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

a set of angel wings, a large stuffed boar, a harp, a drum, a ship’s wheel, a cradle, several large swans made of wool and an armor chest plate that had holes for breasts cut out of it. “… my frock coat?” He slipped off the jacket and held it open to her.

She gazed at the coat, glossy and green, and then at the finely cut shoulders and arms now outlined under his bleached linen shirt, and in a smal voice said, “Thank you.”

Peter was not quite barrel-chested, though he was broader than most, and when he slipped the wel -tailored wool over her shoulders she felt like a smal animal hibernating in a cave. She could smel the barest hint of vanil a, as if he’d scrubbed paint off his hands with scented soap. She looked at his nails. Fingernails were the windows into a man’s soul, and so often the windows were something you had to run by with your eyes averted, but Peter’s were clean, pink, and wel tended.

He reached for a cuff, unbuttoned it and began to rol up his sleeve. “Would you like to sit?” He paced to a stool, grabbing a pencil and a large tablet on the way, and took a seat.

This left Cam with the only other seat in the room, an armchair on a pal et. She slipped into the seat, placed her bag on her lap and gazed down at him. If she moved slowly, she might be able to withdraw the phone unnoticed and at least check the bars.

He opened the tablet, found a clean page and pressed the binding flat. His forearms, now uncovered, were muscular and long, swept with russet hairs that caught the last rays of sun, and his hand moved over the page with a practiced ease.

“I do not see you as Athena.” His eyes stayed on the easy line running from his pencil.

“Don’t you?”

“No. I shal paint you that way if you wish, of course, pray do not misunderstand. But …” The line stretched long then reversed itself and returned.

“But?”

“But you are familiar with the phrase ‘to paint the lily’?”

She knew “gild the lily,” but not “paint.” “No.”

“The lily is on my heraldic arms, so it is a phrase dear to me.” His pencil work changed to shorter, faster strokes.

“‘To gild refined gold,’” he began, “‘to paint the lily,/To throw a perfume on the violet,/To smooth the ice, or add another hue/Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light,/To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,/is wasteful, and ridiculous excess.’ Shakespeare,” he added, smiling. “King John. I should prefer to paint you without artifice. As unadorned as possible.”

Oh.

Her throat dried, and for a moment the scratching of the pencil on paper was the room’s only sound.

“I, ah, thought this was to be an interview.” She tilted her head toward his tablet.

He laughed. “ ’Tis an artist’s interview. I draw. You talk.”

“And then you wil decide if you can paint me?”

“Have no fear on that account, milady.”

He turned the tablet and began at another corner.

“I am sorry about your husband,” he said. “Were you long married?”

She thought of her time with Jacket. “Four years.”

“It must have been heartbreaking.” He stole a quick glance at her. “Four years is not a long time.”

She felt a pang of guilt, thinking of her brother’s loss of his wife and son. “I—Yes.” She scoured her brain for a route into the conversation she wished to have. “I have heard a good many things about your work, and, of course, I have admired it myself.”

“Have you?” His fingers worked the page, making long strokes and more detailed ones, thick lines and thin. Jacket never worked from a sketch. Wherever his reapings came from, it wasn’t a sketch pad, and Cam hadn’t seen an artist work like this in some time. It reminded her of her own drawing classes in col ege. It struck her as oddly interesting that the process hadn’t changed much in three hundred years.

The drawing had become an angular thing, with many lines in paral el. Cam leaned forward. “Ah, that’s not my face.”

He laughed again, a rich, throaty laugh that emanated from deep in his chest. Stil , he didn’t look up. “No. It is your hand, milady.”

She felt an unexpected sense of discomfort. She thought he’d been sketching her as a whole, though, in fact, he hadn’t looked at her more than once or twice since