Scandalous Brides: In Scandal in Venice\The Spanish Bride (5 page)

Elizabeth froze. No. It could not be. Could it?

“It is the dark lord from the ball last night!” Georgina crowed dramatically.

Elizabeth let out a tiny squeak. Her pencil fell from numb fingers, scattering parchment every which way. “Nicholas,” she whispered.

Georgina clapped her hands, dancing around the room on her small green half boots. “Is it not wonderful, marvelous?”

“But ... how?”

Georgina suddenly whirled to a stop, and looked innocently down at her fingernails. “Fate, Lizzie. It was meant to be.”

Elizabeth clicked her tongue knowingly. “Um-hm. Fate. A redheaded fate.”

“Oh, Lizzie, don’t fuss! What does it matter how he came here? It was obviously meant to be.” Her eyes narrowed. “It is just such a pity you look as if you had been dragged through a cow pasture, dear. You are not a charwoman, you know.”

Elizabeth’s gaze flew to the mirror. She did indeed look like the proverbial beggar-girl. Her hair straggled from its loose plait, falling over her face and her nightgown-clad shoulders like limp black linguini, and her face was chalky and hollow from lack of sleep and a surfeit of champagne. She dragged the nightgown over her head, and fled to her dressing room clad only in a silky chemise.

“Fear not, Cinderella!” Georgina sang, producing a comb from her pocket. “Your fairy godmother is here.”

The Elizabeth who finally emerged from her room was completely unrecognizable as the shrieking ragamuffin she had been not fifteen minutes before. Her hair was neatly plaited and coiled in a gleaming coronet atop her head, fastened with ivory combs. She was freshly attired in a blue sprigged muslin morning gown, and she smelled of her favorite lilies of the valley. Bianca and Georgina waved her off like proud mamas at a night at Almack’s.

And if she was tugging on stockings and slippers as she hopped one-legged down the stairs, who was to notice?

She paused at the foot of the stairs, half hidden by the newel post as she peered through the open door of their small drawing room. It
was
Nicholas. The dark man who had almost kissed her in the moonlight, and who had haunted her night. She had almost come to the conclusion that he had only been a dream, an enchantment of the night. Night in Venice could be quite intoxicating, after all; it could make things, and people, who were really quite ordinary seem almost earth-shattering.

Now she saw she had been quite wrong to suppose he could ever be ordinary in any light. He was impossibly, piratically elegant amid the comfortable shabbiness of their rented furniture. Today, his unfashionably long hair was held back in a neat, black ribbon-tied queue, revealing the clean, strong line of his throat and jaw as he tilted back his head to look at a painting on the wall. His blue coat and buff breeches fit him like a second skin; his boots were glossy with a champagne polish.

And she felt like the lowliest beggar-girl, despite Bianca and Georgina’s efforts. She longed to run back and out in her violet silk, her best day dress. But he had already turned, and seen her lurking there, watching him.

With a deep breath, Elizabeth pasted on her brightest smile and stepped forward, hand outstretched. She just hoped he would not notice the smudges of charcoal across her knuckles, or the paint beneath her nails. “Mr. Nicholas! Such a surprise.”

He lifted her proffered fingers to his lips, his breath warm and sweet on her skin. “I had heard that you were in need of a secretary, Miss Cheswood.” • Secretary? What could that be? Every thought had flown out of her head at the sound of his voice. “Where could you have heard that?” she answered, surprised that her voice sounded so steady and normal when her heart was bursting.

“Shall we say, a small bird told me? A small red bird.”

She could not help but laugh at the wicked glint in his dark eyes. “Oh, I see. Yes.” She seated herself as regally as possible on a threadbare chaise, attempting to tuck her feet beneath her so that he could not see that her stocking had slipped from its garter and fallen to her ankle. Kicking off her slipper, she tried to pull the tube of silk up with the toes of her opposite foot.

“You did not mention that you were in need of a position,” she said. She gestured to the fine cut of his clothes, the unscuffed boots. “Indeed, you do not look as if you need to work at all.”

“Appearances can be deceiving, Miss Cheswood. You would do well to remember that.” Nicholas turned back to the painting he had been studying when she came in. “Is this your work?”

