Flirting With Forever (13 page)

“Aye, wel , we’re lucky the king has an appreciation for the absurd.”

“Oh, he’s a regular Mark Twain.”

“Who?”

“Er, my sister Shania’s son. A right comic lad, that one.”

His gaze flicked briefly to her now bare shoulder. Even with careful monitoring, the luxurious weight of the dressing gown’s fabric was making it hard to stay covered.

“I apologize,” he said. “You were kind to al ow Nel to borrow your dress, but you do not have to spend the wait in a dressing gown. I’m sure you must be cold. May I offer you

…” He looked around the room. In addition to the shield, spear and clubs, there were a set of angel wings, a large stuffed boar, a harp, a drum, a ship’s wheel, a cradle, several large swans made of wool and an armor chest plate that had holes for breasts cut out of it. “… my frock coat?” He slipped off the jacket and held it open to her.

She gazed at the coat, glossy and green, and then at the finely cut shoulders and arms now outlined under his bleached linen shirt, and in a smal voice said, “Thank you.”

Peter was not quite barrel-chested, though he was broader than most, and when he slipped the wel -tailored wool over her shoulders she felt like a smal animal hibernating in a cave. She could smel the barest hint of vanil a, as if he’d scrubbed paint off his hands with scented soap. She looked at his nails. Fingernails were the windows into a man’s soul, and so often the windows were something you had to run by with your eyes averted, but Peter’s were clean, pink, and wel tended.

He reached for a cuff, unbuttoned it and began to rol up his sleeve. “Would you like to sit?” He paced to a stool, grabbing a pencil and a large tablet on the way, and took a seat.

This left Cam with the only other seat in the room, an armchair on a pal et. She slipped into the seat, placed her bag on her lap and gazed down at him. If she moved slowly, she might be able to withdraw the phone unnoticed and at least check the bars.

He opened the tablet, found a clean page and pressed the binding flat. His forearms, now uncovered, were muscular and long, swept with russet hairs that caught the last rays of sun, and his hand moved over the page with a practiced ease.

“I do not see you as Athena.” His eyes stayed on the easy line running from his pencil.

“Don’t you?”

“No. I shal paint you that way if you wish, of course, pray do not misunderstand. But …” The line stretched long then reversed itself and returned.

“But?”

“But you are familiar with the phrase ‘to paint the lily’?”

She knew “gild the lily,” but not “paint.” “No.”

“The lily is on my heraldic arms, so it is a phrase dear to me.” His pencil work changed to shorter, faster strokes.

“‘To gild refined gold,’” he began, “‘to paint the lily,/To throw a perfume on the violet,/To smooth the ice, or add another hue/Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light,/To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,/is wasteful, and ridiculous excess.’ Shakespeare,” he added, smiling. “
King
John
. I should prefer to paint you without artifice. As unadorned as possible.”

Oh
.

Her throat dried, and for a moment the scratching of the pencil on paper was the room’s only sound.

“I, ah, thought this was to be an interview.” She tilted her head toward his tablet.

He laughed. “ ’Tis an artist’s interview. I draw. You talk.”

“And then you wil decide if you can paint me?”

“Have no fear on that account, milady.”

He turned the tablet and began at another corner.

“I am sorry about your husband,” he said. “Were you long married?”

She thought of her time with Jacket. “Four years.”

“It must have been heartbreaking.” He stole a quick glance at her. “Four years is not a long time.”

She felt a pang of guilt, thinking of her brother’s loss of his wife and son. “I—Yes.” She scoured her brain for a route into the conversation she wished to have. “I have heard a good many things about your work, and, of course, I have admired it myself.”

“Have you?” His fingers worked the page, making long strokes and more detailed ones, thick lines and thin. Jacket never worked from a sketch. Wherever his reapings came from, it wasn’t a sketch pad, and Cam hadn’t seen an artist work like this in some time. It reminded her of her own drawing classes in col ege. It struck her as oddly interesting that the process hadn’t changed much in three hundred years.

