Flirting with Forever

by Gwyn Cready

  Oh.

  Her throat dried, and for a moment the scratching of the pencil on paper was the room’s only sound.

  “I, ah, thought this was to be an interview.” She tilted her head toward his tablet.

  He laughed. “’Tis an artist’s interview. I draw. You talk.”

  “And then you’ll decide if you can paint me?”

  “Have no fear on that account, milady.”

  He turned the tablet and began at another corner.

  “I am sorry about your husband,” he said. “Were you long married?”

  She thought of her time with Jacket. “Four years.”

  “It must have been heartbreaking.” He stole a quick glance at her. “Four years is not a long time.”

  She felt a pang of guilt, thinking of her brother’s loss of his wife and son. “I—Yes.” She scoured her brain for a route into the conversation she wished to have. “I have heard a good many things about your work, and, of course, I have admired it myself.”

  “Have you?” His pencil worked the page, making long strokes and more detailed ones, thick lines and thin. Jacket never worked from a sketch. Wherever his reapings came from, it wasn’t a sketch pad, and Cam hadn’t seen an artist work like this in some time. It reminded her of her own drawing classes in college. It struck her as oddly interesting that the process hadn’t changed much in three hundred years.

  The drawing had become an angular thing, with many lines in parallel. Cam leaned forward. “Ah, that’s not my face.”

  He laughed again, a rich, throaty laugh that emanated from deep in his chest. Still, he didn’t look up. “No. It is your hand, milady.”

  She felt an unexpected sense of discomfort. She thought he’d been sketching her as a whole, though, in fact, he hadn’t looked at her more than once or twice since they’d sat down. It seemed more intrusive, somehow, for him to focus on a single part of her body. The thought was irrational, she knew, but that didn’t stop the rush of heat across her cheeks.

  “Your fingers are slim and strong,” he said, defining a nail with a few quick curves, “yet without any of the coldness or implacability that can detract in such matters. There is a determined grace here, which I find interesting.”

  Immediately her fingers laced together in a nervous grip.

  He caught the movement and bowed his head. “I beg your pardon. My attention has made you uncomfortable. The cardinal sin of portraitists. May I have your leave to sketch the drape of the dressing gown? ’Tis less intrusive, and the contrast of the dark against the light is really quite remarkable from this angle.”

  Cam relaxed as he turned the page. “Aye.” The three tall windows in the room showed the purple-blue of the sky to the east and the orange-red in the west, reminding her of the view from her loft at twilight, the south hills of Pittsburgh laid out like some sort of Tuscan landscape, with the towering squared spires of the Presbyterian church and the neighboring conical tower of the Catholic one sitting like a pair of medieval fortresses on the highest ridge of the town. In the winter the structures were lit with spotlights and reigned triumphantly over the coming darkness.

  It had been a December night four years ago when Jacket found her watching the same scene from the top of Mt. Lebanon’s open-air parking garage and had swept her into his arms, offered to move to the States, and asked her to marry him. A month later he’d bought them the loft space, high atop the building across the street, having convinced the building’s owner to scrap plans for a suite of offices. As Jacket said when he handed her the keys, “I want to give you the night sky.”

  It seemed like such a long time ago. But when he’d given back the ring, she’d felt some of the same sort of magic again. Her heart twinged. Would she ever see him again? She knew where she was, but not how she’d gotten here or if she’d ever get back. She couldn’t even get a look at her phone for fear of Lely seeing it. While she couldn’t help but admit she was enjoying his company, she wished she could get just a moment or two alone.

  The phone buzzed to flag a new text. Oh God, she had service! But then she saw Peter’s eyes.

  “Um.” She jerked the chair forward. “Sorry. Readjusting.”

  He returned to his tablet.

  Whew! She moved her hand slowly to her purse. His gaze lifted, and she stopped. If she could only get him to leave.

  “Mr. Lely, might I have a glass of water? I find I am quite parched.”

  “Certainly.” He went to the door, and she reached for her phone. But then he tugged a brocade pull beside the door, and in the distance she heard the faint ring of a bell.

  Crap! How hard was this going to be?

  “Someone will be here in a moment.” He lowered himself once again to the stool.

  “Thank you.” She sighed and inclined slightly. “’Tis not the best light for sketching.”

  He paused. “You are versed in an artist’s needs?”

  She nearly laughed. An artist’s needs. Did she have the energy to do that again with Jacket? “A bit.”

  “Do you draw or paint?”

  Cam started. He meant her. It wasn’t uncommon for a woman in Lely’s time to have been tutored by a governess in sketching and even watercolor—Dürer had popularized the latter as a medium in Western Europe in the early sixteenth century—but from the time Cam had abandoned hopes of becoming a painter herself any direct question about her own artistic abilities made her self-conscious.

  The door opened before she could answer. It was Moseby, who started visibly at the sight of her. The look of horror that followed suggested the rules about when the master may and may not be interrupted were well-known and strictly enforced. Poor Moseby. It just wasn’t his day.

  “I do beg your pardon, sir, most humbly I do. I thought you had rung,” he said and attempted to slip back into the hall.

