Then she cupped his face against her palm and rose up to bring her mouth to his in an inviting and sultry kiss.
Eve flushed and looked away, although it wasn’t embarrassment that sped through her but anger, and a hot jealousy she had no right to feel.
He took the woman’s arms and set her away. “We’re done, Constance. It’s over.”
But his attempt to dissuade her only amused her. “Not until I say it is.”
Putting an end to the conversation, she stepped past him, trailing her hand over his broad shoulder as she went. She stopped and looked at Eve, not bothering to hide her disdain.
“Whatever do you see in this pathetic girl?” she called out to him.
Eve looked down at the book she held in her hand, trying to hold it still despite the anger that made her shake. “Il maestro mi ha detto che ero bella, alla mia anima,” she commented, loudly enough for both of them to hear and know that she’d understood every word they’d said.
She raised her eyes from the book. It was her turn now to cast a scrutinizing gaze over a very surprised Constance. Eve dismissed her with a sniff, returning her attention to the book, although she couldn’t have said for the life of her what picture was on the page.
“Perhaps he grew tired of having to compensate for superficiality and seeks a deeper satisfaction in his art.” Eve didn’t dare to look up as she added, “And in his bed.”
Constance gave a sound of strangled fury.
Forcing herself not to look away from the book, Eve turned the page with trembling fingers. But she kept her back straight and her shoulders relaxed, as if she wasn’t bothered one whit by that awful woman.
“How dare you!” Constance seethed, but Eve didn’t glance up to discover which one of them she was accusing. Good God, how her hands shook!
“Goodbye, Constance.” Vincenzo moved toward the door, clearly wanting her to leave.
“We are not through, do you hear me?” she bit out. When she reached the door, she lowered her voice into a chilling promise. “You’ll regret this.”
With as much dignity as she could muster, she glided from the studio.
“I already do.” He shoved the wicket closed after her. It rattled on its hinges, and the latch clattered as it dropped into place.
A silent stillness fell over the studio.
Eve knew without having to look at him that he’d leaned back against the door and folded his arms over his chest in that way he did whenever he wanted to appear relaxed but was anything but. He couldn’t possibly be relaxed after a lovers’ spat like that. Her heart was pounding furiously, and their fight didn’t truly involve her. She’d simply been caught in the fray.
“I told you that you were beautiful, did I?” he called out quietly to her in English, translating the insult she’d given to Constance in Italian.
“Yes.”
“All the way down to your soul?”
She shrugged. “It was implied.”
He laughed, a low and deep rumble that fell through her like soft summer rain. She couldn’t stop a warmth from blossoming inside her.
“Be careful with Constance,” he warned, his cautionary words contradicting his amusement. “She didn’t leave here of her own accord.”
So Eve had surmised. Rather easily, too.
“She isn’t the sort of woman who handles jealousy well.”
Obviously not. “I can take care of myself.”
“Apparently.” He pushed himself away from the door and arched a brow. “Ma’am?”
“I was only showing respectful deference.”
“You were pointing out that she’s older than you,” he translated as he slowly approached her.
Eve sniffed. That, too. “Perhaps.”
“What else was it you said about me—about growing tired of superficiality?” He stopped in front of her. “About wanting deeper satisfaction?”
Her cheeks began to heat, but she found the determination to stare straight into his dark eyes. “Don’t you?”
“In my art, yes. But you implied that we were lovers.”
The heat in her cheeks flared into a full-out blush, fanning out from the back of her neck and down between her breasts. “I only made a general observation. How was I to know that she would misinterpret it?” She swallowed down that lie. She’d certainly implied an intimacy between them that didn’t exist, but that shrewish woman deserved it for saying those awful things.
“A general observation, hmm?”
“Of course. I mean, a man like you…”
His eyes narrowed. “Like me?”
“I’ve heard of your reputation, Signore Vincenzo.” So had most of Europe. “You’re a man of great art and great passion.” Her blush deepened. “So of course you would seek out interesting women to…”
“To what?” he pressed.
She cleared her suddenly tight throat. “Share your bed.”
If her mother had lived to hear her have this conversation, Mama would have died of embarrassment. Yet Eve dared to say such indecent words right to the man’s face. That dark, handsome face with its high cheekbones, framed by unruly, thick hair that was so dark as to be almost black. Just like those eyes that seemed to notice everything. He might not have said that she was beautiful all the way down to her soul, but without a doubt those eyes could see that deeply into her.
“Doesn’t every man want that?” he murmured.
She thought of Burton Williams, who wanted her only for her father’s money. “Not every man.” The raw honesty of that was audible in her voice.
“Then they’re fools.”
She sighed out, “They certainly are.”
Smiling faintly, he shifted closer, and the trembling in her hands began again.
“You’re right about me, Eve. I am a passionate man, especially when it comes to my art.” He stood so close now that she could feel the warmth of his body and smell the scents of linseed oil, tobacco, and port that swirled around him. “And perhaps you are beautiful right down to your soul. We’ll find out how deep that beauty goes when I paint you.”
A soft thrill sped through her at that quiet promise.
