Because in her heart, Peyton believed she was the child clinging to the leg of that man at the desk. A painting depicted her own parents’ double murder.
Peyton tore her eyes from the girl at the desk to study the shadows, the odd variety of furniture. Their depths disturbed her in more ways than she could define, or maybe refused to acknowledge. There was something horribly familiar about the work. Not just the strokes and thickness of the paint. No, she recognized the—
“You know. This portrayal looks like that room in your grandfather’s house. Remember? The one we had trouble locating the key for?” Tarron’s voice seemed terribly far away.
Are you in a tunnel?The words were there but were stuck in a dry throat that refused to function on command.
Tarron’s arm slipped from her hold. She sagged as he dipped close to the lower right corner of the painting. “Hmm, you’re not going to believe this, darling. But it appears as if your nemesis, Jess Aldis is the genius behind—”
Peyton succumbed to another welcoming darkness that she imagined resembled the nondescript portions of Jess Aldis’s latest piece.
Two
B
loody hell.” Alistar thrust his empty wine glass at Carson. He reached Peyton McKenzie just before she hit the waxed wood beneath her. The glass missed its mark and shattered, littering the floor with shards that silenced the murmuring crowd.
“Holy shit.” Miss McKenzie’s companion, a flamboyantly-dressed effeminate man, spun, his hands fluttering out uselessly. “Peyton? Oh dear. Oh dear.”
Alistar resisted rolling his eyes, taking the unexpected opportunity to study the girl in his arms. Her skin was perfection. A rare translucent cream-colored porcelain that made his fingers twitch with a need to mix a tube of warm ivory with umber to match her perfect shade. How could someone who looked so innocent write such scathing tripe? A mouth like hers belonged on an angel.
Blast. What was he thinking? Peyton McKenzie was no angel. She was the devil in an angel’s clothes. And he was cursed.
“In here, my lord.” The curator led him through to an office.
Alistar lowered the she-devil to a tufted sofa and stepped back. Her eyes fluttered and opened. He identified the color immediately. A manganese-blue hue, ideal for painting sky and water. He flinched beneath her unblinking stare. Heart pounding furiously, he stepped away, his eyes never leaving hers. He reached the door and turned, hurrying through the nearest exit that led outside to the open air. There he was hit with the rustling trees speaking the Romanian mantra he would never escape. The closer his thirty-third birthday drew, the stronger and louder yet more jumbled the words became. He bent at the waist with his palms flattened just above his knees, breathing hard.
“You want to tell me what that was all about?” Carson had followed him out the back door of the small, elegant museum. He held another two flutes.
“Not particularly.” As close as he and Carson were, Alistar had never confessed anything regarding the curse. He’d likely be committed before the inevitable. He slowly straightened.
“She’s an attractive girl.”
Unfortunately.That damned curse. Of course, he’d never believed such a thing existed. Who in their right mind would? That the Earl of Griston would go insane on the day of his thirty-third birthday. Alistar had thumbed his nose at the notion until his father, the tenth Earl of Griston, had been hospitalized when Alistar was thirteen. His father had died an agonizing death of brain cancer five years later at the age of thirty-eight, making Alistar Spears the eleventh in a long line of mad earls.
Yes, he’d done his research. The one glaring thing he’d gathered was that something horrific had happened in the summer of 1819. But what?
And nowhere could Alistar find it documented. No one could explain what happened to cause Loren Spears, the fifth earl, to go mad on his thirty-third birthday. If Alistar was destined for an asylum, he just wanted to know why.
“Why did she faint when she sawGirl in the Window? It’s a perfectly respectable piece. Not a single speck of blood in the entire work.”
He pulled up, staring at Carson, astonishment spreading through him. “That is a brilliant question, my friend.”
Three
G
irl, you should have seen that man move. Mm, mm.” Tarron carried a tray filled with an array of cookies, scones, and pieces of apple and mango, and set it on the table in the library of the Leander Skerry house. He dropped into one of the chairs across from Peyton, numbing her ears with talk of the “lord” who’d kept her from an undignified landing.
She made little noises of acknowledgments here and there, not really comprehending much of what he said.
“And the curator addressed him as ‘my lord.’” Tarron loved drama, hence the pink and orange highlights interweaved in his long, pulled-back dreads.
Peyton? Not so much. She’d already changed out of her professional attire and slipped into comfortable faded jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers. “Damn it, is there not a single ounce of coffee in this house?” she demanded.
“Darling, we’re in England. Did you hit your head?”
“The English drink coffee. I’m asking if the housekeeper included some when she made her grocery run.” She stood up, took a mango cube, and stuffed it in her mouth. “Never mind. I’m going for a walk.”
