A Portrait of Love (The Academy of Love #3) - Minerva Spencer Page 0,13
I swear you shall live to regret it.” The enraged speaker catapulted out of the open doorway.
Even though Honey was frozen, he must have noticed something out of the corner of his eye because he stopped and whipped around to face her.
She gave a small, nearly inaudible, gasp of surprise. Good Lord. What had happened to him?
He surged toward her with an odd, lurching gait that drove her back a step, raw rage rolling from him like waves of heat.
“Who the devil are you? And what are you doing lurking about and listening at keyholes?” He kept walking, driving her back and back, until she hit the wall and felt something sharp jab her hip. The thought that she might have damaged a priceless painting was even more horrifying than the furious man stalking her. She turned to look over her shoulder and nearly fainted with relief when she saw it was only the corner of a plinth bearing a marble bust.
A hand grabbed her arm ungently and swung her around. The face that scowled down on her was not far different from the beautiful portrait she’d painted all those years ago—at least on the right side.
But the left side had been vandalized with angry red scars that had destroyed the smooth, high-boned beauty. The slashes and gashes and pits bore the slick sheen of recently healed wounds. His magnificent golden-blond hair had been cropped brutally close, doing nothing to hide what remained of his left ear or the deep horizontal groves that began at his jaw and deeply scored his cheek. He glared down at her with the same beautiful blue eyes, but the left eyelid was pulled down at the outside corner, the stretched skin giving the eye a perpetually sinister cast. He’d been tall and lithe when she’d known him but now his broad shoulders were heavily muscled and massive rather than slender.
It was Simon, but it was not Simon.
The man in front of her was a byproduct of war: a more intense, distilled version of his prior self. He was sinew, muscle, and bone—all softness and excess flesh had been burnt away. What remained was pure warrior, a man branded, bent, and distorted by violence.
This was not the Simon she knew, nor did he appear to know her.
The crushing realization left her sick inside; he looked at her with no recognition at all in his glorious eyes. He did not know her.
Honey wanted to weep.
“Simon.” The word was quietly spoken but it cracked like a bullwhip in the cavernous hallway.
Both Honey and Simon Fairchild startled, as if they’d been caught in the act of something indecent, yet still they could not look away from each other.
Rather than release her, his hand squeezed tighter while his jaw worked, as if he were chewing his options and found them indigestible. His eyes narrowed and the nostrils of his fine, aquiline nose flared as he struggled to impose some modicum of control—as he appeared to remember that it was not her he was angry at.
He dropped her arm as if she’d scalded him and spun away, his expression—on both the angel and monster sides—disdainful. He pushed past the other man without speaking and lurched down the hall, his steps awkward but swift.
The air in his wake crackled and Honey felt as though she’d been picked up by a powerful cyclone and tossed aside, her ears ringing, her soul battered.
“Miss Keyes?”
Honey had never met the Duke of Plimpton in person. By the time her father finished Simon’s portrait the duke had merely sent a lackey to collect it, the grand ceremony planned for its unveiling never spoken of again.
His Grace the Duke of Plimpton looked nothing like Simon. He was a paler, slighter, and far less noticeable man than his younger brother in just about every way except for his cool dignity and quiet power.
Unlike Simon, the duke’s hair was a nondescript brown. His features were regular and not unattractive, but, on the whole, unexceptional. He lacked Simon’s size and was not much above medium height, lean and compact rather than broad and towering like his younger brother.
Only in the shape of their tilted eyes did she see any resemblance. But where Simon’s were the Egyptian blue of a Raphael painting, the duke’s were a dull gray that was every bit as nondescript as the rest of him.
Simon Fairchild was a blazing star while the duke was the distant and unknowable dark side of the moon.