Elizabeth’s mouth softened as she examined the painting, a portrait of a young mother and her infant. “Yes. The woman was a peasant, who brought us fresh milk and eggs when we were at Lake Como. She was beautiful, like a Madonna. It is one of my favorites, but it is an early work of mine, very rough.”

Nicholas tilted his head, taking in the smiling, golden-haired mother and her fat bambino. The lines
were
rather rough, the background of rolling hills and trees clumsily drawn, but the woman’s vibrant personality shone like a fine red wine on a summer day. The vivid blue of her skirt shimmered. It was obvious that Elizabeth
saw
people, saw their true essence, and captured that on canvas. It was remarkable.

Then his gaze shifted from the smiling peasant woman to another mother, painted on a smaller canvas. This mother was pale, her red-gold hair falling over silk-covered shoulders, her blue-gray eyes smiling at the toddler beside her. There was something about those eyes....

“She looks remarkably like you,” he blurted out.

“She should. She was my mother.” Elizabeth ran her eyes over the woman’s painted green gown, the fall of her hair. “She died when I was nine, long before I ever picked up a paintbrush. This was from memory, it was ... I don’t know. Fantasy? I simply ...”

Then she came back to herself, to the dark eyes intent on her, and she could have bitten her tongue for running on so. Whatever was she thinking, to be babbling on about her mother so? And to a man who, no matter how devastatingly attractive, was a stranger. An
English
stranger. His eyes, those black, fathomless pools, the way he focused on her every word as if it were the most vital thing that had ever been said, they were enormously seductive. He made her quite long to tell him everything, every ugly secret she carried inside, to unburden her soul and move forward, free from guilt and pain and the whole rotten past. This man had enormous power, she sensed, but whether for good or evil she could not tell.

He was probably quite the rake back in England. Just like someone else she knew.

It would be so very, very foolish to give him such power over her. If he was not to be trusted, then news of her whereabouts would find its way back to England so very quickly. Peter was still her legal guardian. He would come for her, drag her away from the tenuous happiness she had found for herself in Italy.

That Elizabeth could never bear. She could never go back to being Lady Elizabeth of Clifton Manor again. She had put all that behind her that awful night. The night she became a murderess.

It had been folly to even paint that portrait of Isobel Whitman Everdean, the Countess of Clifton, Incomparable, Diamond of the First Water, and mother. Anyone could have recognized her.

She would have to be very careful around this intense, unreachable man. She would be quite foolish to hire him, bring him into their household, make him privy to their secrets.

Really.

She couldn’t do it.

She could not!

“We were not speaking of my painting!” she snapped suddenly, turning her head away from her mother’s smile, the smile that seemed to say
You are my daughter after all.
Isobel had always had a keen eye for masculine beauty.

Nicholas seemed unfazed by her small fit of temper. He simply looked at her with faint amusement in his handsome eyes, and came to stand beside her. He towered above her, enveloping her in his warmth and the spicy scent of his soap, surrounding her in an inescapable cocoon of ... of sheer
maleness.

Not that she especially wanted to escape, she found.

“Were we not?” he mused, quite serene and unaware of her faintly gasping breath, the flush on her cheekbones. “And here I thought that your painting was the very reason I am here.”

Elizabeth relented, and waved him to be seated on the chair beside hers. Anything so that he would cease looming over her, and she could think clearly again. “How
did
you discover I was in need of ... assistance?”

He shrugged. “Venice is small. One hears things.”

So it
was
Georgie, Elizabeth thought. A small pang of unwelcome jealousy pierced her heart with the vision of her exquisite friend laughing and whispering with this man.

This
man
continued. “Despite what you may think, Miss Cheswood, I
am
in need of this position. I am a long way from home. Do you not want to help a fellow English patriot in need? A weak cripple, helpless and in need of an employment?” He brandished the silver-headed walking stick he had been leaning on.

He was about as helpless as a prowling lion on the savanna, Elizabeth knew, but oh, he
was
lovely with that teasing gleam in his eyes. He swept his waving hair back from his forehead in one silky movement, and she almost melted into a puddle at his feet. A great, oozing puddle of female giddiness.

