Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Next evening
As Tristan had known he would, he’d come.
And here he stood in her garden, beyond the terrace, beyond the edge of light.
He’d been standing like this for a full ten minutes.
Staring…
At Lady Amelia, illuminated by the warm, yellow glow of the two candelabras in her studio, as she moved carefully and seriously, readying her materials for his arrival—easel placed before a straight-backed chair, indicating she would sit while she painted; brushes arranged with meticulous care at precise intervals on a small table; paints and water ready to be mixed and made into magic on paper.
He shouldn’t be here, he understood that. But he was an adult and, last night’s escapade in Rossi’s fountain notwithstanding, she was an adult, too. And as adults they’d made a bargain. Further, he was a gentleman; he wouldn’t be breaking his oath.
But…as a gentleman, shouldn’t he?
Well, he was here, so that was that decided.
Except he was watching her through her open double doors like a lecher.
Right.
He cleared his throat, and her head whipped around, her clear blue gaze searching the night beyond the terrace for him.
He had no choice but to step into the light.
She didn’t smile or greet him in any way, but simply kept arranging brushes that had already been resituated three times since he’d arrived, and however many more before that. She was nervous.
He entered the studio and decided it would be best to get the obvious out of the way. “About last night,” he began.
Bent over the small table, she froze. Very deliberately, she straightened her long, elegant body, squared her shoulders, and faced him. “I licked your neck.”
His eyebrows lifted toward the ceiling. They couldn’t help themselves. That was certainly the obvious sorted.
“And…and…” she continued, her cheeks and the tips of her ears glowing pink. “And I apologize.” She swallowed. “Profoundly.”
Tristan hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this. A profound apology. He didn’t want her apology, profound or not. What he wanted, if he was being truthful, was for her to lick his neck again. He’d detected some talent in that tongue of hers.
But he wouldn’t say that. Any of it. Instead, he picked up the sound of piano drifting on the air. “Is that music coming from this villa?”
“Oh, that’s Archie.”
“Archie? Your brother?”
A tiny smile formed about her mouth. “There’s only one Archie, Your Grace.”
Intricate and skilled, the music carried on, each note following the next with inevitability. Nay. Archie wasn’t simply skilled. “He plays magnificently.” An idea about the Windermere siblings occurred to him. “And Lady Delilah, does she have artistic ability?”
“This may come as an utter shock,” said Lady Amelia, dry as dust, “but she’s an actress, by desire if not by trade.”
“And your cousin?” He might as well ask. “Has she an artistic skill?”
“Juliet rather keeps herself to herself, but she does scribble an awful lot in her notebooks.”
“A writer then.”
“I’ve been on the lookout for an anonymously published serial about a trio of scandalous siblings,” said Lady Amelia, her tone still wry, but a twinkle in her eye.
Tristan snorted. Lady Amelia could be entirely too serious. He liked that she could be funny, too. “You Windermeres have hidden depths.”
She swallowed and cleared her throat, all traces of humor falling away. Her nervous gaze flicked toward the settee. The air seemed to change its elemental composition in an instant. “If you will have a seat”—she inhaled a tiny sip of air—“we can begin.”
Taking his sweet time, Tristan lowered himself onto saffron velvet and spread his legs wide, taking up three quarters of the surface area.
She would have to move closer to him to take her place at the easel, which would leave her four or so feet from him.
Now that he’d assumed his place, she would be realizing that four feet was nothing.
Actually, in this room, at this hour, only the two of them, it was something.
It was a distance that flirted on the edge of intimacy.
An amount of space easily surmounted to achieve it.
Awareness of what could be tremored through his body.
Without venturing closer than absolutely necessary, she slipped into her chair and dipped a brush into the water dish, stirring it into a pot of paint, then repeating the process. She appeared to be working her way up to asking him a question.
And he knew exactly which question that would be. “Would you like me to remove my coat?”
She met his gaze around her easel. “If you would,” she croaked.
He shrugged the garment off his shoulders and tossed it aside. “Perhaps my waistcoat, too?” he asked, the very soul of politeness.
“Yes, please.”
“And my cravat?”
All out of words, she bit her bottom lip between her teeth and nodded.
Perhaps it was ungentlemanly, but this was fun.
He rather liked making Lady Amelia Windermere go speechless.
Slowly, deliberately, he unknotted his cravat, giving her gaze no choice but to watch.
