Page 7 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
“I am sorry to have caused you distress,” he said. “It seems my informant did not understand, and I apologize for disrupting your evening.” He could be crafty as well. Let them think he would give up then attack again when they—she—felt safe. He bowed and strode for the door.
“Wait!”
He stopped, one foot hovering over the floorboards in the hallway. He shifted that hovering foot back into the room and peered in the direction of the settee. The young woman sat bolt upright, her hands twisting her skirt in her lap. Not at all unconscious and clearly aware of the recent events. Ha. He knew it. Crafty minx.
“I cannot tell you much,” she said, “but I can tell you what I know. You are looking for a forger, and”—she took a deep, steadying breath—“I am she.”
Three
The word she’d been avoiding, tried to lock up safely, had slipped into the world and still reverberated around her. No one else seemed to hear its ringing, but she did.
Forgery.
Her secret. Her sin. Now a secret no longer.
The man who’d lifted her as if she weighed no more than a doll stared at her with eyes so dark a gray they bordered on black and a touch of amusement about him despite his quite recent brush with some deep emotion that had sounded very like despair on his mobile lips. He looked like a man used to smiling and getting his way. And when he’d held her in his arms, he’d felt like a man used to working hard, putting muscle and bone to the test.
He strolled back into the room, his gait the deceptive loping of a jungle predator. “Were you even unconscious, Miss Frampton?”
She gasped, affronted. Pretending to be at least.
He had the right of it. She had very muchnotswooned. Not a bit. She’d needed time to think, and her body had responded to that need with action—wise or not, it had not cared. She’d pretended to swoon and commenced thinking. He came looking for her. And for every horrid reason. The man standing before her may as well have stepped out of her nightmares to make known all her sins, and he was unfairly, devastatingly gorgeous. A fact she would ignore moving forward, because he had orchestrated her complete ruination.
To be fair,shehad orchestrated her own ruination.
There existed only one course of action—lay her sins on the table and pay the price. She might not have decided to do so had his voice not wavered. Had she not heard in his few words what she felt in her own heart—desperation.
“My fainting spell is neither here nor there,” she said.
“You’re right.” He prowled closer. “Tell me, Miss Frampton, how you became a forger of fine art?”
She closed her eyes and inhaled. What a weight, what a disaster. The paintingsgone, he’d said. Gone, as she’d feared. Not a story she’d concocted with her overeager imagination. The truth. She wanted nothing more than to sink into the floor and never return, but she forced herself to open her eyes and face her curiously silent family. Her father’s mouth gaped open in a shocked O, and her mother’s gaze grew glassy, thoughtful. No shock there? How odd.
When she met Posey’s blank gaze, her sister said, “It’s not true. You’ve not forged a single thing. What an absurd idea.”
Fiona licked her lips. “I have, though. I’ve—ahem—forged quite a few paintings.” Among other things.
Lord Lysander stepped closer, looming over her, his face a mask, unreadable. “Which ones?” The question in his voice—suspicion. He did not yet believe her.
And she wished it weren’t true.
She stood to better face him, to end his looming. Didn’t quite work. She came only up to his shoulders. Perhaps if she went on tiptoe, she could tap the top of her head on his chin. “The Rubens only, since those are the only ones that matter to you, Lord Lysander, are, in no particular order, a few unfinished sketches,A Landscape with a Shepherd and His Flock, and—”
“Enough.” His jaw ticked. “Youare who I’m looking for?” He turned and paced toward the fire, the long, muscled length of his arms angled behind his back, his hands clasped, tossing a string of mutterings into the flames. “A woman? But why not? Mother always said. Ha. Wouldn’t she like this. Yes, then, a woman. But so young and—” He turned to them sharply. “Where is Lady Balantine? Tell me anything you know of her.”
Fiona wrapped a hand around her wrist, the tendons there tight against her fingers, tight like the rest of her body. And tired, too. But she’d not sleep tonight. When he left, the true conversation began.
“I wish I could tell you,” she said. “I wish I knew myself. You think I have not been plagued with worry since her disappearance? She”—Fiona swallowed hard, hoping to wet her throat to better push the words out—“she was a source of income for me, and now that’s gone.”
Forgery had been her only option, the only way she’d been able to help, covertly of course, because no one would even consider for more than a moment the idea that she could helpat all. But she could. She had a brain, despite what everyone thought. What she didn’t have was any skill beyond what they’d paid for—painting, technical perfection, and the ability to copy the old masters. It’s what one did when learning—copy. Only one was not supposed to do it as well as she could. Nor should one learn from rather shady baronesses how to make a painting look older than it was. And one should especially not sell what they’d copied.
She’d not done all that in ignorance. She’d known the laws, the risks, and she’d taken them, earned her keep, and kept her family fed… with the only skill they’d allowed her to cultivate. Fiona’s palms broke into a sweat, and she wiped them on her skirts. “I thought the paintings were safe. Lady Balantine assured me they would not be sold.”
“They were not for the dowager, and they never hung in her house,” Lord Lysander said. “They were for me and have been at the center of my father’s art collection since you finished them and shipped them off to Lady Balantine.”
Fiona stumbled backward. Her legs hit the settee, and she toppled to its cushions.
As if they were connected through a tattered cord, his body jerked forward as she fell.
