“Why?” It did not make sense—her persistence, her fixation on repairing the situation. “If, as you’ve told me, you did not intend to put me in your illustrations in the first place, then none of this is your fault. Why do you care so much?”
He did not know what he expected her to say. That she was a good person, perhaps. That she cared about injustices done to young women whose family reputations preceded them. That she sympathized with a fellow female artist interested in a medium that society did permit ladies to indulge in.
He did not expect her to fix her eyes upon him, her face pale and set, and say firmly, “Because I did draw you. Intentionally.”
Matilda looked up at the Marquess of Ashford’s forbidding face and wondered faintly why she could not contain herself in his presence.
She had intended to provoke him into meeting with her. She’d known he would object to her plan—despite how eminently logical it was!—and she’d hoped that she could assuage his concerns through conversation.
She would show him, she’d thought to herself, how reasonable she could be. She would not argue with him, merely present her ideas and overcome any opposition through gentle persuasion.
But then he’d appeared, and dragged her off the path, and he was so—so—
Sogrowly.So stern and dictatorial.
She was perverse! Whenever he spoke, she wanted to do the exact opposite of what he told her to do, and when he saidnoin that devastating autocratic way of his, shelovedit. She wanted to tease him until he said it again, wanted to fray his control until he turned her over his knee.
It was all mixed-up inside her, her regret over the engravings, her attraction to his person, the push-and-pull of resistance and submission that she craved.
She wanted to persuade him to take her to Northumberland. She wanted to tutor his sister in oil painting and—perhaps—encourage young Bea not to fear London society. If her years as one of the Halifax Hellions had taught Matilda anything, it was that gossip only had power over you if you permitted it to do so, and that the perception of others only mattered if you truly cared about what those people thought.
Her last seven years in society had involved a great deal of frivolity, but this—this could be somethingmore.
She could do something good with Beatrice de Bord. Something worthwhile.
When she’d been tucked in her bedchamber at Number Twelve Mayfair, she’d told herself firmly that her desire to go with Ashford to his northern estate had nothing to do with the man himself. Probably she would not even see him—she would be busy with painting and his sister.
But here, in his presence, she could not deceive herself about her attraction to him.
She had liked his letters. She had felt something go soft inside her when he’d admitted how affected he still was by the scandal that had consumed him after his wife’s death. She was drawn to him, to the force of his personality and the quiet intensity in his tall, lean body.
And she did not want to go with him to Northumberland under false pretenses. She needed to tell him the truth, and if that truth meant that she stood no chance of persuading him to let her tutor his sister, then so be it.
“I drew you,” she said again, “and then sent those drawings to the engraver.”
He looked baffled and decidedly displeased. The scar on his cheek swooped downward with the corner of his mouth. “Did you lie, then, at Denham’s?”
“I did not lie. I have not lied to you, and I will not.”
“Lady Matilda—”
“Listen,” she said. “I do not intend to repeat myself. I have illustrated erotic texts for the last five years because I enjoy doing so. At first, I merely acquired pamphlets on”—she felt her cheeks grow hot, but she would not falter now—“on the use of restraints and flogging in sexual congress. Because I was… interested. In such things. Am interested. In them. In—things.”
Oh for heaven’s sake, she had faltered. She was the very picture of faltering. Had she been set to illustrate the wordfalter,she would draw herself, right now, wrapping and unwrapping her fingers in her cloak while she looked everywhere but Ashford’s face.
“In the intervening years,” she went on, addressing the grass with some gravity, “I continued to procure certain texts that appealed to me. I became friends with others involved in the production of erotic pamphlets, and I offered my skills at drawing because—well, because I wanted to. Because it was a way for me to learn more about myself and my desires. And in so doing, I learned quite a lot about the men and women involved in such practices in London.”
She darted one quick glance up at Ashford. His face gave away nothing at all.
“You.” She licked her lips and twisted at her cloak. “While it has been many years since you lived in London, stories of your, er, prowess still circulate. Much exaggerated, I am sure, like all gossip. I did not know you, of course, but I had seen you several times, outside the Lords or Brooks’s. I—” Good God, this was humiliating. “I drew you. Notyou,not really you, since I had not even conversed with you. An—imaginary version of you.”
A fantasy Ashford, who did precisely what Matilda most desired, who played out her every lurid imagining on the page. She did not feel it necessary, even in the interest of honesty, to admit quite that much.
“I was very careful,” she said, “to make sure that the drawings could not be identified. I did not draw your beard or your scar. I did not evenknowabout your more celestial attributes. But I suspect that the resemblance was clear enough in theProfessor Flagellantepamphlet”—why was it so much more embarrassing to say that name aloud than it had been to illustrate it?—“that someone grew inspired and added your more distinctive features. I believe you are not wrong in your assessment. Making the professor look like you was a stratagem to increase sales. But the resemblance was there to begin with. Because of me.”
There. She’d said it all. She’d confessed her very worst sins—and as a Halifax Hellion, she had plenty to choose from.
Unfortunately, she did not feel particularly relieved in her mind. Was confession not meant to assuage guilt?
