To paint a living, breathing nude body, in all its shadow and light…flow and fluidity…places exposed…places hidden… She’d painted a number of the nude statues found on every square of Florence. Her studies of Michelangelo’sDavidcould fill volumes. No angle on that body remained unstudied by her keen eye. In fact, she’d scandalized a few fellow viewers one particular day with her acute concentration on his taut buttocks. While most of her observations flowed into her brush, others couldn’t help wondering if a man’s buttocks could possibly bethatmuscular and tight. She’d ended the day deciding it wasn’t possible.
Movement caught the corner of her eye, and she turned.Ripon, striding through the doorway, all arrogant, condescending, masculine duke.
Except he didn’t particularly look like a duke just now. He looked more similar to how she’d first encountered him. Like a man about to go build a stone wall with his bare hands.
The arrogance and condescension, however, that was all duke.
She opened her mouth to greet him, as was proper, but he strode straight past her without acknowledgement, only stopping at a table with a small, lumpy platform beside it, both draped with sheets.
“I must confess to a curiosity,” she said.
He grunted and swept the sheets off the table and platform, revealing the tools of his art and a great unformed white lump of stone.
“How can you possibly expect to sculpt me without looking at me?”
He grunted again and picked up a hammer, then a chisel. She noticed the marble had already been roughly shaped. At last, he looked up at her.
She sucked in a deep breath, and her spine went straight as a ramrod. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep up this position. What was clear, however, was that he wasn’t meeting her eye. He was viewing her like an object. At last, he placed the chisel tip onto marble and made his first strike.
She jumped, then laughed sheepishly. She might’ve even detected the faint outline of a smile on the duke’s face, but she couldn’t be sure in the next second.
What a cacophonous business was sculpting. Such a lot of noise and labor to find the form in marble. But she could see he was striking with purpose and skill, not great blows, but careful placement of the chisel and banked strength behind the hammer strikes. It was both a brutal and delicate process, the rendering of his art.
Of a sudden, he stopped and laid down his instruments, the final strike of the hammer echoing through the studio.
What was he—
With a shrug of one great shoulder, then the other, he shed his coat. As he hadn’t been wearing a cravat in the first place, but rather a simple red neckerchief, he now looked decidedly manly.
Like the most masculine man she’d ever beheld.
He rolled one sleeve, then the other, up to his elbows, and his manliness increased tenfold.
Heat suffused her body.
He picked up hammer and chisel again, and her gaze couldn’t seem to remove itself from his forearms. A dusting of dark hair. Muscles both dense and sinewy, tensing and releasing beneath his skin, leading her gaze toward his hands. Massive, masculine hands. The hands of a brute. The hands of an artist, too. Those hands…
How would they feel upon flesh?
Herflesh.
It was only when he glanced up and met her eye that she realized she’d begun to fan herself. “Are you hot?”
Yes, she didn’t say.Perspiring buckets, she didn’t say either. “It’s a bit close in here.”
It wasn’t. This light, airy studio was the perfect temperature.
It was her body that had taken on the heat of a hothouse in July.
“Remove your fichu.”
A scandalized hand reached for her throat. “That’s a rather forward request.”
Ripon straightened, and his stormy gray gaze bored into her. “I need to see the line of your clavicle, and you’re clearly burning up.”
A familiar mulishness set in at the note of condescension in his voice. She pressed her lips together and didn’t budge.
Ripon heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Can you put away the scandalized English miss for a bit?”
