A Portrait of Love (The Academy of Love #3) - Minerva Spencer Page 0,35
at dinner last night.”
“What did you say at dinner?”
She gave him a look of mock surprise. “Weren’t you at dinner last night?”
He ignored her sarcasm. “Clearly I missed something important.”
“And why would that be I wonder?” She tapped her chin with her forefinger and rolled her eyes skyward, as if searching her memory.
He sighed heavily. “Likely because I wasn’t paying attention. Now, tell me what you said.”
“That artists frequently paint over pictures that do not please them or are not right somehow. After all, why discard a perfectly fine canvas?”
“Ah, that’s right. I recall now.” He chewed the inside of his mouth for a moment before saying, “So, which was it?”
“Which was what?”
He cast his eyes skyward in a mocking echo of her recent look. “Did it not please you or was something not right?”
Honoria gave a careless wave of one hand. “That was a long time ago, my lord. I hardly remember.”
He gave a low, dangerous chuckle while slowly shaking his head from side to side. “Oh Miss Keyes, what a fibber you are.”
Her heart bolted like a horse that had been roughly spurred. “What do you mean?”
“I want you to paint me.”
“So you already said. However, as I said, I am engaged after I complete these two portraits.”
“What? Alvanley’s dog?” He gave a bark of laughter. “That’s very droll.”
She couldn’t help the smile that tugged at her lips.
“If you do sittings of me while you are here you can paint me after you’ve finished with Cecily and Rebecca. It would be very economical for you.”
She snorted. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why can’t I?”
“You already have a portrait.” And it was glorious. Honey had seen it hanging in the newer of the two galleries after she’d left the breakfast room. Her father had done an inspired job of capturing Simon’s younger self. Physical beauty and a zest for life had blazed out of eyes that were surely the color of heaven. It wasn’t her father’s masterpiece—that was the portrait of Honey’s mother—but it was close.
“That is who I used to be.” He smiled grimly. “Back when I was young and innocent and foolishly optimistic. I wish for a portrait of who I am now.”
“You mean now that you are old, debauched, and bitterly pessimistic?”
He laughed. “Exactly.”
She opened her mouth, and then closed it. And then opened it again. “I understand your appearance is different,” she said hesitantly, flushing under his sardonic gaze. “But surely you are the same person?”
“Are you the same person as you were back then at what—fourteen? Fifteen?”
“I was fifteen,” she said, spurned that he did not remember.
“Are you the same as your fifteen-year-old self?”
Against her will, she gave the question some consideration. Was she? She almost laughed out loud. In one way she was: she was still infatuated with the man across from her. She flushed with shame and anger.
When she looked up it was to find him watching her, his expression intent. How long had she waited for him to look at her like that—as if he wanted to consume her? Or at least to consume what she was thinking, if not her person.
Honey shrugged. “In essentials I am the same. In experience, well, of course that is different. I am older, I have more experience in the world, I—”
“Have you been painting all this time? Did you ever go away to school?”
She should have been annoyed by his interruption, but she was too flattered by his interest. “I did not go to school.”
“Ah, yes, I recall you had a governess—a dragon of a woman who breathed fire at me.”
“That was Miss Keeble.”
“She accompanied us on our little jaunts.”
So, he did remember.
“So, the redoubtable Miss Keeble was your teacher, then?”
“For a while.” Honey hesitated, wondering how much of herself to share. “But she left—and so did the one after her. Our household was rather unconventional and most of them did not care for the schedule my father kept. By the time the third one left I was seventeen and spending more time on my painting.”
“So you never left home?”
Something about his question made her bristle. “For several years I worked at an Academy for Young Ladies.”
“You were a schoolteacher?” He eyebrows shot up, the left one almost as high as the right.
“What, don’t you believe I’m qualified to teach art?”
He gave a derisive snort. “Don’t be foolish—what a bloody waste of talent.”
She flushed at both his language, his dismissal of her life as a waste, and his backhanded compliment. “For your information, my lord, I