Chapter 16
Without a word, Edward bent down and picked up one of the brushes. He turned it in his fingers. Then he reached up and drew a crude flower on Gordon’s forehead. One stroke. Pink paint. Lopsided petals. A stem that dripped.
“He does not deserve a clean forehead.” He held the brush out to her.
Valeria stared at him. She stared at the brush. She stared at the portrait, at Gordon’s painted face, with a pink flower drooping between his eyes. His painted expression had not changed, but the flower made it look absurd. A tyrant with a daisy on his brow. A monster in a nursery.
The incongruity of it hit her in a place she had not expected.
A laugh bubbled up in her chest before she could stop it, rising past the tears she did not have, the anger she was done carrying, and the careful nothing she had trained herself to feel.
She took the brush.
“Well, he does not deserve flowers either,” she drawled, before smearing black paint all over his forehead.
The next ten minutes were not dignified.
They did not use brushes for most of it. The brushes were too small and too precise, and precision was not what this was about. This was about obliteration.
Valeria smeared green across Gordon’s waistcoat with her palm.
The paint was cold and thick, and it spread across the canvas with a satisfying sound, like mud on a wall.
She pressed her hand flat against his painted chest and dragged it down, watching the green obliterate the careful buttons and the careful cravat and the careful posture of a man who had spent his entire life making sure everything about him was controlled, correct, and beyond reproach.
Edward smeared blue paint down his nose. A thick, uneven line that turned his aquiline profile into something comical. He did it without hesitation. No pause. No asking permission. Just paint on canvas, quick and certain, the way a man crossed out a word he had decided to delete.
Valeria found the red paint and covered Gordon’s hands with it. Those painted hands. The ones that had never touched her, not once, not in three years of marriage.
Gordon had controlled her with words, silences, and the withholding of food, freedom, and human interaction.
He had not needed to touch her. His hands had stayed in his lap, or on his desk, or around a glass of brandy.
They had never reached for her, and that was its own kind of violence.
The violence of a man who made you understand that you were not worth reaching for.
She covered them in red. Every finger. Every knuckle. She pressed her stained hands over his painted ones and left prints of her palms on the canvas. It looked like blood, or like roses. She did not care which.
Edward put yellow in his hair. A bright, absurd shock of color that turned the carefully painted brown curls into something a child might have done.
Valeria blacked out his eyes. Both of them.
She pressed her thumbs into the painted pupils and dragged them outward.
The black spread across his face and erased his gaze, and she felt the weight of three years of being watched lift from her shoulders like a coat she had finally been allowed to take off.
They used their fingers. Their palms. At one point, Valeria picked up an entire pot of ochre, upended it over the canvas, and watched it run down Gordon’s painted chest like mud after a storm. It dripped onto the frame, the wall, and the floor, but she did not care.
Edward found white paint and drew a large X across his face, slow and deliberate, two strokes that crossed over his nose.
The finality of it made her heart flip.
She stood back, breathing hard. Her hands were covered in paint. Blue, green, red, yellow, black, and ochre. There was blue in her hair, green on her wrists, red under her fingernails, and ochre on her dress.
She looked like a mess. She looked like a woman who had just destroyed the last remnants of a man who had tried to destroy her.
And she was laughing.
Not the polite laugh she let out in company. Not the careful, measured laugh she had perfected over three years of Gordon, the laugh that was loud enough to seem genuine but not so loud that it attracted attention or punishment. Not the practice laugh. Not the performance.
But the real laugh.
It shook her whole body. It started in her belly, bubbled up in her chest, and burst out of her mouth. It was too loud and too much. It made her eyes water, and it did not stop.
She laughed, and the sound filled the drawing room and bounced off the walls. She could not control it, and she did not want to. She laughed until her ribs hurt, and then she laughed some more.
She turned to Edward. He had paint on his jaw, his shirt, and his hands, and he was looking at her with an expression she had not seen from any man in her life. Not careful. Not hungry. Not amused. But closer to awe. He was looking at her as though he had just watched a dead thing breathe again.
