The Look of Love

by Kelly, Julia

  He took the next two steps more slowly now, but his heart was beating rapidly with the realization that this wasn’t just a random collection of drawings. Each mattered. They were all real moments of true connection in their friendship. They told him she’d noticed just as much as he had.

  The next drawing was unmistakable. It showed Ina in an evening dress on her knees while he sat on a sofa in Mrs. Sullivan’s library the night she proposed to him.

  Four steps up, their wedding day. This one was sketched as though a member of the audience was taking in the soaring altar that dwarfed Reverend Macdonough as he stood between the two of them, Ina’s long veil flowing out behind her.

  The drawing after that sat only one step away. It was Ina in her dressing gown, standing just over the threshold of his bedroom on their wedding night.

  The drawings were placed every other step now. The night he came to her bedroom to tell her about his job. The two of them eating sandwiches in her studio. The boat ride to Daldour Abbey. A drawing of them in Daldour Abbey that would make even a libertine blush. Them at breakfast. Them by the fire in their drawing room, each with a book in hand. The train ride to Oak Park. Him holding Ina while they sat on the window seat in her room at the manor house.

  He clutched more than a dozen sketches in his hands now, and he was almost to the top of the stairs. He looked up, and pinned to Moray’s office door to cover the glass was one last sketch. He hurried up the stairs and nearly stumbled when it came into view. It was drawn as though by someone looking through the office door to Moray’s desk. Leaning against the desk with her arms braced on either side of her was Ina.

  He dove for the handle, pushing open the door. His breath left his body when his eyes landed on his wife standing just as she’d drawn herself.

  “Ina.” Her name was half groan, half prayer on his lips.

  She let go of the desk, her hands coming together in front of her skirts as they always did when she was nervous.

  Before she could say a word, he was across the room. Sketches scattered around their feet as he caught her up, one hand at her waist and the other cupping the back of her neck, and kissed her.

  He kissed her as though he’d never kissed her before and would never kiss her again. She melted against him, and he poured everything into that kiss, because he’d known the moment he saw those sketches on the stairs that she’d told him exactly what he’d longed to hear all those years. She loved him.

  Her fingers gripped the fabric of his jacket a little tighter, as though she never wanted to let go. But then she broke away. Still clinging to him, she leaned back to study his face.

  “You’re kissing me,” she said.

  “Yes, and I want to do it again.” He tried to bundle her in his arms, but she leaned back further, threatening to upset a pile of papers on Moray’s desk.

  “I had an entire speech planned out where I was going to beg you for forgiveness,” she said.

  “You can still give me the speech if it makes you happy.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand. You’re supposed to be angry with me. Furious. You never wrote after I left you word. I thought you were gone forever.”

  He frowned. “I never got anything in the post.”

  She shook her head. “I left a letter with Grace.”

  The letter Grace had given him had been from Ina. He’d been so wrapped up in his own anger and disappointment he hadn’t even considered that his wife might’ve tried to leave word explaining to him why she’d left.

  “She only gave it to me two days ago, and I didn’t realize it was from you,” he said.

  She pulled her shoulders back and let go of him. “Then I have things I must say.”

  He smiled as he looked down at her. “So do I.”

  “Me first,” she insisted. She swallowed, and then said, “I’ve been a coward for a long time.”

  “No.”

  She shook her head. “I have. It was easier to be your friend, so that was what I wanted more than anything else. I clung to that idea so hard because my life was easy so long as I stayed unmarried. I had you and my work. That was enough.

  “Then we married and it was as though everything turned upside down. I began to understand that you were more to me than a friend, and more to me than a husband.”

  He raised a hand to cup her cheek, his thumb stroking over the indent just below her lower lip. Her eyes fluttered closed and he reveled in the pleasure it gave her. He never thought he’d touch her again, and each night he’d broken a little more because of it.

  “There are so many things I regret,” she said, “but the one thing I don’t regret is marrying you. I love you.”

  Those three words filled his heart up until he almost couldn’t take it. For years he’d wanted to hear her say it without prompting or coercion. I love you. Not with a qualifying as a friend. Just those three words and nothing else.

  Ina bit her lip, refusing to flinch or cringe in embarrassment as she watched Gavin. She loved him fully and without reservation. He should know, and if he didn’t feel the same way she needed to know now.

  She’d thought she was prepared for him when she heard him on the stairs. Her hands had trembled terribly against the mahogany desk while she waited, and she’d feared he might see her sketches and simply walk out. When he’d come crashing through the door, her knees had almost given out in relief. Then he’d dropped everything and kissed her like a starving man, and she’d been lost.

  But now everything was in his hands. All she could do was wait.

  His hand traced down her arm until he reached her hand. His fingers danced over hers before pressing their palms flush against each other and lifting her hand to his lips. He pressed a kiss to the back of it, sparking her skin.

  “I came back because I’m hopelessly in love with my wife.”

  Her heart soared. Gavin still loved her. It hardly seemed possible after everything they’d gone through. After all of their time apart. And yet here he was, professing it to her amid all the sketches that were her way of showing him that he mattered. That she cared.

