Page 45 of What a Lord Wants

“With Evelyn?” Winslow drawled deliberately, his eyes narrowing, “A man of your position?”

Well, perhaps notexactlylike this.

Dom shifted uneasily in his chair. “I know that she’s dedicated to charity work and helping those in need.” Thanks to Davies’s information and the web of servants’ gossip throughout Mayfair that could have given the Home Office a run for its money in terms of intelligence gathering. “The Academy is hosting an auction, with all proceeds going to provide supplies to artists who might otherwise not have the opportunity to further their art.”

He reached into his breast pocket for the invitation that he’d brought along, to use so that her father wouldn’t think he was lying about the exhibition. Even though he was. Through his teeth.

He placed it onto the desk. “I want to invite Miss Winslow and your family to attend the private preview as my guests.” Instinctively sensing Winslow’s soft underbelly, he added, “And perhaps to encourage you to make a few bids in the auction.”

Winslow visibly relaxed at that, going so far as to rumble out a chuckle that jostled the bourbon in the glass still poised on his round belly. Clearly, he now thought that he understood why the Marquess of Ellsworth was in his home. Not to gain access to his daughter but to his money.

For a man like Winslow, men who wanted his money were common place. Those who wanted his daughter, however, were the enemy.

And Dom would be the devil himself if the man ever learned why he was really here.

“None of those indecent artists, I hope.”

“Worse.” Dom grimaced and eased back in his chair. “Englishartists.”

Winslow chortled. “Well, then, perhaps we’ll attend. We’ve got space for a painting in the dining room. Perhaps one of a nice fruit bowl.”

Dom finished off his bourbon in one swallow.

“When you mentioned Evelyn,” Winslow mused, “I thought you’d gotten some idea about courting her.”

“No.” Just painting her naked for all the world to see.

“That you were here to get your aristocratic hands on my money.”

Thatrankled, to be thought of as nothing more than a fortune hunter. Dom smiled tightly. “I possess my own fortune and have no need to marry an heiress.”

Winslow smiled in faint apology. “Well, you cannot blame a father for being cautious. Especially with a young lady like Evelyn.”

“Of course,” he repeated in a mutter. What the devil was wrong with Eve? Nothing as far as Dom could tell.

“She’s always been a handful, that one. Oh, her older sister Mariah is stubborn to a fault, determined to prove herself at every turn, and caring far more about business than the niceties of society. But Evelyn…” He heaved a deep sigh of concern. “That one always leaps without looking.” When Dom frowned, Winslow sat up and placed his glass on the leather-padded desktop. “It’s not that she’s a troublemaker or set on scandal—nothing like that. Evelyn simply throws herself into life with every bit of herself first, then only later stops to think of the damage she might be doing.”

That was certainly Dom’s experience with her.

“Always skirting the limits of propriety with her antics, always wanting to experience everything first-hand. As if her life depended upon it.”

An electric jolt pierced Dom as Eve’s words from last night came back to him. He stared at Winslow as the man pushed himself out of his chair and crossed to the cabinet, this time fetching the decanter back to the desk.

“Always behaving as if she has to cram three lifetimes into one.” Winslow shook his head. “I think it’s because of her mother.”

Dom waved off the man’s attempt to refill his glass and sat forward in his chair. “How so?”

“My Beatrice passed away from fever when the girls were little. She wasn’t feeling well after a walk through the park, so she lay down to take an afternoon nap.” Grief flashed over Winslow’s face before he busied himself with topping off his own glass. “She never woke up.”

Avoiding Dom’s eyes, he lifted the glass and took a long swallow.

“Evelyn was only eight. Far too young to understand why her mother had died. For the longest time afterward, she was terrified of sleeping alone—terrified of falling asleep at all, in fact.” He stared into his glass. “She would force herself to stay awake for days on end until she finally grew so tired that she would simply fall over, unconscious, wherever she was. When she did sleep, she suffered such nightmares that she’d wet the bed or wake up screaming loudly enough to be heard several streets away. She stopped eating, lost so much weight…For the longest time I worried that we’d lose her, as well.”

Dom knew about her mother’s death, but he didn’t know about this additional hell. To go through that on top of losing her mother…Good God.

“The doctors tried to help her. They prescribed all kinds of powders and potions, but mostly the medication just made everything worse.” He rubbed his forehead. “Then she started in with all those wild antics, refusing to behave, doing all kinds of things that a young lady simply shouldn’t do.Adventures, she called them, but they were really just her way of distracting herself from her mother’s death.”

Dom’s gut twisted into a sickening knot.Alive, that was the reason she gave for hiding her true identity. She’d needed to feel alive. No wonder she’d kept coming to the studio long after she should have revealed the truth.