“Hurry,” he said. “We must make haste. It’s already quarter past ten.”

“Quarter past ten? Are you sure?”

“Of course.” He took out his watch to show her. “See, precisely.”

“And your watch is accurate?” She had no confidence in him at all.

“Checked it against Big Ben’s chimes this morning.”

She rubbed her still-tender temple. She was forgetting something. What was she forgetting?

“My aunt! My goodness, she must be famished.” And frightened, all alone in strange surroundings, with Elissande nowhere in sight.

“Oh, no, she’s fine. You left her room key about, so I visited with her earlier while you were still abed. We even had our breakfast together.”

He had to be joking. This was a man who forgot that he needed to change his egg-stained trousers by the time he went from the breakfast parlor to his own room. How could he possibly have remembered her aunt?

“I invited her to come with us today, to call on your uncle. But she—”

“Excuse me?” Her head spun. “I thought…for a moment I thought you said we are going to call on my uncle today.”

“Well, yes, that is the plan indeed.”

She could not speak. She could only stare at him.

He patted her on the arm. “Don’t you fret; your uncle will be thrilled to see you respectably married—you were getting a bit long in the tooth, my dear. And I am a marquess, you know, a man of considerable stature and influence.”

“But—my—she—” Elissande stopped. In her fear she was stammering. “Mrs. Douglas, what did she say?”

He urged her into her blouse. “Well, I told her that we would be delighted if she could accompany us, but that I understood she must still be weary from her travels yesterday. She said she would prefer to rest today.”

Elissande barely noticed that he was buttoning her blouse. “I thought she would,” she said. “But don’t you see, I can’t leave her. She doesn’t do well in my absence.”

“Nonsense. I introduced her to my housekeeper and they are getting on famously.”

“Your housekeeper?” She supposed he must have one, since he could scarcely be expected to keep his own house. But in the rush of the past thirty-six hours, she had not once thought about where he lived or what his household arrangements must be like. “Your housekeeper is in town?”

“Of course. I don’t usually close my town house until early in September.”

He had a house in town and they were at a hotel?

“I’d like to see my aunt,” she said. She had little faith in his ability to hire good servants.

However, Mrs. Dilwyn, his housekeeper, turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise. She was a tiny dumpling of a woman in her late forties, soft-spoken and meticulous. In her notebook she had recorded everything that had transpired since her arrival at eight o’clock in the morning: the amount of fluid Aunt Rachel had ingested, her visits to the water closet, even the precise number of drops of laudanum she had taken—Elissande noticed she’d taken three more drops than usual, no doubt to erase the horror Lord Vere had brought about by proposing to take her back to Highgate Court.

“See, I told you,” said her husband. “Mrs. Dilwyn will quite pamper Mrs. Douglas. She spoils me extravagantly whenever I’ve the slightest sniffle.”

“My mum was bedridden the last two years of her life—Lord Vere was kind enough to allow her to share my rooms, so I could care for her,” said Mrs. Dilwyn.

“I quite enjoyed having her about. She used to tell me I was the handsomest man alive.”

“Oh, you are, sir,” said Mrs. Dilwyn with what appeared to be genuine fondness. “You are.”

Lord Vere preened.

Mrs. Dilwyn leaned closer to Elissande and lowered her voice. “Mrs. Douglas, might she be a bit irregular? I know my mum was.”

“Yes, unfortunately she is,” said Elissande. “She does not like vegetables and she hates prunes.”

“My mum hated prunes too. I will see if Mrs. Douglas might like a stewed apricot better.”

“Thank you,” said Elissande, half-dazed. She was not accustomed to having anyone share her burdens.

She did have a look at Aunt Rachel, who was dozing in bed. Then Lord Vere hurried her out of the bedroom and out of Aunt Rachel’s suite.

“Quickly now, or we’ll miss our train.”

She made a last-ditch appeal as he marched her down the corridor toward the lift. “Must we? So soon?”

“Of course,” he answered. “Don’t you want the man who raised you to meet your very fine husband? I must tell you I’m quite excited. I’ve never met an uncle-in-law before. We shall get along splendidly, he and I.”

Freddie owed much of his development as a painter to Angelica. She was the one who had seen his pencil sketches and recommended that he try his hand at watercolor and, then later, oil painting. She’d read the daunting book on the chromatography of oil paints and summarized it for him. She’d introduced him to the works of the Impressionists, with the art journals she’d brought back from her family’s holidays in France.

He had never been able to work with anyone next to him, except her. From the beginning she had been there with him, usually with a thick tome on her lap, absorbed in her own interests. From time to time she might read aloud from her book: the scientific reason why sugar of lead in paints resulted in the rapid darkening of the finished painting, a spicy sonnet from Michelangelo to a beautiful young man, an account of the infamous Salon des Refusés of 1863.

So in a way, it was inordinately familiar to work with her in proximity.

Except for her nakedness, that was.

She lay on her side on the bed he’d had his servants install in his studio, her back to him, her head propped up on one hand, reading The Treasures of Art in Great Britain.

Her hair fell loose, a tumble of umber locks interspersed with shades of raw sienna. Her skin gleamed, lit from within. The softness of her bottom made his fingers grip hard at his pencil. And that was before he even took into consideration her breasts and the shadowed triangle between her thighs reflected in the mirror she’d strategically placed on the far side of herself.

He had to remind himself every other minute that his purpose was art and the celebration of beauty. The comeliness of her body was as much a part of nature as the smooth bark of a birch or the sunlit ripples of a summer lake. He should have no difficulty appreciating it as form, color, interplay of light.

Yet he wanted nothing more than to throw down his pencil, walk up to this particular combination of form, color, and interplay of light, and—

He looked down at his sketchbook instead. Not that it was much help. He’d produced several drawings already, one a general outline of the entire tableau, one a study of her profile and her hair, one of her midsection, and one of what he saw in the mirror.

“Do you know, Freddie,” she said, “before I returned to England, I thought surely your experience with Lady Tremaine would have left you brooding and resentful. But you are the same man you always were.”

It was just like Angelica to raise unexpected topics. He looked at the empty canvas he had prepared.

“It’s been a long time, Angelica. Four years.”

“But are you completely recovered from her?”

“She wasn’t an illness.”

“From the loss of her then?”

“She was never truly mine.” He took a sharper pencil from his box. “I think I knew from the very beginning that we were on borrowed time.”

He’d been gloriously happy with Lady Tremaine. But there had always been an element of deep anxiety to his happiness. When she had reconciled with her husband, he’d been heartbroken but not bitter—because it had not been a betrayal, but only the end of a wonderful era of his life.

He flipped to a new page in his sketchbook and drew Angelica’s shapely calves, wishing his hands were his pencils, that as the drawing took shape, he could slide his palms across her cool, soft skin.