Just another example of how his world was being inverted. In no small part by Eve herself.
He blew out a hard breath and searched the armoire. How was he going to paint the nude he wanted with a model who refused to remove her clothes? No bloody idea. But he wasn’t ready to let go of her just yet. Not as his model, and not as simply the woman who had brightened his studio since she’d been coming here.
He held up a long corset. A good start. Then he went into the other room to fetch the pair of boy’s breeches he knew were there, leftover from a painting he’d done last year and shoved, unwanted, into the chest of drawers.
“Maestro?” she called out from below.
“Up here!” He held up the breeches and corset to gauge them for size. They would do.
She climbed to the top of the stairs and stopped. Then she blinked, surprised at the sight of him holding up stays in front of himself.
“I know that you probably want to change out of your wet clothes, too,” she began, cautiously, feeling out his sense of humor after their argument, “but I think you’ve been going to the wrong tailor.”
He grimaced and tried not to notice the way she looked in the dressing robe. Surprisingly more elegant than he’d yet seen her. Standing there like that, all deliciously rumpled and her wet hair now loose around her shoulders to dry, she was a vision. It was all he could do not to grab her and kiss her until she melted beneath him.
“These are for you.” He tossed them to her to avoid risking an accidental touch, then quickly stepped past her to return downstairs. And away from the bed located only a few feet away.
She followed him. “I don’t understand—breeches and stays?”
“A temporary compromise.”
He busied himself at the worktable by sorting through a box of pencils that had already been sorted, just to keep his hands busy and his mind on his art. But she was now a large part of that art, so the pencils did little good. He shoved the box away and turned to face her, leaning back against the table. His hands gripped the edge of the tabletop.
“I can’t sketch a nude if my model is fully dressed. So we compromise.” He waved his hand to indicate the corset and breeches. “Still clothed, but form-fitting and revealing enough that I can do the initial sketch for the underpainting.”
Her tension visibly eased, yet she said nothing in agreement to his proposition.
“It’s either this, or…” Or I have to find another model.
The unspoken words hung in the air between them, the silence broken only by a low roll of thunder in the distance.
“I don’t want to lose you as a model,” he admitted. “I thought it was the sense of curiosity and excitement in you that I wanted to paint, that contradictory look of innocent seduction.” He felt rather than heard her soft intake of air and continued in a quiet, low voice, one that matched the muted sound of the falling rain. “But it’s so much more than that. It’s the vitality in you, the sparkle…just begging to be painted.”
As his gaze trailed slowly over her, he felt as if he were truly seeing her for the first time. All the complexity of emotion inside her was starkly visible on her face, all of it endowing her with a sense of vulnerability that had him wanting to protect her at the same time that he wanted to expose her to the world.
The contradictions she embodied sent him reeling.
“That’s what I want to convey on the canvas.” His eyes fixed on hers, and he uttered the challenge with a confidence that pulsated inside him. “You want to feel special? If you give me the chance, Eve, I will make you immortal.”
For a moment, neither of them moved. Their gazes locked as the rain fell over the old carriage house and murmured in a soft hum against the walls and window. His heart ticked away the seconds, terrified with each one that passed that she would say no.
“Yes,” she agreed breathlessly, barely a sound passing over her lips.
That single whispered word tightened a coil of longing inside him, one that was more than physical lust. More than just his desire to emerge from Vincenzo’s shadow.
If he could capture her essence on the canvas the way she’d captured him—a masterpiece.
And yet…“Eventually,” he warned her solemnly, “you’ll have to undress completely in order for me to paint you the way I want.”
“I know.”
He suspected that when that time came, he’d have another grand fight on his hands. But for now, their tenuous compromise held.
He nodded toward the screen. “Go dress.” When she started forward, he added, “And leave your hair down.”
She hesitated mid-step but didn’t turn to face him. As if she suspected what the sight of her did to him, with her hair lying half dried down her back like that. Then she nodded and slipped behind the screen.
He hung his head in his hands and gulped down deep breaths of air to steady himself.
Madness, that’s what this was…Sheer madness! To dress his nude model in breeches and stays so she wouldn’t be naked—what would Giuseppe Carracci say to that if the old man were here to see what his star apprentice had come to? Just so he could keep an untried model in his employ.
A compromise? He choked back a bitter laugh. How many hundreds of times over the years had he told himself that an artist should never compromise? That his art had to be pure, his vision the sole focus of his creativity? Well, he’d just let a willowy, ginger-haired gel who wore her emotions in her eyes steal that focus away. And it stunned him.
“How do you do it?” she asked quietly from behind the screen, the silence stretching between them perhaps too much for her to bear. “How do you make scenes come alive on a flat canvas, with just paint and a brush?”
He lifted his head to stare at the screen and gave an ironic smile. “God only knows.”
“I’m serious,” she scolded lightly over the soft rustle of fabric. “You keep saying that you see so much in me—”
“I do.” More than she realized.
“But how do you actually do it? If I tried to paint the same picture, it wouldn’t be nearly as grand, even if I put the exact same colors in the exact same spots.”
