“Ha. He made many promises he didn’t keep.” He surveyed the room, his stomach sinking. “How the hell am I supposed to find you a patron when you can’t do a damn thing?” He snapped his teeth together and crossed the room. “Why did he do this?”
She lifted her gaze to him, and he expected to find it watery but found it strong and clear instead. “Do you mean why did he save my life?”
“No. I mean why did he give part of our family’s fortune to house and feed and clothe a young lady as if she were a bastard daughter or a mistress when our own pantry remained empty at home? Tell me.”
“Such accusations.” She paced toward him until their chests almost bumped. Close enough to smell her. Tea and mint. “I’m not his daughter.” A snap of passion in her voice. She wagged a finger in his face and marched forward, forcing him to retreat until his back hit the shelves behind him. “Nor his mistress.”
“I know that bit. I saidas if you were.”
“My father is—”
“The Earl of Crossly. Dead.”
She flinched, her hand wavering up to a small, gold chain necklace at her throat, a tiny golden bird dangling from it, resting between the folds of her fichu. The movement brought his attention to the hidden swell of her bosom, and he refocused on her face before speaking.
“The last of his line but for a daughter. You. No cousins, even, to speak of.” A brittle bit of wall around his heart cracked. She appeared so very alone. His father had been a charitable soul, and despite the woman’s lack of artistic talent, he could well understand why she’d pluck on his father’s heart strings. The woman had no one. Not even her title could help her. “Why aren’t you with friends? Do you have none?”
“I did. Your father.” Her words were as hard as bricks and easily shut him out. “It is enough for you to know your father found me a home when I most needed it? And he brought the marchioness to meet me and comfort me. And he sent tutor after tutor to me every month, trying to help me find my talent. Only… I do not have one.”
Slowly, recognizing the wild animal in her eyes and not wishing to scare it, he lifted an arm between their close bodies and nudged her hand to the side until that wagging finger in his face went limp and hit her skirts. Her other hand covered her eyes, and she swayed forward as if she might sway into him, lean on him for support as she had done his father four years ago.
But he wasn’t his father, so he cupped his hands around her shoulders and set her aside. “Do you expect sympathy from me?”
She peered into his eyes. “No.”
“Good. You’ll find none.” He took a step forward, walking her backward as she had him. “When my father died, he left us with debts and everything in ruins. He left the only thing of value—his art collection—to the Royal Academy of Arts but for six paintings and a will demanding we continue to pay for the lives of three artists until we found patrons to replace him. The man, you see, continues to penury us from the grave. But not for long. I’ve found two of these artistic hangers-on already, resituated them—one with a duke with more money than sense and the other with a wealthy merchant of equally substandard reasoning skills. You are last on my list, and I thought it would be an easy matter to rid ourselves of you.” Two more steps brought her up against the window once more, a barrier of only a few inches of air between them. “This complicates matters.Youcomplicate matters.”
She threw her head back and laughed. “A complication, yes. I’ve often been told so. I have been for a long while now, I suppose.”
“I can’t find you a patron if you’ve no talent. And I can’t stop payments to your account unless you find a new patron.” And he couldn’t do his part to save the estate, to rebuild the family, if he didn’t do those things. And they couldn’t sell the house until she left it. Not because of any will stipulation but because he and his brothers, oddly raised as they had been,weregentlemen at the very base of everything. “I’ll figure something out,” he muttered.
She sauntered toward him, her body swaying but her face a brittle mask. “I could always become your mistress, Lord Theodore. Since your father’s death, I have contemplated a life in the demimonde if I run out of options. And with no talent and no one to care for me, I’m already low on those.” Her fingers traced the buttons of his waistcoat.
Elegant fingers, long, like those of a pianist. Her nails were rounded and smooth. The hands of a pampered woman. As they trailed, her eyes softened, her lips, too, as they parted slightly.
Theo’s cock tightened. She was beautiful—delicate and strong, fiery yet soft—and her touch scorched him, stole breath and warped bones. And she touched him, gazed at him with those soft eyes, as if he were wanted,needed. So damn beautiful he had to squeeze his fingernails into his palms, cutting, biting, to keep from reaching for her. Those pinpricks of pain reminded him well—beauty lied. Beauty was false, an illusion that entranced, ruined.
He snorted and turned from her, stopping in the doorway. “You may seek a man’s bed in exchange for stability, Lady Cordelia, but it won’t be mine. I’ll be back.” He left the house, never pausing to look back. His father hadn’t left him an artist to foist off on someone else, he’d left Theo a moral dilemma. They couldn’t continue supporting this woman and her house and her servants and her gowns and frippery. But he couldn’t toss her out. He’d investigated her connections. She had none, at least none interested in accepting a woman with a murky past into the bosom of their family. What then?
He stopped cold on the street. Hell. He’d left his clothes.
One
July 1822
Theo did not forgive.
He meted out justice through black ink and satire.
Currently, he meted warming cream into cold coffee in his chamber at his sister’s house and doodled a very large-nosed man in the corner of his sketchbook. Morning sun flooded through clean windows, and at a perfect slant and dusty light to give the man taking shape on the paper a bit of a jaunty air, a mischievous one. He made the hair a touch too long, made the man’s jacket look like the one worn by Lord Lunly sunup to sundown. Then he drew a puff cloud emanating from his backside. The man was as windy below the belt as he was silent above it. Everyone knew that. And he’d recently sold his eighteen-year-old daughter to his eighty-year-old crony. Not everyone knew that. They soon would, though, the man’s crimes wafted into public view by his own flatulence.
Theo’s lips curled into a rogue grin, a delight he allowed himself rarely, as his hand wandered lower on the page, drawing another man with a cheeky expression, this one entirely a product of his imagination and blown across the English Channel by his own wind. The scratch of the pencil on paper slowed, and the quiet closed around him until only he and the sketch existed in a world gone black. In the rooms he’d rented before moving in with his sister a fortnight earlier, noises had shaken the walls at all hours. Still, he’d felt more alone than he did here, where his infant niece Merry’s cries woke him at all hours, and Maggie could knock on the door whenever she liked.
Knock, knock, knock.
Theo sighed, the silence shattered, his isolation soon to be rather crowded. He slammed his notebook closed, his stubby pencil slipping through his fingers and dropping to the floor. “Come in.”
“Good morning, Theo,” Maggie said, throwing open his bedchamber door. “I am glad you’re awake.”
