“I am tired,” she confessed.
There. How simple. A nudge here. A word there. And she would do as he wished. Above all things, he wished her to open to him, to spill words she meant to keep guarded. He gestured toward the hunter-green settee before the fire. “Sit.”
Her small steps sent her badly made gown swaying deliciously about her curved hips. Would she let him buy her gowns? Not likely. But it would not stop him from clothing her in the silks she deserved.
As her patron, was it not his place to ensure her luxury? How easy it was to convince himself of the rightness of his actions. The innocence. He knew better, deep in his loveless heart.
She eased herself down onto the furnishing, keeping her back straight, not allowing herself the casualness of easing back.
Andrew smiled to himself. She didn’t trust him. It didn’t matter that her mother did or that he intrigued her. He would have to lead her carefully every step of the way in this strange relationship of theirs.
So, quietly and without warning, he crossed the room and sat beside her, allowing his calf to rest slightly against her gown. She froze, and her gaze snapped to the place where their bodies met.
He slid his leg back and gave her an innocent look. “Do forgive me.”
“Perhaps you should consider sitting over there.” She jerked her strong chin in the direction of the wing-backed chair adjacent to the fire and several feet away from her.
“I prefer this.”
She arched a brow. “You are not making me comfortable.”
He leaned back, allowing his body to drape along the lounge in a display of languor. He was on the verge of being an ass, but he couldn’t help himself. Largely, it was his nature. “How comfortable should you like to be?” An innocent question, laced with invitation.
She started to stand, too shocked or angry at his tactics. “Lord Stark, it is indeed your intent that I should be your plaything.”
He clasped her wrist in his hand, hating himself for a moment. Hating that his unpleasant nature, a nature that didn’t know how to be kind or affectionate, had won out over the intentions he had set in that small cottage in Sussex. The rake in him had come to rule so much of his life, it had taken over this meeting without him even truly realizing it. Without giving thought to how deeply he might offend her. Christ, he was a cad.
Andrew swallowed back bitter self-disgust. Had he really become so callous that that meeting in the country had been foreign? And yet, he’d liked himself there. Now? Suddenly tired, he swiped a hand over his face, perhaps to hide his shame.
“Forgive me,” he begged, eyes shut.
“I—”
“You must, you know,” he said, each word an ache. He opened his eyes and lifted them to her pale face.
She met his gaze, her eyes flashing with anger. “I beg your pardon?”
He studied her delicate face, his heart doing the strangest beat in his chest. “Forgive me?”
She blew out an exasperated breath. “Why?”
Though it took him every last vestige of soul he had, he allowed that small crack in his heart, the one he’d been so determined never to let her see, open. “Because I understand you.”
Those emerald eyes of her narrowed. “I don’t believe that.”
“You are here not as my guest,” he pointed out, unsure how to explain that he had seen deep into her beautiful soul at that river and could see it already withering like the burnish of fool’s gold. He couldn’t allow that. He would do whatever was necessary to fan it back to life.
She began to tug away, but he held fast. “You are not here as my plaything but as something entirely different. I am your patron, because I see something in you which needs tending, an awe of this world which is dying daily. I saw a desire in you to embrace a life so much larger than the little one you were leading.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she snapped, but didn’t pull away. In fact, she lingered, swaying slightly at his words.
“Is that not true?” he prompted gently, afraid of hurting her with his blatant honesty. ”Do you not die daily?”
She winced.
He should have stopped there, but he needed her to see how much he understood her pain. “Your foot is sliding ever nearer your coffin as your mother drifts away. Oh, I know you are not dying. Not physically. You’re too robust for that. You are no foolish maiden waiting to be saved, my lady Ophelia.”
He pulled slightly at her hand, urging her to sit beside him again, and she did, her skirts flowing over his legs as she yielded to his gentle pressure.
He leaned in toward her, undaunted in his need to reach her. “You have seen those you love taken from you, and you know your mother is fast approaching a threshold she must cross. A threshold she can never retrace her steps over. And you are killing off your heart in slow, steady degrees so that you will not have to feel it.”
Her throat worked, and her eyes glassed over. “How dare you?” she said, her voice taut with a hint of anger. “How dare you be so cruel?”
His own heart, usually a shallow, dull ache in his chest, throbbed at her pain. “To make you cry?” He hesitated. “To say that which you have no wish to hear?”
Her shoulders shook, then she nodded. Tears slid down her cream-colored cheeks, cutting pathways across the porcelain.
“Tears are proof that you are alive, Ophelia. That you love your mother.” He took her hand and out of sheer impulse placed it upon his heart. She curled her fingers into a fist, resisting his comfort.
“The day you stop crying, my lady,” he soothed, refusing to give up, “is the day you become what I have become.”
Her fist trembled over the linen as if at any moment she might pound it against him in protest. “And what is that?”
“Someone whose heart still beats but who feels so very dead.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fear is the true weakness of the heart,
not love.
-Ophelia’s Notebook
Ophelia yanked her hand from him and tore from the room, brandy sloshing over her fingers as she made her escape. She raced down the hall to her mother’s room, then forced herself to draw in a calming breath. She would not enter her mother’s chamber so distressed.
