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He shook his head dismissively.

“It was nothing,” he said. “Never mind. Forbes holds a gun like it’s a hot eel. I’ve lost more skin shaving.”

“But he . . .” Her horror was genuine. Not a trace of her former righteousness remained.

“He intercepted the picture and recognized me.” Anthony realized that he was testing his wounded arm, moving it experimentally. Her eyes followed the motion. He pressed the arm to his side.

“And feared he understood his wife’s sudden interest in art.”

“You must believe I had no idea of such a thing!” Her exclamation carried her a step closer. The air she displaced stroked him like a finger. He tipped his head to the side, tapping his thumb against his thigh. “Mrs. Forbes bought the painting sight unseen, based on my description alone. She wanted a nude god and that’s what she received.”

“Whatever I believe, whatever myth you read . . .” He leveled her with his gaze. “Make no mistake. The subject of that picture is me.”

It was the truth as he saw it. Plain and simple. But it didn’t sit well with her. Her eyes were slits.

“If you understood anything about . . .” She bit off her protestation.

“Anything about . . .” he prompted.

“Anything!” she said. She stretched out her hands. “You are not my subject. You are the means I used to explore a classical ideal. Every figure composition needs a model. The models aren’t the point. It’s the aesthetic approach that matters. If you weren’t a . . . a . . . philistine, you’d know Endymion from the moon in the upper left corner.”

“The moon, is it?” He smiled. “So Endymion was a kind of night watchman for sheep? Even a philistine knows you need to stay awake for that. And wear a tunic,” he added, an afterthought.

She hissed at him. Not since he’d turned in a Latin composition on the back of a cricket scoring sheet had his failure of intellection incurred such wrath.

“In mythology”—she spit it out—“Endymion was a shepherd so beautiful the goddess of the moon fell in love with him and visited him while he slept. Love. Beauty. Those are the subjects of the painting.”

She was easy to annoy. He knew better than to tell her she was magnificent in her outrage. Pink had blossomed across her cheeks. He wondered if she’d had red hair as a child, red curls that darkened to this shade of copper brown. She blushed like a redhead. Face, throat.

Had he licked her nipples and watched their rose color spread? He was a philistine for forgetting.

She was muttering something. Amending her accusation. Conceited pig it sounded very like. And that last was surely idiot.

“Idiot though I may be,” he said, “I am not an artist’s model. I am the Duke of Weston. And I fear I trump your Endymion in notoriety, at least in contemporary society. And so, your classical ideal is compromised by your infelicitous choice in raw material. Mr. Forbes is not the only person who will find himself unconvinced that my face belongs to a shepherd.”

Miss Coover’s face looked thunderous.

“Isn’t he, though?” she said. “Mrs. Forbes wanted to hang the painting in her chambers. No one else will see it.”

“True enough.” Anthony pressed on as her indignant expression wavered. “I’m not worried about that picture. My present concern is . . . other pictures.”

“There are no others.” Her mouth formed a straight line. “I am sorry you were nearly killed,” she added.

In the pause that followed, he realized there were two ways of interpreting the sentence. Her look challenged him to inquire as to her meaning.

“Thank you,” he said with a smile.

“Well. That’s that. I’ll be going, then.” She drew herself to her full height. There wasn’t much of her, but her pile of curls added inches up the vertical axis.

“Miss Coover.” He held up his hand. “If you possess studies, sketches, any material whatsoever that shows my likeness, I must ask you to turn them over. I can’t—I won’t—have my figure reproduced.”

“Fine.” She didn’t look at him.

“I must also ask for your silence.” The portion of shame—it grew more enormous by the moment. He had to tamp it down, ignore it.

“I require your silence,” he clarified, putting steel in his voice. After all, he wasn’t really asking. Asking wasn’t good enough. Too much was at stake. He needed a guarantee.

Sleepless nights of drinking and whoring. He would not be reading of them in the Pall Mall Gazette.