“Practice,” he answered, only half jokingly. “Years and years of practice.”
“There’s more to it than that. There must be.”
When she stepped out from behind the screen, he forgot to breathe.
Never in the history of the world had a pair of boy’s breeches been as seductive as that pair. He’d been right about the material being form-fitting, but he’d never realized until that moment how round her hips were, how thin her waist beneath the long stays that reached down to the tops of her thighs. How full her bust as the plump tops of her breasts pushed up beneath the tight ties. And her hair, tumbling down her back like that…
Sweet Lucifer.
Misunderstanding the intensity of his stare, she nervously folded her arms in front of her chest and dropped her gaze to the floor. “Am I dressed all right, then, for what you have in mind?”
For what he had in mind at that very moment as his cock pulsed longingly, she was far too overdressed, and he wanted nothing more than to help her right back out of them. With his teeth.
“Fine.” His voice squeaked in a way that he hadn’t heard since he was fourteen. Christ.
If this wasn’t madness, it was damnably close.
He cleared his throat and pushed away from the table. “You asked how I create my pictures.” Yes, that’s it. Take the conversation back to his art. Art was safe territory, and since she’d raised the topic in the first place, perhaps it would stop her from being nervous around him. Because right now, she was as stiff as stone, and unwittingly making him just as stiff. “It’s all about learning techniques that allow me to make a picture appear on the canvas exactly as it is in my head.”
He gestured her over to a stack of finished canvases leaning against the rear wall. All sizes, various colors, widely varying subject matter…
He selected one and held
it up. “What do you see when you look at this?”
“It’s a drawing room.” She stepped to his side, and with her followed the faint scent of jasmine. “The doors are open to the garden. There’s a table and pianoforte, a fireplace—”
“Look closer. What do you see?”
She squinted at the painting, then announced dryly, “Paint.”
Cheeky chit. “Then you surely see the brush strokes, too, how some are thick and bold, others thinner, lighter…some just lines. And some places not lines at all.”
He set it down and picked up another. This one done from memory of the Italian countryside north of Rome.
“No lines, do you see? Just colors fading into each other, creating form and shadow.”
He put it down and selected another, this one of a woman sitting at her vanity, her back halfway turned toward the viewer and her dress slipping off her shoulders, as if it could fall the rest of the way off at any moment and bare her to his eyes. A single candle lit the woman’s figure.
“Thin layers of glazes upon glazes, until a color emerges, then eventually a form.” He murmured, “There are no lines in the real world. Only colors and shading.”
When he set it down and reached for another, he realized too late— Constance, lying reclined, with a length of red silk draped over her.
He frowned. He should have felt a sense of loss when he looked at her picture, or at least anger over her attempt to blackmail him. But he felt nothing except disappointment in himself as an artist. He hadn’t captured in this painting the emotional essence he’d wanted…that same sense of innocent seduction that radiated from Eve in every move she made.
“Sometimes the artist fails,” he murmured.
“How so?” Her question was innocuous enough, but he felt the tension rise in her as she gazed at Constance’s half-nude form.
“This kind of art asks the model to bare her soul, and it takes more courage to bare one’s soul than it does to bare the body. That’s what’s missing here. If the model doesn’t realize that, then the artist can never capture it. Constance never understood that.” He set it down. “That’s why you’re already a better model than she was.”
He flipped a sheet down over the canvases to keep the dust off and made a mental note to remove all the paintings of Constance from the studio. If his London dealer didn’t want them, then he’d find sellers on the continent who did. But he didn’t want them here bothering Eve.
“You said she wasn’t your muse,” she commented.
“She wasn’t.”
“Then who is?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I haven’t met her yet. Or perhaps I met her long ago and still carry her deep within me. Perhaps it’s not even a woman at all but a special place or object.” He arched a brow. “But whomever she is, she certainly isn’t Constance.”
He crossed to the work bench to fetch a piece of charcoal and felt her eyes on him, now studying him as closely as he studied her.
He gestured with the charcoal. “You want to know what brings a painting to life? It’s not technique. That’s what allows the paint to form on the canvas in the same way as the picture I hold in my head. But what inspires that picture in the first place, what compels an artist to spend months or years on a painting?”
“Yes?”
“That’s the magic spell.” His eyes locked with hers across the room, although he refused to let himself contemplate any further how Eve fit into that incantation. “That’s the muse.”
“And if you never find her?”
“Most artists don’t. That’s why they move from one woman to the next, lover to lover, model to model, always searching.”
She paused, and he could see the question she burned to ask resting on her faintly parted lips. “And if you do find her, if she’s a real flesh and blood woman…What happens then?”
He held her gaze in his for a long moment. “Perfection.”
“Then I hope you find your muse.”