She stood in the long, dark hall, shaking hands clasping the half-spilled glass of brandy. Fiercely, she gripped it with both hands and drank, drank until she reached the dregs, determined to feel anything but the temptation she’d left in that room.
How could anyone so beautiful be so terrifying?
She eased one hand to her corseted middle.
Why had he been terrifying? There’d been the rakish moments, the moments when her flesh had longed for him to embrace her, to fulfill her expectations that he wished her here only to make use of her body, to teach her pleasure in a way she’d never known, but had read much of.
But no. That was not why she was here.
With full certainty, she understood her presence was for something entirely different.
Tonight, she’d looked at him, and in that last moment, he’d been her mirror, a hideously beautiful mirror of foreboding, threatening her with the future of dark, empty eyes and a heart that wept blood, even though it swore it felt nothing.
Andrew Stark did not feel nothing. The misery in his eyes convinced her of that, no matter what he might believe.
She wouldn’t follow such a fate, would she?
Ophelia shoved such fears to the recesses of her thoughts, lifted her chin, then opened her mother’s door and silently slipped in.
A fire bathed the large room in a rosy glow, but the candles had been snuffed. One might have thought the room, full of delicate furnishings and a broad bed decked with silk hangings, was entirely empty.
A piano stood near the windows, a new addition since their arrival, and its presence drew her eye, clearly the queen of all the furnishings. When had that arrived?
She turned her eye to the bed and for a moment wondered if her mother had disappeared. At firs
t glance, she might have mistakenly believed it was uninhabited, but for the small rise in the covers proclaiming her mama’s occupation.
Ophelia took careful steps, her slippers muffled by the soft, woven, ice-blue rug. She longed to speak with her mother, but she wouldn’t wake her. Not when her mother so needed rest. It seemed now she was sleeping away what little life she had left.
But at least she was not in discomfort when she slept. Large doses of laudanum ensured that.
Ophelia’s skirts brushed the coverlet of the bed, and she placed the empty brandy glass on the carved, pale confection-like bedside table. Her mother’s face was so small, small and strangely wrinkled, as it had not been just a few months ago. Her cheeks were deep hollows, giving the once-beautiful lady with skin to be envied by the angels, a mask-like look.
The mask was not a pleasant one. There was no beauty to it. Only a sort of delicate, whispery, gallows’ pallor.
A tear slipped down Ophelia’s cheek.
How ever was she to bear it?
Everyone she had ever loved had left or betrayed her. Now, her mother, the one person who remained who loved her no matter what she did or said, was fading.
Would she become like Viscount Stark? Strange and cold? Poetic one moment, calculating the next? There was a desperate yet confident desire in his determination to have his way. Would she become so void? She prayed not. She prayed she could fill her life with something besides the hollow pursuits that seemed to have left him more empty than his losses.
Her mother’s eyes fluttered, then opened. As she spotted her daughter, a smile eased the harshness of her features, and she seemed to coil with delight. “Can you not sleep?”
Ophelia swallowed back her tears, but not quite in time.
Her mother frowned. “Why are you crying?”
Ophelia glanced away, her throat closing at the audaciousness of her mother’s question. But Lady Darlington had made peace with her fate and no longer felt the great, grappling battle Ophelia waged with it.
“How can you ask?” Ophelia asked softly.
Her mother looked up at her for a good long moment. Then her brows drew together, a look of exaggerated consternation ordering her features. “You are crying because my preposterous body is giving up on me?”
Ophelia nodded, feeling a laugh play at her lips. Her mother had such a way of looking at her condition as if to wink at it.
Her mother gave the matter thought, then nodded to herself. “I suppose it is natural that you should cry.”
“Why, thank you, Mama,” Ophelia teased.
Slowly, arduously, her mother drew her hand out from the bed-clothes, then patted it on the bed. “It is only I am not sad at all. Except perhaps to be leaving you.”
Ophelia drew in a shuddering breath, then lowered herself to sit on the edge of the bed. “I am sad. Very sad.”
“And afraid?” her mother asked oh-so-wisely.
Ophelia weighed that question for a long moment. How to answer? She didn’t wish to worry her mama. All she truly wished was to ease her mother’s passing from this world. “Yes. A bit.”
“Then you are a fool.”
Ophelia gasped. “Pardon?”
“You should be very afraid. It is quite a dangerous world out there.”
“Mama—”
“Which is why I have brought you to London.”
Ophelia looked away, unable to confess what had happened just now between her and Andrew. “One would have thought Sussex infinitely safer.”
“If you wished to die whilst you lived, but I do not think that is your fate.”
Ophelia remained silent, searching for words that would express how she still dreamed of being an artist and longed to fulfill that dream. Unable to express it, at last, she glanced at the piano. “When did that arrive?”
A girlish laugh came form her mother. “This afternoon. Andrew visited me, and we discussed music. An hour later, the piano was moved in. I think he realized how much I missed playing.”