  “I had, Tom. Come in.”

  Moseby reentered, cap in hand, looking as if he’d rather be carved into pieces and served en brochette. “Sir?”

  Cam thrust her hand in her bag and jerked the phone into view, “What the hell just happened?” the text read. Poor Jeanne. She looked at the signal. One bar.

  “We should like some water and wine,” Lely said, “as well as cheese and fruit.”

  Cam tilted the phone, and the bar disappeared.

  “Immediately, sir.” Tom shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I am most grievous sorry about the painting of Miss Gwyn, sir. Most grievous. You were quite the canny one, miss,” he added enthusiastically in Cam’s direction. “A right bit of sleight of hand, what with donning that gown in a whore’s trice. It was downright—”

  Lely cleared his throat significantly, which almost made Cam drop her bag, but the noise had been aimed at Tom, who paled and retreated, though he only made it two steps before reversing himself and returning.

  “Tom, this is more time than I had wished to spend with you this afternoon,” Lely said, returning to his sketchbook.

  The young man relaxed, and even managed a lopsided smile, the master’s teasing tantamount to forgiveness. He said, “The cheese and fruit, sir, is that to be your supper?” Then, apparently deciding there was a better path into the matter at hand, tried this instead: “Sir, Miss Kate sends her compliments. If she is not to be a Danish supporter, she wishes to eat, and would you be wantin’ to join her at the Orb and Scepter for joint of suckling pig? No charge for her time.” He blew out a long breath, grateful to have completed his mission.

  It seemed to be Peter’s turn to shift with embarrassment. His cheeks turned ruddy, and Cam didn’t know if he regretted the revelation of his model’s status as a prostitute or the fact that, despite having taken advantage of her marginalized position by employing her for his patrons’ pleasure, he was still ungenerous enough to require a free ride when her own meter was running. Cam hoped it wasn’t the former. It would have been hard to
imagine a woman willing to pose entirely nude coming from any other profession in Peter’s time. And as for the latter, well, Cam had hardly met an artist who didn’t feel as if every pleasure in the world was owed him. Why should Peter be different—other than the fact, of course, that she’d begun to think he might be?

  Peter dropped his pencil and had to bend to retrieve it. “My compliments and regrets to Miss Kate,” he said stiffly. “I am otherwise engaged.”

  Moseby nodded happily, this message being far easier than the first. “Otherwise engaged.” He bowed. “I will inform her immediately.”

  * * *

  Peter reached for the pencil blindly. He had no wish to meet his companion’s eyes. There had been a time before Ursula when neither his supper table nor his bed had lacked for companions—lithe, accommodating beauties from all reaches of the court who had sought his company with eagerness. But he had never been a whoremonger, and he employed the women to keep them off the street. If you had two eyes, two arms, two legs, and the semblance of a smile—and often even if you did not—you could find a place in one of Peter’s tableaux. His patrons liked to have the beautiful ones around. If you were not beautiful, you cleaned or cooked. But beautiful or no, you did not warm the bed of Peter Lely. Kate knew that, even if she chose to pretend she didn’t. And all of the women received a decent wage, all the food they could eat, and a place to sleep in the studio if a place was wanted.

  No, he had no wish to glimpse the look on Mrs. Post’s face. What he wished was to lose himself once again in the sketch and their easy conversation. Forgetting himself, even for a moment, had been nectar indeed.

  “I do not mean to displace Miss Kate,” she said. “If you have an engagement, you need not cancel it. We won’t be long.”

  He gripped the pencil and continued to fill in the shadow. The lily of the valley scent that seemed to blossom off her skin was torture. “Kate is in my employ. She’ll understand.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Tell me,” he said, capturing the puddled line of the hem, “what size portrait you seek?”

  He felt rather than saw her shift.

  “I don’t know. The usual, I suppose.”

  “We have full-length, three-quarters, and half, depending on your needs. Is that his ring?”

  She touched a chain at her throat, thinking he meant the ring Jacket had given her, then followed the line of his gaze to her other hand.

  “Oh, this? No.” She held out the aquamarine in a filigree setting. “This was my mother’s. She got it from her mother-in-law after my father proposed. Then she gave it to my brother’s wife when he proposed.”

  He looked up, curious. “And then your brother’s wife gave it to you?”

  “No, she passed away, actually.” Her face clouded, and he regretted the question. “My brother wanted me to have it. I think he felt it would keep a piece of her alive for him.”

  Aye, Peter thought, to send both a bolt of joy and sorrow through him each time it came into view. How tiringly predictable the despairing are. He touched his emerald and wondered what sort of bittersweet treasures Mrs. Post kept of her dead husband.

  “You have seen a world of unhappiness,” he said. “A husband, a sister… ’Tis a comfort, I suppose, you have a brother with whom to share—”

  She held up a hand, wrenching discomfort on her face. “I have a confession to make.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m not a widow. I’ve misled you.”

  Peter, who had anticipated the revelation of her real name, felt his stomach lurch. “I see. You are married.”

  A beat. “No.”

  But this was not the “no” of a maiden. He steadied the pencil and waited. You fool.

