Page 40 of What a Lord Wants

He laughed darkly at the ludicrousness of that. “By pretending to be a model?”

“By making me feel alive!” The confession burst from her in a soft cry of anger and surprise. But he also sensed an inexplicable longing in her. The same longing he’d witnessed in her that day in the rain, when she’d placed her hand over his heart and asked him why he needed to paint her. “You—Vincenzo—made me feel freer and more alive than any time since my mother died. And you expected me to give that up by telling you who I really was?”

Her words chilled through him.Dear God…“Your mother’s dead?”

She gave a fierce, jerking nod and turned her face away, briefly squeezing her eyes shut. “Soon, I’ll be her age—herlastage, when she died. She didn’t have a chance to live. Not to trulylive, not like she should have.” She swallowed down the grief as the confession ripped from her, “I’m terrified of being like her, of not having the chance to experience life, one lived to the fullest. If I sit still, if I sleep, if I stop moving forward—”

The fear darkening her face sliced into his gut like a knife.

“I have to keep moving, don’t you see? Because my life suffocates me otherwise. Being at the studio was the most wonderful escape I could ever have hoped for.” Then she twisted the blade when she admitted in a whisper so soft that it was almost lost beneath the noise of the party, “You understand that part of me, that need to seize life with both hands. You’re the only one who ever has.”

No. Apparently, he’d understood nothing about her. “When did you plan on telling me the truth?”

The words were barely out before a cold realization sank through him, like ice water in his veins.

She hadn’t planned to tell him at all.

He turned to fully face her, no longer caring who might see them arguing. “You were going to just disappear, weren’t you?” Not a question. After all, he knew her nearly as well as he knew himself. “Leave the studio one afternoon and never come back.”

Her shoulders sagged, almost imperceptibly, but that faint movement proved him correct. And added a bitter sense of betrayal to the emotions already roiling inside him.

“And kissing me?” The ache inside his chest made him ask, “Was that all an act, as well?”

A faint pinking of her cheeks gave away her emotions. She admitted in a whisper, “Nothing about that was a lie. I thought you understood that as well, but it seems I was wrong.” Her eyes glistened in the candlelight. “About a great many things.”

She moved away before he could stop her, walking back toward to the party and oblivious to the curious stares that the other guests sent her way.

He stared after her, his chest twisting more tightly with each step she took. To drop that confession as she did, that explanation for why she’d misled him—then to admit that she’d planned to abandon him without a word—

When her hand snaked up to swipe at her eyes, something inside him snapped.

It would be a cold day in hell before he let her simply walk away.

When he caught up with her, she stood just inside the upstairs drawing room, unnoticed by the other guests. Her face had paled, her arms hanging limp at her sides. But her gaze was pinned to what was happening at the front of the room near the fireplace, where a group of young dandies and misses had gathered.

“Eve?” he murmured quietly as he came up behind her and touched her elbow. She didn’t move, not even to yank her arm away.

Concerned, Dom followed her gaze to Burton Williams, Viscount Houghton’s son. He stood at the fireplace, his arm stretched lazily across the marble mantel and holding a glass of cognac in his hand, while in the other he held a letter. He was laughing, along with the crowd gathered around him.

“‘When I think of my Prince Charming, I think of you, my dearest love,’” Williams read, pressing the glass of cognac to his chest in a show of mocking emotion. Roars of laughter went up through the room. “I dream every night about your smile, your laugh, how deep your voice, how strong your arms…’”

More laughter. Some of the people nearly doubled over in their glee. A few of the ladies at least had the decency to attempt to hide their tittering behind their fans, but one buck repeated back the last words in a falsetto that drew even more laughs.

Eve began to tremble.

“‘Tell me that you love me, that you share the same feelings I do.’” Williams now made grand sweeps of his arms to punctuate the letter. “‘If my heart means anything to you—’” He stopped reading and glanced around the room in an aside. “It didnot.” When the laughter that comment brought died down, he continued, “‘—you’ll come to me and bring heaven along in your wake. Your smile is like sunshine on a gray day, warming and bright, all goodness and light.’”

Howls of laughter went up throughout the room, none louder or harder than Williams’s own. So hard that he was gasping to recover his breath before he read on.

Beside them at the back of the room, a young woman noticed Eve. She choked on her laughter, her eyes instantly widening, and a heated flush of guilt reddened her cheeks. Her hand went to her throat as she tugged at the sleeve of the laughing woman beside her. When the woman glanced over at her, she saw Eve, and the laughter awkwardly died on her lips. Both women looked away quickly and stepped back to distance themselves from the rest of the group.

Dom grew cold as he realized what was happening. The bastard was reading Eve’s letters and letting all of society laugh at her for daring to love him.

He lowered his mouth to her ear and cajoled gently, “Let’s leave.”

“We haven’t reached the best part yet,” Williams announced as he shuffled through several pages of letters. “Wait until you hear how she compared me to Adonis in his—”

Williams glanced up and saw her.