Page 54 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
A breath more of silence, conversational hesitation that allowed Fiona to gather her bouncing thoughts and put them into some sort of order.
“Yes,” Zander said. “We must plan. Though I’m not sure exactly what more we can do. I’m beginning to feel—”
“No. Not that.” She did not wish to hear the word that would end his sentence, likely one to ring a bell of doom, to sink her soul low, but he was right. They were at an impasse in the matter of the paintings, and there was really only one topic of conversation to be had. “I mean we must talk about last night’s kiss.”
“I don’t see why. Things that happen in masks aren’t real.”
“Oh?” She arched a brow. “As I recall, we had removed the masks.”
“Ah. Yes, well—”
She threw herself across the hack to sit beside him. “Zander. I have little patience or elegance. I pursue what I want with, as you well know, little consideration for my own well-being.”
“You say that as if you’re proud of it,” he said, folding his body into the corner farthest from her.
“I am, rather. Not all days does it do me in. Sometimes it rather makes life better.”
“And this supposedly beneficial, definitely chaotic quality of yours is pertinent right now because—”
“I want you. Oh, don’t sputter. And don’t try to jump out of the hack. It’s moving much too quickly. You’ll hurt yourself. I don’t want you, as in your name or your hand in marriage. I am aware of your reasons for remaining a bachelor.”
He lurched forward, holding his empty hands out to her. “I have nothing, Fiona. Everything I have I give to others except for the means to clothe myself well, a necessity of my occupation. My clients want to see the little lordling when they look at me to know they are getting insider information as they climb their way toward social suitability. But other than clothes and food, Fiona, everything goes back to Briarcliff and Raph, my brother and his home, my home. The only home I have. I cannot provide one for a wife myself.” He fell back into the corner, into the shadows, his arms falling lifeless at his side.
A muddle. Because when she said she didn’t want him that way, she didn’t fully mean it. It had felt like the right thing to say, because it felt like what he wanted her to say, needed her to say. A small part of her brain and a hidden part of her heart had begun to paint a portrait, though, of a man and a woman that looked a bit like them, of children and perhaps a dog. Or cat. Both. Why not? It was a dream, after all. All of them living in a little terrace home near the shop, within reach of Mayfair so he could visit clients and curate art collections, so they could visit that lovely lady, his sister, and take strolls through Hyde Park on days she was not designing a new piece to make Foggy’s eyes pop out of his head.
She could see it so well. But neither of them had any means of bringing the picture to fruition. That did not mean, however, that she could not have him in other ways. In what little time remained between them.
“Not marriage,” she said softly, watching London pass by in a blur outside the window. “An affair. Brief.” But necessary. She turned her head and met his gaze.
He slumped in the shadows, but his dark eyes blazed like stars in the semidarkness.
She folded her hands in her lap and kept that gaze without letting it consume her. “I do not want to wed unless I feel a passion for my husband, and at this moment, I cannot imagine feeling such a passion for any man but you.”
The stars in his gaze flashed out as if he’d closed his eyes. “It will pass. With time.”
She rather thought it wouldn’t. It would be with her when she drew her final breath. “I expect nothing from you but pleasure, lessons I’ll likely have little chance to practice in my life. But for now. With you. Keep in mind I am no lady. I am a jeweler’s daughter. And a forger. You cannot ruin me.” The brief grin she flashed slipped from her lips slowly as she planned her next words. “I would like to know all that you can teach me, and you will find me an eager student, an eager participant.”
The hack rolled to a stop, and Fiona took in a heavy breath, filling her lungs with his silence. He did not stop her from opening the door and descending, and before she closed it, she found him in his dark corner, the vague outline of his body, the pale shadow of his face.
“If you are willing, I will be in the shop tonight past midnight. Waiting.”
His eyes flew open, and she could see those stars once more.
She’d wait tonight for him to come to her, but she would not wait now for a reply. She slammed the hack door and fled to the safety of the shop.
Posey looked up from the counter as Fiona entered. She wove her way quickly around it and took Fiona’s face in her hands. “Fee, you do not look well. You’re red as a rose.” She growled at the door, “Did Lord Lysander hurt you?”
“No. And he’s not outside. It has merely been a trying hour or so.”
“Why did you rush away with him?”
“Lady Balantine has returned to town. But she has no idea where the paintings are. It had always been a thin hope that she would have some idea, would have moved them to another location or some such, but”—Fiona pressed her eyes closed, finally letting the significance of the final few hours penetrate her fully—“that is not the case.”
“Then the”—Posey glanced around the shop to make sure they were alone—“paintings are truly gone?”
“Likely sold.”
Posey licked her lips and smoothed her skirts as she often did when thinking. “Should you… leave?”
