For the last five years in London, she had been made excruciatingly aware of men and their desires. Now—here—she was free of the constant service to men, and yet what was she thinking about? A man, his thoughts, and his organ.
Disgusted with herself, she grabbed the paper off the easel and tore it up. She’d had dozens of new and different experiences in Cornwall for her paint. Why would she draw a man’s penis with wings? She tore her thoughts into a thousand tiny pieces and threw them to the wind. She wanted them to flutter into the ocean to drown in the waves, lost forever. But the wind took them a different direction. Instead of toward the water, the pieces blew back toward the castle to be caught in the gnarled bits of shrubbery or trapped against stone. Not drowned then, but scattered here and there like seeds to torment her whenever she came across them again.
No one gathered the trash as happened in London. She might find her fragment of thought tomorrow or the next day or the day after that.
She thought about chasing the pieces down and burning them, but she chanced to look at his lordship then. True to his word, he had been silent the whole time. She had assumed he’d slept because the man was never so quiet. But now she saw him watching her with a dark, steady gaze.
The tiger watches his prey.
She flushed crimson when she met his gaze. He had seen what she’d drawn before she’d blotted it all out. Did he understand it?
“A pity,” he said as he watched a scrap of paper tear free of a branch before dropping near a boulder. “What were you thinking when you painted it?”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
He straightened off the rock and came close to her. “Have you ever drawn anything like that before?”
She shook her head.
“Were you thinking of me?” he asked. His lips curved. “Did I provide the inspiration for that?”
She swallowed. “I have never tended a man’s sickroom before. You needed to be washed often. It allowed me a chance to study in ways I never have before.”
His smile was slightly crooked as if he mocked himself as he spoke. “You may study more if you like. It won’t be the first time I’ve posed, though I’d ask you to make me more handsome.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “You have modelled for such things?”
He shrugged. “I was younger then and full of myself. And I’d just discovered that erotic art sells very well.” His expression sobered. “I would be honored if you chose to paint me.”
She had been painting him for days. She’d drawn his tiger eyes, his large tiger hands like thick paws. She’d made a study of his spine and the curve of his flanks. This was the first that she’d drawn his organ though, and she thought it funny that she’d made it into sea birds.
She hadn’t realized she was smiling until he touched her face. She didn’t realize he was that close until she felt his fingers trail across her cheek and jaw. His thumb rolled over her lips as if measuring the contours of her mouth.
“How experienced are you with men?” he asked.
She didn’t know how to answer that. She had a great deal of knowledge about men, but he was wholly outside her experience.
“Are you a virgin?”
She shook her head. “Not after the trip to England.”
He winced. “I’m sorry. I would kill every one of them if I could.”
Her lips curved at his vehemence, and her insides softened that this tiger man would fight them for her. The entire voyage had been a horrible blackness on her life that had taken years for her to paint out and burn.
But life in the Lyon’s Den had softened that pain, and she could now think of it without darkness consuming her. She had listened to the women there, as much as they would talk to her. And she had learned that she was not the only one who had been abused by men. They had shown her by example that she could survive. And they had said, too, that sex could be pleasurable.
Li-Na had never felt the urge to find out if that was true. Then she’d come to Cornwall. Now she feared that it was all she thought about. Could it be pleasurable with him?
She had thought about that a lot.
“The past is done,” she said. “And I will not dwell on it anymore.”
He nodded. “You have loved though, yes?”
“Yes.” She had loved the eldest Zhong son until the moment he had abandoned her to his father’s fury.
“He kissed you.”