She frowned. Considering the way she’d stared at him all through dinner, she could probably stand to do a bit of work on her professionalism. For heaven’s sake, he was a Griffin. One of the Griffins. He’d probably had his portrait painted by Lawrence or Reynolds. Or both.
But in her defense, he’d arrived in Wiltshire with better timing than a white knight. And aside from desperately wanting to memorize the angle of his jaw and the curve of his brow in case he should vanish again, all but the excited core of her couldn’t believe he was there in the first place. Since he was there, however, from this moment on she needed to be absolutely, unquestionably professional about sketching and painting him. No more moon-eyed staring, whatever her reasons for it. This was her one blasted chance.
She’d barely slept, and not just because Susan had kept her up half the night chatting about how princely and royal and handsome and wealthy their houseguest was. Her fingers had practically itched—and still did—with the desire to pick up a pencil and sketch him. Even after just half a day she felt as though she knew every bit of him. Considering the importance of the portrait, however, she wanted him seated in front of her. Only her best work would get her to Vienna—and away from Wiltshire and the Eades family and their governess position.
The door clicked shut behind her. With a start Caroline turned around. Lord Zachary stood just inside the conservatory, gazing at her. “Good morning,” he drawled.
For a moment she simply looked back at him. Susan had been correct. He wasn’t heavy or hairy or overly muscled, but masculine in the best sense of the word. And no man had ever before looked at her with that expression on his face. She swallowed as he moved forward, closing the distance between them, his lovely gray eyes focusing on her mouth.
Caroline watched him approach, taking in the tilt of his head, the play of his thigh muscles beneath his snug buckskin trousers, and storing the memories for future recall on canvas. She didn’t care how many epithets her sisters piled on his head—physically, he was magnificent. “Good morning,” she returned, attributing the sudden tightness low in her stomach and the heat running beneath her skin to the desire to begin sketching him again at once.
“It definitely is now.” Lord Zachary touched her cheek with his fingers. Leaning down, he took her mouth in a slow, soft kiss.
For a dozen heartbeats Caroline froze, every ounce of her being focused on the warm touch of his lips against hers. Then with a start daylight broke through the mist. Gasping, she pushed backward. “What—what are you doing?”
His fine brow furrowed. “Kissing you.”
“Well, stop it at once!”
“I did.” He lowered his hand, his expression darkening at the same time. “You don’t have someone hiding in here as a witness, do you? Because this was your—”
“Are you mad?” Caroline was still trying to remember how to breathe, and her voice squeaked. “What are you talking about?”
“You invited me up here for a private rendezvous. I don’t—”
“I invited you to my studio so I could sketch you.” She’d never heard that insanity or soft-headedness ran in the Griffin family, but then they wouldn’t make any such thing public. Certainly none of her subjects had ever kissed her before. “And open the door at once, before my maid comes to investigate and catches us in here alone!”
His gaze left her face, traveling toward the sketch pad and the carefully laid out pencils, then moving on to the walls at the back of the conservatory. She didn’t need to turn around to know what he was looking at; for heaven’s sake, she’d painted all of them. Finally his gaze returned to her again.
“When you said you wanted to sketch me, you actually wanted to sketch me.”
“Yes. What did you think…” Abruptly, the kiss and the expression in those gray eyes made sense. “Oh! I am not some…lightskirt, sir!”
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, stalking back to pull open the door again. “I’m a damned blockhead. Apologies, Miss Witfeld.” Lord Zachary stood in the doorway for a moment, then looked at the back wall again. Finally, almost as though it was against his better judgment, he strolled over to look at her artwork.
She turned around to keep him in sight, mortification and anger pulling her in opposite directions. How could he have thought such a…scandalous thing? And about her? “So you often have ladies offer to sketch you and then—”
“No,” he cut in, his face darkening as he faced her again. “It was a mistake. A stupid mistake. This”—he gestured at the wall of paintings—“well, you have to admit, it’s a bit unusual.”
