A Wedding by Dawn

by Alison Delaine

  “I believe you’re acquainted with most of them,” she told him. “What a blessing you will have company and conversation during the tedious wait.”

  “Oh, I don’t intend to stay,” he said just as they reached the artist’s apartment, where the door stood ajar.

  She looked at him. He didn’t?

  “But I did promise your aunt I would see you safely to your destination,” he added, and then they were inside the studio, where two of her other invitees relaxed at a table by the window and a third conversed with the painter, who was busy setting out his brushes and paints, and there was a round of greeting and hand kissing and general admiration, and then the painter was guiding her toward a red chaise longue nestled against a waterfall of gold draperies, asking her a half dozen questions about exactly how she would like to be painted.

  “Avec des fleurs?” He added a vase of silk flowers to a small pedestal at the foot of the chaise, then whisked it away and stood back. “Sans?”

  Nicholas was leaving?

  “Avec.” Flowers seemed appropriate. But...she turned, only to find Nicholas standing right behind her. Across the room, the other guests were opening a bottle of wine, laughing at something the Marquis de Bravard was saying. It took all her willpower not to ask whether Nicholas really intended to leave. No doubt he wanted her to ask, which was why she couldn’t.

  “If you are in a hurry, Mr. Warre, by all means go,” she said instead.

  He checked his pocket watch. “I have a few minutes.”

  The painter gestured for him to make himself comfortable in a nearby armchair. Nicholas made no move to sit.

  “You said you have a costume I can wear?” India said to the painter.

  “Mais, oui. Oui! Behind that screen, mademoiselle.”

  “Oh, I do hope there is something exotic.” She surveyed the collection of portraits around the room—women who had reclined in this very studio. Some watched her with brazen, Do you dare do as I’ve done? gazes. Others posed with eyes averted. “Or perhaps I should choose something more traditional,” she added, noting a common theme of soft, draping robes. She laced her fingers together, more to hide a sudden trembling than anything else.

  “Or perhaps you need not make a decision at all,” Nicholas said, nodding to a large portrait on the far wall behind the painter’s canvas. The woman in that one preserved her modesty with nothing more than gently bended knees and a hand resting in her lap.

  “Mmm. An interesting possibility. But—” she looked up at him “—I worry you might regret allowing your wife to pose entirely nude in front of spectators.”

  “Forgive me,” he said in a low voice, “has there been a wedding I’m unaware of?”

  She beckoned the maid she’d brought and disappeared behind the screen, where she inhaled deeply. Twice.

  Nicholas was acting as if yesterday had never even happened. Of course he was—what choice did he have? It wasn’t as if he could hide himself away in shame and embarrassment. Not and pursue his intention of maneuvering her into wedlock. And it certainly wasn’t as if he would allow her to glimpse such aching torment again.

  The only reason she’d witnessed it at all was because she’d caught him by complete surprise. The depth of that pain was proving impossible to forget.

  “Mademoiselle?” the maid prompted.

  “Oui.” India breathed deeply. She wasn’t here to think of his difficulties, but hers.

  Likely he was amusing himself at this very moment by imagining that now she would make her excuses and explain that she’d decided to be painted fully clothed.

  Have you learned nothing at all about me in these past weeks, Mr. Warre?

  She fingered the variety of fabrics and costumes draped over the top of the screen and ignored the little voice reminding her what she had learned about him. If anything, the revelation should make her more determined to be rid of him.

  She chose a soft blue wrap that looked like something from classical Greece.

  The maid helped her undress and put on the wrap, draping it around her hips and over her shoulders. With nothing underneath, the wrap clung to India’s curves and slid sensuously across her skin. She unpinned her hair and shook it out, letting it fall over her shoulders and breasts. A few more tucks for security and a dozen strokes through her hair with the brush, and she was ready.

  She felt nearly naked, and with the feeling came a fresh resolve. When Nicholas saw her like this, he would put a stop to their game. With his true intentions out in the open, she could set about recruiting Auntie Phil’s help to thwart them.

  She took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the screen.

  Nicholas was sitting in the armchair. And she knew, now, that he’d lied when he said he was leaving.

  “Ah, mademoiselle,” the painter said, kissing his fingertips at the sight of her. “Venez...” He guided her toward the chaise. A low, appreciative noise came from the direction of the card table where the men were seated.

  Nicholas’s gaze followed her impassively. He assessed her choice of outfit with a tiny furrow between his brows, the exact way she’d seen him assess a questionably aged roll at one of the inns where they had stayed on the road from Marseille.

  She walked to the couch, conscious of her bare feet on the wooden floor, aware of every place the soft fabric whispered against her skin. Any moment he would stand up. Announce that the portrait would not be painted.

  The comte and Monsieur Pisannes wandered closer, while her other three guests watched from the table by the window.

  “Magnifique, n’est-ce pas?” the comte said to Nicholas.

  “Ravissante,” Nicholas agreed.

  India sat down. Uncurled her body across the chaise longue and draped one arm over the top like the women in the other portraits.

  “Là,” the painter said. “Just there.”

  “Surely you will be late if you stay any longer, Mr. Warre,” she said.

