She looked at the engraving.
And then she sat down very hard and very suddenly on the gravel path.
Chapter 2
Christian was indulging in a kind of sick glee at her discomfiture when Matilda Halifax went dead white and collapsed in a heap in front of him.
Goddamnit. It was not sporting.
He crouched on the ground and reached for her wrist, cursing himself as he did so. He could not take her pulse now and then go on to murder her.
It had taken him a moment to recover from the shock of her. She was so far from what he had pictured—all freckles and curves and sweetness, the very picture of an innocent English country lass—that he had forgotten his outrage for a moment.
But when she’d made to deny her involvement in the engravings, it had flared back to life. Anger—but mixed with something else.
He’d felt—
Well. He hated to admit it, but he’d felt a vague kind of admiration for the way she’d stood up to him. Gently bred young ladies quailed in his presence typically, and though she was one of the bloody Halifax Hellions, she also couldn’t be more than five-and-twenty or so. He’d expected her to run. Or weep.
Perhaps both.
But she’d tipped her chin up like the queen of the milkmaids and admitted that she was the artist of a whole library of lewd engravings. It was bold and fearless and slightly insane. The woman was a bloodypornographer.If she were revealed, he thought she could face imprisonment—though as the sister of an earl, perhaps not.
Why would she do it? He knew the Earl of Warren through the Lords, knew the Halifax family was rich as the devil and connected somehow to a royal duke. She did not want for money or notoriety.
Perhaps she simply enjoyed taking jackasses like himself and dragging them through the mud.
Her pulse was normal. He dropped her wrist, and her entire arm fell limply to her side.
“You’re fine,” he said, rising. “Stand up.”
“I prefer to remain where I am,” she said faintly. She appeared to be gazing into the middle distance, her eyes glazed.
He gritted his teeth. All of English society might think him a monster, but obviously he had some idiotic scruples left. He could not shout at a half-swooning woman sitting in a rumpled heap in the gravel.
He caught her elbows and hauled her up, dropping her arms as soon as she seemed steady on her feet. “I tracked you down,” he began, but the goddamned woman would not let him launch into his prepared remarks.
“Wait.” She bit her lip, and her eyelashes fluttered as she looked at the ground, his waistcoat, his buttons. Anything but his face.
“I don’t—”
“Wait,” she said again, more desperately. And then she looked up, and her ridiculous blue eyes were wide and shining. “I’m sorry. I’m—ohGod,I’msosorry.”
He had not expected that.
“Why—”
She cut him off again. “Sir—your lordship—Lord Ashford. You must believe me. My drawings did not look like that when I sent them to the engraver.” She fumbled for the pamphlet he still held in his hand, opening it to the page he’d shown her before.
It was a picture of him, not a stitch upon his body, standing over a little dumpling of a woman. Her enormous breasts had come entirely out of her gown, and her hands were bound behind her. Above her, the illustrated Christian glowered and pointed his riding crop at her nude, dimpled bum.
Jesus Christ. Even the bloody expression on his face was right.
“Look,” said Matilda. She flattened out the pamphlet, tracing her fingers across illustrated-Christian’s angry brow. “This part, I drew. The eyebrows, the hair, the eyes. The nose, yes, that’s mine too, but here”—her fingers caressed the neatly trimmed black beard, the scar on the man’s left cheek that precisely mirrored his own—“surely you can see that it’s been added later.”
“You cannot be serious—”
“Look,” she demanded again. “Look at the lines, for heaven’s sake. I use a stippling technique to make it easier for the engravers to replicate. Look at the delicacy of the brow—and then this beard, how harsh the lines are.” She fixed her blue gaze back on him, her expression the horror of the offended artist. “Surely you can see that I did not draw that. The style is coarse. It’s completely different.”
