“I agree that I will not steal any woman from any man,” Raphael intoned through gritted teeth. “I will not sully any woman’s honor with my wicked ways.”
The flint in George’s eyes melted into gold. He smiled suddenly. Raphael uncrossed his arms, fighting against the urge to give an answering smile, feeling like he was being bathed in a golden, warming light. Ah. So, George’s charisma was the magnetism that kept men and women coming back to this club. In the dark study, the energy that radiated from him almost illuminated the small corner of the room, like the contrasts in a Rembrandt tableau, where a single shaft of light slanted across the canvas to highlight the artist’s chosen subjects. Raphael’s fingers flexed, itching to paint, as they had done after that godawful Concard ball.
“All right. Then you are in.”
Raphael sat back. “That’s it? That’s all I need to do?”
George shrugged. “Yes. Have you any questions?”
Raphael leaned forward again. “Yes. What do you actually do here?”
Raphael followed George through the town house as he opened door after door, and each time motioned Raphael to peer inside. One room seemed to be dedicated to fossil identification, another to farming techniques, and yet another to the construction of romantic poetry. Each room contained women and men exchanging ideas, arguing, laughing.
Raphael drew back from one particularly raucous room dedicated to gardening, of all things, and leaned against the wall of the hall. “Where’s the dance hall, the card rooms?” he asked brusquely as George followed him out. Surely, there had to be somewhere where one could escape actually talking to the opposite sex, and instead engage in some normal pursuits. He was a painter, a man accustomed to his solitude, not some kind of roustabout gossipmonger.
Even in Mayfair, in his painting room in Barden Hall, he couldn’t find peace or silence. Not even in his head.
Dear god, he would kill for something to neutralize the black slime of discontent that buzzed behind his ears.
All his so-called friends bothered him, who persisted in pulling him from his painting to engage in drinking bouts, where they moaned about women. Even the sober ones, the politicians, and the not-so-sober ones, such as his friend Miles, who attended the Prince Regent. God knows why they were his friends. Look where they’d got him…nicknamed The Beast of Barden Hall.
How his friends had laughed. They said the ton had known what it was doing when it laid that name on his shoulders after his supposed affair with Carina, that the ton could see Raphael’s roaring insides.
The new moniker had been good for business.
Briefly, Raphael smiled.
“Did you see someone you liked?” George asked hopefully.
Raphael started. “What? Oh no.”
George sighed. “I knew it wouldn’t be that easy.”
Inwardly, Raphael snorted. He didn’t need to find someone he liked. He just needed to finish his bloody painting.
George gave him a considering look. “Tell me, what sort of a lady are you really interested in?”
Raphael stilled. The question wasn’t one he’d ever considered. Women had always come easily. The women whose faces had captured his attention to the exclusion of all else—women he’d painted—had inevitably ended up between the sheets. Then the control they tried to exert, or a twist to the lips when they sneered at more unfortunate members of the ton, or sheer boredom on his part – would draw his attention away and onto a new subject.
He’d stolen plenty of other men’s women that way, but he’d never been the one to make the first move. Always, he’d been the first to end each affair.
Just, dammit. He wasn’t guilty of the last one, never mind his reputation.
“They have to have a certain something,” he ventured, hedging at what could be the truth for some people, though he had absolutely no idea. He never dallied with a woman very long, casting them back quickly as he tired of them. His father had been the same. He had had a very dim view of women, something which the alleged affair with Carina had reinforced for Raphael rather than blown apart.
“Everyone here has a certain something for someone,” George said dryly. “You can do better than that.”
Raphael crossed his legs. Perhaps if he enumerated the opposite of what had caused him to turf most of the eligible women from his bed? “No sneering. No predictability. No obsessions with the ton.”
George nodded and continued nodding as Raphael fell silent. “Anything else?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
George sighed. “Let’s look at this another way. What do you do as an artist? Apart from paint, of course?”