  The painter assessed her critically, ordering her to bend one knee, straighten the other, lean this way, then that way. Beneath the fabric, the tips of her breasts puckered. They jutted out visibly, and her cheeks warmed, but there was nothing to be done about it now. She looked to see if Nicholas Warre had noticed.

  He was checking his pocket watch. “Not just yet.” He flipped it shut and raised his eyes, leveling them at her.

  Butterflies collided.

  The painter stepped back. “Voilà. Perfect.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Warre? Perfect?”

  “I shall defer to the artist’s expertise on that score.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from inside his waistcoat and unfolded them, leaned back in his chair and began to read.

  “I shan’t,” the marquis said, sipping a glass of wine and observing her appreciatively from another chair nearby. “Parfait.”

  Nicholas wasn’t even going to watch? She fumed silently while the painter took his place behind the canvas. Her irritation went unnoticed as Nicholas studied his papers.

  At the table by the window, the comte and Monsieur Pisannes exchanged cards with two of her other guests. They’d probably seen dozens of scantily clad women. Perhaps hundreds. Maybe Nicholas had, too. The marquis continued to sip his wine and observe her. She didn’t want to look at him—not now—but she needed to.

  Devil take it, she needed to act as if reposing in a state of undress in front of these men was giving her no end of delight and was exactly the kind of thing Nicholas could expect from her for years to come. As if there was nothing she wanted more than to crook her little finger and have half a dozen gentlemen falling at her feet.

  Of which Nicholas would not be one, because he would never fall at anyone’s feet, and—

  Oh. The room around her faded.

  Because he wasn’t looking away anymore.

  And she wasn’t breathing anymore.

  And his eyes moved lazily across her torso, and her breasts came alive beneath his gaze, tingling, and suddenly she was more aware of hersel
f than she could have thought possible. Other places stirred deeply—intimate places, ones that would never be painted. And now it was as if he was touching her again the way he’d done in that hayloft, except that he wasn’t touching her, he was only looking.

  Admit that you want me, Nicholas. The words winged through her mind out of nowhere—or perhaps not from nowhere. Because desire burned hot in those green eyes, desire and memories of what they’d done together.

  And it was very, very clear that he did want her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HE’D BEEN SO bloody sure she wouldn’t do it.

  That evening Nick lounged carelessly in an armchair while Madame Someone-or-Other kept up a lively debate about whether the work of a certain young Genovese poet merited the regard of a rational thinker.

  After staring at India’s barely contained breasts for the better part of the afternoon, Nick didn’t imagine he would ever think rationally again.

  Across the room, the Comte d’Anterry was likely having the same reaction. The man had spent nearly the entire evening staring at India, who was seated in a chair next to Lady Pennington, who shared a small settee with a young man who seemed slightly less enthusiastic about poetry than he was about Lady Pennington’s figure.

  He would have laid money India wouldn’t do it.

  But she’d done it.

  And now there were three other men in this room alone who knew exactly, precisely how that swathe of thin blue fabric had molded to the perfect roundness of India’s curves—and clung to their peaked crests. And it was his own bloody fault. He could have stopped the entire thing.

  But he’d been so sure she would stop it.

  And when she hadn’t, a morbid fascination had gripped him because she was so completely unlike any young woman he’d ever met. So utterly dogged in her purpose. So...herself.

  And because even after what she’d surely overhead yesterday, he still recognized the smoldering desire in her eyes—for him.

  He’d be a fool to read more into that than it merited. But one thing seemed clear: she hadn’t told her aunt what she’d heard in the church. If she were going to tell, certainly she would have done it by now. Wouldn’t she? Rather than go through all that scheming at the painter’s studio, trying to convince him that marriage to her would be an endless festival of cuckoldry?

  It was an effort that continued even now, as she paid not one whit of attention to the discussion, but a bloody lot of attention to a Monsieur LeGrand, who crossed his legs carelessly and toyed with his signet ring while he contributed the occasional offhand remark to the conversation. LeGrand was one of those self-styled intellectuals whose arrogance would get him killed outside the safety of a salon.

  India cast occasional glances in Nick’s direction, apparently to be sure he wasn’t missing any of her flirtations.

  Meanwhile, she had contributed nothing to the conversation. Not a consumer of poetry, apparently. It was a good guess neither was Lady Pennington, and Nick would lay a large sum on the prospect that Lady Pennington had skimmed just enough of the poet-of-the-evening as she prepared her toilette to be able to contribute the kinds of vague yet acceptably relevant comments she did now.

  Monsieur LeGrand expressed an uncharacteristically long opinion about a particular opening stanza, and Nick studied India’s carefully averted gaze and oddly rigid posture. The moment LeGrand finished speaking and the debate flared up on the other side of the room, she relaxed.

  Interesting. Why had she not done as her aunt clearly had and read a little of the poet’s work so as to chime in?

  He watched LeGrand bestow a moment of attention on her, and he followed the direction of the man’s gaze directly to the swell of India’s breasts above her stays.

  Nick’s jaw tightened. He could end this game they were playing tomorrow if he chose. Everything was all arranged with Père Valentine, who stood at the ready to perform the ceremony at a moment’s notice. Winston and Vernier had agreed to be available as witnesses under the same terms.