“But let me be clear—all I plan on doing with you is painting.”
“Good,” she whispered. Which was good. It was all she wanted, too, and far more than she should be doing anyway. So why did her heart skip with a painful thud of disappointment?
As if contradicting himself, he reached up to twirl one of her loose curls around his fingers. “I made a mistake with Constance.”
“Apparently.”
His lips twisted wryly. “She was my model, but then I took her as my lover. I won’t make that mistake again.” Self-recrimination darkened his face. “To be a great artist, a man can’t serve both his art and his mistress. If he splits his passion, both of them will suffer. I decided a long time ago to put my art before everything else in my life.”
“But she was your muse.”
“She was never my muse.” He released her hair. “An artist’s muse inspires him to put his soul into his work, to reach for the sublime. To be more than himself. Constance was never that.”
She swallowed. Hard. “But she’s beautiful.”
“She is. In some ways, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
Her chest panged, and she turned her face away. “Oh.”
He took her chin in his fingers and turned her back to look at him. “But simply being beautiful isn’t necessarily what an artist wants in a model.”
“Just in his mistress.”
When his eyes narrowed in displeasure, she regretted the slip.
“Non essere gelosa, mia bella,” he scolded gently. “Constance isn’t as delicate as you.”
Certainly not with those claws she kept hidden beneath kid gloves.
“And she lacks your light.”
She caught her breath. Her light?
“With Constance, a man is shown sexuality, but with you, he’s tempted by sensuality. Her
appeal is lust. Yours is allure.” He released her chin. “I have special plans for you.”
“Oh?” The jealousy inside her melted into a low heat.
He reached behind her and took a book from the shelf. It fell open in his hands to a well-worn crease in the spine, revealing on the right side a page covered in handwritten notes and on the left—
“Sleeping Venus,” he told her. “The first reclining nude in European art.”
Her eyes moved over the painting of the naked female figure, delicately asleep on a pile of red and white silk. “It’s beautiful.”
“Finished by Titian after Giorgione’s death.” He turned the page to reveal another leaf covered in notes and a painting on the left. “Cranach's River Nymph at the Fountain.”
A second sleeping woman. “They all seem very relaxed.”
His eyes gleamed at her wry comment as he turned another page. “Titian’s own masterpiece in the form, The Venus of Urbino.”
Eve’s breath hitched as her eyes fell on the naked female at the center of the painting. “That one’s not asleep,” she forced out around the knot in her throat, her eyes trailing over the blatantly sexual figure.
“Indeed not, and daring to stare straight back,” he murmured. “Alluring, sensual, confident…Every inch of her a goddess, one knowing the viewer is shamelessly looking at her and enjoying what he sees.” He flipped through another few pages, skipping decades of history between each page turn. “Ruben’s The Hermit and Angelica, Velasquez’s Venus at Her Mirror…Boucher's Louisa O’Murphy, in which the woman isn’t a goddess being looked upon with desire but a mistress to be looked upon with lust. By the time that one was painted, the woman was no longer a goddess to be worshipped at a distance but a flesh and blood woman to be made love to.”
Eve stared at the naked woman, not facing up like the others—not facing the viewer at all, in fact—but turned onto her belly and draped across the cushions of a settee in a pose of complete submission. She rested on the same soft red and white silks from Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, her legs parted, her body pliable and lush. As Eve stared at the painting, the heat of the blush returned to her cheeks, so did an aching that blossomed low in her belly.
“By the time we get to Goya and Ingres—”
As he flipped the pages, Eve saw the scandalous Goya painting that had shaken Europe nearly two decades earlier, the one of a woman lying fully nude with no attempt to cover any of her nakedness. She, too, stared boldly out at the viewer, but this time with a wanton expression of lustful invitation.
“—we have no idea who the women are, but they are common and ordinary, perhaps even prostitutes. Certainly not a goddess or a king’s mistress. And the way they stare so boldly at the viewer, so world-weary and brazen—”
“I see.” She looked away from the painting.
He closed the book and handed it to her. “Artists no longer portray seduction as art but as a commodity.”
“I don’t understand.” She set both books aside, certain the tingling in her fingertips came from the erotic nature of the paintings within. “What does that have to do with me?”
“I want to paint a woman who encompasses all of the best elements of the form. The secret allure of spying on Giorgiano’s Venus but with the knowledge that the woman in the painting is accessible to an ordinary man. The sexual temptation of Goya and Ingres tempered by hints of innocence and curiosity. A woman who doesn’t boldly dare the viewer to make love to her but one who issues a demure invitation to please and be pleased, who is all the more desirable because of it.” His eyes gleamed intensely. “I want to paint a divine goddess who invites human pleasures.”
Her heart pounded, her breath coming shallow and fast. She had no idea what to say.
“You’re that woman, Eve,” he confided in a low voice, as if sharing a secret.
And certainly not to that.