The drawing had become an angular thing, with many lines in paral el. Cam leaned forward. “Ah, that’s not my face.”

He laughed again, a rich, throaty laugh that emanated from deep in his chest. Stil , he didn’t look up. “No. It is your hand, milady.”

She felt an unexpected sense of discomfort. She thought he’d been sketching her as a whole, though, in fact, he hadn’t looked at her more than once or twice since they’d sat down. It seemed more intrusive, somehow, for him to focus on a single part of her body. The thought was irrational, she knew, but that didn’t stop the rush of heat across her cheeks.

“Your fingers are slim and strong,” he said, defining a nail with a few quick curves, “yet without any of the coldness or implacability that can detract in such matters. There is a determined grace here which I find interesting.”

Immediately her fingers laced together in a nervous grip.

He caught the movement and bowed his head. “I beg your pardon. My attention has made you uncomfortable.

The cardinal sin of portraitists. May I have your leave to sketch the drape of the dressing gown? ’Tis less intrusive, and the contrast of the dark against the light is real y quite remarkable from this angle.”

Cam relaxed as he turned the page. “Aye.” The three tal windows in the room showed the purple-blue of the sky to the east and the orange-red in the west, reminding her of the view from her loft at twilight, the south hil s of Pittsburgh laid out like some sort of Tuscan landscape, with the towering squared spires of the Presbyterian church and the neighboring conical tower of the Catholic one sitting like a pair of medieval fortresses on the highest ridge of town. In the winter the structures were lit with spotlights and reigned triumphantly over the coming darkness.

It had been a December night four years ago when Jacket found her watching the same scene from the top of Mt. Lebanon’s open-air parking garage and had swept her into his arms, offered to move to the States and asked her to marry him. A month later he’d bought them the loft space, high atop the building across the street from the garage, having convinced the building’s owner to scrap plans for a floor of offices. As Jacket said when he handed her the keys, “I want to give you the night sky.”

It seemed like such a long time ago. But when he’d given back the ring, she’d felt some of the same sort of magic again. Her heart twinged. Would see ever see him again?

She knew where she was, but not how she’d gotten here or if she’d ever get back. She couldn’t even get a look at her phone for fear of Lely seeing it. While she couldn’t help but admit she was enjoying his company, she wished she could get just a moment or two alone in this room.

The phone buzzed to flag a new text. Oh God, she had service! But then she saw Peter’s eyes.

“Um.” She jerked the chair forward. “Sorry. Readjusting.”

He returned to his tablet.

Whew!
She slowly moved her hand to her purse. His gaze lifted, and she stopped. If she could only get him to leave.

“Mr. Lely, might I have a glass of water. I find I am quite parched.”

“Certainly.” He went to the door, and she reached for her phone. But then he tugged a brocade pul beside the door, and in the distance she heard the faint ring of a bel .

and in the distance she heard the faint ring of a bel .

Crap!
How hard was this going to be?

“Someone wil be here in a moment.” He lowered himself once again to the stool.

“Thank you.” She sighed and inclined slightly.“ ’Tis not the best light for sketching.”

He paused. “You are versed in an artist’s needs?”

She nearly laughed. An artist’s needs. Did she have the energy to do that again with Jacket? “A bit.”

“Do you draw or paint?”

Cam started. He meant her. It wasn’t uncommon for a woman in Lely’s time to have been tutored by a governess in sketching and even watercolor—Dürer had popularized the latter as a medium in Western Europe in the early sixteenth century—but from the time Cam had abandoned hopes of becoming a painter herself any direct question about her own artistic abilities made her self-conscious.

The door opened before she could answer. It was Moseby, who started visibly at the sight of Cam. The look of horror that fol owed suggested the rules about when the master may and may not be interrupted were wel known and strictly enforced. Poor Moseby. It just wasn’t his day.

“I do beg your pardon, sir, most humbly I do. I thought you had rung,” he said, and attempted to slip back into the hal .

“I had, Tom. Come in.”