  “I knew you were special from the moment I first sat down and talked to you, but it took me some time to realize I’d fallen in love. I became infatuated because you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but that was a superficial sort of love,” he said. “It wasn’t until we married that I understood what it was to really love you. Body and soul. I want you with marble dust in your hair. I want you sitting across a fire from me, distracting me when I’m trying to read. I want you in every way a man can want a woman.”

  She blushed at that.

  “I want you when I make you blush too,” he said with a grin before leaning in, his voice a whisper. “When you blush all over.”

  “Gavin,” she said, pushing gently at him.

  “I loved that you left because you were thinking only of what you thought was best for me,” he said, kissing the inside of her wrist and making her shiver with delight. “I loved that you came to Oak Park without question.” A kiss to her forearm. “I loved you on Daldour.” Her elbow. “I loved you on our wedding night so much I could hardly be in the same room as you for fear I’d reveal too much.” He edged her against the desk again, his legs pressing against her thighs. “I loved you the day I married you.” He kissed her neck. “I loved you the day you proposed to me.”

  She laughed.

  “You hold my heart in yours, Ina. You always have,” he said softly. “Is there any chance you might come to trust me once again?”

  “I should ask you the same thing,” she said, her eyes brimming. “I was the one who left Oak Park. I was so frightened you’d come to resent me. Everything your mother said is true. My family is only just respectable and that’s only because of my father’s money. People still talk about my mother. I have a passion that’s not supposed to be fit fo
r ladies. I’m ill-suited to run a grand house like Oak Park.”

  “I don’t care a whit about any of that,” he said. “The truth is, my mother’s a horrible snob.”

  “I should never have run. I thought I was absolving you of our marriage. I’d just found out about Grace and she was so much more suited—”

  “She’d never suit me. She isn’t you.”

  She couldn’t help the smile that touched her lips. “You truly don’t care that I make a poor baronet’s wife?”

  “I’m a baronet and you’re my wife. That’s all I care about. I’ve been thinking about letting Oak Park as soon as I can make the necessary improvements to the land. I don’t want to live in that stodgy old house any more than I imagine you do.”

  “It would give me great pleasure never to set foot in it again, but”—she drew in a deep breath—“if it’s important to you that we live there for part of the year, we can make arrangements.”

  “Not at all. I was thinking that we might look at buying our house on Rothesay Place with the income from Oak Park’s rents. Or we could go somewhere else.”

  “We’ll figure that out later,” she said. “There’s something else I’d rather do first.”

  She pulled him down into a kiss.

  This was where she was meant to be. With the man who saw her for who she was and loved her without hesitation. The sculptor and the writer. The Scotswoman and the Englishman. Ina and Gavin.

  When at last he pulled away, he pressed a kiss to her temple. “There’s no rumor, is there?”

  “Rumor?” she asked.

  He pulled out a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She skimmed it, her eyes widening. “Is this what Moray wrote to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought something had happened to me?”

  “I thought Gowan might be spreading rumors because you’d come home unaccompanied,” he said. “I worried that you might be in some sort of danger, and I couldn’t get here fast enough.”

  She shook her head. “It sounds like Moray knows you better than you think.”

  “If you tell him that, he’ll never shut up about it.”

  She laughed. “Your secret’s safe with me. We should go home and give him and Eva their office back.”

  “Before we do . . .” He bent over and shuffled through the sketches on the floor, handing them to her as he went. Finally he held one up in the air, triumphant.

  “This one is coming with us,” he said, turning the sketch from Daldour Abbey for her to see. “I’m considering having it framed and hung in our bedroom.”

  “Our?” she asked with raised brows as she stuffed her sketches into her portfolio.

  “Pick one of them. I’m done sleeping apart from you. We can keep separate rooms if you think it’ll scandalize the servants any less,” he said.

  She laughed. “If we hang that on the wall, sleeping in the same room will be the least of their worries. Besides, aren’t I supposed to be the scandalous one?”

  He grinned and looped his arm around her waist. “Then I’d better start catching up.”

  Epilogue

  Two weeks later

  INA STOOD IN the middle of the crowded gallery, her hands clamped on her husband’s arm to prevent them from shaking. Gavin was on her right, practically holding her up, while Lana was on her left. Christine had stopped in front of them to examine a sculpture of a woman with a water pitcher. With her stood Anne, chaperoned by Moira Sullivan, for although Mrs. Breck didn’t approve of the several nude sculptures—including that of the mysterious I.R.D. that had made a stir at this year’s Royal Sculpture Society exhibition—getting into the good graces of Edinburgh’s premier matchmaker was far more important than standing on principle.

  “It’s going to be fine,” said Lana, leaning into her.

  Ina knew it was ridiculous to be nervous. It wasn’t as though this was the first time the public would lay eyes on one of her works, but commissions had provided only one type of validation. Now her work was being exhibited next to some of Europe’s premier sculptors and even she had to admit it was intimidating.

