Page 38 of Flirting with Forever

Another knock sounded. “Sir?”

Dammit. “What is it, Tom?”

“The palette, sir. As you requested. May I come up?”

“Leave it on the landing. I’ll fetch it in a moment.”

Peter could see the pale blue of her gown through the lens of fire. Then he saw it fall. Her calves were slender, and each movement stirred a part of him that he had thought was unstirrable.

You old fool. He’d painted many women, possessed even more. The notion of the calf of a woman he hardly knew sparking his desire was beyond imagining. Her shadow stretched across the wall like some Stygian shade. He could see the easy fall of her breasts as she lifted the gown over her head. He would have given many ducats to see the muslin slide down those shoulders. He could imagine the rosy nipples catching the thin fabric and the inviting triangle of curls below.

He put a hand on the railing and caught his breath. Idiot. She was a customer, and what’s more, she was newly engaged. Nonetheless, he hurried down to the palette, scooped it up, and returned, two steps at a time, in order to not miss her as she emerged from the shadows.

She came out like a new queen—regal, uncertain, rising to the weight of the occasion. The color of the gown made her hair sparkle and flash as if she wore a crown of candles, and his heart soared to see the glimpses of lilies. They crept around her neck and followed that long, glorious line southward into the valley between her breasts. He wondered if her skin gave off the same lily-of-the-valley scent as her hair had when he’d been sketching her.

He loved the look of women in dishabille, as they called it, and he certainly loved the look of this woman in it. It was fresh, natural, and bewitchingly erotic without a whisper of impropriety.

“Are you ready?” he said.

Her fingers worked the edge of a sleeve nervously. “I feel like a bride on her wedding night.”

“Oh dear. Whatever minor confidence I’d had in approaching this painting has now officially taken its leave.”

They both laughed.

* * *

Despite an education that included seven long years under the fastidious eye of the monks at Saint-Étienne, Stephen felt his mouth, still in possession of that last morsel of ham and bread, fall open.

Peter’s cousin, who had long since pushed his plate away and awaited a piece of the cook’s fine gooseberry pie, cocked his head. “Was that laughter?”

Stephen swallowed and let out a satisfied smile. “We must let the cook know to keep the kitchen fire lit. I do believe it’s going to be a long evening.”

Seventeen

Without a way to get to her phone, Cam was stuck. No alternate next move presented itself. She could run, but to what end? She had arrived after an earthshaking mouse click, and now she felt like a mouse caught in a trap, in a painter’s studio that had closed for business three hundred years before she was born. There were no rules for the situation in which she found herself. At some point, Lely would either return her purse or leave the room. Until then, she would soak up some color. After all, if wasn’t every day a historical biographer landed in the same century as her subject, and with a man who succeeded him as royal portraitist and presumably knew him well.

“It must be a very grand honor to be the king’s portraitist.”

Lely made an indeterminate noise. “Words do not do it justice.”

He had decided on velvet the color of chestnuts for draping the chaise, and it was the edges of this material Cam now gripped. Despite all her years in the art world, she was unprepared to be the focus of a master’s efforts.

“Um, how would you like me?”

He gave her a brief smile. “Given your comment on the wedding night, I’m unsure how to answer. To what are you used? How does your fiancé pose you?”

“My fiancé does not pose me.”

He laid down his mixing knife and gave her a careful look. “Do you mean to say you have not posed? Ever?”

She flushed. “No.”

“Then I suppose it truly shall be like a wedding night.”

The warmth rose to her ears and scalp. She reached for the glass of Rhenish, which had been refilled in her absence.

“Have your last,” he said. “I should like to have you lying down.”