Raphael paused. “Mix colors, look at the light, position the canvas, pick out the distinctive features…”
“Look for the little things, you mean? The things that add up to the whole?”
Raphael nodded. “Yes, well if you put it that way—”
George smiled, the slightly worried look that he’d worn for the last half hour falling away. “I believe you will find someone you like here. But you’ll have to search for her. And you will have to use your observations to inform you.”
Bloody hell. A cryptic…marriage maker. That’s all Raphael could call the enigmatic man. If he hadn’t joined the Lonely Hearts Social Club for another reason, he’d have asked for his money back. Suggesting that Raphael had to find the woman himself was tantamount to saying, ‘Here’s my club, everyone’s looking for somebody, something might fit like a silk stocking.’
George continued quite cheerfully, “The dancing room and card room are on the ground floor near the main entrance. Some of our less committed members pass the time there.” George’s face lapsed into its customary plainness. He examined his nails. “Of course, we are always interested in members who set up their own interests. Perhaps you could offer art classes, although you wouldn’t be the only one.”
“Come and see my etchings, you mean?”
George gave him a long stare. “You seem to be treating my establishment as some sort of joke. I would like to point out that you were the one who wanted to join us, not the other way ‘round. You are, of course, free to leave at any time.”
George’s words echoed in the suddenly quiet corridor. Raphael peered around the door jamb into the room they had just left.
Every pair of eyes was turned toward the door. Every face was alive with interest. Every mouth was pursed as if to burst out with “Beast of Barden Hall!” as soon as he withdrew his head.
He wasn’t disappointed.
“You may have an uphill struggle,” George said delicately. He shrugged. “I’ll leave you to look around by yourself. See if you can meet some like-minded individuals.” He turned on his heel and walked away as softly as a cat, leaving Raphael alone in the suddenly noisy corridor.
Raphael dismissed George’s words immediately. Like minded individuals, indeed. There was only one reason he was here. He wasted no time. He prowled down the corridor and opened the first door that he and George hadn’t yet entered. Good grief. Musicians. Playing in a quartet with more promises in their eyes than promise in their musicianship. They were always a rowdy lot, musicians. Why did they have to join a club in order to find a mate? As far as Raphael knew, musicians were always finding themselves in compromising situations. Take his friend Miles, for instance – a committed rake and violinist. One chance to get out his violin and every lady was playing his tune. Raphael compressed his lips. In fact, it was Miles, the popular-with-the-Regent Miles, who had got him into this mess. If Miles hadn’t got Raphael the commission to paint Carina’s portrait, Raphael would never have lost his friendship with Bertie and he would never have ended up at the blasted Concard Ball and—
He slammed the door with a bang, causing several overblown parps on the clarinet and a severe scrape from a violin bow. Bloody musicians.
The next room was a billiards room. A man was teaching a lady very delicately how to hold a billiard cue. She didn’t seem to need the m
an’s help, but the cue just happened to keep slipping out of her grasp. Raphael snorted. Courtship was the same the world over.
He tried several more doors down the corridor. Flower arranging—awful—some kind of chemistry affair, and, lastly, dressmaking.
None of the subjects interested him. Shaking his head, he opened the last door and climbed a narrow flight of stairs to the third floor.
It was quieter up here. And only three rooms remained. In one of them, a lady paced, while three men hung on her every word. Raphael only caught the words “The murder weapon…” before he closed the door. What he sought wasn’t in there.
The second door opened upon a light-filled room without furniture or occupants.
The third small room contained four people. Raphael quietly pushed the door open wider, then stepped back into the corridor when the noise inside his head exploded and his heart thumped. Dammit to hell and back, that didn’t normally happen when he pursued a subject for his painting.
Stalking forward again, he advanced across the open threshold, dimly taking in the tableau that had frozen at his entrance. Three ladies sat in a crescent, easels in front of them, facing a bowl of fruit on a low table in the center of the room. A man crouched beside the table, pointing at an orange in the bowl.
