Page 27 of The Duke Undone

“The studies you made for that painting. The sketches.” He spoke in a clipped tone, all business. “I will have them.”

“You won’t!” God help her, he touched every nerve. He issued a command and her first instinct was to resist, with force. “They’re mine.” She felt her mouth pull mulishly. “I won’t display them, or paint from them. But . . .” She shrugged. She had no finer phrase, so she settled on repetition for emphasis. “They’re mine.”

“You will send them to me, or I’ll batter down your door and take them.”

“Good luck. I don’t live in a famous mansion named for my forbears. My door is harder to find than yours.”

A shadow flicked across his eyes. Was he remembering what he must have seen on his carouses? The houses with windows patched over with rags and paper, the tenements listing from their decayed foundations, the teeming courts with their jumble of wooden galleries and garbage-clogged gutters?

Aunt Marian’s shop occupied a tiny corner of an Elizabethan house, massive and well built but divided into several businesses and living quarters. It didn’t feature in a Baedeker’s guide to London.

“The Academy must record the addresses of its students.” He drew his brows together, his expression dark. “I don’t think you want me to speak to the Keeper. Or the president.”

She had no rejoinder. If the Duke of Weston complained about her conduct, or worse, produced her letter to Mrs. Forbes, the council would strike her name from the list of students. She had impersonated a Visitor to sell a painting that dishonored a duke.

She’d be expelled at once.

“I don’t want to do it either. Not when you’ve worked so hard to get here.” His glance swept her and the gallery and seemed to roam further, to take in Burlington House, the Royal Academy itself, and all it stood for.

The words were uttered without irony. For a moment, she felt naked before him, more naked than he could ever be, with his money and power, all of it handed to him. It was a strange feeling. He recognized her ambition, recognized the sacrifices she had made to get so far. There was a note of something that sounded like admiration in his voice. But also, an unmistakable threat.

He would ruin her all the same.

“I’ll send the sketches,” she whispered.

“And do I also have your guarantee of silence regarding our acquaintanceship?”

She fixed her eyes on a statue, the foot of a statue, a clever foot, the foot of Hercules, no less. The heel was a thick pad of muscle pressing into the rippling mane of the Nemean lion.

“Yes?” Weston prodded.

“I’m practicing silence.” She pursed her lips. Her mouth, which had sweetened with his kisses, tasted bitter. She dragged her eyes up to look at him.

He was smiling a faint smile.

“Make sure you perfect the art.”

“Tell me,” she said in a rush, even as a part of her—the sane part—was begging not to ask, not to be told.

“My painting. Once you explained to Mr. Forbes . . . Did he let Mrs. Forbes keep it on the wall?”

She searched his face, now a mask, beautiful and remote. Only a muscle in his jaw ticked, his jaw that was perhaps his one imperfection, a shade too square.

With deadly calm, he delivered the blow.

“I took the picture,” he said. “I took it and destroyed it.”

She sagged, then clenched her muscles, her teeth. Her eyes felt tight and hot. She would not cry in front of this man. She would not cry in front of anyone.

Why should the information cut like a knife? The picture was already gone. She’d sold it. Had she imagined that someday the Forbeses would donate it to a museum? That it would feature in exhibits dedicated to the early work of Lucy Coover?

Months of labor, of love. Of fantasy.

“Miss Coover.” He was going to say something else, her corpse, but he wasn’t her corpse, he never had been. She stepped around him and bolted for the door. Hatred gave her feet wings.

She hated him, the Duke of Weston. She wanted to erase him from her memory. But for her, the recourse didn’t lie at the bottom of a bottle. She stumbled blindly down the hall, down the stairs, into the dark corridor of classrooms. There was no recourse.

She would go to her grave before she would forget his face.