren realized his state of dress.
Wrinkled coat, his cravat loosened about his neck for the match.
Dirt-streaked surely, sweat layering his skin.
But the enchanting woman before him poured tea and handed him another ratafia biscuit as if nothing were amiss.
Georgiana managed him in a way he didn’t recall anyone else doing.
She seemed real, exactly as she was, right there for him to grasp, nothing false in her.
No greedy aspiring duchess about her. Her gaze was steady, her expression curious but controlled.
He suspected she wanted to know more about him—but didn’t need to know more.
And that made all the difference.
Letting the silence settle, she waited until he was mid-mouthful before saying, “I want you to sketch me.”
“I wasn’t any good,” he choked out before polishing off the tea to wash it down.
That wasn’t true. He’d been promising enough to gain the modest notice of a London gallery owner, something his father had shot down like an ailing pigeon the moment he heard of it; Nesbit had been right about that.
What was more, the art classes he’d taken on the sly had earned him more than one commission offer, something that simply wasn’t done in their world.
A duke’s heir didn’t paddle in any pond save the duchy’s.
Georgiana pinned him with a golden gaze while he deliberated, seeing clean through the lie.
Ren slid his cup onto the white-damask-covered table and glanced around for no reason other than a rare case of nerves.
They were alone for the most part, standing close but not overly so, the scent of crushed clover drifting by on a tranquil gust. Aside from the invisible thread connecting them, the subtle current humming beneath his skin whenever she was near, they could almost have been, like the couple they hoped to bring together, discussing the weather.
“I don’t sketch much anymore.” Ren reached for a lemon scone and bit into it, like he hadn’t been a na?ve twenty-two the last time he talked to someone about this.
“Except for little drawings of Henry…and the staff on occasion. With permission, of course. I also quite like working on likenesses of my horses. Trivial scraps.” Chewing, he dusted his hands together and tried to look anywhere but at her.
“There’s a studio of sorts, modest, at my Yorkshire estate.
Enough unused rooms for paint and canvases, much better than my space in the city.
I even thought to take up sculpture. There’s a discreet instructor in Hampstead I’ve been talking to. ”
She hummed softly, drawing his gaze to her lips, to the sleek line of her neck. “So, the duke is an artist?”
Ren had never thought of himself as an artist. He’d never been allowed to. “I dabble. A meaningless pastime that keeps me occupied.”
“I want you to dabble with me.”
“Gia.”
“Ren.”
He shook his head, but he was charmed, and it showed.
Her smile bloomed, exposing the crooked front tooth he adored. “What can it hurt? A trivial scrap to remember my summer by.”
Ren knew what he wanted. Gia Harrington lying across his indigo sheets, legs parted, magnificent breasts cradled in his hands, his mouth all over her.
Charcoal staining the fingertips he trailed along her skin, his drawings littering the floor, crinkling beneath them as he pressed her into the mattress.
What he couldn’t read was what she wanted.
“Bad idea,” he whispered, the thought of her seeping through his artist’s mind. Regrettably, his body had also begun to respond.
She traced her thumb along the rim of her teacup. “But you want to?”
He paused, her invitation a drug he desperately longed to take. Yes.
“You have the materials here?”
He nodded. He never traveled without art supplies.
She shrugged daintily, the shrewdest negotiator he’d ever seen. “The unfettered soul I saw today, let him decide.”
“That soul has poor judgment, sprite.”
“I’ll bring my maid,” she offered, gazing at him through lashes dark at the tips, as though dipped in chocolate.
Ren pressed a bewildered laugh into his fist, then scrubbed his hand over his jaw. “Somehow, I have little confidence in her as chaperone if you’re proposing her for this fiasco. I wager she’s used to your mischief.”
“One miniature, less labor than a horse’s likeness.” She traced the toe of her shell-pink slipper through the grass. “It might not even be worth keeping.”
Ren glanced once around the thinning assembly, seeing most had moved into the manse for luncheon, then leaned close enough for his breath to brush the delicate swirl of her ear.
The scent of honeysuckle and her sun-warmed skin swept over him, delicious impact.
“It will be worth keeping, Gia. I’ve never had a taste for beginning something I cannot finish. ”