Raphael ignored the man and stepped around the nearest woman, barely noting the disgusting brown with which she had daubed her canvas. He knocked her canvas as he attempted to move farther into the room.
She squawked into life. “Here, who do you think you are?” She jabbed him sharply with her brush.
The man in the center of the room straightened, emitted a loud snort, and faced Raphael as he tried to reposition the upset canvas. “Well, well, well. I wonder what we’ve done to deserve this pleasant company?”
“Rude company, you mean, Mr. Russell.” The aggravated paint brush jabber poked Raphael again with her brush, hard in the ribs.
“The man whom you are currently tickling with your wonderful and artful baton, Miss Athena, is The Beast of Barden Hall.”
Raphael swung round and snarled, finally turning to look at the man at the center, annoyed that he’d been drawn away from his quarry. Dark eyes met blue ones, intensely blue ones. Bertie.
A mixture of surprise and deep shame overcame him. Bertie was a member at the London Lonely Hearts Social Club, too? There was a time when they had told each other everything. Gods, he had so much to tell his longtime friend, the only man who understood why Raphael was the way he was—
“So, are you here to steal another commission, Raphael—I mean, Beast—or are you here to steal more hearts?”
The ladies gasped.
Raphael stiffened. Before, they’d always talked man to man. Both had been Englishmen apprenticed to David Martin, the renowned Scottish portrait artist. They’d shared a room in Edinburgh and drinking bouts in the town taverns. Bertie had even been with him when it had been announced that Raphael’s father had died. He’d seen Raphael’s conflict. Had strangely understood Raphael’s joy and yet sadness.
Recently, they had begun to emerge from Martin’s shadow, gaining their own reputations. Bertie, however, had seemed to be branching out into still lifes, which was why Raphael hadn’t hesitated to accept the commission to paint the Prince Regent’s mistress. He hadn’t known that the commission previously had been offered and then whipped away from Bertie before it was too late. And now he couldn’t tell him why.
Raphael hunched and glanced warily toward the back of the room, meeting two quizzical brown eyes that flicked over him, assessing him, seeing into his very soul. The lady’s delicate lips parted in a repeat of when he’d first seen her. Her lithe hands held a small brush. He couldn’t stop his curiosity. Ignoring Bertie, he stepped around the next woman’s easel and headed to the side of his quarry to see what she had painted. Oh god, please not more brown oranges.
The canvas held no oranges at all. Instead, she had painted an exquisite, tiny beetle. Something that wasn’t there. She was undoubtedly a good painter—excellent, in fact—but hadn’t she rather missed the point of the exercise?
“Do you like what you see?” Bertie said over the top of the easel. “Perhaps you could come and take some lessons.”
Raphael swung to face Bertie, shame forcing confrontation into his voice, “Why would I need to do that?”
Bertie folded his arms.
Raphael’s blood ran cold. Bertie had a protective look on his face. Good god. Was Bertie saying that this was his woman?
For Bertie certainly wasn’t talking just about painting.
Chapter Three
Ophelia kept her eyes on her canvas. She couldn’t seem to do anything else, not after she’d been pierced by Lord Barden’s dark gaze. He was standing right beside her. Her breaths came short and fast, and her brush trembled, spattering paint against her skirts.
“Oh!” She stared down at the fat drops of green oil paint that dribbled down her sober dress, reluctant to wipe them away, sure her elbow would touch Lord Barden’s large form even as he and Mr. Russell, the painting master, ignored the class and exchanged their cryptic comments. Slowly but surely, heat crept up the back of her neck. What was he doing in the London Lonely Hearts Social Club?
It was a coincidence, surely. One of those strange moments where everything conspired to look like something other than it was. She’d been assured of that regularly over the past dull weeks she’d spent dead heading roses back in Weatherop Wold, wondering if a convent really would have been a better escape from the ton.
