Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

of Nel ’s skin gleamed in warm light, the pil ows on which she lay looked as if they would rise like clouds into the sky, and the pale blue dressing gown, the very one she now wore, draped off her shoulders, exposing pale breasts, a curving waist and a long, slender leg bent at the knee. Her head was reclined against the pil ows, angled slightly as if she were sharing a sly secret with the viewer, and sensuous waves of red-brown hair trailed across her shoulders and onto the white silk. Cam could almost see the individual strands, feel the lush fabric, smel the perfume on her skin.

Cam saw what Peter saw, and for a long moment she wondered what it would be like to be thus observed. She also wondered if Peter was in love with Nel .

“It’s beautiful,” Cam said truthful y. It was also mildly shocking. It wasn’t that artists hadn’t been painting women nude during this time. They had from time immemorial.

What made it shocking was that women of the court—she could hardly add upstanding as she knew Nel had been a prostitute as wel as an actress prior to going to bed with the king—did not pose without clothes. It was one thing for a woman of the street or the artist’s wife to pose for him. It was quite another for a woman who expected to maintain a place of honor and position to do it. This was the same quality that had made Peter’s paintings of the women with a breast exposed so intriguing.

Nel dimpled again. “Peter knows how to make a woman look beautiful.”

Cam stepped back to admire the whole.

The only part unfinished was Nel ’s face. It looked as if he had started over at least once and possibly twice. Her eyes, nose and mouth were no more than ciphers.

A young man wearing a leather apron unlocked the door and slipped in. “Pardon me, m’um—oh, good afternoon, Miss Gwyn,” he added, his pocked face lighting up.

“Good afternoon, Moseby.”

“Regrets, ladies, but it’l be my hide if I don’t get this painting stowed. The duchess is in high dudgeon. She wants to know when Mr. Lely wil begin her portrait.”

“Advise her not to choose a three-quarter view,” Nel said. “The hump may show.”

Cam stepped out of Moseby’s way as he unfastened the canvas. “I’m getting the impression,” Cam said to Nel ,

“you’re not an admirer of the duchess.”

“She makes things damned uncomfortable for Peter.

She’s figured out Charles likes to have portraits painted of his lovers—and for some reason she thinks that because she’s Catholic she should be the only one. She’s taken to dropping in unannounced to see what she can sniff out—

like one of them Frenchy truffle pigs, upon my word.

Charles just assumes Peter wil keep the royal lovers separated and his affairs discreet, and he has a mighty temper, which is why Peter has to go through this ridiculous Merry Andrew show whenever she shows up.”

Cam shuddered. Her family had been divided into the lions and the lambs. Anastasia, who took after their father, practical y grew fangs and a stinger when she was mad.

Cam, like her brother and mother, approached the world with unwavering calm, and she had had to work hard al her life not to be crushed in the onslaught. She hated the tyranny of temper.

“That doesn’t seem exactly fair.”

Nel laughed. “Fair doesn’t come into it. Charles is like a lava flow. It isn’t that he assumes everyone wil get out of his way—he just happens to destroy the ones who don’t.”

“He wouldn’t destroy Peter, surely.” Cam didn’t know much about Lely’s later years. Was it possible he’d lost the favor of the king?

“I heard he nearly chucked him once. There was a misunderstanding over one of Peter’s whores. The king wanted her. Peter refused. Said he needed her for a painting he was completing that night and suggested one of the other girls might be more in the way of the king’s liking.

It was a reasonable suggestion, and the king is known for giving his bedmates expensive gifts, so I’m certain any of them would have been happy to take her place. Charles was in one of his Falstaff moods, grinning and playing the