Page 61 of Compulsion

“We should go,” I say, but she pulls her phone out of her bag.

“Just a few more minutes,” she requests, taking a picture of the encroaching storm. “This is my favorite weather.”

“Ah, yes. I noticed your preference in your paintings.”

She sets her phone down and focuses on me again, brows raised. “At the market that day?”

Fuck.

She thinks I’ve only seen her work one time: on the day I came to the market to save her from the thief.

She has no idea that I stare at scores of her paintings every day. And she doesn’t know that I’ve found her darker art that she keeps hidden in her closet.

I manage to keep my expression neutral and nod.

“Do you always paint landscapes?” I ask, pushing her to confess about her stunning, erotic work.

Her eyes cut away from mine, fixing on the horizon. “It’s what always resonated with me most. And the tourists seem to like them.”

She’s not lying, but she is evading me.

“What do you like about them?” I press.

She blows out a sigh. “This will always be home,” she admits, keeping her gaze fixed on the coming storm. “I have a complicated relationship with my family, and I sometimes feel resentment about my inability to leave them far behind. Like you did.” Her clear eyes finally focus on me again, peering straight into my soul. “You managed to go to an entirely different country. I’ve only been able to move a few cities away.”

“Why not go farther?” I’m hanging onto her every word, craving more of her intimate confessions.

“I can’t afford it,” she admits. Then she sighs. “But it’s more than that. I don’t think I’m capable of leaving. This is home,” she repeats, but the declaration is soft with something like regret.

Does she feel trapped by her affinity for this place?

“That’s why you favor the storms,” I surmise.

Her paintings are beautiful, but her most powerful landscapes provide a glimpse into her tumultuous emotions when it comes to her home.

“Yes,” she admits. “How did you manage it? Leaving home, I mean.”

Something twists in my gut, a painful twinge. I breathe through the strange pain.

“Yorkshire is beautiful, but I’m not the sentimental type.”

She’s looking at me with that keen blue gaze. She’s holding nothing back, and she expects the same of me.

“I didn’t want my title,” I confess. “The only way my father would accept that was to leave and not return.”

“Why not?” She seems just as desperate to know me as I am to learn all of her secrets.

I find that I don’t want to hide anything from her.

“My father is not a good person,” I say, and it’s almost as though the words are issuing from someone else’s lips. “He uses his title and his wealth to cover his sins. He’s a selfish, weak man. I refused to take up the same mantle. I want nothing to do with him.”

For an awful moment, I see the blood, hear the incessant blaring of the car horn where my father’s unconscious body is slumped over the steering wheel.

I shake off the childhood memory before it can fully form. I haven’t thought about that night in years.

“And your mother?” Abigail asks softly, coaxing.

I sneer. “She just wants her comfortable lifestyle. She will accept anything my father does, as long as the family keeps up appearances.”

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