Keeping her traitorous eyes on her artwork, she ignored the men and pressed the brush to her canvas, pleased that it remained firm in her hand. She added a hint of emerald green to the image she’d created of a beetle that had crawled over the orange in the fruit bowl half an hour before and tried to ignore the large shadow cast across her canvas.
“No, not like that!” Lord Barden said unnervingly close to her ear.
Oh god! What had she done? She gazed at the fruit bowl, frantically looking for the beetle—had she got the colors wrong? But the beetle was long gone. Briefly, she was flooded with heat and then a chilling realization chased the warmth away. He was going to tell her, like all the others, that she was wrong to paint something that didn’t exist.
A beautiful black curl grazed her ear and Ophelia shivered with awareness. She inhaled sharply as Lord Barden closed his long fingers around hers and stroked the canvas with the tip of her brush, edging more emerald green paint off the brush’s bristles onto the canvas in soft movements to cover the beetle’s back. “Perfect,” he whispered in her ear before withdrawing his warmth as suddenly as he had given it.
Ophelia froze. Her mind blanked. All the myriad observations that normally fed through her brain stopped. She looked up, breathing out as if she had taken her last breath.
Lord Barden watched her closely, drowning her in his eyes. He took her trembling hand, turned it over, and kissed the soft underside of her palm.
Oh gods. Yes. Her heart raced, filling her chest, and she shivered again.
“Thank you,” the demon-angel said. And then he let her hand go and stalked from the room, knocking Athena’s canvas again, and leaving a brusque “Bertie” lingering in the silent room.
“Well!” Athena exploded. “Did you ever see such arrogance? Such stupidity? No wonder he’s called the Beast of Barden Hall.”
As the words fell from Athena’s mouth, Ophelia stiffened. After the dullness of Weatherop Wold and endless probing questions about her marriage prospects from her mother and her aunt, finding the card for the Lonely Hearts Social Club had felt like a hand from God. And though she’d fumbled with the shears in the Club’s dressmaking room, gazed hopelessly at the fossils in the archaeology room, and almost run screaming from the gardening room, returning to painting had been a blessed relief. Even if she had to endure Athena’s boredom and obvious crush on the painting master.
But she’d had enough of listening to Athena dishing the
dirt on this person and that person, as Minerva, their classmate, sucked it all up and regurgitated epithets about the offending individuals. With her heart still filling her chest and an energy coursing through her veins, Ophelia put down her brush with a sharp click on her easel and took a deep breath. “As one who is called the Whelp of the Wolf of Weatherop Wold, Athena, I can assure you that a small amount of licentious behavior does not merit one to be called a beast, rude or otherwise.”
Athena’s head whipped back as if Ophelia had slapped her. “I—I—” she stuttered.
“Quite right,” Mr. Russell said quietly.
Ophelia turned her head toward his and stood up, the unfamiliar effervescence in her body propelling her onwards. “You called him a beast, too, not ten minutes ago.”
Mr. Russell reddened. “I think painting is finished for today.” With jerky movements, he picked up the orange from the display and started to peel it with a small pocketknife.
“But you haven’t judged our paintings!” Athena said, obviously recovered from Ophelia’s outburst.
“I don’t need to,” Mr. Russell said with a sigh, lifting one broad shoulder in an elegant shrug. “You will have done something spherical in brown, Miss Minerva will have painted a passable orange, and Miss Ophelia will have painted something that no one else has seen in the room.”
“A whelp and a wishful thinker,” Athena muttered, not very quietly. “No wonder she hasn’t had a sniff of interest on the marriage mart.”
The declaration was like a physical blow to Ophelia’s body, flattening the energy that had buoyed her upwards. She watched, winded, as Mr. Russell fixed Athena with a solicitous stare that seemed to convey pity rather than support. “Not all of us can see the reality of life when it is presented to us.”
Was he speaking about her or Athena?
Beautiful Beast (The Marriage Maker Book 36) Page 2