Page 28 of The Art of Sinning
A note of panic flickered in her eyes before she masked it behind a wooden look once more. “Go start your painting. I’m perfectly comfortable.”
No, she wasn’t, but he was beginning to think it wasn’t because of the pose. No doubt she was self-conscious about being so lightly garbed, but he couldn’t help that. He wanted her to be Art personified, taken off guard and looking betrayed by Commerce’s attack.
Had he been mad to think that a fine lady would make a good artist’s model?
No. Lady Yvette was capable of being what he wanted. He’d seen it earlier, when she’d asserted her rights in the drawing room. He simply needed to bring out the real her. To take her out of herself, so she forgot who she was and how she was dressed.
“Now,” he said as he walked back to his easel, “look tragic.”
To his satisfaction, she lifted her imperious brow. “How does one ‘look tragic’?”
“You tell me.” He began to sketch.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”
“Have you never experienced tragedy?”
The way she withdrew into her stony pose again told him that she had.
He followed his instincts and said the first thing that popped into his head. “Does it have something to do with this room?”
That startled her. “What makes you say that?”
“Because being in it clearly bothers you. Why?”
For a moment he’d thought he’d erred again, for she froze in place, a veritable ice sculpture. Then she muttered a curse. “Can’t you just leave it be?”
“No. Unfortunately, although I’ve found the pose and setting I need, you aren’t going to be comfortable with it until you are comfortablehere. In this room.”
“Ican’tbe comfortable here.”
He stared at her. “Why not?”
It took her a moment to answer. “This was where I spent all my time while Mama was... dying. It will forever be associated with her death for me.”
The naked agony in her features was profound and genuine, and what he needed for his painting. But it also tugged at his heart. Because he knew what it was like to refuse to return to the scene of a tragic death.
That sort of connection between him and his subject rarely happened, and it made him feel almost guilty about rousing her pain.
Almost.
Ignoring his odd twinge of conscience, he sketched the play of emotion on her face while he had it. But she was already retreating into her safe, stiff cocoon, damn her. “How did your mother die?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He fixed her with a hard look. “Then I will pack up my paints and return to London, and you won’t get your trip to the brothel.” When an expression of heartbreaking vulnerability crossed her features, he swore under his breath. “I’m sorry. That was cruel. But what I seek to show in my art is the depth of people’s feelings. So if you can’t—or won’t—show them to me, I can’t do my work.”
Her throat moved convulsively. Then she gazed past him and sighed. “She... had consumption. It was awful. She lingered for months.”
He’d never had to endure that—the wasting away of someone he cared about. It seemed somehow worse than Hannah’s brutal but quick demise. “How old were you?” he asked as he resumed sketching.
“Ten. After Papa left, I helped care for her for a while. I didn’t think she should lack for family to comfort her.”
The thought of Lady Yvette feeling responsible for comforting her consumptive mother at ten chilled his soul. “Your fatherleft? Where the hell did he go?”
Bitterness twisted her lips. “Oh, Papa was hardly ever here when I was growing up. He preferred the city. Mama was the one who ran the place. Even after the doctor said she had consumption, Papa hired a nurse for her and took himself off to London to sit Parliament. He said it was his duty.” She glared past Jeremy. “Apparently being at his wife’s side during her final months wasnothis duty.”
Thunderation. Her father had been almost as much an ass as his.
