Chapter 11
Lord St. Alban wasn’t exactly forbidding.
That was the first thought that popped into Olivia’s mind as she cut a discreet glance his way, his eyes already upon her, watching her, absorbed in her as if she was the only person who mattered in this room, even in all of London. No one had ever looked at her like that.
Her pulse wanted leave to gallop through her veins. She inhaled to tamp the feeling down. It wouldn’t do to let gratification sway her into a course at odds with her goals.
She shifted her perspective and attempted to view him the way the rest of London must see him, as distant and unapproachable. It was his impeccable, physical perfection and those inscrutable eyes that refused to surrender a hint of his private thoughts.
Yet her perception of him continued to differ from Society’s. Their encounter on Ludgate Hill, for instance, away from the prying gaze of the ton, the informality of it, the intimacy of it. The way he’d snatched her from certain death and held her against his long, adept body for one, two, three heartbeats too long. Indeed, he wasn’t the sort of man who let a woman fall.
He wasn’t distant and unapproachable to her.
She tore her eyes away, determined to rejoin the conversation around her. “Lady Olivia,” said Lady Bede, a lively, if slightly eccentric, Society matron, “you must tell me about this artist. He is quite good, I’d say.”
“Lady Bede,” Olivia began, “he is a she who works from Le Marais in Paris.”
A few scandalized titters rippled through the small group. A shock borne of delight rather than of narrow-mindedness.
“A woman, Lady Olivia? A woman painted these?”
She couldn’t contain a smile at Lady Bede’s enthusiasm. She’d provided the woman a delightful on dit that would have her enthusing for days.
“But the paintings in the final room,” Lady Bede said, appearing both flabbergasted and captivated at once. “Such sensuality . . . created by a woman’s hand?”
“Indeed,” replied Olivia, relieved to feel engaged by someone other than him, even if only for a moment. “A new style is emerging from the Parisian schools. A realism in painting unlike anything that has come before it, except perhaps by the hand of Caravaggio. Exciting, isn’t it?”
“Hear! Hear!” cheered a lord on the periphery of the group, eliciting a host of snickers.
Olivia used the commotion to step away. They wouldn’t miss her. Her gaze cut toward Lord St. Alban. Gone. Impossible this heaviness in her chest was disappointment.
An arm slid through hers from behind, and, before she knew it, she was secured fast to Mariana’s side. “You will be delighted that I have brought a bank check, but no husband.” Mariana wasn’t one for small talk. “So I am free to spend said check exactly as I please.”
A laugh complicated by nothing other than pure, familial love bubbled up from deep inside Olivia. “Is Nick traveling?”
“He and Lavinia have hied off to the north country in search of the perfect bay stallion. That girl loves horses more than just about anything, and that man loves our girl more than just about anything. So there you have it. A father who will do anything for his daughter, and a daughter who knows it.”
Domestic bliss radiated off Mariana in waves. Olivia still hadn’t adjusted to her sister’s wifely happiness. It was difficult to imagine now, but Nick and Mariana had been estranged for most of their marriage.
Then, six months ago, Paris happened. Like a magic trick, one moment, their marriage was smashed into pieces, irreconcilable, and the next—the wave of a hand, the flourish of a cape, et voilà!—they were whole again, reconciled with nary a chip on the surface. It was as if their preceding ten years of estrangement never happened.
Except it wasn’t only Nick and Mariana who were affected when they’d emerged from those Parisian shadows, bringing with them into the light a resurrected Percy. Olivia hadn’t been able to breathe when she heard the news, the life she’d built for herself threatening to collapse on her. To be a wife again . . . To lose her hard-won freedom . . . Unthinkable.
The old soldier’s words came back to her. A right selfish and unnat’ral wench. She could accept that descriptor if it meant keeping her freedom.
“But, Olivia, I’d like to change the subject,” Mariana said, a spark of mischief in her tone. “Have you been holding out on me?”
“Pardon?” she asked, buying what little time she had left.
“Come now. As your elder sister, I can see straight through you.”
“You are older by three minutes. I hardly think that qualifies as elder.”
Like a bloodhound on a scent, Mariana pressed on. “When I spoke with the very handsome viscount tonight, I formed the distinct impression that the two of you are, let’s say, acquainted with one another.”
Olivia turned away from Mariana on the pretext of fixing a flower arrangement. Her elder sister would see the truth in her eyes in a second flat.
“Lady Olivia Montfort, you have been holding out on me!” Mariana said, her voice an excitable whisper. She snuggled closer. “Tell me everything.”
“Mariana,” Olivia began in the most patronizing tone she could muster, “you make it sound so . . . so”—What was a good word for it?—“tawdry.” Maybe that was too good a word for it. “He’s simply interested in our little progressive school for his daughter. The Dowager Duchess of Dalrymple sent him my way, and I answered a few questions for him. That is all.”
As lies went, it wasn’t bad.
