Page 219 of The Ladies Least Likely
Ren’s face was unbearable to see, his composure gone, the naked emotion laid bare. Wordlessly he gripped her shoulders, his fingers digging into her skin as he clung to a desperate hope. His throat and jaw worked as he struggled to form the words choking him.
“I can promise nothing,” Harriette whispered. “I wish I could, Ren. But—will you see that she gets this? And uses it?”
His affirmation was a finger beneath her chin, tipping her face up so he could probe every line of it with his all-too-perceptive eyes. She let her eyelashes flutter down. She felt uncertain, suddenly, about letting him see into her soul. If anyone could detect what lay within her, it would be he. At the moment she was full of nothing but deceit and despair.
She heard his slight hitch of breath, felt air fan over her cheek, smelled the trace of lemon from the scone he’d nickedfrom her aunt’s breakfast table. Her heart surged to her throat, beating with wild anticipation. And when his mouth pressed against hers, she moaned with the sheer relief of being able to kiss him again, when she could seem to think of nothing else during the times he was not kissing her. He was heat and strength and delirious passion and a calm, deep knowledge that steadied her. He was Ren. He was the home she’d always wanted and had not found until now.
“I see what happens when I am lax in my chaperoning duties.”
Princess wandered into the studio wearing morning dress and no powder in her hair, which shone a deep, true black. “I find you two canoodling.”
Ren drew back as if she were a snake that had struck him, spewing venom.
“What an absurd word,” Harriette snapped when she had come up for air.
Ren, with a gentlemanly flush of embarrassment, stepped away from Harriette’s table and turned toward the canvas she’d been working on all morning. Even more absurdly, Harriette felt heat climb her cheeks. He was within his rights to look at what she’d done so far; he was the one paying her to produce it. But she felt intensely shy about his seeing how she saw him. It felt too revealing.
More revealing even than the sketches of him in simply his shirtsleeves, waistcoat and neckcloth discarded, lounging on her couch with an insolent, amused expression curling his excessively well-shaped lips. Those prints were selling faster than Mrs. Darly could make them.
Harriette stepped in front of the canvas and turned it away from his inquiring gaze. “I’ve not done enough yet for you to get a look proper.” That wasn’t true. She’d gotten the most important part: his face and its remote, thoughtful expression,the beauty of his strong features, and the suggestion of honor and strength that were such an integral part of him. But she didn’t have his full body outlined yet—she would have to rely on her sketches to complete his figure, and then hours more to fill in the background. She didn’t have enoughtime.
“Did you tell him yet?” Princess, with a yawn, settled herself on Darci’s couch.
“Not yet.” Harriette’s heart squeezed. “I’ve, ah, been working up to it.”
“Tell me wh-wh-what?”
Ren’s face was a needle piercing her chest. He looked like he could not handle one more blow. Even his mighty shoulders would bow under her desertion.
How could she leave him now? And how could she ask for her commission to be paid if she hadn’t completed the portrait before she left? She knew he would grant her the funds in a moment, if he had the means and he knew it would help her mother, but it felt dishonest. Stealing from him, when he had already given her so much.
“The Duchess,” Princess said unhelpfully. “Of Löwenburg. Harriette’s mother?”
“What about her?”
“She’s failing.” Harriette set her brush in its cup so he would not detect how her hand trembled. “I must go to her soon. Mrs. Demant thinks she may not last the week.”
“You are leaving?” Ren whispered.
“I have a place on a coach departing from La Belle Sauvage Inn in Ludgate Hill tomorrow.” She raised her eyes to his. “At eight of the clock.”
“An ungodly hour, when all decent folks are still asleep in their beds,” Princess remarked.
“When will you return?” Ren’s voice was hoarse.
“I do not know. It may be that Franz Karl will want to leave directly from Portsmouth once he comes to collect me. I have sent him a letter, though who knows what condition she will be in by the time it reaches him, if it reaches him at all.”
“This is our last day together?” All the color left Ren’s face as he absorbed this blow.
“I am afraid it may be such for a good long while. I cannot say what the future holds.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “I wish it were different. I wanted time to finish this portrait. Time to introduce Amalie to London. Time?—”
Time with him. That was all. Endlessly unrolling days together, like the summer they’d spent roaming the meads and hills of Shepton Mallet under blue-gray skies, treading land full of ageless history and claiming it at their own.
Time to stand by and watch him court and marry another, devote himself to her, build a life with her, and spare a moment now and then to talk with an amusing friend from his childhood? No, thank you. The one blessing of her unanticipated change of circumstances was that Harriette would not have to see Ren take a countess and his position in society and know she had no place in his life, and never could. The turnabout that had suddenly elevated her and made her a possibly worthy equal—daughter to a duke, destined to be a duchess in her own right—had at the same time snatched any hope that she could claim Ren for her own in any respectable fashion.
He gave her such a look of disbelief and betrayal that her stomach flipped. It was fortunate she had not been able to take any breakfast, or the contents would have been going arsey varsey about her insides.
“You are leaving.” He concentrated on forming the words. She knew his difficulties increased when he was agitated. “Just like that.”
