Page 11 of His Mistress, His Muse, and Other Madness
“Can I see it?”
She blinked. Had Miss Williams been right? Would he really help her?
“Ye-yes. Here.” She retrieved her list from a nearby table and handed it to him. “I’ve been amassing it for over a year. I added to it after the art auction we attended in May. I’ve not utilized it yet because I wanted to have a small working of the model in progress, something to show them the scheme works. Proof.”
He looked at the list, then at her, then at the list once more. “That’s why you insisted on coming?”
“Yes. To make connections.” The auction had been a scandalous affair, half masquerade, wholly unsuitable, but she’d seen faces despite dominos once the champagne flowed thick through enough veins. And she’d stored them in her memory, added them to her list, the names of those who threw pence and pounds at art as if it would save their souls from damnation.
“An art school. Here. How the hell d’you come to that conclusion?”
“I may not be good at art, but I loved learning it.Doingthe art mattered more than the art itself, helped me—” She snapped her lips closed. He didn’t care about her healed heart, still scarred over a bit. Art had given her a place to pour her pain, to find joy, to discover life in ways she’d not seen it before. One of her revelations—art should be for everyone. Not just the few who could afford it. Because even if it did not earn you pence and pounds, it made you human.
Another truth he would likely not care to hear. Better to stick to the practicalities. A man like him would appreciate those.
“The woman whose legs you saw flying out the window,” she said, “is to be my violin instructor. She’s a grump mostly, and when she told me I should tell you everything, I thought she’d gone a bit mad, but now I see she had the right of it, and—”
“The chairs?” He waved a hand about the room. “The ones circled-up? Those are for…?”
“My other instructors.” Hope brimmed in her on a wave of relief. She should have told him long ago.
“How many of them have you?”
“Eleven, but one—Mr. Spencer, the poet—also acts as my bookkeeper for the moment, until we can afford a real bookkeeper, you understand.”
“I do.” His gaze returned to her, and the gargoyle returned to his face. “You let a poet keep your books and toss likely valuable instruments out the window. And worst of all, you have collected a group of eleven individuals under your care and made promises to them you likely cannot keep.”
Her heart quickly became acquainted with the floorboards beneath her feet. Damn Miss Williams to perdition! What did she know after all?
He slammed her papers on the table and stalked toward her. “No.”
“No… what?”
“No, you cannot have this house.”
“I can if I buy it.”
“Can you afford to outbid the current buyer?”
Likely not. She crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s not your house to sell, now is it? Belongs to your brother, as you delight in telling me.”
He dug a finger into the paper, ripping it slightly.
She flinched. Felt like a tear in her own skin, it did.
He leaned over her like a mountain blocking the sun, finger still digging, ripping. “Paying eleven salaries, how will you save enough money to buy this house? Saving money to buy the house, how will you pay the salaries? And in a single month.” He snorted and leaned away, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’ve relied on others your entire life. You’re helpless as a babe.”
She breathed deep and slow and smoothed gently the torn paper, controlling just barely the trembling of her fingers. Then she met his gaze. “You’re right. I am helpless. But I am trying not to be. I do not wish to be any longer. You would toss me over to another person to take care of me when I would like to take care of myself, to help others as your father helped me, and—”
He snorted and paced away from her. “My father, my father. It’s always him with you.”
“He was a good man.”
“Who ruined his family’s finances.”
“And who saved me.” Lord Theodore rolled his eyes. “You are a beast.”
He flashed his bared teeth. “And you are hopelessly naïve.”
