Page 50 of His Mistress, His Muse, and Other Madness
“You must pick up on that thing that defines the subject of the drawing and put your effort there. You’ve met my brother Zander, and he’s very tall, so if I were to draw him, I’d make him a giant. I cannot explain it further. In many ways it makes no sense. But—”
“No. I understand. You portray the inner self, the hidden reality, by exaggerating the outer bits as much as you can without entirely negating a resemblance. You focus on the part of the outer resemblance we most associate with a certain individual, and by focusing there, you communicate the identity best.”
He leaned into the sofa’s back. “Precisely so.”
“I cannot do so well as you, but I shall try.”
She set his pencil to the page, and the sounds of scribbling, scratching, filled the air between them. Now and then, she glanced up at him, and sometimes the very tip of her tongue flicked out in concentration.
Hell. He was in hell, having her full concentration on him, her body so near and his to touch according to every mind in the room.
“There,” she finally said. “Oh, it’s a masterpiece fit for my Gallery of Shame, but I rather like it. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes.”
She handed him the notebook. She’d drawn a statue hewn from hard rock—Theo. Even the curve of his hair was chunky and chiseled. “My jaw is huge, Cordelia.”
“I have made it so, yes, but only because when I look at you that’s what I most see—that hard and unforgiving jaw, always clenched. But look there. Can you tell?”
He followed the line of her finger further down the page, past the rugged cliffs that were his shoulders and to the… melting expanse of his chest? The cliffs of his head and shoulders dropped steep into the ocean of his body, a stormy ocean. The lines of the drawing were not practiced, but the eye that had drawn it was observant, the mind that conceived it thoughtful.
“Have you ever seen the Cliffs of Dover?”
“Yes.”
“You remind me of them. Hard and craggy cliffs dropping into the sea. A week ago, I would have thought you all cliffs and edges, but now I do not think so. Is that truth?”
He ripped the paper from the notebook, and she gasped, clutched at it. But he waved her hands away and folded it, dropped it into the pocket of his jacket. It might be truth. “It’s mine now. You cannot have it for your gallery.” Nor could Pentshire have it for his little competition.
She leaned away from him with a pout. Then a yawn, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, her eyes fluttering closed.
“Still tired,” he said. “Go back to bed.”
“I can’t.” She ducked her head and whispered, “Not without you.Can’twithout you.”
He would have picked her up then, carried her up those damn dangerous, spiraling stairs, laid her on his bed, and done much more than sleep with her there. But he wouldn’t because no matter what Pentshire and the others thought, he could not make her his wife. And he refused to make her his true mistress.
“Try,” he growled, standing. He left her alone on the sofa, his last glimpse of her one of slight dismay, her eyes having shot open, her mouth parted with an affronted and damn adorable gasp.
The first deserted room he found contained books on every wall from floor to ceiling. Distraction. Good. He grabbed the nearest one to hand and fell into a chair with it. But try as he might, the words floated before him, refusing to make sense, to march to the order he bade them to.
They moved aside to make way for the memory of her small gasp and for visions of all the things he could do to her to make her gasp again.
Thirteen
He’d done it again, shown her in the most abrupt way possible that she was a hindrance, not someone he delighted in being around, but a burden he would be glad to be done with in ten or so days’ time.
Needing something to do with her hands to hopefully distract her from the roaring in her ears, she picked up the pencil and drew useless lines across the paper—up and down, back and forth, over the bumps left behind from her drawing on the paper above it. Which now resided in his pocket. How could he look at her as she sometimes caught him doing, hold her as he had this morning, and then stride away from her as if she were no more to him than… than a stranger on the street.
The pencil’s tip snapped, and she tossed it to the sofa cushion and buried her face in her hands with a tiny, almost silent groan. She knew she should not want him, shouldn’t want to be wanted by him, but he’d turned her inside out. She stood, tired of being alone in the room full of partners, tired of feeling like a burden, and—
Tripped over his satchel.
She cursed, steadied herself, and yanked the satchel off the floor, threw the pencil and notebook inside, and slung it over her shoulder as she stormed from the room. Where had he gone?
“Theo!” she cried out as she marched down the hall. “Theodore Bromley!” She poked her head into the three rooms on the right side of the hall, called his name again, without the honorific, again, so heknewwhere he stood with her. Then she moved to the other side and threw open the first door there. “Theod—oh. There you are.”
He sat in a chair by the window, slumped low, legs spread wide, one booted ankle crossed over his knee and his arms slung across the chair’s arms. He lifted his gaze above the edge of the book. What simmered there?
