13

The back room was shockingly quiet, after the buzz of the gallery. The space was crammed with dusty shelves bearing canvases, stretched or rolled and tied with twine. A wall of wood and gilt frames, tools, a desk overflowing with invoices.

Arabella led the duke through the warren of shelves. She had crammed her rejected piece in a corner, under a cloth.

She wanted to ask him a thousand questions so badly her jaw hurt. The issue was that as soon as she did, he'd start supplying answers. She could imagine many that would hurt. Especially since, completely ignoring her good sense, a tiny moth of hope had awoken inside her ribs.

She gestured to the covered canvas, propped on a dilapidated easel. "Here it is. Feel free."

He lifted the cloth, and saw that it was a portrait of him.

It was very much like the one she'd drawn that night—his visage against an indistinct, storm-gray background, head and shoulders, hair mussed, buttons of his wrinkled linen shirt open. Rendered in oil paint, rich with detail, nuance. Fully realized.

He stepped back, surprised. "When you said you worried it would cause problems, I imagined it was you, naked."

"Oh. No. I cannot imagine that would do much one way or another, at this stage of my storied existence."

He regarded the portrait more fully. She had worked on it slowly, over weeks. In part because it resisted her. She kept trying for the mix of emotions she'd seen in him when he sat for her that night in the cottage. But her brush instead kept rendering him amused, and intent, and fascinated. She knew it was impossible for a viewer to discern the story of the moment they were seeing, but it made her cheeks burn that the smile quirking up his lips was the very one he'd had at the moment he told her that he would give her what she wanted, but only if she begged.

By his face, though, it seemed very possible that Nick recognized it.

"It is my best work, I think. My favorite, at the least."

He was still gazing at it. "Then why not show it?"

"Because it would embarrass you. And your wife."

"Well. As I mentioned. No wife."

"I am sorry to hear it."

"Are you?"

"Regardless," she said, hating the quiver in her voice, "I would not wish to cause you further talk. You've been through quite enough of that."

He stepped closer. Too close. She started to move back—but couldn't, finding her back against the wall.

"Bella, Bella," he said softly. "There you go with the compassion. I thought you understood I am quite amused by the ridiculous things people say."

"Still—"

"And more than that, I thought you understood that I value the truth." He nodded to the portrait. "‘ Something happened between them. That wicked expression on his face. Bastard looks ridiculously besotted, '" he said, mimicking the gossipy voices of the ton. He gave a short laugh. "They'd have gotten it right for once."

She didn't know what to say. Probably because so much of her mind was employed in surviving the nearness of his body. She was beginning to feel light-headed. "Your Grace—"

" Nick . Say Nick. I made you scream that name. Extremely disappointing to hear you go backward after all that effort."

He was going to touch her any minute. If he touched her, she would die, which posed a problem because if he did not touch her, she would die.

"Nick."

"Yes. Better."

"Why did you not wed?"

He did touch her then. One lock of gold curl, loose at the edge of her upswept hair. "I didn't love her."

"I thought that was the point."

"So it was." He smoothed the lock back into her chignon. "The urge to kiss you is strongly interfering with my ability to carry on this conversation."

"You'll need to be the one to step back. You have me pinned."

His gaze flared at that, and she realized it had come out more provocatively than she'd intended.

He took a step back. Exhaled, gathered himself. And continued the explanation. "I'd done a much better selection job this time. I could not have been less interested in her. I stood an excellent chance of succeeding in my plan to never love again. Pity I was already so deep in it with you that the entire exercise was a farce."

Arabella opened her mouth, but had no idea what to say. So she shut it.

He shook his head. "I'm not far enough away. I still want to ravish you."

He took another step back, and sighed. "Barely any better. At any rate, after you left, when I realized it was not going to pass, how I felt, I was worried. It was hell, to be precise about it. I was wretched without you, but if I went after you and you said yes, well, then I would have the woman I loved, and I'd doubtless only grow to love you more, and that seemed imperative to prevent, due to my worrisome history, et cetera." He shook his head, wry. "Exhausting bind you put me in, pet."

"I cannot apologize. You're the complicated one."

"Fair. It wasn't until I came here, with a fiancée who was not you, and I heard about this exhibition, that I realized ... " He hissed. "I can't stand this far away anymore. How would you feel about continuing, closer?"

"I'm not sure I would hear a word of it."

"I'll risk it." He closed the distance between them, pulled her close, and kissed her.

There was no preamble to it. In an instant, he had her full against his body, her lips parting under his, his tongue finding hers.

She felt a surge that was relief and hunger, pushed her fingers into his hair, grabbing it by the fistful to pull him tighter. He pushed her against the wall, his body on hers. She wanted more. She wanted everything at once.

