Page 220 of The Ladies Least Likely
He’d left her without warning eleven years ago, shipping off to school when she had finally, for the first time in her life, found a friend. But this was not the same, and she knew it.
She forced a smile that did not reach across her face. “I’ve done what I could. I’ll finish the portrait in Shepton Mallet and ship it to you before I leave. I gave you the face paint to give your sister, and I’ve helped you to find you a bride, haven’t I? Every tea shop and milliner in London has copies of your print, and every woman who can afford it has bought a copy for her private collection. Every marriageable girl dreams of the Earl of Renwick.”
“P-pity the men don’t,” Ren said roughly. “Someone called me Runtwick at Almack’s yesterday.”
“To your face?” Harriette asked, aghast. His face kindled with emotion, and she reached for her Prussian blue pigment to capture the exact, intense shade of his eyes.
“V-very nearly. Behind my back, of course, but within my earshot. They were passing a print back and forth between them. ‘D-don’t make Runtwick any more appealing, if you ask me,’ they said. ’Can’t see what the l-ladies are in a stew about,’ they said.”
“They see not with the eyes of a lady,” Princess said, studying Ren.
Harriette set aside her brush, satisfied she had captured the hue she wanted, that precise cobalt blue, pure and light, calming and stimulating at the same time. “I’ve a mind to make a sketch that will make the gents eat themselves up with jealousy,” she said. Outrage and wickedness tugged at her, twin imps. “Something that will silence the mockery, once and for all.”
Princess twitched her black brows. “Strip him down to the altogether?”
Harriette snorted to cover the quick, hot flare of desire that suggestion fired in her. “I doubt Mrs. Darly would printsomethingthatscandalous. And it might make the ladies perceive him as arouérather than heroic.”
“Sketch him in a heroic pose, then.” Princess shrugged and rose with a languid ripple of skirts. “I wish to write some letters, but I find I have neither paper nor ink. You two won’t be naughty while I fetch my supplies, will you?”
“Rhette, naughty?” Ren said, but Harriette hardly heard him. She reached for her sketchbook and crayon while her eyes roved over the many studies she’d done of her subject. She had his face, all those memorable slopes and angles, and she’d achieved just the right blending of colors to capture the smoothness of his skin and the tone of his complexion, deepened by exposure to the sun. She had a sense for his torso, but only because she’d sketched him in his shirt and understood the build beneath. And because she’d been held against that firm chest and felt the play of the muscles she’d drawn, she understood with her body how tendon and flesh and the masculine structure of him all worked together.
“It’s rubbish because I haven’t got your full anatomy yet,” she blurted.
“I beg your pardon.” Ren glanced toward the doorway as Princess sauntered out with a silken swish.
“We were never allowed to have nude male models at school.” Heat rose to her cheeks at the very thought of asking him to disrobe. She’d asked him to strip before and had been both professional and lascivious about it, knowing she ventured into improper territory. She’d pressed herself against his nether regions, for goodness sake. So why was she being kittenish now about the thought of stripping him down to his skin?
Because now she loved him. Not as a friend, but as a woman loves a man she wants to possess, to know, and to knit her life to.
Her crayon skated across the fresh sheet of paper as Harriette drew herself up in surprise. That line marked adivision in her life: the time before she understood that she loved the Earl of Renwick, and the time after.
She’d loved him for half her life and would continue to love him for the rest of it, the boy he’d been and the man she’d come to know. Something had chimed in her when she climbed that tree to watch him pacing his dressing room in Renwick House; she’d felt then some nudge toward a knowledge that had grown and flowered in just a short time but had nonetheless shot down deep roots. He made sense to her on some basic level. He wasforher.
And she had to leave him.
Her emotions must have shown on her face, because Ren stood as still as if he were posing, staring at her with wordless wonder. Heat flared again in his eyes, but she couldn’t bear to look directly at it. She felt newly vulnerable to him, laid bare by this knowledge—she, who had made herself vulnerable to no man, ever.
She knew he desired her; many men had. But she also had heard the stories of the courtesans he’d kept across Europe. Those weren’t tales that marriage-minded mamas told their genteel daughters over the dining parlor table, but they were tidbits that the members of the Countess of Calenberg’s household reveled in. He had a man’s appetites, and he liked the shape of Harriette. That explained his interest. Being a man with means and freedom and the God-given right to claim anything he wished, it made perfect sense that he would pursue her if he wanted her.
And as soon as she gave the gossip mill a reason to think she was another of his conquests, any power she had to demand respect from her future husband was gone.
But if he were willing to offer his body to her—she had use for it.
“I want to make another set of sketches,” Harriette said, her breathing heavy. It was as though she’d been kissing him for hours, which she would very much like to be doing, but she wanted to draw him more than she wanted to kiss him right now.
“One of your racy prints?”
“This is just for me. So I can finish you. But I need to see—I need to understand…”
She circled her hand in the air, encompassing his tall, rangy frame. He leaned on his good leg, a casual pose, full of elegant, arrogant ease. It was an attitude he’d cultivated to hide his defect, and it was because she knew what he was hiding, how hard he worked to pass himself off like other men, that she loved him so completely.
His eyes darkened to indigo. “Howmuchdo you need to see?” he purred.
Oh, he was lethal. But the come-hitherness, oddly, made her rein herself in. All those courtesans. All those women who’d had the liberty to touch him as often and as thoroughly as they wanted. None of them had loved him, not like she did.
“Sit you on Darci’s couch.” She pointed toward the low couch that Princess had vacated. “The light has shifted and is better there. Now disrobe and put this sheet over your—er, lap.” She pulled a long linen strip off a nearby statue that Darci had decided she didn’t like. “I’ll turn my back,” she promised, and did, in an act of quite uncharacteristic modesty, one she immediately regretted. She wanted to know every part of his body, didn’t she?
He cleared his throat. “I-I need—I need help with my coat and-and boots.”
