Page 27 of What a Lord Wants

If this wasn’t madness, it was damnably close.

He cleared his throat and pushed away from the table. “You asked how I create my pictures.” Yes, that’s it. Take the conversation back to his art. Art was safe territory, and since she’d raised the topic in the first place, perhaps it would stop her from being nervous around him. Because right now, she was as stiff as stone, and unwittingly making him just as stiff. “It’s all about learning techniques that allow me to make a picture appear on the canvas exactly as it is in my head.”

He gestured her over to a stack of finished canvases leaning against the rear wall. All sizes, various colors, widely varying subject matter…

He selected one and held it up. “What do you see when you look at this?”

“It’s a drawing room.” She stepped to his side, and with her followed the faint scent of jasmine. “The doors are open to the garden. There’s a table and pianoforte, a fireplace—”

“Look closer. What do you see?”

She squinted at the painting, then announced dryly, “Paint.”

Cheeky chit.“Then you surely see the brush strokes, too, how some are thick and bold, others thinner, lighter…some just lines. And some places not lines at all.”

He set it down and picked up another. This one done from memory of the Italian countryside north of Rome.

“No lines, do you see? Just colors fading into each other, creating form and shadow.”

He put it down and selected another, this one of a woman sitting at her vanity, her back halfway turned toward the viewer and her dress slipping off her shoulders, as if it could fall the rest of the way off at any moment and bare her to his eyes. A single candle lit the woman’s figure.

“Thin layers of glazes upon glazes, until a color emerges, then eventually a form.” He murmured, “There are no lines in the real world. Only colors and shading.”

When he set it down and reached for another, he realized too late— Constance, lying reclined, with a length of red silk draped over her.

He frowned. He should have felt a sense of loss when he looked at her picture, or at least anger over her attempt to blackmail him. But he felt nothing except disappointment in himself as an artist. He hadn’t captured in this painting the emotional essence he’d wanted…that same sense of innocent seduction that radiated from Eve in every move she made.

“Sometimes the artist fails,” he murmured.

“How so?” Her question was innocuous enough, but he felt the tension rise in her as she gazed at Constance’s half-nude form.

“This kind of art asks the model to bare her soul, and it takes more courage to bare one’s soul than it does to bare the body. That’s what’s missing here. If the model doesn’t realize that, then the artist can never capture it. Constance never understood that.” He set it down. “That’s why you’re already a better model than she was.”

He flipped a sheet down over the canvases to keep the dust off and made a mental note to remove all the paintings of Constance from the studio. If his London dealer didn’t want them, then he’d find sellers on the continent who did. But he didn’t want them here bothering Eve.

“You said she wasn’t your muse,” she commented.

“She wasn’t.”

“Then who is?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I haven’t met her yet. Or perhaps I met her long ago and still carry her deep within me. Perhaps it’s not even a woman at all but a special place or object.” He arched a brow. “But whomever she is, she certainly isn’t Constance.”

He crossed to the work bench to fetch a piece of charcoal and felt her eyes on him, now studying him as closely as he studied her.

He gestured with the charcoal. “You want to know what brings a painting to life? It’s not technique. That’s what allows the paint to form on the canvas in the same way as the picture I hold in my head. But what inspires that picture in the first place, what compels an artist to spend months or years on a painting?”

“Yes?”

“That’s the magic spell.” His eyes locked with hers across the room, although he refused to let himself contemplate any further how Eve fit into that incantation. “That’s the muse.”

“And if you never find her?”

“Most artists don’t. That’s why they move from one woman to the next, lover to lover, model to model, always searching.”

She paused, and he could see the question she burned to ask resting on her faintly parted lips. “And if youdofind her, if she’s a real flesh and blood woman…What happens then?”

He held her gaze in his for a long moment. “Perfection.”