Chapter Fifteen
‘—And I heard six people wish to purchase your portrait, but you won’t wish to sell—’
The teacup in Calliope’s hands was growing cold. She had not yet taken a sip.
‘—and I heard from your sister recently and her plans for her adventure continue—’
She really should drink something. Her mouth was parched, her throat sore, yet she could not drink a mouthful.
‘—but then the roads can be so treacherous these days, I suppose.’
Why was she not thirsty? Was she not hungry? Would she ever feel hungry or thirsty again?
‘Calliope, please. Say something.’
She could not envision a future in which she would be thirsty. What was tea, after all, but a bath for plants? It was a dull brown, nothing like the sharp blues and contrasting reds of Montague’s painting.
Montague…
‘Calliope. Calliope!’
Calliope started, spilling the cold tea over the lip of her cup into the saucer. ‘Wh-What?’
Her aunt looked at her sternly, her embroidery laid on her lap utterly ignored. ‘Calliope, go to bed.’
‘I’m not tired,’ Calliope said automatically.
And it was true. She had never felt less tired, had never wanted to sleep less. For in her dreams she would find the memory of Montague Donovan, Marquess of Laidley, the man she had but hours ago turned down.
Turned down!
She had said no. No to matrimony, no to a marquess, no to a man she was almost certain now she had fallen head over heels in love with.
To fall in love with an irritating man was a great inconvenience. To then decline his offer of marriage was perhaps even worse.
‘You look terrible.’
Calliope’s temper flared and she glared at her aunt, ready to unleash a stinging retort—only to see her aunt smiling.
‘Well, you do. You look unhappy,’ remarked Aunt Louise quietly, picking up her embroidery and turning her gaze to a particularly difficult rosebud. ‘I don’t suppose you want to talk about it.’
Calliope looked down into her tea. ‘No.’
What was there to talk about? She had completely ruined her life and had done so in a moment of panic she could never take back.
Decline Montague’s hand? What had she been thinking!
‘You know, if you just talked to his lordship—’
‘Please, Aunt Louise,’ Calliope blurted out with a twist in her gut. ‘I do not want to talk about it.’
If her mother had not gone gallivanting off to Weymouth, she was certainly have paid more attention to that remark. But the two sisters, though alike, were not identical.
Her aunt nodded while stifling a yawn. ‘Well, you finish your tea. I’m going to retire for the evening. It’s been a long day.’
It most certainly has, Calliope could not help but think as she kissed her aunt’s cheek and watched her leave the drawing room. The longest day in her whole life.
It had been a mistake to ever accept the foolish wager, she knew that now. Art should not be a competition and offers of marriage should not be prizes to be won through some sort of public vote.
The very idea of it twisted her stomach and made her heart sore. What had she been thinking?
Well. She had not exactly been thinking, had she?
‘If I win—if the public, that is, declare my painting the superior between us—I win you. You will marry me.’
Calliope sighed, placing the cup of tea on the console table beside her and rubbing at her tired eyes. There was nothing for it. She would have to leave Brighton and as soon as possible. The very thought of encountering Montague in public—
The door opened. Looking up and expecting to find her aunt returning to find her spectacles or a book she was reading, Calliope was astonished to see the maid, Hannah, flushing in the doorway.
‘Please, Miss Oliver, it’s—it’s a visitor.’
‘A visitor?’ Calliope glanced at the clock over the mantelpiece. ‘It’s half past ten in the evening!’
‘It’s a visitor for Mrs Gower,’ said the maid awkwardly. ‘Apparently it’s urgent.’
Lifting a hand to her temples, Calliope nodded. ‘Send her in. I’ll see her.’
‘But—’
‘Mrs Gower has retired to bed and, as her niece and guest, the least I can do is be polite to one of my aunt’s friends,’ said Calliope tersely. Blast it all, but her temper would always somehow manage to get the better of her! She tried to smile at the flushing maid. ‘Please. Send her in.’
The maid nodded, bobbing a curtsey and stepping into the hall. Before Calliope could think to rise to her feet, Montague stepped inside and halted in apparent shock.
‘You,’ was the singular word they both said.
Behind Montague, Hannah shut the door with a snap.
Calliope could barely understand how she was still standing. The man before her looked even more handsome, which was provoking in the extreme, but he also looked—sad. Desperate, in fact, his hair wild and his cravat untied.
And he had been intending to speak to her aunt in this manner?
‘I thought—the maid said—I should go.’
Montague had turned around before Calliope took an instinctive step forward and spoke without thought.
‘Stay.’
