Her brain stuttered out, words failing her. Pictures—her refuge—flooded her mind instead.
Ashford on his knees, his dark head buried between rounded female thighs. Ashford atop a woman in bed, her wrists bound to the spindles, her breasts bared. Ashford in a chair, a lady in his lap, his mouth—
No. No. There was no way he could have connected her with the engravings. It was not possible.
“I beg your pardon?” Her voice came out thin.
His fingers tightened on her upper arm, biting into her flesh. The clean white scar that sliced through his facial hair twisted down as he spoke. “You mean to deny it?” His voice had dropped lower, just above a whisper. “You mean to pretend that you did not sell your obscene drawings of me to a goddamned printer?”
“I—” Her throat seemed to have closed in on itself. She could not get the words out except between gasping breaths. “I don’t know—what you mean.”
He released her arm and reached into his jacket.
Run,she told herself.Run now.
Her legs did not obey. She was like a rabbit, staring frozen as the hawk descended.
“Which part of it do you refute?” he hissed, and he brandished a little pamphlet in front of her face. “That you did the drawings? Or that they’re of me? Because I assure you, your ladyship, you will find me loath to believe either denial.”
Matilda tried not to look at the pamphlet. Tried, and then looked at it anyway.
Heat flooded her cheeks.
She had not seen it, not since it had been printed. She had read only the manuscript’s fair copy. She had sent along her drawings with the printer’s man, and had not seen the engravings they’d made or the bound final text.
But she knew what it would say.Professor Flagellante’s Naughty Pupil,the cover read,A Fashionable Tale in Two Comic Acts.
“I—have not seen this,” she choked out. It was true. It wastrue.She had not seen the pamphlet.
“Is that right?” Ashford’s voice had gone silky now. “You mean to tell me you are not the MH who illustrated this volume? Who has illustrated, if my man of business has it right, nearly half of the erotic pamphlets published in London in the last five years?”
He could not know this. Her brain tried to spin out some other explanation. He was guessing—he simply assumed it was she because she was a Halifax Hellion and thus a walking scandal—he had plucked her initials out of Debrett’s.
But nothing she could think of made sense.
He knew too much. He knew that it was not just this pamphlet, but a whole oeuvre of them. He even knew where to find her—here in Denham’s sculpture garden.
She had not always been as careful as she ought. She had paid a footman to pick up her fees, of course, but from time to time she had met with the printer’s man herself. She had taken the parcels of manuscripts up to her room and left the handwritten copies in her escritoire where any chambermaid might see.
Perhaps, somehow, Ashford did know.
“I illustrated it,” she managed. Her voice was shaking, and she tried to steady herself. “I illustrated all of them. But I do not—I do not know why you are accosting me, sir. We have not been introduced. There is no connection between my drawings and yourself.”
He laughed, a harsh sound in the quiet night. “We have not been introduced, have we? Peculiar, then, how well you managed to draw my goddamned prick.”
Despite herself, she felt a flush rise in her chest and face like a firecracker.
This—this hetrulycould not know. It was her own shameful secret—that she imagined him when she thought of sexual congress, that she pictured his elegant hands binding her wrists to the bedpost.
The erotic arts community had its rumors, and she had learned these last five years that Ashford was said to have tastes that matched her own. Restraints. A whisper of pain to sweeten the pleasure. It was only natural that as she’d learned more about her own desires, she’d found herself picturing his brooding face.
It was possible—distantly possible—that a hint of that face had crept into her drawing when she’d illustratedProfessor Flagellante.The image of him had been so vivid in her mind—his tall, lean body bent over hers, the flat of his hand warming her backside—that as she’d imagined the arrogant professor, she’d pictured the notorious Marquess of Ashford.
But she’d stripped the drawings of anything that could definitively mark them as inspired by the real man. Her professor had no beard, no scar slashing down his left cheek. If there was something of Ashford in the hair and eyes, it was a faint resemblance, nothing more.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, and to her relief, her voice was back to itself, low and firm. “I did not draw you, sir. Not for this pamphlet or any other.”
“Is that right?” His fingers—those long, graceful fingers, ohGod,this was unbearable—flipped open the pamphlet to an engraving. “Tell me, then, Lady Matilda, how did you know about the tattoo on my fucking arse?”
