But Elizabeth Brighton had found the key and flung the door open. Now, he couldn’t close it.
He didn’t even want to.
Elizabeth coped in her own way. Not through violence or whisky, but with ink-stained fingers and sleepless nights.
She tried to banish him from her thoughts. She threw herself into every invitation, every call, every chore Lady Grisham assigned. She smiled through conversations, flirted just enough with Pomfrey, and feigned the calm of a girl in control.
But her hands betrayed her.
Her sketchbook became her sanctuary and her trap.
At first, she drew him in shadows. Broad-shouldered, standing in the dark recesses of some imagined corridor, cloaked in moonlight. He loomed at the edge of her imagination like a myth.
Her pencil moved before she could think, tracing the familiar shape of his stance, the way he carried tension in his shoulders, how he planted his feet like he owned whatever ground he stood on.
Then, the sketches became clearer. More intimate.
His face appeared next. Not at once, but in pieces. The sharp blade of his jaw. His cheekbones, high and noble. That crooked line of his nose. His mouth…
God help her, she kept redrawing his mouth.
Sometimes firm and set, other times curved into that amused half-smile. And thoseeyes. She tried again and again to capture the way they looked at her like she was a puzzle he meant to solve with his hands and mouth.
It became an obsession. She knew it. And yet she couldn’t stop.
One night, while sitting cross-legged on the carpet beside the fireplace in the drawing room, Elizabeth was sketching again, this time with the warm murmur of her sisters around her.
Daphne was reading, half-asleep in the armchair. Victoria, however, was not so easily ignored.
“What are you hiding, Lizzie?” Victoria asked suddenly, her tone far too shrewd for a thirteen-year-old.
Elizabeth’s breath caught. She snapped her sketchbook closed just in time.
“Nothing that would interest you,” she said lightly, even as her pulse thundered in her ears.
Victoria narrowed her eyes and lunged, quick as a cat, but Elizabeth had reflexes honed by panic. She snatched the book to her chest.
“Let me see!” Victoria whined. “Is it Wilhelmina? Daphne? Me?”
“No,” Elizabeth said, too quickly.
Victoria squinted at her, suspicious. “Itisme. You’ve made me look dreadful, haven’t you? I knew it!”
Elizabeth forced a laugh and turned her body slightly, shielding the sketchbook with an innocent shrug.
“I’m just practicing lighting. Proportions. It’s nothing, really.”
Fortunately, the twins were still young enough to have the attention span of kittens.
Victoria gave a dramatic sigh, flopped back against a pillow, and declared, “Well, if I look short in it, Ishallbe furious.”
Elizabeth murmured a vague agreement and tucked the sketchbook safely beneath her arm.
As the fire crackled and the room faded into a comfortable silence, she allowed herself one last glance at the unfinished sketch.
She’d drawn Alasdair looking straight at her.
It wasn’t just a memory. It was a confession.