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

Poor Jeanne. She looked at the signal. One bar.

“We should like some water and wine,” Lely said, “as wel as cheese and fruit.”

Cam tilted the phone, and the bar disappeared.

“Immediately, sir.” Tom shifted from foot to foot. “I am most grievous sorry about the painting of Miss Gwyn, sir.

Most grievous. You were quite the canny one, miss,” he added enthusiastical y in Cam’s direction. “A right bit of sleight of hand, what with donning that gown in a whore’s trice. It was downright—”

Lely cleared his throat significantly, which almost made Cam drop her bag, but the noise had been aimed at Tom, who paled and retreated, though he only made it two steps before reversing himself and returning.

“Tom, this is more time than I wished to spend with you this afternoon,” Lely said, returning to his sketchbook.

The young man relaxed, and even managed a lopsided smile, the master’s teasing tantamount to forgiveness. He said, “The cheese and fruit, sir, is that to be your supper?”

Then, apparently deciding there was a better path into the matter at hand, tried this instead: “Sir, Miss Kate sends her compliments. If she is not to be a Danish supporter, she wishes to eat, and would you be wantin’ to join her at the Orb and Scepter for joint of suckling pig? No charge for her time.” He blew out a long breath, grateful to have completed his mission.

It seemed to be Peter’s turn to long for the skewer. His cheeks turned ruddy, and Cam didn’t know if he regretted the revelation of his model’s status as a prostitute or the fact that, despite having taken advantage of her marginalized position by employing her for his patrons’

pleasure, he was stil ungenerous enough to require a free ride when her own meter was running. Cam hoped it wasn’t the former. It would have been hard to imagine a woman wi lli ng to pose entirely nude coming from any other profession in Peter’s time. And as for the latter, wel , Cam had hardly met an artist who didn’t feel as if every pleasure in the world was owed him. Why should Peter be different—

other than the fact, of course, that she’d begun to think he might be?

Peter dropped his pencil and had to bend to retrieve it.

“My compliments and regrets to Miss Kate,” he said stiffly.

“I am otherwise engaged.”

Moseby nodded happily, this message being far easier than the first. “Otherwise engaged.” He bowed. “I wil inform her immediately.”

Peter reached for the pencil blindly. He had no wish to meet his companion’s eyes. There had been a time before Ursula when neither his supper table nor his bed had lacked for companions—lithe, accommodating beauties from al reaches of the court who had sought his company with eagerness. But he had never been a whore-monger, and he employed the women to keep them off the street. If you had two eyes, two arms, two legs and the semblance of a smile—and often even if you did not—you could find a place in one of Peter’s tableaux. His patrons liked to have the beautiful ones around. If you were not beautiful, you cleaned or cooked. But beautiful or no, you did not warm the bed of Peter Lely. Kate knew that even if she chose to pretend she didn’t. And al of the women received a decent wage, al the food they could eat and a place to sleep in the studio if a place was wanted.

No, he had no wish to glimpse the look on Mrs. Post’s face. What he wished was to lose himself once again in the sketch and their easy conversation. Forgetting himself, even for a moment, had been nectar indeed.

“I do not mean to displace Miss Kate,” she said. “If you have an engagement, you need not cancel it. We wil not be long.”

He gripped the pencil and continued to fil in the shadow.

The lily of the val ey scent that seemed to blossom off her skin was torture. “Kate is in my employ. She wil understand.”

“As you wish.”

“Tel me,” he said, capturing the puddled line of hem,

“what size portrait you seek?”

He felt rather than saw her shift.

“I don’t know. The usual, I suppose.”

“We have ful -length, three-quarters and half, depending on your needs. Is that his ring?”

She touched a chain at her throat, then fol owed the line of his gaze to her hand.

“Oh, this? No.” She held out the aquamarine in filigree.

“This was my mother’s. She got it from her mother-in-law after my father proposed. Then she gave it to my brother’s wife when he proposed.”

He