“I’ve been dreaming of this painting for years, wanting to create something new in the vision of the masters, yet one that transcends the current artistic sensibilities that strive only to shock rather than seduce, to alarm rather than arouse.” He reached up slowly to touch her lips and trace their outline with his fingertip. Yet Eve knew he wasn’t a man seeing her as a woman, but an artist looking at his model, deciding the best way to portray her features to capture the light he saw in her. “And I plan on doing it with an artistic brilliance that hasn’t been seen since Titian.”
“You’re quite sure of yourself.” Her lips brushed against his fingers.
“I am.”
“And of me.”
His dark eyes captured hers as he repeated in the same throaty rasp, “I am.”
Eve stared back, unable to find the resolve to look away.
She needed to tell him the truth, that it was a mistake that had brought her here. That she could never be naked in front of him. That she couldn’t continue to be his model even fully clothed, no matter how exciting the thought, how tempting the adventure it would bring.
Yet the thought of returning to a silent house to stare at the walls terrified her. She couldn’t bear to hear the clock ticking away and feel the anxious desperation sneaking up on her like a specter, clenching at her chest and stealing her breath away.
She whispered, “When do we begin?”
Chapter 4
The Pall Mall Picture Galleries
One Week Later
Dom leaned in for a closer examination of one of the paintings.
“Ellsworth!”
Rolling his eyes, he straightened as Robert Sheridan, Viscount Margrave, approached. He’d hoped to avoid mindless conversation this evening, preferring instead to focus his attention on the new crop of artists on display this year. No such luck.
The viscount gestured at the wall of paintings. “Fine exhibition they’ve managed to pull off.”
“Agreed. Highest quality of art in years.”
“And good champagne.” Margrave raised his glass, toasting the refreshments table.
Dom turned away before he laughed at the man.
Around them, a sparse crowd of aristocrats, landed gentry, and moneyed middle-class pretended to be interested in the exhibition. In reality, they were taking the opportunity of tonight’s preview not to look at the best paintings that English artists had to offer but to show off their finery and catch up on the most scintillating mid-season gossip. Only William Etty’s latest drew their attention, and even then for his scandalous subject matter of frolicking female nudes that the Times had labeled “offensive and indecent” rather than his technique and composition.
True, the Times had gone too far in its critique, but Dom had no patience for Etty’s work. His royal and mythological subject matter was a backslide rather than forward progress for nude subjects. A situation Dom hoped to rectify with his painting of Eve.
“I hear you’re the man responsible for all of this,” Margrave persisted.
“I thought it was the artists,” Dom muttered, already losing patience with the conversation. The viscount’s unmarried daughter, Lady Jane Sheridan, was still on the hunt for a high-ranking husband, having humiliatingly lost the Duke of Trent last year to a country gel no one had ever heard of. Dom feared the man’s sudden interest in him was purely mercenary on his daughter’s behalf. He could have saved Margrave the trouble, as he never planned on marrying. He was already wedded to his art.
Margrave laughed and slapped Dom good-naturedly on the back. “We all know it’s money that keeps the artists in their paints, and that money comes from people like us who sponsor them. Where would they be without us? I ask you that.”
He forced a smile, knowing the role he had to play tonight as Ellsworth. Still, that didn’t keep him from snatching a glass of Madeira from the tray of one of the passing attendants to fortify himself.
“Besides,” Margrave continued boorishly, “we both know this exhibition would be half its size if not for the paintings you’ve loaned for display.”
Not true, but the d
isplayed paintings by the old masters from his private collection would certainly be a draw. Both the British Institution and the Royal Academy directly helped artists who might not otherwise have the means to create, and as the Marquess of Ellsworth, he would do whatever he could to support the arts.
Even if it currently meant being known in England only for providing paintings by other artists.
Not one person in the room suspected how he truly spent his time, or that his gloves hid paint-stained fingers and nails. But they would soon, if he had his way. And then a new career would begin.
“Why must we see your fine collection only at exhibitions, hmm?” Margrave complained jovially. “Why do you refuse to host parties—or even dinners—at Mercer House?”
In other words, Dom realized, why didn’t he host a dinner and invite Margrave and his lovely husband-hunting daughter? He smiled tightly. “I’m far too dull, I’m afraid. My guests would be bored to tears.”
He also needed to keep his private life separate from his public persona. He already danced a fine line during the months when Parliament was in session, to attend enough votes and events so that he wouldn’t be accused of neglecting his duties, yet find sufficient daylight hours to work in his studio. The last wrinkle he needed to add to his life was increased participation in the season’s soirees.
Or, God forbid, host one himself.
“You need a wife, Ellsworth.” The viscount’s eyes gleamed craftily. “Someone beautiful and supportive by your side who will take care of all the work of hosting parties for you so all you have to do is enjoy yourself.”
“I enjoy myself quite well as is.” Good lord. The very last thing he needed was a society wife hosting parties in his home.
Hoping Margrave would take the hint and leave, Dom turned his attention back to the painting. It truly was magnificent in technique and composition, but it lacked that indescribable spark that the best painters were masters at portraying. He’d never—
“I hear the British Institution offered you a membership.”
Dom inhaled a patient breath and turned back to Margrave, giving up on studying the paintings tonight. “Yes. And I declined.”
What A Lord Wants Page 5
