He scooped up a rolling apple and rubbed it on his shirt.
And Lucien quietly melted away.
Chapter Six
“Mrs. Breedlove, if you move closer to the fire, it will be easier to get a good portrait of you.”
Angelique looked up from her knitting at the chair that Mrs. Pariseau was gesturing to.
Unfortunately “closer to the fire” was almost comically on the nose. It was much closer to where Lord Bolt was sitting, that little book in his hand, long legs outstretched, radiating impatience.
“By all means, Mrs. Pariseau.”
Lucien looked up and saluted her with a raise of his eyebrows. He lingered on her face.
I notice everything, he’d said.
Thanks to him, she’d caught herself several times today softly dragging a fingertip across her bottom lip.
She’d forgotten, somehow, the shivery, subtle pleasures that hid in that tender place. If the right person knew how to coax them out.
She wondered if this was his strategy.Your bottom lip is a miracle. A stunningly beautiful woman.Perhaps when he set out to seduce, he placed these sorts of words about like little lit coals in a straw house. Strategically, here and there. Enough of them and the house was eventually, slowly, bound to burst into flames all on its own.
Thinking of it as strategy was what kept her finger off her lips for the rest of the day.
Mrs. Pariseau had decided to draw everyone at The Grand Palace on the Thames in turn.
“I should like to draw you, too, Lord Bolt,” Mrs. Pariseau said, as she rotated the chair Angelique sat upon. As though he were a three-year-old being promised a sweet.
“Everybody does, eventually,” he said absently.
He didn’t look up at all.
And it was as though he felt Angelique’s admonishing glare.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pariseau,” he added. Amused. Pointedly.
Mr. Delacorte, Mr. Cassidy, Delilah, and Dot were engaged in a rather harrowing game of spillikins, interrupted now and again by shouts of cheerful dismay when the wrong pillikin was moved.
And it was Delacorte, impatiently waiting his turn, who asked the question that Angelique longed to know the answer to but did not want Bolt to know she longed to know the answer to.
“What are you reading, Bolt?”
Lucien looked up and said the one word guaranteed to create a nonplussed and perhaps permanent silence.
“Poetry.”
The silence did indeed ensue.
It certainly was perhaps the last thing Angelique expected to hear but she wasn’t about to say that out loud.
In a room that contained Delacorte, silence was destined not to last.
“Never say poetry, Bolt!” Delacorte was stunned. “Is that why you go about using words like ‘haunt’ when it’s naught to do with ghosts? Instead it’s to do with Moroccan mist—”
A fascinatingly black warning look Bolt aimed at Delacorte shriveled his words on his tongue.
Angelique was immediately curious.