With difficulty, he broke the kiss, breathing hard. He leaned his forehead against hers. "Where was I?"

"Something about Paris, and realizing?" she asked, shaky.

"Yes. I realized ... that you are here. Here in Paris, but more fundamentally, you are here . Alive. Now. Living. Making beauty. Hearing music. Tasting sugar. And I am not with you for any of it."

She felt her throat constrict. He kissed each of her eyelids. "And then there's the crime of all that worship you're missing. Don't underestimate the discipline required not to get on my knees for you this instant."

She laughed, though it came out halfway to a sob. "Tease."

"Try this. We'll have this conversation, and either way, we can end it with my tongue in your pretty cunt. If it's to be goodbye, at least I can sweeten it."

She pulled her head back to look at him, fighting the smile he'd put on her face—because what he was saying was serious. "Why goodbye? I thought just now—I thought I heard you say you love me."

"Bella. I've no more interest in trapping you now than I did then. This ..." he gestured to the dusty room around them, the canvases, the distant sounds of the gallery. "It all suits you. You have what you wanted. You made the life you spoke of. I would take none of this world from you. And I would not push you into mine."

The reality of it felt like very cold water.

"Of course," she said, attempting to gather herself. She straightened her spine, moved her weight away from the wall. "It's not realistic. You need a proper duchess. Not a walking scandal."

He fixed her with a pointed look. "You say that as though one cannot be both. By all accounts I am Lucifer himself, yet I'm a proper enough duke."

"That's different."

"Is it? Why?"

"Because you are a duke —"

"Why be one if I can't even decide whom to make my duchess?" He raised a brow. "I would wed you today. This hour. I would have you for the rest of our lives. I'd happily spend half the year in this city if it's where you wish to be, despite my hopeless French, and there is not a room in England I would not be pleased to enter with you on my arm. Paint what you want. Exhibit what you want. Send a galleon ship of nude portraits to St. James Palace. I would have you as you are, Arabella. Precisely. You're an empress, ridiculous to think you could not easily be a mere duchess."

She'd stopped breathing. She forced herself to inhale.

His expression turned sober. "You are the only person who causes me to get carried away . I didn't intend to turn that into a proposal."

"Of course not," she said quickly.

He slanted her a look. "Don't be so quick to dismiss. Of all the things I want to do to you, proposing stands at the very head of the queue."

"Then why—"

"Because I haven't figured out how to sell it to you yet. I am not ideal. I'm a sometime melancholic with one eye and darkness in his soul, at least according to a woman who'd bedded me only moments earlier. I'm stronger and wiser than I was at twenty-six, certainly, and I did consider it—telling you that what I said that night isn't true anymore. That I don't fear myself in the least. That everything will always be well, forever."

She laughed sharply at that. "I don't think I'm the audience for it."

"Well, exactly. You wouldn't want the easy lie. That is how you ended up here in the first place, painting the truth." He ran a hand through his hair, at a loss. "So I do not know what to say to you."

She touched his cheek. Where smooth skin met scar. Then let her hand drop. "Say what you know."

She watched him consider the question. A long moment spun out. Through the wall, the muffled sound of roaring laughter from the gallery. Then, quiet.

He took her hand. Ran his thumbs along the knuckles, turned it palm up, and pressed a kiss into the center. "I know that being apart from you seems a deeply flawed solution. I know that not giving you my heart is a mistake. I know that I want to wake up beside you as many times as I can. That's the whole of it."

He waited for her to respond. When he couldn't read her expression, he added, wry, "And if marriage strikes you as too conventional, I am certain we can come up with something more modern."

She touched his cheek again. This time, she held it. "I miss you most when it rains."

His gaze softened. "I do hope you miss me from inside a warm, dry room."

"Not always. But I'm less interested in wandering about in a storm if it doesn't lead in fairly short order to you cutting the clothes from my body."

"No need to catch a chill. Ask and I'll do it right now."

She let herself lean against his body. Let herself feel him breathe, for a moment, her eyes closed. "Half the year here?"

"Here, Greece, the moon."

"You would really . . . as I am?"

"Bella. As you are, precisely. The first time we walk into a room together, the entire ton will perish where they stand from the sheer cheek of us. And that means I'll enjoy attending a ball for the first time in my life." He nuzzled her cheek. "I think, all frivolities aside ... we make a pair, Arabella. A good one. A strong one."

She could see it too. She took his hands. And said words she'd spoken to him once before. But this time, she meant them. "I would be honored to be your wife."

His cheeks flushed. He held her gaze, very clear, full of feeling.

"But you will need to do one thing for me first," she said. Leaning back against the wall. Regarding him with an imperious smile.

He raised an eyebrow. "Anything."

"Beg me."

The duke grinned. "With pleasure."