She ran her hands up into his thick, curly locks. She thought of him as a child, how unruly his hair must have been as he’d raced over the bleak and rugged moors. She thought she could hear the sea in the distance and assumed if they walked farther, they’d eventually meet up with the cliffs.
She drew back from his lips. “Are there any portraits of you as a child?”
“No.”
Sometimes it was difficult to get information from him, not because he was being obstinate—although he was certainly that—but because when she looked at him she saw the Earl of Claybourne. When he looked in a mirror, he saw an imposter.
“Are there any portraits of the earl’s grandson—before you came into his life?”
He gave her an indulgent smile. “You’re trying to find something in me that simply doesn’t exist.”
“So there is one.”
“In the room that the old gent referred to as the Countess’s Sitting Room.”
“Will you show me?”
“Catherine—”
“Please. I’m not trying to prove you’re Claybourne. Honestly. But the old gent must have seen something in you, so it’s the closest I’ll come to seeing you as a lad.”
“Why would you—”
She pressed her finger to his lips. “Do I really ask for so much?”
He arched a brow, causing her to smile while rolling her eyes. “All right. I suppose I do.”
He pressed a kiss to her forehead, her nose, her chin. “But you don’t ask for anything I’m not willing to give.”
She liked this aspect of him, when he wasn’t quite so dark and brooding, when he teased her, when he made her so terribly glad to be with him.
He rolled off her and helped her to her feet. They began packing away their picnic.
The wind picked up, rustling the leaves in the trees. She glanced toward the distant road, and a sense of foreboding sent a shiver through her. She didn’t know if it was the prospect of looking at the true Earl of Claybourne as a child or something more sinister that disturbed her.
Luke had visited this room only once and it had given him a blinding headache then.
The old gent had brought him here, to show him the portrait and to explain how his wife had died in this room, died with grief over the loss of her firstborn son and grandson.
The room had carried a heavy flowery scent back then—no doubt the lingering presence of the countess—and Luke had attributed that to causing his headache.
But the room now smelled of furniture oil, and yet still his head began to pound as he watched Catherine trace her fingers over the faces in the portrait without actually touching the canvas. She took a step back. “They look to be very happy.”
“The old gent thought they were.”
She turned to face him. “Have you ever considered growing a mustache?”
“Like the man in the portrait? No.” Nothing he did would make him look like the man in the portrait.
“I can see similarities—”
“Catherine.”
“I know you don’t think you’re Claybourne, but there are similarities. The hair, the eyes…even the chin I think.”
He shook his head.
“How old were you—was he—when this portrait was done?”
