Amy approached. “Good afternoon, Christina,” she said pleasantly.
“Amy. I was just coming to tea. And Sir Aedan was just leaving.”
“I am glad I managed to catch him. I will come to tea shortly,” Amy said.
Christina all but fled the room, all too aware of Aedan’s glance following her.
Chapter Twenty
Aedan savored herwarmth and the fit of his hands along her natural curves through the slick of heavy silk under his palms. She looked up at him, motionless, beautiful, adoring.
“Spectacles,” he reminded her.
She lifted the steel frames from her nose and set them on a table. Aedan gathered her close again, fingers spread across the small of her back.
“Good!” John said. “Hold that.”
Her hands rested on his chest, fabric sandwiched between his torso and hers. Her breasts were soft and full against his chest. The freedom their posing sessions allowed stirred and aroused him. He shifted his hips to retain his dignity.
These posing sessions night after night were sweet torture. Her slight weight against him, her warm, firm body, the play of textures under his hands, the thickness of her unbound hair, set him afire. He ached to kiss and caress her thoroughly, he burned to continue what had begun on a rainy afternoon in an ancient storage chamber.
How much longer could he pretend he was impervious, that she was merely a friend? Every day tested his mettle. She had seeped into every part of his life, blood, bone, and being.
“They meet secretly in her bower and are about to be parted,” John said as he drew on the paper tacked to the easel, the chalk-and-charcoal drawings that he would transfer to the wallto prepare for painting. “She is to marry her father’s choice of groom, but she cannot bear to part from her Druid lover. They need each other. I want to show that.”
Stop, Aedan thought. He was nearly ready to throttle the man.
John was absorbed in his drawing, chalk dashing over sheets of paper that flew off the easel to rest untidy on the table. He began new sketches, hardly stopping between. Aedan glimpsed elegant studies of faces, hands, and drapery, and several full-length couples, bodies joined like rising fountains, passion and love expressed in fluid lines.
“That standing pose is beautiful,” John said, glancing back and forth between page and models. “They are enchanted, these two, swept up in the magic.”
“Oh,” Christina breathed. Aedan sighed. She was like a flame stoking his own fire.
John came toward them to adjust his sister’s gown. “Tilt your shoulder, that’s good. What a graceful line from throat to shoulder.” He retreated to his easel.
Though Aedan had seen countless feminine bosoms bursting from countless lowcut dinner gowns, he had never seen a sweep of skin as alluring as Christina’s shoulder emerging from a simple tunic. He stood silent and motionless, trying to ignore the demands of his body and, blast it all, his heart. He was well and truly caught.
“Tip your head closer to hers, Aedan,” John said. “The very picture of love.”
“Good God,” Aedan muttered as Christina widened her eyes. This modeling venture had been a colossal mistake.
Listening to the whisper of chalk on paper, the sputter of a candle, Christina’s soft, rapid breathing, he thought he might go mad. His body heated like steel in a forge, and he could only stand there like a blasted statue.
“‘Struck deep to her soul, the winsome creature smiled,’” John said after a while, reciting Sir Hugh’s poem while he drew.
Aedan strived to listen and detach from the feel of her in his arms. John had a rich baritone and knew the poem well. Years had passed since Aedan had heardThe Enchanted Briarspoken aloud. Now, John’s voice wove the story anew, Christina took deep breaths in his arms, and suddenly Aedan understood the poem as he never had before, poignant passion and tragedy.
“‘She lay among the briars, lost to him. Lost!’” John recited while he drew. “‘Fallen among the wanton blooms and cruel thorns—’” he continued.
Oh my love, come back to me, and oh my love, come home.
But she drifted moorless upon a distant sea where no soul sails but for the last time.
Hearing a sniffle, Aedan looked down. Christina’s eyes welled with tears. “Sorry. That verse always makes me cry,” she whispered, chin wobbling.
Aedan murmured wordless sympathy, pressing her closer. She sniffled again.
John looked up. “I know you two are not the best of friends, given that hill and the stones and all. But I must ask you to pretend to kiss. Act enraptured if you can. But remember, sir,” John added, “she is my sister. This is just for the painting.”
