Page 34 of His Mistress, His Muse, and Other Madness
“What about you, Lord Theodore?” Pentshire waggled his brows. “Will you kiss again or—”
“No.” Theo strode for the door, leaving Cordelia behind him. “I’ll retrieve my charcoals.” He couldn’t kiss her again. He might never stop. Gathering gossip might prove easy in the next fortnight, but danger still threatened in the warm sighs and soft lips of Cordelia’s kisses.
When he returned to the entry hall, charcoals in hand, he followed a couple slipping into a small side door and found himself in a narrow spiral staircase, stuffy and smelling of dust and stone and bodies pressed too close. The very top opened up to a long gallery, windows stretching the entire length. Cordelia sat at the far end near Mr. and Mrs. Castle, pointing to something on Mr. Castle’s canvas.
He almost hated to intrude. She looked happy. He was a frowning imposition on anyone in a good mood. How many years had it been since he’d created anything other than satirical drawings? The art he’d done before, the type of art he’d learned from his father and used to love—it had no true meaning and purpose. It existed, was beautiful, but achieved nothing. He pressed the heel of his hand to his chest where it ached. He had to paint without purpose for two weeks. No more. He could pretend he enjoyed it as he had then. Theo marched through the milling throng of artists. Cordelia was acting. So could he.
She looked up, and her happy smile slipped slightly, her breath catching, the teeth darting out to bite at her bottom lip. Thinking about the kiss? Hell. He shouldn’t have done it. But two days of travel and the way she’d sipped from his wineglass… he’d crumbled.
“I’m glad you’ve joined us,” she said when he reached her side. She nodded at Mr. Castle’s canvas. “He’s already begun. What will you draw, my lord? To depict a kiss?” Her words existed somewhere between flirtation and curiosity, and he wanted to keep her guessing a bit longer.
He took a seat beside her, opened the beaten box that held his notebook and charcoals, and set everything up to his convenience. Then he looked at her, charcoal in hand, and considered the challenge. To draw a kiss without drawing a kiss. An impossible task created merely to drive him mad with longing. What good did it do to paint the feeling of a kiss?
“What do you think a kiss looks like if not two bodies pressed together?” he asked.
“You ask me?” She laughed. “You know I cannot help you.”
“You may not be able to draw a straight line, but you have a brain. Tell me.”
She looked startled for a moment, her lashes fluttering swiftly, then she swallowed hard but held his gaze until her eyelids closed, pale and striated with the dark red-gold of her eyelashes. That. That was a kiss—the close of an eye, the discovery of sensation and raw possibility in the dark of the self. His hand dropped to the notebook and began its movement across the page, needing to draw, no matter how useless, how silly.
Here—in the sweep of his hand across the page—the real danger: he had a bit of his father in him still, a bit that enjoyed beauty and the creation of it. But he’d long since put his talents to better use. He would not at the end of two weeks find himself trapped.
“I think,” she said as he sketched, “a kiss might look like a… a pause. The moment just before lips touch.” Each word more breathless than the last as his own hand flew faster with the charcoal, leaving the shape of her eye, the strokes of her lashes, the idea of movement, the eye having just fluttered closed. “A pause between the lips, too. That makes no sense. I mean that the lips open. Just a breath. Anticipating… They pause before the storm arrives.”
A kiss as a storm then. Theo threw the page he’d been working on aside and scratched his charcoal against a new page, smudging its clean surface with the flat of his hand as well as with the chalk. Thunderclouds and lightning. No. Wrong somehow. He threw it away.
“A kiss is not a storm,” he grumbled.
Her brows drew together. “No? Hm. No. Perhaps you’re right. It’s warmer, isn’t it? Like a blanket wrapped round you.”
“Hell. I’ve no idea how to draw that.” He threw his charcoal into his box and flopped backward in his seat, flipping the page with her eye over to study it.
Her eyes popped open, and she leaned over. “Oh. Is that… my eye?”
“It is.”
“It’s so large.”
Mrs. Castle peeked over Cordelia’s shoulder and pointed. “Rough, Lord Theodore, but clever. You caught the lover’s form in the reflection of the eye. So we see the kiss coming as she does.”
Cordelia leaned closer to the paper, gasped, and shot upright. “How immensely clever.”
He ruffled a hand through his hair. “It’s nothing.”
Several others wandered by to look at his work, and Cordelia beamed at him the entire time. How could he converse with her staring at him as if he’d just pulled the moon out of the heavens and gifted her with it. And over a damn drawing. Nothing more. Nothing good or—
“Do you know Mr. Simon Oakley, Lord Theodore?”
Theo looked up. He did not recognize the man who spoke to him. “No.”
“Ah, well, he’s a friend of mine. A painter, and I’ve seen him use this trick—using a reflection to show something unexpected.”
“Anyone could do it,” Theo said. And they had. It was nothing special.
“Didshetell you about it?” The man’s focus narrowed on Cordelia.
“No. Why would she?”