“It looks like you would win all the games anyway, Duke,” she quipped.
“Edward,” he corrected. “How so?”
“I have not laughed in years,” she confessed.
The words hung between them. Paint drying on their hands. The ruined portrait behind them. The fire low in the grate. Her smile was so bright it outshone the light in the room.
Edward could not resist her smile.
Not the paint, or the laughter, or the destroyed portrait, or the way she looked standing in the wreckage of her past with color on her hands and joy on her face.
It was her smile. The one that reached her eyes and changed her whole face, making her look like the girl she had been before Gordon. The girl who had been locked away for three years and was now standing in the ruins of her cage, smiling.
He crossed the room in two strides and kissed her.
She kissed him back with equal passion.
Her paint-stained hands found his shirt and pulled him closer. The paint smeared across the linen, but neither of them cared. His mouth opened against hers, and she tasted heat, tea, and the sound he made low in his throat when she pressed herself against him.
His hands rose to cup her face, thumbs brushing along her jaw. He kissed her like he had been thinking about it for days, which he had, and she kissed him back because she had been thinking about it too, and she was done pretending she had not.
His hands slid from her face down to her waist, and he pulled her against him.
She felt the length of his body, solid and warm, and heat curled low in her belly.
His mouth moved to her jaw. Her neck. The hollow below her ear.
He found the place where her pulse fluttered and pressed his lips to it.
She gasped, her fingers tightening in his hair.
He laid her on the carpet gently. One arm behind her back, the other braced against the rug. She went willingly. Not because he told her to, but because she wanted to. Because for the first time in her life, she was choosing to lie with a man.
She lay on the carpet, and he moved above her.
The firelight caught the paint on his hands and the scar on his collarbone where his shirt had come loose.
The look in his eyes was careful and yet hungry.
He held himself above her with one arm and looked down at her, his eyes asking the question his mouth did not.
“Do not ask me if I am sure,” she breathed. “Or I will paint your face.”
The corner of his mouth lifted.
He kissed her throat. Her collarbone. He loosened the laces at the back of her dress with steady, patient hands.
Each lace was undone with care. The bodice loosened. She felt the air on her collarbones, her shoulders. Then he pulled the fabric down and pressed his mouth to the skin above her shift. She arched into him. The sound she made said everything.
She pulled at the shift. He helped her. Over her head, tossed behind them somewhere. She was bare from the waist up.
The fire was warm on her skin. He was looking at her, yet she was not afraid. She had thought she would be. She had thought that the moment a man saw her bare body, she would feel the old terror, the old helplessness, the locked-room panic that Gordon had woven into her very being.
However, she did not feel any of that. She felt seen. Truly seen. Not as a possession, or an asset, or a problem to be managed, but as a woman who was beautiful and whole and choosing to be here.
“Ye are shaking,” he noted.
“I am not afraid.”
“I know.” He kissed her mouth softly. “I can tell the difference.”
He kissed her throat. Her collarbone. The swell of her breast. His mouth was hot and unhurried. He kissed the soft underside of her breast, and she gasped, her back arching off the carpet.
His tongue traced a slow circle around her nipple, winding inward, and then his mouth closed over it.
She made a sound that was half sob, half prayer, and her hand found the back of his head and held him there.
His other hand came up to her other breast, thumb brushing across the peak, gentle and then less gentle.
The twin sensations met low in her core and pulled tight like a rope.
“Edward,” she gasped.
“I’ve got ye,” he murmured against her skin, and the vibration went through her chest and down her spine to settle between her hips.
His mouth trailed down her ribs. He kissed each one.
Across her belly, which was soft and warm and quivering.
He kissed the flare of her hip. His hands found her skirts, and he pushed them up with the same steady patience he had used on the laces, past her knees, past her thighs.
The cool air hit her bare legs, and she sucked in a breath.
His eyes found hers. He waited.
She nodded.
He settled between her thighs, his warm breath brushing the sensitive skin. She closed her eyes and pressed her fists into the carpet. He kissed up the inside of her thigh slowly, patiently, his mouth leaving heat and gooseflesh in its wake.