Her gaze dropped to meet his. “I paint.” The two simple words emerged prim, definite.
While he didn’t have much use for the former adjective, the latter one intrigued. “Which medium?”
“Watercolors.”
Tristan felt a frown forming on his mouth. He couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.
“Do you take issue with watercolors?” she asked, tapping her forefinger on the rim of her plate.
Since she was asking… “As a matter of fact, I do.”
A laugh startled from her. “How can anyone find offense with watercolors? They are quite possibly the least offensive medium of any of the arts.”
“That is precisely why they offend me. They make no statement. They don’t dare me to feel.”
She stared at him, head canted, flummoxed. He found that he liked flummoxing this woman more than he’d liked doing anything in months. Why not continue flummoxing her?
“Show me your watercolors.”
Her mouth gave a wry twist. “They’re but mere watercolors.” There was no mistaking the sarcasm in her voice.
Of a sudden, his question meant to flummox turned into true desire. “I want to see them.”
Her mouth perched on the edge ofno. His ears fully expected it. Then her head canted to the other side, and different words spilled out. “Follow me.”
She pushed away from the table and started walking without a backward glance. He shouldn’t bite. He should march in the opposite direction and not stop until he was home. But she’d cast a lure, and he couldn’t resist.
They entered a room, which he quickly realized was her bedroom. “This isn’t an elaborate way of trapping me into marriage, is it?” The question was asked only half in jest. “I’m no great catch, I can assure you.”
“Oh, I don’t need your assurance to know that.”
Her barb would sting if his skin weren’t already thick as bison leather. Instead, he gave a dry laugh of appreciation.
She led him past the bed and sitting area to a studio space near double doors that opened onto a private terrace. On an easel sat a painting. Of a pomegranate. It was done well in terms of texture and color. No doubt she had a deft hand with a brush. But…
It did nothing for him.
She handed him another painting. A bowl of fruit. Then another bowl of fruit. The same fruit from the previous painting, in fact, but arranged in a different configuration. Then another…and another.
“What do you think?” she asked. She strove for nonchalance, but gave herself away with the twitchy glint in her eyes.
Tristan had never been skilled at disguising the truth. These watercolors were the bland work of a polite English lady. Which was disappointing. He’d thought there might be something impolite about this particular English lady.
“I had it in my mind that you would…” He stopped talking. He couldn’t tell her what was in his mind. He’d thought hermore.
Her eyes the blue of a particularly frigid glacier narrowed on him, and she seemed to make up her mind about something. In a few quick strides, she’d crossed the room to a bureau and began rifling through its top drawer. Seconds later, her hand emerged with a neat stack of watercolor papers.
More watercolors.
Tristan tried not to sigh too deeply, butmore watercolors.
She returned and held the stack to her chest, uncertainty in her eyes. Curiosity sparked within Tristan, even as he couldn’t help thinking how very beautiful Lady Amelia Windermere was in the moonlight streaming through the open double doors. Not the simple beauty of a young surface.Deep-boned beauty.The sort of beauty Botticelli would have immortalized in oil.
His hands were beginning to itch to sculpt her.
On a roughly exhaled sigh, she thrust the new stack of watercolors toward him. “These are…different.”
He recognized the subject of the top painting. Dolce, Signore Rossi’s dog, seated on his purple velvet pillow, poised for a round of barking by the look of it. Tristan couldn’t help smiling as he flipped through the paintings. Scenes on various Florentine squares at different times of the day and sometimes night. Portraits of family members. Curious, those. None of her family were posed formally but, instead, depicted as they would be in life. Archer seated at a pianoforte. The cousin reading by a window. The sister clearly in the middle of one of her long-winded proclamations.
