A Portrait of Love (The Academy of Love #3) - Minerva Spencer Page 0,27

forced the words through gritted teeth.

“You’re right, I didn’t. I’m sorry. I promise I won’t try and look again. But you didn’t need to ruin them.”

“They are mine to ruin.”

Her words surprised a laugh out of him. “Yes, that is true. But still—”

Honey twisted away from his hand, which still rested on her shoulder, and went to stand by the boulder that was nearest the cliff’s edge, her breathing ragged, her vision strangely blurry. What was wrong with her? Why had she reacted—overreacted—in such a way? She was never so wild.

A loose strand of her hair curled and eddied in the slight breeze. She sighed and adjusted her hat, her hands smoothing and tucking as if they had eyes and minds of their own. When her hair felt restrained, she jabbed in a hatpin.

Her rough handling knocked the feather loose and it fluttered toward the cliff’s edge. She lunged to grab it, but it danced and swirled out of reach.

“I’ll get it.” Simon leapt over the rock she was leaning against.

“No, no, you mustn’t, it’s—”

He paid her no mind, instead stepping out onto the small rock ledge that hung over nothing but air.

Honey’s throat constricted as he stood on the very edge, where the feather whirled round and round, its beckoning motion luring him further and further. The toes of his boots scraped as they slid over stone. His body was angled forward, his arm outstretched—

Honey froze, unable to move, speak, breathe, or scream.

For one sickening eternal moment he hung balanced on the edge, his body hanging out in thin air. And then he lunged and she squeezed her eyes shut.

“Got it!”

Her eyes flew open to see him spinning on his heel away from the precipice, a triumphant smile on his ravaged face, his blue eyes sparkling the way they had so long ago. He grinned down at her, his smile slowly draining from his face. “What’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“You—You—”

He nodded encouragingly. “Yes, me. Me what?”

“You almost died.”

His eyebrows shot up, one sleek and blond, one crisscrossed with red scars. “Hardly—I just leaned over to fetch a feather.”

“You leaned over a cliff.” She didn’t even recognize her own voice, which was high and shrill.

He gave a dismissive shrug that made her hands ache to hit him. “You’re a bit too dramatic, Miss Keyes. But I suppose that is all part of the artistic temperament—drama and such.”

“No,” she snapped, the staccato sharpness making him jolt. “I am not at all dramatic. You could ask anyone who knows me. I am the calmest person I know. I am staid, collected, some have even called me phlegmatic”

“You?” His disbelieving gaze flickered back to where he’d taken her sketchbook and she’d behaved like a lunatic.

Her cheeks blazed at the memory and Honey snatched the feather from his outstretched hand and spun around. “I’m leaving.” She grabbed her satchel without stopping and marched toward where the horses stood grazing.

She was fumbling with the straps that held her bag to her saddle when he stopped beside her and lifted it from her hands.

“Here, let me. You are not doing it properly. And you’re squashing your fetching feather. Would you like me to—”

“No.” She flinched away and jammed the feather into her satchel before thrusting the bag into his hands, tapping her toe while he secured it.

When he’d finished, he turned to her, his face so expressionless it was an expression: that of a man forced to deal with an irrational female. She felt a growl building deep in her chest.

“Ready?”

She lifted a foot, preparing to put it in his cupped hands. Instead, his hands slid around her waist and he picked her up. Yes, he lifted eleven stone as though it were nothing.

He didn’t toss her or drop her like a sack of oats, he placed her gently on the saddle like one set a delicate object on a high shelf; it was a demonstration of physical power that left her breathless.

He also held her waist a bit too long before releasing her, the heat and strength of his fingers burning through the layers of cloth and sending more distracting messages to her already raddled brain.

The Simon of fourteen years ago would never have touched her so casually or intimately. This Simon was not the kind, sweet gentleman from her past. Honey questioned whether he was a gentleman, at all.

Rather than leading the horse toward one of the rocks to mount he held the reins lightly in one hand along