Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Next day
Amelia squirmed on the stool the servant had indicated and took in the space around her.
Twenty-foot ceiling…walls of windows on three sides…
busts, statues, and statuettes in various phases of completion in this corner…
a spinning platform vast enough to hold an elephant in that corner.
A bright, airy space with the breeze soughing through the cypress and olive trees outside.
A view extending across the hills to the vast west. Perhaps if she squinted hard enough, she’d be able to make out the Mediterranean Sea.
She might be a speck envious of this studio.
A card emblazoned with a time and a street address had arrived alongside her cup of coffee this morning. She hadn’t needed to ask to whom the address belonged.
The Duke of Ripon.
Today was to be her first sculpting session, and it would be his style to expect her simply to understand his intent. Arrogant, condescending man.
And—oh—that she’d known. That was the part that truly, deeply galled her.
He’d known that she would know.
And he’d known that she would be here.
Well, she hadn’t arrived on time, a fact from which she took no small satisfaction. An hour late, in fact. He could stick that in his pipe and puff it.
Except now he seemed to be making her wait.
Which gave her time for reflection—the sort of time she most definitely didn’t need.
She’d showed him her real art—her true art—the only art of genuine interest to her. The only other person who knew of it was Signore Rossi.
Then Ripon had had the nerve to mention nudes.
The absolute cheek of the man.
Didn’t he know that ladies were meant only to paint for idle pleasure? Ladies didn’t paint nude figures. To do so would only invite more scandal onto her family, and she’d had enough of that.
Except, perhaps his suggestion hadn’t been cheek… Or not wholly cheek.
Perhaps it had been forthrightness. She might’ve detected as much in his eyes. A curiosity not bound by social niceties. It was maddening, yet…strangely enlivening, too—the not knowing what someone would say next.
Nudes, though…
A moderately young lady—she could concede she wasn’t young young anymore—of marriageable age—at seven and twenty she hadn’t quite reached the point of no return—painting people in the altogether? The very notion.
Yet he’d formed the notion and in the speaking of it had planted it squarely in her head.
To paint a living, breathing nude body, in all its shadow and light…
flow and fluidity…places exposed…places hidden…
She’d painted a number of the nude statues found on every square of Florence.
Her studies of Michelangelo’s David could fill volumes.
No angle on that body remained unstudied by her keen eye.
In fact, she’d scandalized a few fellow viewers one particular day with her acute concentration on his taut buttocks.
While most of her observations flowed into her brush, others couldn’t help wondering if a man’s buttocks could possibly be that muscular and tight.
She’d ended the day deciding it wasn’t possible.
Movement caught the corner of her eye, and she turned. Ripon, striding through the doorway, all arrogant, condescending, masculine duke.
Except he didn’t particularly look like a duke just now. He looked more similar to how she’d first encountered him. Like a man about to go build a stone wall with his bare hands.
The arrogance and condescension, however, that was all duke.
She opened her mouth to greet him, as was proper, but he strode straight past her without acknowledgement, only stopping at a table with a small, lumpy platform beside it, both draped with sheets.
“I must confess to a curiosity,” she said.
He grunted and swept the sheets off the table and platform, revealing the tools of his art and a great unformed white lump of stone.
“How can you possibly expect to sculpt me without looking at me?”
He grunted again and picked up a hammer, then a chisel. She noticed the marble had already been roughly shaped. At last, he looked up at her.
She sucked in a deep breath, and her spine went straight as a ramrod. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep up this position. What was clear, however, was that he wasn’t meeting her eye. He was viewing her like an object. At last, he placed the chisel tip onto marble and made his first strike.
She jumped, then laughed sheepishly. She might’ve even detected the faint outline of a smile on the duke’s face, but she couldn’t be sure in the next second.
What a cacophonous business was sculpting.
Such a lot of noise and labor to find the form in marble.
But she could see he was striking with purpose and skill, not great blows, but careful placement of the chisel and banked strength behind the hammer strikes.
