The Marquess Who Loved Me - By Sara Ramsey Page 0,39

to avoid a storm, leaning forward over her sketch as though compressing her size might keep anyone from violating her private space.

She failed. The door opened. “I thought it might be you,” Nick said behind her.

She turned. “Why are you here?”

The door closed. He turned the key in the lock, barring the door as she should have done. “I heard movement up here, but knew it wasn’t the servants’ quarters — I’d heard nothing last night or this morning to suggest this section was inhabited.”

“I would say I’m sorry for disturbing your sleep, but you should have stayed where I put you.”

“You knew better than to expect that.”

She scowled. “You shouldn’t wander alone at night if you’re in danger. What if I had been your murderer?”

He held up his walking stick. “I thought of that. This isn’t a dandy’s affectation.”

“And if he had a gun?”

Nick patted his pocket.

“Dare I ask if you have any other weapons? Perhaps a broadsword in your trousers?”

He grinned, slow and satisfied. “You can conduct as thorough a search as you like, my lady.”

She blushed. She always meant her innuendoes now, but this one wasn’t planned, and it somehow embarrassed her.

“Your…weaponry is no concern of mine.”

Her attempt to regain control, to play the jade, fell on deaf ears. He set his walking stick aside and carefully laid his jacket — and the gun it presumably carried — on the chair where she’d thrown aside her cloak in the heat of her drawing. “What are you painting these days? Flowers still, or have you moved on to trees?”

She’d painted endless flowers when she was eighteen, for want of any other models on the estate where her father had dumped her. “I’ve more varied subjects now,” she said, leaning back against her worktable.

She crossed her arms as she watched him walk around her studio. She almost ordered him to leave. She rarely invited anyone inside, except the maids who lit the fires and swept the floors. But the part of her that didn’t want his scrutiny couldn’t override the part of her that hoped, stupidly, for his praise.

He clasped his hands behind him, his shirtsleeves rippling over the bunched muscles of his back. The first time they had made love, when she had still lived in the country, was after he had sacrificed an entire day to play her model. It had been illicit, exhilarating, and utterly forbidden — but her governess had been sick with pneumonia, and didn’t know that Ellie had given up painting flowers in favor of something altogether more dangerous…

She shifted and pressed her nails into her palms. Forget, forget, she chanted to herself.

He was quiet as he walked around the room. Some of her paintings hung on the walls, but he gave those only a cursory glance. It was her failed efforts, leaning frameless and unloved against the walls, that drew his gaze.

“What will you do with these?” he asked, craning his neck to examine one that sat on its side.

“Paint over them, if I’m ever in need of canvas.”

He kept walking. She forced herself to stay still, to not turn and watch his progress, as though she wasn’t trying to read every reaction on his face. She hoped he would keep moving, that his knowledge of mythology would fail him, that he wouldn’t see himself in the canvasses where her will had broken and her heart had bled into the paint.

But she knew, somehow, when her hopes were dashed. His steps stopped. A floorboard creaked as he shifted his weight, perhaps to lean forward and see a painting more closely in the dim light. The silence stretched on, endless. She was sure she’d already cut crescents into her skin, but she dug her nails deeper into her arms, feigning oblivion.

“I’d have brought manacles up with me if I’d known you wanted them,” he said.

If she had blushed before, this was an inferno. She’d had more suggestive conversations — why should this be any different?

“Artistic folly, nothing more,” she said.

“Did Odysseus have to be chained to do Circe’s bidding?” he asked. She could almost hear his head tilt to examine the painting from a fresh angle. “If Circe had your hair, I vow Odysseus would have been lost immediately, chains or no.”

In the painting, Circe did have Ellie’s hair. Why had she painted Nick as the legendary hero and herself as the goddess who enslaved him? She should have burned it years ago.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “The painting was an interesting exercise,

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