  There was no reason to wait.

  Except that the possibility of his seducing her into compliance seemed more promising than ever. And the idea of her coming to him willingly—even if only driven by desires of the flesh—appealed in a way that caught him down deep, and that he’d do well not to examine too closely.

  He leveled his eyes at her, met her gaze the next time she looked his way. I’ll gladly show you where all these flirtations can lead, India.

  Her cheeks pinkened, and her eyes darted away, and now he wanted nothing more than to take her away from here, find the nearest secluded spot—perhaps an enclosed carriage—and—

  “Mademoiselle India, surely you agree that this poem on the whole has a romantic, and not a rational, theme,” their hostess said.

  India’s attention snapped to the group, and for a moment she stared like a rabbit flushed into the open. Nick sat up a little in his chair.

  “I would agree with that,” India said. “Yes.”

  A gentleman across the room laughed. “Preposterous! Tell us a single verse that is not brimming with rationalism.”

  India hesitated, and then, “I believe that what is romantic is also rational.”

  That was the wrong, wrong thing to say.

  “Pass her the book,” the gentleman suggested. “Read the third and fourth stanzas aloud, mademoiselle, and let us see whether that might be true.”

  India paled, and now Nick sat fully upright in his chair. “Certainly there is something of the rational in the romantic,” he said casually, “else mankind as a species would die out.”

  Their hostess arched a brow at him. “Would it, indeed?”

  He couldn’t imagine why India did not want to read, except that perhaps she worried she would be subjected to further questions along the same vein. But if India didn’t want to read aloud to the present company—and he could hardly blame her for that—then by God, these self-important intellectuals were not going to force her.

  “Without romance, the required act would be rather...perfunctory, would it not?” he asked. “Which might be satisfactory for the male of the species, but would hardly be acceptable to the female—but forgive me, perhaps you would disagree on that point.”

  Laughter went up, and now the attention was fully off India. The hostess gave a witty retort, and the gentleman fired a new line of questioning at Nick, and while he answered, he glanced at India.

  And the expression on her face caught him straight in the gut.

  Thank you.

  She couldn’t have said it more clearly if she’d stood atop Notre-Dame Cathedral and screamed. Inside him something shifted. Surged. And if he never saw anything else in his life, he wanted to see her look at him like that again.

  He wanted to be her protector.

  The one she ran to when she was afraid.

  And God help him, because he wasn’t anyone’s savior. He was barely managing to save himself, and only thanks to this distasteful agreement with her father.

  She bloody well wasn’t going to thank him for that.

  * * *

  “YOU DIDN’T TELL me you’d invited guests to your portrait sitting,” Auntie Phil said later, standing in the doorway of India’s bedchamber. A small edge in her voice warned of displeasure.

  India sat in bed, dressed for the night but not tired at all, and wished there were even one soul in all the world she could talk to about what Nicholas had done tonight. About how she felt. But nobody except Father knew she couldn’t read—not even the many servants she’d cajoled into reading notes and letters aloud to her over the years after she’d pleaded a headache or eye strain.

  “Spectators are all the mode, are they not?” she said, arranging the covers over her lap.

  “Not for young virgins. And now I hear you’ve arranged to meet the Marquis de Bravard tomorrow at the Tuileries.”

  She certainly couldn’t tell Auntie Phil how she’d felt. It was becoming more and more apparent that Auntie P
hil might actually approve of a match between India and Nicholas. Inviting him to that soirée—there hadn’t been a need for that, no matter what Auntie Phil said—allowing Nicholas to escort India alone to the painter’s studio...and tonight, more than once, calling India’s attention to Nicholas in not-so-subtle ways, trying to get them to strike up a conversation.

  It was time to tell Auntie Phil the truth about Nicholas.

  “Never fear,” India said a little testily, “I made sure Lord Taggart overheard every word of my plans, and I’m certain we can count on him to make a very coincidental appearance.”

  “No doubt we can. But what I’d like to know is what you imagine will come of this little game you’ve been playing with him. A man will only stand to be toyed with for so long, India. There comes a point where he will either leave or make his move. And under the circumstances, I daresay Lord Taggart will not simply leave—which means he will make a move, and it may be one you won’t like.”

  India yanked the covers a little higher. “He can’t possibly imagine I will roll over like a dog at the threat of his intentions.”

  “Good heavens.” Auntie Phil laughed, toying with a ribbon at the neckline of her dressing gown. “That would never do. But given the inevitability of the situation—”

  “It isn’t inevitable.”

  “—what you can do is turn things around and gain the illusion of control, so that when the inevitable happens—”

  “It can’t.”

  “—it happens precisely the way you want it to happen, and not the way he wants it to happen.”

  It being their marriage. Hers and Nicholas’s. She saw him in her mind—felt the way he’d looked at her, the way she’d fought herself to keep from looking at him in return.

  Felt that overwhelming relief and gratitude when he’d intervened and kept her from having to confess to the entire party—including him—that she couldn’t read aloud, not even if they mocked her and laughed at her. Not even if they withheld her suppers and banished her to her rooms.