“Oh, we must make that happen.”
As Mariana rhapsodized about the possibility of having Lord St. Alban’s brilliant daughter at the school, Olivia’s mind drifted. She didn’t enjoy lying to her sister, but her dealings with Lord St. Alban existed in a peculiar limbo that she didn’t yet understand. She felt strangely protective of it.
And then yesterday, she’d almost—
Her eyes squeezed shut in mortification. Oh, what had she done? Or almost done?
It was no surprise that last night thoughts of him had pushed sleep out of reach. Frustrated with tossing about and twisting the bed sheets into knots, she’d padded down to her studio to purge her system of him in the only way she knew how: by drawing her obsession into submission.
Her pencil had gone at him from every angle, even introducing different lightings to accentuate the strengths of his firm lips, his chiseled jawline, his angular cheekbones, his piercing eyes that surely saw through her contrariness, her protests, to her true wants, desires, needs.
By the time the first rays of the sun had streamed through an open window, she was spent. Dozens of drawings littering the walls of her studio, she felt that she could be done with him. Surely, her system was thoroughly purged.
Tonight, however, that purging had felt less than thorough when she’d spied him from two rooms away. She’d vowed to stay away.
Instead, she’d spoken of love with him. And she’d spoken of Percy. And they’d spoken of perfection and messes. What a perfect, little mess she could make with him . . .
Oh. Where had that come from?
“Olivia”—
She could hear the gasp in Mariana’s voice. No mean feat.
—“you must explain this series of paintings to me.”
They stood in the final room, the climax of the show. Three portraits lined one wall while facing them on the opposite wall was an oversized map of Europe. Unlike the scenes in the other rooms, these paintings weren’t presented with an extravagant contextual vignette.
“Do you think they’re too much?”
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” replied Mariana, a tease in her voice. “Whores and grande dames share wall space all the time.”
Olivia closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them, hoping to see the portraits in a fresh light, as a new viewer might take them in.
To the left was the first portrait of a self-satisfied lady seated in front of her equally self-satisfied husband, who stood behind her, a proprietary hand on her shoulder.
In the middle was a portrait of a sensuous opera singer lounging on a sofa, head tilted back to better hear the coercive whispers of the young buck stretched out behind her, clearly on the precipice of an amorous diversion. The woman’s saucy gaze remained fixed on those of the viewer as if they shared a naughty secret.
The last portrait portrayed a prostitute, her stare direct and bleak, as a shadowy man cupped her chin in a possessive and sinister manner from behind. The sad resignation within her eyes made Olivia want to look away even as she was drawn into the woman’s plight.
“Was the map directly across excessive? Earlier, it seemed like an excellent idea.”
“A way of underscoring the show’s message about the casualties of empire?” Mariana asked. Leave it to Mariana to cut straight to the heart of a matter.
“Has it strayed into melodrama?”
“Perhaps,” Mariana replied absently, transfixed by the impudent opera singer, “but some people you just have to bash over the head before they understand the subtleties of a situation.”
Of the three subjects, it was the opera singer who had made Olivia the most uncomfortable from the first moment she’d laid eyes on her yesterday. The woman’s frank, sultry gaze suggested not only her own pleasure to come, but also an invitation to watch. Or to participate.
Her heart fluttered a few beats, sending a warm throbbing sensation to the apex of her thighs. She shifted to study the young buck’s face. His eyes appeared to have only just drifted shut, lost to the anticipation of pleasure.
Percy had never taken her from behind in that way. Their amorous interactions had been, well, they’d been a respectful husband and wife in the bedroom. Lights out, covers drawn, domestic, proper, typical of their class, she suspected, but could never know with certainty as one never discussed such things. Not even with one’s sister, especially when one suspected one’s sister had an altogether different bedroom relationship with her husband.
But when she gazed upon the painting with Lord St. Alban in mind, well, she had no trouble envisioning him lost to such a moment and ensuring his lover was, too.
“He left some minutes ago.”
Olivia startled into the present. A thin sheen of perspiration rushed to the surface of her skin, crawling along the nape of her neck, coating her palms. “I beg your pardon?”
“And he walked through that door.”
“Oh?” Olivia replied, blithe nonchalance breezing through the syllable, even as her gut churned in panic. The hallway beyond that door led to . . . The fine hairs on the back of her neck prickled to a stand. “Mariana, I never saw to Lady Bede’s goat milk.” She landed a distracted peck on her sister’s cheek. “Lovely of you to come tonight.”
As the door closed behind her, she heard, “But, Olivia, the kitchens are the other way.” She didn’t need to see her sister’s face to envision the familiar sarcastic quirk of her lips.
It mattered not. Not now. Now that Lord St. Alban had entered this corridor.
Perhaps he’d left the soirée. Or had become lost. Perhaps.
Except both were impossibilities in this particular corridor, which had only two doors.
One led to a storage closet.
The other to her studio.