“She and I are business partners.” He put a bit of steel into the words, a bit of bite so she would drop the interrogation.
But she winked and sauntered off. “If that’s what you wish to call it, who am I to tell you better.” Clearly a woman not afraid of growling dogs. She sat primly at the pianoforte and struck up an aimless tune.
A flutter in the corner of his vision gained his attention, and Amelia sailed into the room, a tattered scrapbook in her hands. She sat on a small sofa closer to the fire and nodded him over.
“Come sit with me, and I’ll show you my past.”
He hesitated. Back there, she could not see the wine splattered all over him. Back there, she could not see the emotions he could no longer control ranging across his face.Pressing his palms into his thighs, he pushed to standing and joined her, though.
Tonight she’d dressed in a copper sort of color, a green shawl loose about her shoulders. She never wore shawls in Manchester. Another difference.
He flicked a glance at Miss Angleton playing the pianoforte, then scooted an inch or two closer on the couch, close enough their knees touched, and then he pulled the shawl up higher around her shoulders where her neck and bosom were laid bare. His hands, knuckles, and fingertips brushed her skin, and she shivered and gifted him a grin born of his touch.
He wanted her.
Now.
And she wanted to look through that book on her lap.
He rapped his knuckles on it. “I’m here, Amelia. Show me.” Words he seemed to have been living since he came to Hawkscraig Castle.I’m here, Amelia. Show me.But show him what?
She opened the book and centered it between them, one half on her thigh and the other on his. “This is where I keep my silhouettes. When I take them, they are bigger, but I use a grid method to shrink them down later. See.” She unfolded a bit of paper tucked into the front cover of the book. The paper was large, one of the pieces she used in her frame.
“Is that the one you took of Miss Angleton?”
She nodded and pulled a smaller bit of paper from between the folds of the larger sheet. This, too, was covered in a lightly penciled grid, and part of Miss Angleton’s profile had been painstakingly graphed onto it, square by square, to correspond to the original. “See?”
He did. “You enjoy this.”
A small smile curved her lips. “I do.” She scooted closer to him so their thighs pressed together, and she turned the page. “This is my grandfather.”
Yes, the silhouette greatly resembled the large painting of the man hanging in the portrait gallery. “Was he kind to you?”
“Yes. Of course. What makes you think otherwise?”
He slipped his hand off his leg and into the narrow space between their bodies. Beneath the cover of the open book, he climbed his hand atop her thigh and let it sit there, warming her. Warming him.
She inhaled a sharp breath and looked at him through the corner of her eyes, barely turning her head, remaining focused on the book. Her breasts rose and fell more quickly than before.
“He left you here,” Drew said, “and you were lonely. No matter what life was like at Briarcliff, it was never lonely. Too many siblings. A mother and father always hanging about us. I’m not sure many parents of the ton enjoy their children. Our parents enjoyed us. And there were the house parties every year, sometimes twice, with every artist in England it seemed. Often from shores beyond. Every hallway echoed with laughter and every surface covered with the implements of art.” He snorted. “Once, I found a fellow in the kitchen. He’d cleared off the large table in the middle and was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling, sketching in a notebook. The cook was scowling and threatening him at knifepoint.”
Amelia laughed. “It sounds… rather like perfection. When my grandfather was home, he was attentive. Taught me to swim in the waves and to ride.”
“Not to shoot a bow and arrow.”
The corner of her mouth quirked up. “Not that, no.” That smile lived too brief a life, and it fell. “He was often traveling.”
“He could have brought you with him.”
“A child would have been a hindrance to a single man traveling.”
“My parents traveled with us. We were in London when they were, and at Briarcliff when they returned to the country. They took us to Greece.” He’d hoped to return one day. “Of course, they couldn’t afford the trip. Didn’t know that at the time.”
Her brows pulled together, and her lips pursed.
He squeezed her leg beneath the book.
“He taught me how to do this,” she said, tapping the book, “and it is something that has long been a comfort to me.”
