Page 1 of What a Lord Wants

Prologue

October 1814

Venice, Italy

“Domenico.” Elena stretched lazily across the mattress, like a cat before the fire. “Come back to bed.”

Buttoning up his waistcoat, Dominick Mercer leaned over to place a quick kiss on her bare back and groaned. Good God, a woman shouldn’t be so tempting.

“I’m already late,” he said regretfully in fluent Italian, as much to convince himself as her. “You know how Giuseppe gets when his apprentices arrive late.”

Of course she did. She was the man’s daughter, after all.

She rested her head on her folded arms and smiled up at him. “You could tell him that you were with me, making passionate love as the moon rose over the canal and losing all track of time.”

He lifted a brow. “Then I’d not only be a tardy apprentice, I’d also be a dead one.”

She laughed, a throaty sound that had him seriously considering crawling right back into bed with her and wasting away the evening the same way they’d spent the afternoon. Lately, he’d spent many afternoons that way, when he should have been at the studio, perfecting his brushwork.

“I’ll be back later.” When her full red lips pulled into a pout, he promised, “By midnight.”

“I will be here.” The self-confidence with which she made that declaration assured him that she’d still be spread delectably across his bed when the campanile’s bell tolled.

His chest warmed as he reached for the jacket tossed over the back of the chair that also held three canvases and a set of pencils. Everything in his tiny attic room that overlooked the old shipyard was connected to his art, right down to the smell of the linseed oil that he used to mix his paints. Including Elena, who was his latest model.

He shrugged into his jacket. Then he leaned down to give her one last parting kiss.

When he pulled away, she reached for his hand. “Domenico…ti amo.”

His heart stuttered, right before it lodged in his throat. Elena loved him. She could have had her pick of artists—ofanyman in Italy, if he were honest—and he could barely believe her words. He placed a tender kiss to her temple, breathing deeply the spicy perfume of her that now mixed with the musky-sweet scent of sex, and closed his eyes in utter happiness.

“I wish I could drape you in glittering diamonds and long ropes of pearls,” he murmured against her skin, “ones as beautiful as you are, and for no other reason except that it will please you.”

Because what he enjoyed most—perhaps second only to painting—was pleasing Elena.

Right now, though, he had only the small allowance his brother Timothy gave him under the terms of their father’s will, most of which went to purchase paint supplies and the bottles of wine he exchanged for lessons from other artists. He’d have asked his brother for more, but if Ellsworth ever learned that he’d spent it on spoiling his Italian lover—or, God forbid, on his art—he might just find himself stripped of funds completely and forced into a commission with the army. Or worse, a living with the Church.

He’d rather die than give up his art. His artwashis life.

“Midnight,” he promised, then regretfully slipped away.

He hurried down from his garret flat to the footpath, then wound his way through the maze of alleys and canals. With each step, he bounced. For heaven’s sake, hebounced! He laughed—he’d never been happier in his life. And for once as he traced the familiar route toward Giuseppe Carracci’s studio near the Rialto, he didn’t want to paint. He wanted only to lose himself, heart and soul, in Elena.

Her image in his mind and the lingering taste of her on his lips distracted him as he moved through the city he’d come to love during the past two years that he’d been living here, ever since his father died when Dom was twenty-one, when he was able to move to Italy to pursue his art.

Someday, he would be a great artist, and his paintings would hang in palaces and fine houses. He’d make a good living then, independent of his brother’s marquessate, as a master with a studio and apprentices of his own.Il Maestro. When that day came, he could completely ignore Timothy’s warnings that Dom was risking raining scandal onto the Marquess of Ellsworth’s unblemished legacy. That dignified Englishmen did not create shocking paintings of nude women.

He laughed at the irony. In England, he had to keep secret his life as a painter, because being a painter was simply far too scandalous a career for a high-ranking gentleman. But in Italy, he kept hidden that he was the son of a marquess. Here, amid the centuries-old canals and stones, engulfed in the scent of saltwater from the lagoon, he could be the man he was in his heart. Domenico Vincenzo. Painter.

And now the man whom Elena Carracci loved.

“Maestro!” he called out as he bounded through the door of the studio on the small piazza. “Give me a brush! I’m ready to take on the world.”

“You are ready fornothing.”

The cold, accusing statement sliced through him, and Dom stopped, facing his old mentor.

Giuseppe stepped out of the shadows. Now into his sixth decade, the man possessed long gray-white hair that he kept pulled into a ponytail, hands always covered with dried paint and charcoal, and lines etched into his face from years of hard living.