She also thought more pragmatically of the pile of unpaid bills stuffed into her desk drawers, of the hours of work that were going unrewarded because no one thought it important to pay a mere woman promptly. There were so many things she needed, such as pigments, canvas, new clothes. And she could not go on forever living on Georgina’s generosity.

If anyone could get her rightful earnings quickly, it was this man.

Oh, but to see him every day! To look at him, talk to him, smell him. Could she do that, without throwing herself at him in some hoydenish fashion?

Could she?

Did she even have a choice in the matter?

No. She did not.

Elizabeth rose and went to the unshuttered window, staring unseeing at the crowded alleyway below. Never, ever had she felt about a man as she did this one, this mysterious stranger with the roguish glint in his eye. There was something in him, an energy, that drew her inexorably.

She had always associated the sex act with her mother and stepfather’s frequent noisy couplings and equally noisy screaming fits. With the rough hands of her ancient “fiancé” tearing at her clothes. With the intense way Peter would sometimes watch her, after he came back from Spain a sunburnt stranger. All of it had seemed so very repulsive. The few times she had become a bit tipsy and allowed Stephen or another artist to kiss her, she had been overwhelmed with fear and pushed them away. Even with Georgina’s assurances of the joy of the act, she had not been convinced.

Elizabeth felt none of this fear around Nicholas. From the first instant she had glimpsed him in the Piazza San Marco, she had felt only delicious warmth, giddiness, like lying in the grass on a hot summer day. She had dreamed of him in her sleep after the ball, dreamed of kissing him. She had bitterly regretted the fact that they had been so rudely interrupted on the terrace.

Was she in truth becoming the “wanton artist” she had been labeled by the more respectable society they had encountered?

She turned away from him now in abject confusion, her palms pressed to her hot cheeks. It was all so odd! Of all the men she had met in her travels, she should feel the least safe with this one. His presence was overwhelming in their narrow house, his silences intense and watchful, as if he waited for something from her. She knew almost nothing about him.

Nothing except the way she felt when he was near. And for now, that was enough.

“Very well,” she answered at last, turning back to him with a smile. “You are engaged.”

He did not answer, merely watched her. His hands moved over the head of his walking stick.

“But you should know,” she continued, “that I cannot afford to pay you until ... well, until after you begin your duties. I have no ready blunt at the moment.” She had used the last of it on new ball gowns for Carnivale.

“Actually, Miss Cheswood,” he interrupted, “you have something I would much prefer to ... ready blunt, until I have begun my duties and you are able to pay my wages.”

Elizabeth stiffened. Had she misjudged this man after all? Was she not safe in his presence? She frowned. “What, pray tell, might that be, sirrah?”

But he surprised her yet again. “One of your paintings. Any you choose.”

She felt her jaw begin to sag, and snapped it shut. “My ... paintings?”

“Yes. I have an idea they will be worth a great deal one day. If, however, you would rather not part with one ...”

“No! I am quite willing to pay you in paintings. I am simply surprised that you would choose that over coin.”

He smiled at her again, that flash of white teeth and dimples that left her dazzled. “Maybe you should give me your account books to look over, Miss Cheswood, so I may begin my duties.”

“I have one duty for you already.”

“Indeed? And what might that be?”

She laughed at the naughty tilt of his grin. “Nothing terribly interesting, I’m afraid! You must call me Elizabeth.”

“Only if you, in turn, call me Nicholas.”

She nodded. “Done. We are very informal here, as you shall soon find.”

As she went to retrieve the books from where she had shoved them beneath a table, Bianca came in bearing a tea tray, still wearing her bedsheet draperies. Her eyes rolled in approval at the handsome man, and she almost tripped over her train while trying to swing her hips in his direction.

Close on her heels was Georgina, a smart feathered bonnet on her auburn curls and a green velvet cloak folded over her arm. She clapped her gloved hands at the sight of the dusty ledgers. “Excellent, Lizzie!’ she said. “I see you are finally showing good sense, and have hired Mr. Carter. So lovely to see you again, sir.” She held out her fingers, and Nicholas gallantly raised them to his lips.