Caroline drew her shoulders straighter. “Not to me, my lord.”
With a slow breath, he nodded. “Of course not. My apologies once again.” Giving her another tight look, he turned for the door.
Blast it all. Uttering a dismayed curse as her hopes strode for the exit, Caroline scrambled to beat him to the door. “I…Don’t go, my lord,” she squeaked.
He stopped. “What?”
If you leave, I have to become a governess. “This was obviously just a silly misunderstanding,” she offered, forcing a chuckle. “We’re both adults. Let’s begin again, shall we?”
One curved eyebrow lifted. “You’re not serious?”
Caroline made herself smile. “Unless you’d rather we had a duel out in the meadow over a kiss.”
A deep chuckle rumbled from his chest. “No. I’m actually fairly good with weapons, and I’d hate for you to win and humiliate me.”
She snorted. At the sound she blushed and covered her mouth and nose, but Lord Zachary laughed again. Caroline took a deep breath. Back to professionalism, before it was entirely too late. “Then we’re agreed. We’ll begin again.”
“Agreed.” He returned to the back wall of the conservatory. “How long have you been painting?” he asked, following the sequence of work.
“Since I can remember. Some of those aren’t very good.” She felt her cheeks, already heated from his kiss and his near escape, warm even further. She didn’t normally feel the need to defend her work, but since she was scrambling to regain her professional standing with him, it seemed important that he knew she wasn’t just a dabbler in paints. “My earliest ones have all the emotion and depth of a tree stump,” she continued.
“Then why do you keep them about?”
Her sisters repeatedly asked her the same question. Coming from him, though, it sounded different—not that he couldn’t believe she would keep her failures in view but that he was genuinely curious as to why she did so. “They remind me that I’ve improved, that it’s a process, and that I learn from experience—and from my failures.”
“You have improved,” he noted, gesturing at one of her most recent portraits, one she’d done of her father. “This is quite good, in fact.”
“Thank you.” She’d heard that before, too, though the compliment was usually followed by something conditional, like she painted well for a female. He’d already called her hobby odd. “You’ve studied art, then?” she couldn’t help asking.
“Some. More than my family probably realizes, anyway.” With a slight grin he turned around, facing her again. “There aren’t any paintings of you.”
“There’s actually one, in the hall behind the drawing room.” She scowled. “I don’t like it very much, but Papa insisted that there be one of each member of the family or he wouldn’t hang any of them.”
“So you capture all of your guests and ask to sketch them?”
He stepped closer again, and that same tightness in her chest started once more, constricting her breathing. “Yes. To sketch them,” she emphasized. “Nothing more.”
“Then sketch me,” he said, gazing down at her. This time she saw humor in his gray eyes. “Where do you want me?”
Caroline blinked. So far, so good, despite the fact that she’d been half ready for him to kiss her again. “Um, by the window, I think, to begin with. This is just preliminary, so I can try different poses.”
“I am a
t your disposal. Standing, or sitting?”
“Standing is good.” Renewed excitement and anticipation flooding through her, she collected her pad and pencils, then pulled her stool toward the middle of the floor to get a better angle. “Perhaps you could gaze out over the field.”
“Should I put a hand to my eyes, as though I’m overseeing my vast domain?” he suggested, demonstrating.
She snorted again before she could stop herself. Stop it, Caroline. Act like a blasted professional before it’s too late. “Whatever you feel comfortable with, my lord.”
He cocked his head at her. “All I need is a portrait that would land me in Bedlam,” he commented, grinning. “My brothers could throw darts at me in absentia.”
Caroline began to sketch, starting this time with his eyes. “You and your brothers don’t deal well, then?”
“We generally deal excessively well. They are my dearest friends.”
“Then why in the world would they throw darts at you?”
Lord Zachary laughed. “They would only throw them at my likeness. The only barbs they actually throw at me are verbal ones.”
