She set her teeth at the thought of him, as though that alone could push it away.
But suddenly she understood in a way that she hadn’t before that all of these colors represented a sort of freedom. She could do with them what she would. Make them into anything she’d like.
She lined up her brushes.
Gingerly, almost reluctantly, Lillias opened her sketchbook. She stared at the first thrilling white page.
She pensively tapped her brush. An inspiration gnawed at her; it had begun yesterday. She resisted it. It remained persistent. And as she didn’t have a spyglass, there was no other way to bring this vision into focus other than to try to coax it out of the paint.
She dipped her brush and added red to blue on her palette, eyed it critically, added a bit more blue.
Once delicious contact was made between brush and paper—how she loved that first moment—the brush seemed to know what to do.
Almost unnervingly, little by little, she began to reveal to herself something she’d never before seen.
In merciful absorption, in a world luxuriously free of expectation, disaster, or barbed anticipation, she worked in a deep black-purple.
Then with slate blue and deeper grays.
Then with greens.
At some point she became aware of a rhythmic thumping. How long hadthatbeen going on?
She paused and frowned, and listened, hand frozen over the paper.
Could it be footsteps on the stairs?
Just in case, she threw her torso over her painting, just shy of touching it. Her heart slammed as if she were about to be caught in the act of smoking another cheroot.
Seconds later she realized she knew the sounds of her family’s footsteps as well as she knew their faces. That sound wasn’t caused by any of them.
She opened the door of their suite and peeredout. The hall was empty of maids; the light through the windows at the far end of the hall was pale; candles burned in sconces. She appeared to be alone.
The sound stopped.
Then started up again.
She left the door of the suite open a crack, and followed the stop-and-start pounding down the stairs to the main floor, as it grew louder and louder.
All the way to the ballroom.
She peered in at the glossy expanse of golden floor.
A very long ladder was pushed against the far end of it, and from the hole in the roof a shaft of sunlight poured through.
Suddenly, a pair of booted, buckskinned legs appeared on the ladder. Her breath stopped when a bare, vast-shouldered, wedge-shaped, gleaming, pale golden torso came into view. So dumbstruck and riveted was she by the little gap between the waistband of his trousers and his narrow waist and the elegant play of muscles beneath his skin during his descent that realization lagged. It only arrived with a resounding jolt when he reached the bottom rung. She was beholding Hugh Cassidy.
Shirtless.
He was holding a hammer in one hand.
The banging sound was now officially her own heart.
He jumped down gracefully, pushed a hand through sweaty hair, and his shoulders lifted and fell in a sigh. And then he turned around.
Because he must have heard her heart beating from where he stood.
He froze. She was caught.
