Page 9 of What a Lord Wants

She stared at him in astonishment.

He shrugged. It was the most obvious thing in the world—“For good measure.”

A soft bubble of laughter spilled from her pink lips as she realized that he was bamming her. Partially, anyway. Her hand flew to her mouth, but it was too late to stop the lilting laugh that drifted through the studio, as soft as the northern light falling through the fanlight’s glass.

The nervousness eased from her, and she lowered herself gracefully onto the chaise. But she sat straight with a ramrod stiff spine and knees primly locked together.

“You’re not at all what I expected,” she admitted.

“What did you expect?” He motioned at her. “Sit back.”

She scooted to the back of the chaise but sat just as rigid, with the same painfully correct posture as before. “Not an Englishman, for one. I thought you were Italian.”

“All artists are Italian.” He gave her a chastising smile and tapped his chest. “In our hearts, where it matters.” Then he frowned. Her posture wouldn’t work. Not at all. “When you were a child, were you scolded for not sitting up straight?”

“Constantly.”

“Forget it. And everything else you were taught about being proper.”

Her mouth fell open in faint shock. Yet he also sensed an excitement rising in her.

Closing the sketchbook with a frustrated snap, he set it down and approached her. “Lie back.”

She did so with a wary expression, only to end up looking impossibly like someone sitting up straight and stiff while lying down.

He blew out a hard breath. A challenge? The woman was proving to be the most trying subject of his career.

So he took a different tack. “Pretend you’re alone in your room, feeling just a bit drowsy and as languid as the warm afternoon, so you decide to lie down for a nap. Show me how it would look.”

She draped herself across the chaise then, letting her head and shoulders go lax. Her body softened against the cushions.

“Tuck your right arm behind your head, and drape the other along your side.”

She did as asked.

The pose was better, her body visibly more relaxed, but aggravatingly, not yet what he wanted to capture. “Now, show me what you would look like if you were interrupted in the middle of that nap by a man who’d entered your bedroom and found you looking like this.”

She clutched at the front of the gown, as if afraid the ties had somehow come loose in her sleep and revealed her bosom, while the other tugged down at the skirt to cover her legs.

But it was the look in her eyes that captured his attention. Not one of bewilderment or fear…but surprised curiosity.

Thatwas the emotion he seized upon.

Squatting down beside her, he brought his eyes level with hers as he balanced on the balls of his feet. “What if you weren’t surprised?” His voice emerged far huskier than he’d intended. “What if you’d issued an invitation for him to come to you, to gaze upon you like this and take his fill of the sight of you? What if you didn’t want him to leave, instead longing to have him shamelessly join you right here on the chaise?”

“Shamelessly?” she repeated, her soft voice breathless.

“In every way. And lacking in repercussions of any kind…except that for a few moments he’s allowed to bask in your beauty and fantasize about how exquisite it would be to have you.” He leaned closer, close enough to hear the quickening of her breath and smell her jasmine perfume. “That’s what’s wanted from a painting of a beautiful woman. A man who sees it wants to feel as if he’s right there in the room with you, alone, able to touch your soft warmth by simply lifting his hand.”

Unable to resist, he trailed his fingers down her arm. Goose bumps formed magically in their wake.

“He wants to believe that you’re waiting for him, longing to give yourself and please him, to accept his pleasures in return.” He dropped his hand away, his point made. “A man viewing that painting wants to be seduced, and our job is to make him believe that he has been.”

“And if a woman is viewing it?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

“Then we make her believe that she’s capable of committing that very same seduction.” He let his gaze travel slowly over her, across her breasts and down her legs, allowing his appreciation for her beauty and the delectable way she was displayed show on his face. The way someone looking at her painting would do. “That’s what art is. Mutual seduction.”

Her eyes grew big and bright as she stared disbelievingly at him. For a moment, he thought he’d thoroughly stunned her, perhaps to the point that she might leap off the chaise and flee.