Moseby reentered, cap in hand, looking as if he’d rather be carved into pieces and served en brochette. “Sir?”

Cam thrust her hand in her bag and jerked the phone into view. “WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?” the text read.

Poor Jeanne. She looked at the signal. One bar.

“We should like some water and wine,” Lely said, “as wel as cheese and fruit.”

Cam tilted the phone, and the bar disappeared.

“Immediately, sir.” Tom shifted from foot to foot. “I am most grievous sorry about the painting of Miss Gwyn, sir.

Most grievous. You were quite the canny one, miss,” he added enthusiastical y in Cam’s direction. “A right bit of sleight of hand, what with donning that gown in a whore’s trice. It was downright—”

Lely cleared his throat significantly, which almost made Cam drop her bag, but the noise had been aimed at Tom, who paled and retreated, though he only made it two steps before reversing himself and returning.

“Tom, this is more time than I wished to spend with you this afternoon,” Lely said, returning to his sketchbook.

The young man relaxed, and even managed a lopsided smile, the master’s teasing tantamount to forgiveness. He said, “The cheese and fruit, sir, is that to be your supper?”

Then, apparently deciding there was a better path into the matter at hand, tried this instead: “Sir, Miss Kate sends her compliments. If she is not to be a Danish supporter, she wishes to eat, and would you be wantin’ to join her at the Orb and Scepter for joint of suckling pig? No charge for her time.” He blew out a long breath, grateful to have completed his mission.

It seemed to be Peter’s turn to long for the skewer. His cheeks turned ruddy, and Cam didn’t know if he regretted the revelation of his model’s status as a prostitute or the fact that, despite having taken advantage of her marginalized position by employing her for his patrons’

pleasure, he was stil ungenerous enough to require a free ride when her own meter was running. Cam hoped it wasn’t the former. It would have been hard to imagine a woman wi lli ng to pose entirely nude coming from any other profession in Peter’s time. And as for the latter, wel , Cam had hardly met an artist who didn’t feel as if every pleasure in the world was owed him. Why should Peter be different—

other than the fact, of course, that she’d begun to think he might be?

Peter dropped his pencil and had to bend to retrieve it.

“My compliments and regrets to Miss Kate,” he said stiffly.

“I am otherwise engaged.”

Moseby nodded happily, this message being far easier than the first. “Otherwise engaged.” He bowed. “I wil inform her immediately.”

Peter reached for the pencil blindly. He had no wish to meet his companion’s eyes. There had been a time before Ursula when neither his supper table nor his bed had lacked for companions—lithe, accommodating beauties from al reaches of the court who had sought his company with eagerness. But he had never been a whore-monger, and he employed the women to keep them off the street. If you had two eyes, two arms, two legs and the semblance of a smile—and often even if you did not—you could find a place in one of Peter’s tableaux. His patrons liked to have the beautiful ones around. If you were not beautiful, you cleaned or cooked. But beautiful or no, you did not warm the bed of Peter Lely. Kate knew that even if she chose to pretend she didn’t. And al of the women received a decent wage, al the food they could eat and a place to sleep in the studio if a place was wanted.

No, he had no wish to glimpse the look on Mrs. Post’s face. What he wished was to lose himself once again in the sketch and their easy conversation. Forgetting himself, even for a moment, had been nectar indeed.

“I do not mean to displace Miss Kate,” she said. “If you have an engagement, you need not cancel it. We wil not be long.”

He gripped the pencil and continued to fil in the shadow.

The lily of the val ey scent that seemed to blossom off her skin was torture. “Kate is in my employ. She wil understand.”

“As you wish.”

“Tel me,” he said, capturing the puddled line of hem,

“what size portrait you seek?”

He felt rather than saw her shift.

“I don’t know. The usual, I suppose.”

“We have ful -length, three-quarters and half, depending on your needs. Is that his ring?”

She touched a chain at her throat, then fol owed the line of his gaze to her hand.

“Oh, this? No.” She held out the aquamarine in filigree.