Precisely why she had uttered such a word, Calliope could not conceive. But she had, and she wanted him to stay…and he did.
Montague sank onto the sofa opposite the empty grate. ‘I… I don’t know what to say.’
Well, she certainly had nothing to say. The trouble was, the unconscious part of her had propelled her forward and now Calliope found herself seated beside the aggravating marquess on her aunt’s sofa, the carefully embroidered cushion falling to the carpet as she did so.
‘And I don’t know what to say.’
That was not entirely true, but it was surely true enough.
Montague turned bewildered eyes to her. ‘Truly? Because I… I want to understand. When I fell in love with you—’
‘You did not fall in love with me,’ Calliope said hurriedly, heat scalding her face. ‘You do not need to do this, our connection is at an end—’
‘But I do not want it to be.’ Somehow, Montague even looked serious.
This was all a nonsense. Calliope tried to smile. ‘You are just—this whole competition was because we did not like each other—’
‘I believe I was promised hatred.’
She did not look at him. How could she, when her heart was breaking? ‘To wed based on a competition, to force you into that. I know you only proposed because you felt you should have won the art competition.’
There it was. The truth.
It had not been a truth she particularly liked, but then, what was there to like? Montague should have won the art competition. He would have won her hand in marriage by doing so. The only reason he had proposed was because he felt robbed of his victory.
Well, Calliope was not going to give it to him. She sat up a mite straighter and forced herself to look into the deep rich colour of Montague’s eyes.
She had won. She was the prize and she had won herself.
A victory, perhaps, though it felt a little hollow in this moment.
Montague’s jaw had dropped in what appeared to be genuine astonishment. ‘Calliope Oliver, you cannot truly think I proposed to you out of pique?’
A small flicker of doubt curled within her. ‘Well—’
‘I may be the most contrary person you have ever met, but dear God, Calliope, I want to marry you because I adore you!’
The words echoed around her aunt’s cosy drawing room and Calliope’s mind, making as little sense in one as the other.
‘No, you don’t,’ she said before she could stop herself.
Montague turned on the sofa so he was facing her, his knee pressed up against her own, and said in a rush, ‘Now you listen to me, Calliope Oliver, and you listen well. You are the most spectacularly antagonistic and elusive woman I have ever met, and I adore you.’
‘Montague—’
‘I adore you,’ he said sternly, fixing her with an unyielding look. ‘I want to marry you because you make me laugh and feel outraged and furious and joyful all at once, and no one has ever made me do that. No one. And no one ever shall, not like you. Can’t you see that?’
It was all Calliope could do to force her lungs to move.
He…loved her? He adored her, that was perhaps even more than love. And he wanted her? Wanted her hand in marriage. Not out of resentment at losing the art competition, but because he wanted her as his wife?
She had to be sure. Swallowing hard, Calliope whispered, ‘And you don’t wish to marry me for any other reason? My art, or—’
‘Does there have to be a reason?’
Yes, she wanted to say. Yes, because I don’t understand this. I don’t understand why you would love me.
‘There has to be one, though,’ she said breathlessly, working hard not to throw all caution to the wind. ‘A marquess doesn’t just decide— Unless you’re worried about John—’
‘I’m worried about John, but that is not why— I choose you, Calliope, because I cannot live without you,’ said Montague, his gaze steady. ‘From the moment I saw you, I knew. I knew I wanted you.’
Her pulse raced. ‘Before John. Before you saw my art—’
‘If you never painted again, I would still love you,’ Montague said, his eyes never leaving hers. ‘You are a true artiste, Calliope, but that is not all you are. You are a woman, a firecracker, a walking temper that makes my heart sing and I love you.’
Kissing Montague was the only thing she had wanted to do the moment he had stepped into the drawing room, and Calliope found it most easy to somehow find herself in his arms, her lips crushed against his own, taking the first kiss of what she knew would be a lifetime more.
The kiss was unexpected, but oh so welcome.
‘Calliope,’ Montague murmured into her mouth, his arms swiftly around her, tugging her closer, closer, closer.
The kiss deepened, and to his exultation this time it was Calliope who led, who tilted her head, who parted her lips and edged her tongue curiously into his mouth, exploring him, taking him over as though he had not already surrendered.
Fizzles of pleasure were soaring through Montague’s body and he was quite prepared to believe he was no longer actually seated on Mrs Gower’s sofa. How could he be seated when he was spiralling, floating above the world in a heady mix of decadence and need?
And oh, how he needed her.
‘Montague,’ Calliope whimpered in his mouth as his hands moved to her waist. ‘Oh, Montague…’