She snorted. “You can barely keep your eyes open. You are still recovering, my lord, and so should rest while I am gone. Mrs. Hocking is in the kitchen. She will come if you call.”
“I’m not an invalid to be watched over like a child.” He leaned toward her, his eyes sparkling in the afternoon light. “Will you paint or play in the sand?”
She had no idea. She didn’t relish taking her paint supplies down to the water, but then she could simply sit on the edge of the cliff and let her brush mimic the waves.
“I will carry your paints for you,” he said before she could answer. “Then rest while you work.”
He was trying to watch her paint. They both knew it, and this time she didn’t object as vehemently as she had before. She had grown comfortable with him, especially when he waggled his eyebrows at her.
“I will follow you down to the water,” he warned. “I’ll exhaust myself, causing a relapse that will have you sitting by my bedside throughout the night.”
“I did not mind that part. It was your snoring that bothered me.”
“Then we had best get going right away.”
She relented with a smile. He was charming when he put his mind to it, and today she was receptive to it. Indeed, it was the first time in years that she was charmed by anything instead of anxious about it. What was happening to her that the rigid control of her life in London had slipped into easy banter with this man?
She was still pondering that as they made their way to the edge of the cliff. He was solicitous in carrying her paints and easel. She was careful to walk slowly and watch for any signs of discomfort from him.
“We can stop here,” she said, indicating a place where he could sit on a convenient boulder or even stretch out on the ground if he so chose.
“The view further out is better.”
It was true. “But I don’t need a view to paint. The water is inspiration, not the truth of what I paint.”
He carefully set down her easel while she took everything else from his arms. He seemed to be strong enough to manage it all, but she did not want to take the risk. Meanwhile, he kept prodding her, forcing her to think about something she had always done but never spoken aloud.
“Then what is the truth that you paint?”
“What I feel, my lord. And if you keep pressing me, then I shall brush irritation into every stroke.”
“I should like to see that.”
Of course, he would. “It would not be a pretty sight.”
“But it would be something new. I have never seen irritation on paper.” He settled down on the convenient rock. “But I have no wish to inspire hatred in you, so I shall sit here and watch.”
She arched a brow. “I do not think you can be quiet.”
“You underestimate me.”
Did she? In the short time that she had known him, he’d been talkative. Indeed, that first night he’d been talking to himself about his horse when he walked in. But unlike the chatterboxes at the Lyon’s Den, she didn’t mind his voice or his words. He thought about things aloud, and she liked the pattern of his thoughts.
Without thinking about it, she picked up her brush, wet the ink, and began to make marks on the paper. She thought of his words like waves, and she painted them as such. She thought first of him talking to his horse, and she drew heavy, flat waves like the grumbling she remembered. She recalled their first breakfast when she was still frightened of him. His gruff statements were short, but to the point, rising steadily in irritation when she did not give him the answers he wanted. Those were the waves hitting the boulders by the cliff face and bursting upward.
Their conversation about the goddess Yao Ji by the sand had been inquisitive. He asked leading questions, and she drew them as long lifting waves further out to sea. Her answers were the undertow of the waves, pulled into him like water drawing upward into a wave.
And then she thought of his illness, of their nighttime reminisces, and the way he made her laugh as he complained about his gruel. These conversations could not be drawn clearly. They were mixed too much with memories of his body. In the space of one day, she had gone from a general awareness that he was a strong, handsome man, to intimate knowledge of the shape of his frame, the bulk of his muscles, and the ebb and flow of the hair on his body.
She had washed every part of him. She had held his joints, stroked his muscles, and marveled at the beauty in his body even when it was wracked with fever. There was little fat on him, so she had spent hours tracing the contours of his anatomy. And she had washed his most intimate place.
What was a man’s organ except for the repository of his seed and the method by which he forced a woman to carry it? It was nothing more than masculine flesh, and yet she could not dismiss it from her thoughts.
Lord Daniel was not a man who forced himself on women. So what then was his organ but the holder of his seed? It was large and strong like him. The tip was shaped like an arrow but not one that pierced. It was smooth and blunt, as if he could charm his way to what he wanted rather than force.
What fanciful thoughts! And scandalous, too. Worse, she realized she’d been painting her thoughts as they’d wandered through her addled mind. What she’d drawn were seagulls flying across the sky, but they were not any bird that existed in nature. They were male organs with wings and clouds that doubled as veins or—
She darkened her brush and blotted out her thoughts. The ridiculous birds became storm clouds, dark and furious. She did not want to think about such things. For the first time in years, she was not surrounded by ladies who served men’s needs. She did not have to listen to their coarse discussions of every part of a man. Not just his intimate bodily functions, but the way he gambled for pleasure, or gossiped about his compatriots.