His shirt fell open into a wide V, revealing his dark fuzz of chest hair, and he settled back. “Anything else?”
“Um, that’s all for the moment.” A beat. “Thank you.”
Without asking, he rolled his shirt sleeves to his elbows. She watched every movement from start to finish. And after he’d done, there her gaze remained. Her eyes had gone nearly black with the flare of her pupils, the blue of her irises a thin ring. Interesting.
She picked up a nub of charcoal and began sketching, her gaze flicking back and forth between the easel and his forearms, suddenly an artist in her element. Her demeanor began to relax as she settled into her flow. He liked her this way—at ease with him, treating him as her subject.
But here was the thing: he wasn’t simply her subject, like a bowl of fruit, no matter how she might will the idea into reality. He was very much a man—one whose lips she’d kissed, whose neck she’d licked. “You needn’t have apologized,” he said.
Her brush stopped. “I took advantage of you.”
A laugh burst from him. No conversation was ever predictable with this woman. “That’s a first.”
“And your gallantry,” she said. Her head canted, and she looked at him. Really looked at him. “Which does beg a question.”
“Oh?” He might want to brace himself.
“I can’t quite square this gallantry of yours with your big bad scandalous reputation,” she said. “How did you come by it? Were you genuinely so rotten to your fiancée?”
“Yes.” It was simply true. But he could see from the curiosity in her eyes that he wouldn’t be getting away with the simple answer. And for some strange reason, he felt like giving this woman the long answer he’d never given anyone. “I became a duke at the grand old age of three years.”
“Your father died young.”
He nodded. “In a boating accident.”
“That must’ve been devastating for your mother.”
Lady Amelia’s empathy caught Tristan on the back foot. “He was the love of her life, and she never quite recovered.”
“She didn’t remarry?”
He shook his head. He could tell Lady Amelia more. That he’d learned a valuable lesson from his mother. If one never gave oneself over to great love, one never left oneself vulnerable to great loss. The sort of loss that never let up or let go.
But that wasn’t the conversation they were having, so he wouldn’t.
“From then on, essentially,” he continued, “I did everything I was supposed to do and embodied everyone I was supposed to be—good son to my mother, good student at Eton and Cambridge, good duke to my lands and tenants. Then the day arrived that it was decided I was to be a good husband.”
“An achievable goal, surely.”
He snorted. If only. “It so happened that father’s bosom friend had a daughter of marriageable age. I allowed my mother to arrange the match.”
“It sounds so very cold.”
Tristan shrugged. “From my experience, one young lady is about the same as any other. They must drink the same water to turn themselves into bland, agreeable ciphers.”
Lady Amelia’s face twisted with instant outrage. “Oh, spoken just like a man,” she exclaimed.
Her vehemence took him aback. He hadn’t said anything anyone didn’t know—particularly the young ladies themselves, surely. “Pardon?”
“Do you not have any idea what girls and young ladies are put through to secure their futures? Have you never considered that bland agreeableness is a mask we are schooled to use? Our futures depend upon it as it seems the male sex simply cannot accept our true selves,” she finished in a huff.
He let her words blow over him before conceding. “Fair enough.”
Her jaw unclenched. But she wasn’t done. “Tell me more about this fiancée.”
“There isn’t much to tell about Lady Sarah.”
“That simply cannot be true.”
“Oh, but it is.”
She laughed, no humor in it. “I see now.”
“You do?” he asked slowly. He sensed no good could come from that.
“You see marriage as women’s business.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Has it never occurred to you that two are in a marriage.”
“Not particularly.” From what he could tell, women had the running of the wedded state. But he would keep that opinion to himself. Lady Amelia’s glare wasn’t having it.
“Why did Lady Sarah jilt you?”
Whatever his answer, Tristan understood he would be found at fault. But he stood on firm ground here. “If you must know—”
“I must.” Lady Amelia was clearly determined.
“It was she who asked me an imprudent question.”
“Which was?” she asked, suspicious.
“She asked if I loved her.”
“And your reply?”
“I, well…” It occurred to him that his answer might not reflect well on him. “I snorted.”
“You snorted?” Lady Amelia’s gaze narrowed. “What else?”
“I told her I’d only met her twice.”
“And she said?”
He shifted uncomfortably. The ground was less firm here. “She pointed out that we, in fact, had met eight times.”
“She’d been counting.”