Ophelia’s heart squeezed. How was it possible that Viscount Stark at one moment could be so impossible, so seemingly unfeeling, and then in the next do something so incredibly kind? How could she thank him for such a gesture? Her mother had once been a beautiful pianist, and it had been painful for her to leave her piano behind. The cottage in Sussex could not have borne an instrument, even if they could have afforded one.
Her mother rested her small hand over Ophelia’s, the warm glow of the fire adding a certain sort of otherworldly certainty to her mother’s face. “Viscount Stark will ensure that you are protected.”
Despite her gratitude, Ophelia snorted. “Viscount Stark is a bit of an ass.”
Her mother tsked. “He’s a lost soul.”
“Yet you are determined that we should be in his hands.”
“Let me tell you something.” The softness vanished from her mother’s countenance to be replaced by earnestness. “I have not always been the wisest of creatures, but I have always, always listened to that still, quiet voice within me. That is how I met your father.”
Ophelia smiled despite her sorrow. Her parents’ love had been a recurring theme of her childhood. Holding hands. Soft kisses and long walks down by the river of their estate. Secret smiles and glances that seemed to convey feelings so important, and so intense, that no words ever could have given them breath. All those things had been a common thing to her parents.
Once, she’d hoped to find something akin to it. But long ago, she’d learned that such relationships happened once in a century. And her father had died young. Thus, even her parents’ tale had not been an entirely happy one. “I know you feel deeply, Mama. But I am concerned about Lord Stark.”
Her mother’s certainty didn’t dim, rather it increased as her voice grew stronger. “All I can tell you, my dear, is that when he walked into our cottage, that voice of mine commanded that I seek his assistance. I knew he would give it. He needs us.”
“Are you mad as well as ill?” She bent and lightly kissed her mother’s delicate forehead. “For surely you have too many teeth to be a soothsayer.”
Her mother tsked again. “I only speak what I feel. You, too, would do well to listen to your feelings, though I know you are more your father’s daughter in that respect.”
It was true. She’d never been full of her feelings, but rather entrenched deeply in her books and studies. Fancies still filled her head, certainly. But she preferred not to listen when her feelings came calling, for far too often, they brought sorrow to her door. Allowing one’s self to give way to feelings was dangerous. She was going to have to struggle not to be swept away in sorrow when her mother died.
No, it was better to enjoy feelings through the works of literature, art, and music rather than within herself. “I am just not sure that I should entirely trust him.”
“Trust him?” her mother scoffed. “Not yet. I said he needs us. He needs us to teach him how to live again.”
“Mama, is this the best timing?” Ophelia bit down hard on her lower lip, composing herself even as her lungs burned with unshed sorrow. “You are dying.”
Her mother gave her a look as if it was, in fact, Ophelia who had entirely lost her wits. “And when, my daughter, would be a better time to teach someone to live?”
She winced. When, indeed? Her mother seemed to possess a knowledge as she neared her death that only the most devoted scholars might hope to attain. Still, Ophelia longed to rail at her mother that she didn’t wish her to waste her energies on a wastrel, that they should go straight back to Sussex and live their tiny life in the quiet cottage, untroubled by the world or anyone in it, despite their lack of income. She longed to have her mother just to herself, to wrap her in lamb’s wool, and keep her as strong as she may, as long as she could.
There was little doubt in her mind that that was the last thing her mother wanted. Now she had this chance to live life to the very last, Adelle Darlington would burn herself out like a beautiful cinder, glowing un
til she was at last nothing but ash.
And so, she wouldn’t argue with her mother or propose their immediate return. Her mother wouldn’t likely last through such a journey, in any case.
Heart heavy, eyes stinging, Ophelia slipped under the coverlet beside her mother and curved her body around her mother’s little one, recalling the days when it had been the reverse.
When her mother had cradled her slight from, hugging her.
So much had changed, yet even as she sheltered her mother, holding her gently, she still felt a little girl, lost in a world of frightening shadows, unwilling to let go of the only protection, perfect or no, she had ever known.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Artists are the most curious and
remarkable folk in the world.
-Ophelia’s Notebook
A tavern was no place for a lady. It was as simple as that. More than simple. Every single moment Andrew stood in the loud, booming hall filled with the half-damned of society, he cursed himself. But if Ophelia was to meet the most revolutionary and talented artists of the day, this was where she would do it. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood didn’t dwell in tea shops, but on the edges of society, reveling in the lives of everyday folk.
It wasn’t even three o’clock in the afternoon, and the tavern was doing a thriving business. The scent alone could knock one over. Unwashed laborers stood at the bar and sat at the tables strewn about the darkened room, and the cheap perfume of the barmaids coated the air.
Ophelia stood just beside him, her rosy mouth agape. Two red slashes of color stained her pale cheeks, and her hair, instead of being suitably tucked up, spilled from beneath her navy bonnet in rich, shining waves.
And that was how Gabriel Rossetti, leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and painter, spotted her.
“Gabriel,” Andrew said, squaring his shoulders, ready to punch the other man if he grew too forward. “I have a prospective model to introduce to you.”
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