  “There is a man—”

  Peter’s heart clenched.

  “—though we are not married.”

  “You’re lovers?” The words were as natural as if he were asking about the tides or the upholstery in a carriage. He finished the drape of the gown and flipped the page in the book. He would not deny himself at least a small sketch of that hair, even if it were the only way he might possess it.

  “Yes,” she said with a hard, crimson flush. “Well, no, not now. We were once. We were engaged to be married, though it ended badly, and I left him. That was in June. He’s asked me to reconsider.”

  The blood howled in Peter’s ears, though he noted instantly she did not say she’d accepted. He brought the pencil in an untamed curve across the page, followed by another, and another. “Tidings of joy to you, then,” he said, trying to keep the question from his voice.

  “Aye.”

  The look on her face did not match the pronouncement.

  “When is the happy day?” he asked.

  “What? Oh, I don’t know. His offer was very recent.”

  Which is why, Peter thought, she came to me. The portrait would be her answer.

  In the face of this burning disappointment, he had two choices. He could tell her his diary was full, thus ensuring this foolish misadventure would be stopped before it began. Or he could paint her and accept their time together for what it would be: a stupidly painful crush played out in a series of sittings in which Peter would lose himself in her image if not the woman herself while the flames of intimacy licked painfully at his heart.

  It had been a long time since he’d felt anything in that stony organ except despair, so it was with some surprise he found himself willing to trade one punishment for the other.

  His shoulders relaxed. The terms, as it were, had been negotiated. He would burn and twist, like a pig on a spit, but he would possess her metaphorically. And no woman who had ever been possessed by Peter Lely left without the stamp of him on her somewhere.

  “Come,” he said, jumping to his feet and offering his hand. “Let me take you to the portrait studio.”

  “But why not stay here?”

  “The studio has better light.”

  “But…”

  “Come. The room is just upstairs.”

  “Over this one, you mean? Directly over this one? At the top of the house?” She clutched her bag possessively.

  He looked at her, confused. “Aye.”

  She put her hand in his. “I should like to see it.”

  Sixteen

  Cam gazed around the small space in surprise, her hand still warm from his touch. He had led her up a short flight that reversed at a landing, to a long but narrow room. The space was lit by a row of windows angled above them, following the line of the slanted roof overhead. Four bars, here we come, she thought. Through the diamond-paned glass, the orange-red rays of the sun spread like the layers of a tequila sunrise. Across the room, a set of double doors were opened to a narrow balcony. An easel stood against the south wall, next to shelves of brushes and jars. In the center of the room a double-sided fireplace, beside which Peter now crouched, rose from the floor to the roof. An upholstered chaise sat across from the easel.

  “This studio is for my evening work,” he said. “We have light full west.”

  The room’s sensibility differed immensely from that of the lower rooms of the house, partly because of the smaller scale of the elements—a lantern instead of sconces and chandeliers, shelves instead of a workbench—and partly, Cam realized when she turned, because of a low, wide settee that stretched out in the darkened space on the other side of the fireplace.

  Covered in etched velvet, the settee’s cushion was perfectly flat and long enough to seat four with ease. Several plush throws lay folded near one arm, and a dozen or more cushions in various silks and Far Eastern prints camouflaged the settee’s odd depth and high-backed frame.

  When she spotted the decanter of pale yellow wine and glasses on a low side table, she realized with a small gasp that it wasn’t just a settee. It was a seducing couch.

  His evening work, eh?
<
br />   She turned and crossed her arms. “My fiancé says he despises an evening light.”

  As she’d hoped, Lely flinched at the word fiancé. Nonetheless, he continued his arrangement of dry grass and kindling beneath the grate.

  “Why is that?” he said.

  “He says it makes every brushstroke lie.”

  Peter stopped and turned, and Cam instantly realized her error.

  “Your fiancé is a painter?”

  “He is…” The wheels of her mind spun but nothing came. “…a painter, aye.”

  “Would he not prefer to paint you himself?”

  Cam felt the familiar rush of embarrassment. “No. This is meant to be a surprise.”

  He returned his gaze to the kindling. “What’s his name?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t know him.”

  “I know almost all of them.”

  “Jacob,” she said. “Jacob Ryan.”

  “Ah,” he said, brushing his hands on his breeks and standing. “You’re right. I don’t know him. Irish, is he?”

  “His father, yes. His mother’s from London.”

  “And his work?”

  “Portraits, mostly.” She thought of the fruit in Lucite. “Some, er, still lifes.” Still lifes were what she had once painted. She waited for Peter’s dismissal of the genre. Portraitists were notoriously snobby when it came to still lifes. Of course, in the 1600s, “historical” paintings—scenes from the Bible, mythology or history—were considered the highest form of painting, so Lely’s work was already a step down from the top rung of the ladder. She wondered on what rung Restoration-era painters would put the sort of post-conceptual art Jacket did. Probably a ladder in a different universe.

  Lely made no comment, just picked up the lantern he’d brought from below, and used a stiff piece of paper to move the flame to the kindling. The room filled with a golden glow just as footsteps sounded on the stairs.