“And you retaliate in kind, I suppose?”
“One-sided barb throwing is never any fun.” Holding his head rigid, he managed to look at her from the corner of his eye. “Could you paint me in a military uniform?”
Drat. He was just as peculiar as the Earl and Countess Eades. Still, at least it wasn’t a monkey suit or a Greek god’s toga he’d asked to be sketched in. “I could, yes.”
“Excellent. I’ll send it off to Melbourne. He’ll have an apopl—”
“No!”
Lord Zachary looked full at her, so that she had to stop sketching his ear. “Why not?” he asked.
She drew a breath. “I need the portrait.”
“To add to your wall? I’ll pay you for it, of course, Miss Witfeld.”
“No. It’s…I’m applying to a painters’ studio. The application is the portrait.” Caroline gestured at him, trying to calm herself down. Of course he couldn’t have the portrait when she finished it. “I can paint a second portrait for you later if you’d like, after this one is finished. Please turn your head again.”
He complied. “Which studio?”
For a bare moment Caroline closed her eyes. If she told him, he’d undoubtedly ask why she hadn’t applied to the best-known British painters and studios, and she’d have to explain that she had, but each and every one of them had turned her down. “I’m sure you’ve never heard of it. Lady Gladys said your sister recently married.”
“Yes, she did. To my eldest brother’s closest friend—which, I suppose, is a good thing, because otherwise we would have had to kill him.”
“Good heavens, why?”
Lord Zachary cleared his throat. “It’s a long story.”
She smiled. “I doubt we have any of the same acquaintances, even if I made a habit of gossiping—which I don’t.”
His head shifted for a brief moment as he glanced in her direction. “They eloped.”
“They did?”
“Twice, actually.” His sensuous lips curved upward. “We caught up to them once, and they slipped away from us again. Set our damned horses loose. It took me twenty minutes to track down Sag—Sagramore. By then Melbourne had decided to let them go.”
“I appreciate your trust, my lord. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Call me Zachary,” he returned. “And I’m trusting you with my image on canvas, so I suppose Nell and Valentine’s reputations are fairly safe with you.”
Despite the easy tone, she understood the steel beneath the words. If she did tell anyone, he would know about it. And then she could bid farewell to his image on canvas. “Exceedingly safe,” she said, noting that his smile deepened and his expression grew more attractive. If she could capture that look, she might have a chance with one of the painting masters after all.
Zachary smiled at the enthusiasm in her voice. Caroline Witfeld liked him. And that was despite his ham-fisted misinterpretation of her invitation. She also had a temper, and that interested him, as well. “‘Exceedingly safe, Zachary,’” he prompted.
He heard her blow out her breath. “Zachary, then. Thank you for doing this for me.”
“My pleasure.”
The whole strangeness of the situation rather appealed to him. In most circles he knew, if he’d made the error in judgment he’d made with her, their morning chat would have concluded several minutes ago with a slap across his face. And yet there he sat, posing for some sort of art project and telling her about his family’s one scandal. Melbourne would be having an apoplexy at his unfounded decision to trust her. Melbourne, however, wasn’t there, and his own presence was his brother’s fault, anyway.
Even with their decision to forget the kiss, in London they would have been pushing the limits of propriety. Open door or not, here in the country, in a house filled with seven sisters, her parents, his aunt, and two dozen servants, it could still be trouble. Her father at the least, however, knew about her interest in sketching him, and no one had even looked at the idea askance. Witfeld Manor didn’t seem quite as balanced as most other households of his acquaintance. It was refreshing.
At the same time, he wasn’t going to be tricked into a compromising situation and a marriage if he didn’t even get another kiss first. “Shouldn’t we have a chaperone or something in here?”
“My maid is in the hallway by now, if that makes you feel safer,” she said absently, obviously concentrating on her sketching. “She generally stays out of the room because she either snores or fidgets. It’s very distracting.”
