Taking his sweet time, Tristan lowered himself onto saffron velvet and spread his legs wide, taking up three quarters of the surface area. She would have to move closer to him to take her place at the easel, which would leave her four or so feet from him. Now that he’d assumed his place, she would be realizing that four feet was nothing. Actually, in this room, at this hour, only the two of them, it wassomething. It was a distance that flirted on the edge of intimacy. An amount of space easily surmounted to achieve it. Awareness of what could be tremored through his body.
Without venturing closer than absolutely necessary, she slipped into her chair and dipped a brush into the water dish, stirring it into a pot of paint, then repeating the process. She appeared to be working her way up to asking him a question.
And he knew exactly which question that would be. “Would you like me to remove my coat?”
She met his gaze around her easel. “If you would,” she croaked.
He shrugged the garment off his shoulders and tossed it aside. “Perhaps my waistcoat, too?” he asked, the very soul of politeness.
“Yes, please.”
“And my cravat?”
All out of words, she bit her bottom lip between her teeth and nodded. Perhaps it was ungentlemanly, but this was fun. He rather liked making Lady Amelia Windermere go speechless. Slowly, deliberately, he unknotted his cravat, giving her gaze no choice but to watch. His shirt fell open into a wide V, revealing his dark fuzz of chest hair, and he settled back. “Anything else?”
“Um, that’s all for the moment.” A beat. “Thank you.”
Without asking, he rolled his shirt sleeves to his elbows. She watched every movement from start to finish. And after he’d done, there her gaze remained. Her eyes had gone nearly black with the flare of her pupils, the blue of her irises a thin ring. Interesting.
She picked up a nub of charcoal and began sketching, her gaze flicking back and forth between the easel and his forearms, suddenly an artist in her element. Her demeanor began to relax as she settled into her flow. He liked her this way—at ease with him, treating him as her subject.
But here was the thing: he wasn’t simply her subject, like a bowl of fruit, no matter how she might will the idea into reality. He was very much a man—one whose lips she’d kissed, whose neck she’d licked. “You needn’t have apologized,” he said.
Her brush stopped. “I took advantage of you.”
A laugh burst from him. No conversation was ever predictable with this woman. “That’s a first.”
“And your gallantry,” she said. Her head canted, and she looked at him. Really looked at him. “Which does beg a question.”
“Oh?” He might want to brace himself.
“I can’t quite square this gallantry of yours with your big bad scandalous reputation,” she said. “How did you come by it? Were you genuinely so rotten to your fiancée?”
“Yes.” It was simply true. But he could see from the curiosity in her eyes that he wouldn’t be getting away with the simple answer. And for some strange reason, he felt like giving this woman the long answer he’d never given anyone. “I became a duke at the grand old age of three years.”
“Your father died young.”
He nodded. “In a boating accident.”
“That must’ve been devastating for your mother.”
Lady Amelia’s empathy caught Tristan on the back foot. “He was the love of her life, and she never quite recovered.”
“She didn’t remarry?”
He shook his head. He could tell Lady Amelia more. That he’d learned a valuable lesson from his mother. If one never gave oneself over to great love, one never left oneself vulnerable to great loss. The sort of loss that never let up or let go.
But that wasn’t the conversation they were having, so he wouldn’t. “From then on, essentially,” he continued, “I did everything I was supposed to do and embodied everyone I was supposed to be—good son to my mother, good student at Eton and Cambridge, good duke to my lands and tenants. Then the day arrived that it was decided I was to be a good husband.”
“An achievable goal, surely.”
He snorted.If only.“It so happened that father’s bosom friend had a daughter of marriageable age. I allowed my mother to arrange the match.”
“It sounds so very cold.”
Tristan shrugged. “From my experience, one young lady is about the same as any other. They must drink the same water to turn themselves into bland, agreeable ciphers.”
Lady Amelia’s face twisted with instant outrage. “Oh, spoken just like a man,” she exclaimed.
