When he settled back into silence and the shadow took on its crisp edge once more, she traced his forehead and the dip of his eyes and his nose.
“There’s a bump there,” she said, brushing her fingertip against the shadow of the tiny slope on his nose. “Did you break it?”
Complete stillness, utter silence. Then the shadow’s lips broke apart. “Atlas broke it. Do you want that bit of nonsense,too?” He leaned forward, and then his shadow sipped from a glass once more. More than sipped. Downed the rest of it.
“You do not have to tell me anything you don’t want.”
“Why not tell it? It doesn’t matter to me anymore. It was long ago. Humiliating.”
She traced his top lip before he moved again.
“I told you of the year I came home for Christmas and learned the truth of my family’s finances.”
“Mm. I remember.”
“I punched my father.”
She gasped, a small thing, barely audible, and the pencil dropped from her startled fingers, clattered to the floor below.
“Shocking, I’m aware.” She retrieved the pencil but could not set it to paper. He’d become a blur once more, moving and speaking with a new speed likely fueled by wine. “I was enraged. My dreams gone. My future decimated, and he kept saying none of it mattered. That all would be well. Things would turn out as they should. Fate. Damn fate. He believed in it. And lived by it. And because he thought it would all turn out well, he’d done as he’d pleased. The future I’d wanted for myself didn’t matter to him. So he’d paid for his art with it.”
She clutched the pencil to her chest. The old ache made his voice raspy, made the pain of his heart sound new and fresh.
“I hit him more than once. Would have kept hitting him had Raph not pulled me off. And then I pointed my anger athim. Broke his nose. That’s when Atlas broke mine.” A choke of a laugh. “The three of us had matching noses before and matching noses after. Raph, my father, and me.”
“I can’t imagine you that way—enraged to violence.” Not true. She could. When something or someone he loved was threatened, he’d attack. Of that she had no doubt. Until then, he’d prowl around the edges of the jungle, or the drawing room, observing.
“I don’t plan to be ever again. Control is the most important thing a man of strong passions can possess. It’s a necessity for himself, but for the safety of everyone else as well.”
As if that very control he spoke of took hold of him now, his shadow took clear shape, turning the man to immovable stone. She finished tracing his lips and then his chin, his neck. Then she curved the outline upward, over the back of his neck and head, following the wild curves of his disarranged hair.
“Done,” she breathed deeply. The silhouette was an outline only, an empty sketch that could not hope to capture the complexity of the man behind the screen. “May I ask you one more question?”
“I knew I would be subject to interrogation when I sat for you. Ask.”
“Why did you help Miss Angleton this evening? Why improve her drawing? And without any insult to her.”
His head bowed and his neck curved, and the graceful shadow of his hand riffled through his hair. When he straightened once more, he said, “Because leaving it as it was would have done no good. To her or Bernard. They are both mine to protect.”
“And you will do so, even if you must do a bit of art?”
“Even then. Now answer a question for me, Miss Amelia Dart.”
She pressed her palm ever-so-gently flat against the paper, against his soft shadow. “Yes.”
“Has anyone ever drawn your silhouette?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head even though he could not see the gesture. “No one needs to remember me.”
“Hell.” He shoved to his feet and shoved the frame aside.
She took several steps back because that’s what one did when a tall, handsome man with wild eyes pounced, but he prowled after her, and with each step, his gaze softened. When her legshit the edge of her bed, she yelped, a tiny sound, and his hands wrapped softly around her upper arms.
First, he studied her, his gaze roaming over every inch of her face and lower. Then, he lifted a hand to her forehead and sketched down the bridge of her nose, her lips, to the very tip of her chin, which he tipped up and kissed, a kiss hot and slow at the same time. He tucked her under his arm and led her back to the frame. Past it, navigating her toward the chair in front of the fire. When they stood just before it, his hands found her waist, the belt there holding her blue wrapper closed, and he tugged, undid the slight knot entirely until the ends hung useless to the floor. His hands slipped beneath the shoulders of the garment, pushed back, and the wrapper slipped off, pooled around her feet. The shift followed, and perhaps she should have stopped him at some point, but… not a bit of her body, mind, or heart wanted her to.
She’d never stood bare before a man, and even though this man had touched her in the most intimate of places several times over the past few days, a shiver still raced up her spine not entirely of desire, and she crossed her arms to cover her breasts.
He uncrossed them with gentle but forceful ease. “Let me see.”
