Portrait of a Scandal

He’d even bought some paints and attempted to reproduce the colours of that remarkable hair. He hadn’t been able to do it justice, back then. He hadn’t the skill. And he hadn’t been allowed to pursue his dream by taking lessons.

‘It’s for young ladies, or tradesmen,’ his father had snapped, when they’d discussed what he really wanted to do with his life, if not follow his brothers into one of the traditional professions. ‘Not a suitable pastime for sons of noblemen.’

He could do it now, though. He’d learned about light and shade. Pigment and perspective.

His fingers stilled. In spite of what his friend Fielding had said, she wasn’t merely a brunette. There were still those rich, warm tints in her hair that put him in mind of a really good port when you held the glass up to a candle. Fielding had laughed when he’d admitted his obsession with it and clapped him on the back. ‘Got it bad, ain’t you?’

He glanced up, his hand hovering over the half-finished sketch. He might well have had it bad, but he hadn’t been wrong about her hair. It was just as glorious as it had ever been. After ten years, he might have expected to see the occasional strand of silver between the dark curls. Or perhaps signs that she was preserving an appearance of youth with dyes.

But that hair was not dyed. It could not look so soft, so glossy, so entirely...natural and eminently touchable...

He frowned, lowered his head and went back to work. He did not want to run his fingers through it, to see if it felt as soft as it looked. He could appreciate beauty when he saw it. He was an artist, after all. But then he would defy anybody to deny she had glorious hair. A lovely face. And sparkling eyes.

Though none of that altered the fact that she was poison.

He looked up, directly into her eyes, eyes that had once looked at him with what he’d thought was adoration. He smiled grimly. It was easier to read her now that he was older and wiser. She was looking at him assessingly, challengingly, with more than a measure of calculation simmering in the brew. All those things she’d taken such care to hide from him before.

Yes, she was poison right enough. Poison in a tantalising package.

From behind him, he heard her current lover shift impatiently in his chair. He probably regretted allowing her to have her way in this. It must irk him, having her looking at another man with such intent, while he was sitting mere inches away. But he was doing so, as though he was powerless to deny her anything.

God, she must be extraordinarily gifted between the sheets...

His mouth firming, he dropped his gaze to the page on his lap, adding a few deft strokes which put depth to the image he was creating.

‘There,’ he said, taking the finished sketch and tossing it to her lover.

The man looked at it, raised his brows and handed it across the table to Miss Dalby, who snatched at it.

‘This is...’ She frowned as she scanned the picture. ‘It is amazing, considering you did it so quickly.’ The expression in her eyes changed to what looked almost like respect. And he felt that glow which always came when people recognised his talent. His gift.

They might say he was a failure in every other department of his life, but nobody could deny he could draw.

‘How much do you charge?’

Miss Dalby was looking at the picture she held in her hands as though she couldn’t quite believe it. He stood up, folded up his stool and gave the insouciant shrug he always gave his subjects. And gave her the answer he always gave them, too.

‘Whatever you think it is worth.’

* * *

Whatever she thought it was worth? Oh, but that was priceless! She would have paid any amount of money to have him sitting at her feet, a supplicant. Ten years ago he’d swaggered everywhere, bestowing a smile here, an appreciative glance at some beauty there, with the air of a young god descended to the realms of lesser mortals. It was worth a king’s ransom to see him reduced to working for a living, when at one time he’d thought that she, with her lowly background and her lack of powerful connections, could be tossed aside as though she were nothing. And a delightful notion sprang to her mind.

‘Monsieur Le Brun.’ She beckoned the courier, who leant closer so that she could whisper into his ear. ‘I should like this young man to have the equivalent of twenty-five pounds. In French francs.’ It was the annual wage she paid her butler.

‘Do you have sufficient funds about you?’

His eyes widened. ‘No, madame, to carry such a sum on my person would be folly of the most reprehensible.’

‘Then you must draw it from the bank and see that he gets it. First thing tomorrow.’

‘But, madame—’

‘I insist.’

After a moment’s hesitation, he murmured, ‘I see, madame’, with what looked, for once, bafflingly, like approval. And then, ‘As you wish.’

He reached into his pocket and produced a heap of coins, which he dropped into Harcourt’s outstretched palm.

‘Please to furnish me with your direction,’ he said, ‘and I will call to settle with you for the rest.’

* * *

Nathan’s lips twisted into a cynical smile as he scrawled his address on the back of the sketch he’d just drawn. It was obvious this impudent fellow meant to call round and warn him to stay away from the beauty he currently had in his keeping. From the sneer about the fellow’s lips, the Frenchman assumed he was penniless. It was the trap so many people fell into where he was concerned, because he wore old clothes when he was sketching, clothes that he didn’t mind getting ruined by charcoal dust, or from sitting in the dirt when there was an interesting subject he simply had to capture.

This Frenchman planned to make the point that Nathan need not bother trying to compete. He had the wealth to satisfy her. To keep her. And what did he, a shabby, itinerant artist, have to offer?

Apart from relative youth, good looks and a roguish smile?

And all of a sudden, he had an almost overbearing urge to do it. To take her away from this slimy excuse of a man. To pursue her, and win her, and enslave her, and bind her to him...and then throw her away.

Because, dammit, somebody ought to punish her, for every single thing he’d gone through this last ten years. If she hadn’t set her sights on him and damn near enslaved him, then he wouldn’t have been so devastated when he found out what lay concealed behind the pretty façade. He would not have agreed to the disastrous marriage brokered by his family, or embarked on an equally disastrous political career, from which he’d only managed to extricate himself by committing what amounted to social suicide.

Oh, yes, if there were any justice in the world...

Only of course there wasn’t. That was one lesson life had taught him only too well. Honesty was never rewarded. The devious were the ones who inherited the earth, not the meek.

Tucking the pile of coins into his satchel, along with his supplies, he employed the smile he’d perfected during his years in politics, directing it in turn at the Frenchman, at Miss Dalby, and at the mousy woman who was sitting with them at table.

And strode out of the door.

* * *

‘Goodness,’ breathed Mrs Mountsorrel. ‘I have heard of him, of course, but I never expected him to be quite so...’ She flushed and faded into a series of utterances that could only be described as twittering.

But then that performance was the one he’d used so many times to reduce susceptible females to a state of fluttering, twittering, hen-witted compliance. Having those heavy-lidded, knowing hazel eyes trained so intently on her face would have had the same effect upon her, too, if she hadn’t been enjoying seeing him grovelling at her feet quite so much. And then again, there was something about the combination of those aristocratic good looks, and the shabby clothing, that might have tugged at her heartstrings, had she any heart left for him to tug at.

‘He has the reputation with the ladies rather unsavoury,’ put in Monsieur Le Brun, at his most prune-faced.

‘Oh, yes, I know all about that,’ twittered Fenella. ‘Miss Dalby is always reading accounts of his doings that appear in the newspapers. Why, his wife wasn’t dead five minutes before the most terrible rumours started up. And then, of course, when he fell from grace so spectacularly, there was no doubting the truth of it. He would have sued for libel if the papers had been making it up. Or is it slander?’

‘You sound as though you find him fascinating,’ he said, with narrowed eyes.

‘Oh, no, not I. It is Amethyst who followed his career in public life so closely. I mean, Miss Dalby, of course.’

He turned to her with a frown.

‘Well, madame, I...I commend you for wishing to aid someone you have known in the past. And being so generous, it is one thing, but I implore you not to be deceived by his so-charming smile.’