It began to dawn on him that she truly had forgotten the kiss, put it completely behind her. Hm. Chits didn’t do that where he was concerned. And it had been a pleasant kiss, damn it all. “It actually wasn’t my safety I was considering,” he returned.
“Your virtue, then.” With a self-amused smile she continued scratching the pencil along the paper.
So now she felt comfortable enough with him to make jokes. Next she’d be laughing to all her sisters about how he’d kissed her and had had to apologize for it. “Mm hm.” Before he could change his mind about the wisdom of his actions, Zachary pushed away from the window. He could always just apologize again.
“You’re moving. Stop moving.”
He ignored her admonishment, not stopping until he stood directly in front of her, perched on her prim little stool. “Miss Witfeld,” he said, tilting her chin up again with his fingers, “I don’t think you know me quite well enough yet to comment about my virtue—or lack thereof.” Slowly he leaned down toward her.
“Oh,” she breathed.
He meant to stop an inch away from her, meant only to point out that he wasn’t merely a clay model waiting to be drawn onto paper, or a jester because he liked to jest. Instead her soft mouth, the startled but unafraid expression in her deep green eyes, beckoned him. Closing his own eyes, he touched his mouth to hers for the second time that morning. A moment later the pencil hit the hardwood floor and her hand slid around the back of his neck.
“You know Caro must be sketching him,” a female voice came faintly from the bottom of the stairs, and he broke the kiss.
Her eyes were still closed, her face upturned. “Miss Witfeld,” he murmured, “we’re about to have company.”
“I’m going to take up painting, if it means I get to spend time with Lord Zachary,” another voice said from closer by.
Caroline’s eyes flew open. “Get back over there,” she hissed urgently, grabbing up her pencil and jabbing it toward the window.
“I am,” he returned in the same low voice, backing to the row of windows and returning to his pose.
So she truly wasn’t interested in trapping him into marriage, then. If she had been, wrapping her arms around his shoulders or falling on him would have taken care of that. The first time, he could claim an honest, if witless, mistake on his part. But now Zachary was sweating. Good God, that had b
een a stupid, reckless thing to do. And as before, it left him not precisely reeling, but tingling all the way down his spine.
“Caro?” The first girl scurried into the room, one, two, five others on her heels. All six dipped into a wave of curtsies in his direction, so many skirts waving he could practically feel the breeze. “Lord Zachary.”
“Good morning, ladies,” he returned, smiling.
“We looked everywhere for you,” the youngest, Violet or Viola or something, said. “Breakfast is ready, Lord Zachary.”
He looked over their heads at Caroline. Her color was high; if the sisters’ attention hadn’t all been concentrated on him, she and he might still have been in trouble. “May I move now, Miss Witfeld?”
She shook herself. “Yes, of course. I’d like to sketch your hands later, though. Perhaps out in the garden?”
“Certainly.” Caroline Witfeld was a single-minded chit, and more composed than he would have expected, if she was still thinking about the portrait after two damned kisses.
“You can’t monopolize him, Caro,” one of the twin girls protested, grabbing his arm and towing him toward the door. In the flurry of activity he couldn’t even tell which of the sisters had hold of his other arm. “We want to show him Trowbridge.”
“And the garden and the pond,” another said.
“The wildflowers on the hillsides are lovely this time of year.”
“We could take one of the riding trails, Lord Zachary. You could ride Sagramore.”
“I’d be pleased to go,” he commented. “But of course I am at my aunt’s disposal.”
“Oh, you must come visit with us!”
Well, at least here he seemed to be more than an extraneous sibling. Zachary nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
Halfway through breakfast Mrs. Witfeld appeared, arm in arm with Aunt Tremaine. “Girls, what do you think?” their mother said, her voice quavering with excitement. “I’ve been talking with Gladys, and she’s agreed to stay for at least the next fortnight.”
An Invitation to Sin Page 5