Chapter 4 #2
When she’d been tucked in her bedchamber at Number Twelve Mayfair, she’d told herself firmly that her desire to go with Ashford to his northern estate had nothing to do with the man himself. Probably she would not even see him—she would be busy with painting and his sister.
But here, in his presence, she could not deceive herself about her attraction to him.
She had liked his letters. She had felt something go soft inside her when he’d admitted how affected he still was by the scandal that had consumed him after his wife’s death. She was drawn to him, to the force of his personality and the quiet intensity in his tall, lean body.
And she did not want to go with him to Northumberland under false pretenses. She needed to tell him the truth, and if that truth meant that she stood no chance of persuading him to let her tutor his sister, then so be it.
“I drew you,” she said again, “and then sent those drawings to the engraver.”
He looked baffled and decidedly displeased. The scar on his cheek swooped downward with the corner of his mouth. “Did you lie, then, at Denham’s?”
“I did not lie. I have not lied to you, and I will not.”
“Lady Matilda—”
“Listen,” she said. “I do not intend to repeat myself. I have illustrated erotic texts for the last five years because I enjoy doing so. At first, I merely acquired pamphlets on”—she felt her cheeks grow hot, but she would not falter now—“on the use of restraints and flogging in sexual congress. Because I was … interested. In such things. Am interested. In them. In—things.”
Oh for heaven’s sake, she had faltered. She was the very picture of faltering. Had she been set to illustrate the word falter, she would draw herself, right now, wrapping and unwrapping her fingers in her cloak while she looked everywhere but Ashford’s face.
“In the intervening years,” she went on, addressing the grass with some gravity, “I continued to procure certain texts that appealed to me. I became friends with others involved in the production of erotic pamphlets, and I offered my skills at drawing because—well, because I wanted to. Because it was a way for me to learn more about myself and my desires. And in so doing, I learned quite a lot about the men and women involved in such practices in London.”
She darted one quick glance up at Ashford. His face gave away nothing at all.
“You.” She licked her lips and twisted at her cloak.
“While it has been many years since you lived in London, stories of your, er, prowess still circulate. Much exaggerated, I am sure, like all gossip. I did not know you, of course, but I had seen you several times, outside the Lords or Brooks’s.
I—” Good God, this was humiliating. “I drew you. Not you, not really you, since I had not even conversed with you. An—imaginary version of you.”
A fantasy Ashford, who did precisely what Matilda most desired, who played out her every lurid imagining on the page. She did not feel it necessary, even in the interest of honesty, to admit quite that much.
“I was very careful,” she said, “to make sure that the drawings could not be identified. I did not draw your beard or your scar. I did not even know about your more celestial attributes. But I suspect that the resemblance was clear enough in the Professor Flagellante pamphlet”—why was it so much more embarrassing to say that name aloud than it had been to illustrate it?
—“that someone grew inspired and added your more distinctive features. I believe you are not wrong in your assessment. Making the professor look like you was a stratagem to increase sales. But the resemblance was there to begin with. Because of me.”
There. She’d said it all. She’d confessed her very worst sins—and as a Halifax Hellion, she had plenty to choose from.
Unfortunately, she did not feel particularly relieved in her mind. Was confession not meant to assuage guilt?
Perhaps she was the sort of person who required more active reparation.
She looked up at Ashford, who was still looming over her in a fashion that she found both alarming and vaguely exciting. “Now you know,” she said, “why I feel responsible for what has happened. Now you understand why I would like to try to repair the damage.”
“Lady Matilda.” Ashford’s voice was a dark growl, and truly, she was mad in the head, because the sound of it sent a hot thrill down her spine. “I do not know why you think this confession would persuade me, but if anything, it has done the opposite.”
“I know!” she burst out. “I know that. I am too scandalous for your sister. I am disgraceful and shocking—I know. But I simply—want to fix what’s gone wrong. I—”
He swallowed, and she could see the pale line of his throat bob beneath his beard. “No,” he said.
She stepped toward him. “If you—”
His hands closed over her shoulders, and she could feel each finger through the layers of her cloak and gown. She forgot the words that had been in her head, her lips parted on nothing but her quick, unsteady breaths.
“No,” he said again. Somehow his face was very close to hers.
She touched his chest. She could feel his heart thundering through his greatcoat. His pulse was racing.
Heat pooled in her lower belly.
“Please,” she said, and she did not know what she meant to ask for, only that she wanted it. She wanted everything.
His gaze went to her mouth. Matilda caught her breath.
And then Ashford dropped her shoulders and stepped back, breaking the contact between her palm and his body. “Go home, Matilda,” he said. “We have nothing more to discuss.”