  “I’ll never understand why the judges didn’t award Hero and Leander the top prize,” Gavin grumbled.

  “An honorable mention is far more than I’d hoped for,” she said, squeezing his arm to press her body lightly against his.

  “At least on Friday half of Scotland will know who I.R.D. is,” said Christine. “I’m glad you’re letting Moray write that article about you. It’s a shame Gavin couldn’t do it.”

  “Moray says I’d write far too glowing an article, and he’s probably right,” said Gavin.

  “I’ve instructed my butler to purchase as many copies of the Lothian Herald-Times as he can find on Friday morning,” said Moira. “There are a few members of the Royal Academy in London who shall be receiving a copy by Saturday post.”

  Ina laughed through her nerves, secretly happy that the fierce, well-connected lady was on her side—as was her incredibly supportive husband. He’d approached her with the idea to publish her real identity when they’d lain tangled in her sheets after their reconciliation. He’d calmed her nerves at the initial idea and coaxed her gently until she’d agreed. Then he’d spent a good portion of the evening thanking her all over again.

  “There are so many people here,” said Anne, looking around in wonder at the exhibition that sprawled over two floors of the Assembly Rooms.

  “It feels as though half of Edinburgh is here,” said Mrs. Sullivan, her fan flapping in front of her to create a breeze on the unseasonably warm day.

  Ina’s smile was strained, and she looked around again for her sculpture. Hero and Leander were here somewhere. She just had to find them.

  Lana squeezed her arm tight and said, “You’ll feel better once you see it.”

  Ina nodded quietly and allowed herself to be led through the gallery.

  Christine glanced at the program in her hand and up at the corresponding number on the wall. “It should be the next room.”

  If the previous room had been large, this one was massive. The butter-yellow walls with their delicate white plasterwork were the perfect backdrop for the cool grayish marbles that dotted the room. Huge windows let beams of natural light stream in and reflect off of several massive mirrors. All throughout the room, groups were clustered around sculptures. Ladies carrying folded-up parasols chatted amongst themselves as gentlemen, who looked decidedly uncomfortable even in their summer-weight suits, accompanied them. But rather than feeling slow and lethargic, the air had a charged, frantic atmosphere about it. It was as though everyone in attendance was drawing on the energy of such creativity in one place.

  “I think that’s it,” said Anne, pointing toward the middle of the room.

  Through the crowd, Ina glimpsed the foot of Leander. Her Leander.

  Pride cut through her nerves and her feet went willingly to the sculpture. It was unreal seeing it in such a setting as this. Her work was being displayed alongside some of the best in Britain. She’d been shaking when she nailed down the top of the crate, refusing to let Norris do it because it was her work in there. Her talent. Her breath. Her life.

  Her lovers were beautiful.

  Whoever had placed the work had put it directly in front of a window, and the warm glow of the sun made the natural crystal in the marble sparkle. Her piece wasn’t tall like some of the more monumental statues, but the lifeless, almost languid pose of Leander and the bent sorrow of Hero were arresting nonetheless.

  It was the best thing she’d ever done, and now she was here, sharing it with the people she cared for the most.

  “He’s beautiful,” whispered Lana, squeezing her tight.

  She nodded and murmured a thanks, not trusting herself to do anything more.

  “You can almost hear her weeping a
nd her gown looks soft to the touch,” said Christine. “How do you do that with a hammer and chisel?”

  Ina gave a shaky laugh. “How do you flit around the notes of the Queen of the Night’s arias?”

  Her friend inclined her head as though to say she understood.

  “Who is it by?” a pretty, plump blond woman standing a few feet away asked.

  Ina froze, feeling all at once exposed and yet curious.

  “It says here the artist’s name is listed as ‘I.R.D.,’ ” said the woman’s companion, his tall beaver hat dipping over the program in his hand.

  “It’s extraordinarily good,” said the woman.

  “A little scandalous too,” said the man who cocked his head to the side. “Shouldn’t he be wearing something?”

  The woman laughed and swatted the man on the arm with the familiarity of half of a long-married couple. “He’s just drowned in a river, darling. Surely you can’t expect him to be wearing a dinner jacket.”

  The man smiled rather indulgently.

  “You should ask Mr. Simon who the sculptor is,” the blond lady said, referring to the head of the Royal Sculpture Society.

  “Do you know, I think this is the same man who sculpted that Hercules in the other room,” said her companion.

  “The artist preferred to remain anonymous, but I can’t see why,” said Gavin, leaning toward the couple with a smile.

  She looked at him, rather alarmed by the mischievous tone of his voice.

  “Who can ever really understand artists?” said the gentleman.

  “She is rather a mystery to me, even if I am married to her.”

  “Gavin!” Ina gasped out.

  “She?” asked the woman with delight as she looked from Gavin to Ina. “Are you the artist?”

  He swept an arm before her. “Meet my wife, Ina Rose Duncan, newly made Lady Barrett.”

  “You’re not supposed to say anything until Friday,” she said, nudging him in the ribs with her elbow.