Hell. “Not her.”
“Why not?” Zander demanded. “She loves a lost puppy.”
“By that,” Fiona said, “he means Lady Balantine has a charitable heart. She’ll take in Lady Cordelia even if she can’t paint. Is it true? Zander said she’s not an artist at all.”
Theo nodded. “She can’t paint or sculpt or sketch or do anything other than vex me.”
Zander shoved the wire back into his pocket with a laugh. “It’s a delight to behold. Our angry Theo flustered and felled by Lady Cordelia’s few perfectly placed and certainly scandalous remarks.”
Zander would never have met the woman if she’d not followed Theo to an art auction shortly after they’d met. He should never have mentioned the cursed event to her. Should never have gone back to see her. Especially once he’d learned how she fired his blood. But her very existence seemed so vulnerable, alone in that house but for a few servants. Her vulnerability must have been what had attracted his father to her aid. He’d always liked puppies too.
Theo didn’t like puppies. At least not cuddling them. He preferred righteously defending them from the shadows. And there existed no doubt—Lady Cordeliawaslike a puppy, and she nipped at his protective instincts like an actual dog nipping at his heels.
But then all of that—her privileged little house on Drury Lane, his father’s support—made him angry as a bear, too, gave him claws and amplified his roar.
To hell with her. Why had his father given her everything and them nothing?
“Lady Balantine… Hm.” He tapped the table. “What do you think, Maggie?” His sister did not answer. “Maggie?” He looked up and found his sister sleeping, splayed out crosswise on his bed.
“Oh, poor dear.” Fiona stood and nudged Maggie awake, wiped away the trickle of drool at the corner of her mouth with Theo’s quilt.
“Terribly sorry,” Maggie said with a yawn. “Merry kept me up last night. She’d been sleeping so well, then all of a sudden—” Another yawn. “Perhaps I’ll go back to bed now.” She slunk back toward the mattress.
“No, no. Come along.” Fiona helped her rise and escorted her out of the room.
Theo and Zander stared one another down once alone.
“What?” Theo barked.
Zander zipped across the room and sat near Theo. “You are, you realize, the only one of us that can actually draw.” Theo grunted. “Yet you’ve produced no artwork to win your inheritance.”
The stipulations of their father’s will required all six of his children to produce an original work of art, judged suitably refined by their mother before she released their inheritance—to each offspring, a Rubens painting worth several hundred pounds. At least.
Bollocks that.
Theo would have chucked the will in the Thames at the first opportunity had he the chance. And he’d burn in Hell’s fires before he submitted any drawing to his mother for approval. Not that he needed it anymore. His mother had, after his eldest brother had fallen in love, married, and gone soft-hearted, declared they could have their inheritances without artistic endeavor.
Theo had refused the kindness. He’d not take anything he hadn’t earned. If he couldn’t earn it the way his brothers and sister had, he didn’t want it.
“I won’t produce any artwork for Mother to scowl over. My art is not the type she is likely to approve of.”
“You never know,” Zander said. “Try.”
“Raph painted some nonsense all up his wife’s arm that showed his love.” Theo shivered, wrinkled his nose. “And you defeated a villainous fellow with art supplies and in the process produced the impression of a backside on a canvas that Mother fawns over—also a product of love. Maggie created a silk pattern of Father’s favorite flower. I’m likely to give her a drawing of”—he flashed a glance at the closed notebook nearby—“a man with flatulence.”
Zander coughed a laugh then winced. “You’ll have to consider a different subject, to be sure. Perhaps instead of it just being a man, it could be Father. He always did get a bit gassy when he ate asparagus.”
“No, Zander. I am incapable of producing the sort of sentimental nonsense Mother wants from me. So I will never win my inheritance.”
“Pity.” Zander drummed his fingers on the top of his leg. “I have something for you. Raph sent it.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a square of paper with a wine-red wax seal and a name scrawled above it. He slapped it down onto the table between them.
Theo flexed his muscles, so he didn’t recoil. It was no snake. Merely an epistle written in his dead father’s hand. “I can’t have that. You shouldn’t have that.” Their inheritances had come with letters from their father, to be won at the same time they won their willed paintings. Since he never planned to win his, he’d never read his father’s final words to him. Not that it mattered. He didn’t want to know.
Zander sighed. “I realize you’re angry all the time. It’s your entire personality, and frankly I find it charming, even if no one else does. One always wishes for a growly, scowly brute to round out a dinner party. But Father wrote six letters, one for each of us, and—”
“Tell me, how does a letter buy back the lands Raph had to sell to pay off Father’s debts?”
“Raph has come to terms with who Father was.”
