McGillivray's Mistress - By Anne McAllister Page 0,64
A flush heated her cheeks.
“Ah, yes. You feel passion.” Adela laughed delightedly when she spotted Fiona’s blush. “That is what we want, what we nurture! That I cannot teach. That you must bring, yes?” She smiled, her intent blue gaze settling on Fiona. Then she let out a long, satisfied sigh. “That I know you bring.”
“You do?”
Adela nodded. “Oh, yes. Come now. We get to work.”
The rest of the two-hour session was as intense as the beginning. The chunk of marble was theirs, she told Fiona. They would learn it together. They would feel it and talk about it and try to understand what it said.
“The stones speak,” Adela told her. “But they need us to give them voice. We must listen and feel and then show what they say.”
Avidly Fiona listened while Adela lectured on. Listening to Adela was like being given a translator. Ever since she’d been sculpting, Fiona had been trying to find the words in this new idiom. Now, at last, with Adela she had someone to teach her what the words meant and how to say them. She had the mentor she’d told Lachlan she needed.
“I only help,” Adela insisted when they were finishing.
Fiona’s mind was spinning, full of new ideas, new concepts, new ways of looking at her medium and the world. She didn’t know whether she was more exhilarated or exhausted. “I just hope I’m up to it,” she said.
“You already have the tools. I refine them. You have the passion, as I say.”
“How do you know?” Fiona asked. She thought she did, but she wasn’t sure.
“I see it in your work, this passion.”
“In the shells? In the cutouts? In The King of the Beach?”
Adela smiled. “Is that what you call him?”
Fiona nodded.
“He is the king, yes,” Adela agreed, nodding as she opened a wide flat drawer in the map cabinet behind her, then took out Fiona’s flat black portfolio and spread out some photos.
“Passion, yes?” she said happily.
Fiona stared. They weren’t photos of The King of the Beach. They were photos of her sculpture of Lachlan!
Closeups showing every side, every curve, every line of the sculpture of Lachlan as beautiful and naked as Fiona remembered him.
She went white. “Who? How—? How did you—?”
“King of the beach indeed.” Adela’s gaze flicked up and her eyes laughed. Then she mused, “He looks familiar. But then all beautiful men, we wish they look familiar, yes?”
It was all Fiona could do not to snatch the photos and bury them. How on earth—?
Her mind was reeling.
Had Molly? But Molly didn’t know. No one knew—
Except the man himself.
IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN LACHLAN.
He would never!
So it had to have been Molly, Fiona had decided by the time she got home that afternoon.
Molly must have found the sculpture wherever Lachlan had put it. Surely it hadn’t been out for display. But if she’d stumbled across it, Molly—knowing how upset Fiona was—would have known how much she’d been depending on being able to leave Pelican Cay. She must have taken matters into her own hands, making the photos and sending them in.
Dear God.
What on earth would Lachlan do when he found out?
The sound of the door buzzer from downstairs momentarily interrupted her panic attack. She’d been pacing the floor since she’d got home.
“Come out for a coffee?” Vittorio had urged her. “Tell me about your meeting with Signora Dirienzo.”
But Fiona had shaken her head. “I can’t,” she’d babbled. “I need—I need to think!”
Maybe Lachlan would never find out. Maybe it would never come up. But Signora Dirienzo had talked about doing a show at some point. “Where you’ve been and where you’re going.” And she’d patted Lachlan’s clay self on the butt. “Starting here.” She’d beamed.
The buzzer went again. Longer. More insistently.
Fiona knew who it was. Marcelo, another of Giulia’s cousins, the eldest of Tommaso’s sons, had said he’d stop by after work to replace a cracked windowpane.
If she wasn’t involved in something, Marcelo would talk her ear off. And she didn’t need to talk to Marcelo right now.
She needed to think what she was going to do, how she was going to handle this. Molly, of course, wouldn’t have known about Fiona’s promise to Lachlan.
The buzzer again.
“Come up!” Fiona yelled. Then she deliberately ducked her head under the tap to wash her hair so she could ignore Marcelo when the door opened.
“It’s over there,” she said, waving her hand toward the broken window sash without looking up when she heard footsteps at the top of the stairs. “Can you fix