So do I. He gestured at the chaise, then moved behind his easel and canvas so he could sketch her and retreat once more into the safety of the walled fortress his art had erected around him. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”
Chapter 7
Several Weeks Later
Eve raised her thumb and held it up at Dom, as if gauging the distance between them for the drawing she was making of him. She squinted one eye in mocking exaggeration of what she’d seen him do when he’d sketched her, moving her thumb forward and back for a full minute. Then she looked down at her sketch, made one small mark, and raised her thumb to start the whole process again.
“Enjoying yourself, are you?” Dom didn’t glance up from the worktable where he was taking inventory of paint. Normally, his apprentice would have mulled the paints from dry pigments, but since Jacopo was absent, Dom had been forced buy paint from the colormen. The paints now sat on the table in small bladders that had been punctured and resealed with a tack, ready to be mixed with oils and used.
The faint irritation she heard in his voice made her smile. “Immensely.”
She leaned forward on the chaise where she sat in the corset and breeches, with her hair down and her legs tucked casually beneath her instead of reclining in the pose he’d selected for the painting. There was no work today because the sky was too overcast, and Dom refused to bring in lanterns. Lantern light was the wrong hue, he’d told her, and would change the color of her skin.
So she busied herself instead with sketching him. And teasing him mercilessly.
“But you’re not holding yourself in a natural position.” She gave an exaggerated sigh of peevishness. “I am unable to capture your true essence.”
He scowled.
“There it is!” She scribbled madly on the paper.
He shot her an aggravated glance, although the sparkle in his eyes told her that he didn’t find her nearly as annoying as he let on.
In fact, they both seemed to enjoy quiet afternoons like this, cocooned in the studio, wiling away the hours until the sun decided to show itself again and he could continue painting. He’d completed the underpainting two weeks ago, layering across the initial charcoal sketch of her form on the canvas a thin painting in raw umber. No details, only the barest of outlines. Then slowly, over the next several days he’d applied layer after layer of paint to different places on the canvas, letting each layer dry before returning to that section of the painting. The earth tones of the underpainting gave way to the real painting above, rendered in vibrant colors that made her figure and face come alive on the flat surface.
But today, there was no work, and it was just the two of them in the studio. Jacopo had been called back to Italy for a family emergency and wouldn’t return for at least a month, and Eve was glad of it. Not that she didn’t like Dom’s apprentice—the young man had left her alone after she’d given him her most charming smile and told him in Italian that if he ever patted her bottom again she would grab him by the bollocks and castrate him. The threat was not lost in translation.
No, she simply enjoyed having the maestro to herself.
Best of all, Constance had not made a reappearance. Thank goodness. Eve was even gladder still when Dom had all the paintings of the woman removed from the studio. He said it was because he needed to concentrate on the model in front of him and couldn’t do it with images of other women in sight.
A complete fabrication, she was certain. Still, she was glad they were gone.
He crossed the studio to her and took the sketchbook from her hand to look at what she’d drawn. “Not bad.” Then he flipped it over to a blank page and handed it back. “Better.”
She gave a sniff of mock offense. “Perhaps you should rethink any plans you might have of becoming a model.”
With a low chuckle, he took back the book, then gently slapped her on the hip so she would put her legs down and make room for him on the chaise beside her. He sat, then held out his hand for the pencil. She gave it over.
“Looks l
ike the sun is never going to show itself today.” He began to sketch on the blank page. “You might as well leave and enjoy yourself somewhere else.”
“I enjoy myself here.”
He fought back a small smile of disbelief.
But it was true. During the past few weeks, she’d looked forward to being in the studio with an anticipation she’d never felt for anything else in her life. And not just because he made her feel beautiful, although he did, and the painting currently coming to life on the easel proved it. Dom also made her feel intelligent with all their conversations about art and culture, philosophy, humanism, and religion. Whoever would have suspected that her studies at Miss Pettigrew’s School for the Education and Refinement of Young Ladies had enough merit to prepare her for conversations like these?
More, he did exactly as he’d promised that day in the rain—he’d made her feel special.
He’d kept telling her that she was the only person who could pose for this particular painting, but she never truly believed him until he started putting the layers of paint onto the canvas, when her face and body began to emerge from the colors and shapes.
The truth, though, was that it wasn’t him or her. It was both of them, working together, that drove the energy and life appearing on the canvas. That was more special to her than he would ever know.
“What are you drawing?” She shifted closer to see the sketch, leaning into his shoulder and bringing her face next to his. If anyone saw them together like this…scandalous. But they’d worked together so closely during the past weeks that neither gave a second thought to such casual contact. Especially since he’d begun to paint her bare flesh.
His compromise of the breeches and stays had worked while he’d done the initial sketch and underpainting, and even when he’d begun to paint those parts of her—arms and legs, shoulders, head—that were already exposed. When he’d finished those sections of the canvas, though, she’d had no choice but to undress completely.
Thanks goodness she’d had a sheet draped over her then. While she lay bare beneath, he pulled back the sheet a few inches at a time, revealing only a small part of her to his eyes so that he could paint her yet not expose her completely. Now, almost all of the initial color layers were complete, except for those bare spots of canvas at her breasts and between her legs that she hadn’t yet dared to reveal.
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