It was both a brutal and delicate process, the rendering of his art.
Of a sudden, he stopped and laid down his instruments, the final strike of the hammer echoing through the studio.
What was he—
With a shrug of one great shoulder, then the other, he shed his coat. As he hadn’t been wearing a cravat in the first place, but rather a simple red neckerchief, he now looked decidedly manly.
Like the most masculine man she’d ever beheld.
He rolled one sleeve, then the other, up to his elbows, and his manliness increased tenfold.
Heat suffused her body.
He picked up hammer and chisel again, and her gaze couldn’t seem to remove itself from his forearms. A dusting of dark hair.
Muscles both dense and sinewy, tensing and releasing beneath his skin, leading her gaze toward his hands.
Massive, masculine hands. The hands of a brute.
The hands of an artist, too. Those hands…
How would they feel upon flesh?
Her flesh.
It was only when he glanced up and met her eye that she realized she’d begun to fan herself. “Are you hot?”
Yes, she didn’t say. Perspiring buckets, she didn’t say either. “It’s a bit close in here.”
It wasn’t. This light, airy studio was the perfect temperature.
It was her body that had taken on the heat of a hothouse in July.
“Remove your fichu.”
A scandalized hand reached for her throat. “That’s a rather forward request.”
Ripon straightened, and his stormy gray gaze bored into her. “I need to see the line of your clavicle, and you’re clearly burning up.”
A familiar mulishness set in at the note of condescension in his voice. She pressed her lips together and didn’t budge.
Ripon heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Can you put away the scandalized English miss for a bit?”
“Pardon?” she exclaimed, outraged.
“I’ve seen your paintings,” he said. “I’ve seen who you really are. Or, at least, a glimpse of her.”
Amelia’s breath decided to stop. Could it be? That he saw…her?
Troubling, to be sure.
She’d opened a box of troubles last night, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it. To be seen, fully seen, was a novel experience, and that it was this man of all people made her feel special. That he appreciated her work…
With a will of their own, her hands reached up and removed the fichu.
It was only a scrap of lace, not her virtue, after all.
A cooling breeze chose that moment to brush across her skin.
Her eyes drifted shut in bliss. When they opened, they found his upon her, a look in his eyes she didn’t recognize.
Her body seemed to. It seemed to want to melt beneath it, even as a feeling curled deep within her stomach, and deeper still to a place only she knew—and, quite honestly, not all that well.
Meanwhile, he kept working—placing chisel, striking chisel, cocking his head this way, then that, the crease in his brow growing ever deeper in the plain script of dissatisfaction. “Tilt your head slightly left,” he said.
Amelia obeyed.
“I said slightly.”
She overcompensated to the other direction, which only increased his grumpiness.
“Slightly lift your chin.”
She lifted her chin.
“Slightly.”
She exhaled a rough breath. “Are you a horse’s arse to all your models?”
His eyebrows drew together. “I’m giving you direction.”
Amelia snorted for perhaps the first time in her life. It was a surprisingly freeing experience.
He started up on the marble again, but his dissatisfaction only increased until he set his tools down on an abrupt clatter and made for her. Alarm streaked through her. What was he—
Then he was standing squarely before her, not a foot away, staring intently, seeing her and yet somehow not seeing her in the objective way an artist viewed his subject. And there was his scent again—clove, sandalwood, and sweat.
She cleared her throat and opened her mouth to speak when he did it: he laid his large hands upon her shoulders and cleared all rational thought from her brain.
His hands were warm, almost hot, his heat seeping into her with every rapid beat of her heart.
Strong, too, their latent strength apparent.
They could crush her if they chose, but they were gentle, one remaining on her shoulder and the other tucking beneath her chin, nudging it up by small increments, his intense gaze upon her…
It was only when he said, “There,” that she realized her eyes had drifted shut.
“Stay exactly as you are,” he said, the words a deep, velvet rumble across his throat.
An involuntary quiver shimmered through her.