So in a way, it was inordinately familiar to work with her in proximity.
Except for her nakedness, that was.
She lay on her side on the bed he’d had his servants install in his studio, her back to him, her head propped up on one hand, reading The Treasures of Art in Great Britain.
Her hair fell loose, a tumble of umber locks interspersed with shades of raw sienna. Her skin gleamed, lit from within. The softness of her bottom made his fingers grip hard at his pencil. And that was before he even took into consideration her breasts and the shadowed triangle between her thighs reflected in the mirror she’d strategically placed on the far side of herself.
He had to remind himself every other minute that his purpose was art and the celebration of beauty. The comeliness of her body was as much a part of nature as the smooth bark of a birch or the sunlit ripples of a summer lake. He should have no difficulty appreciating it as form, color, interplay of light.
Yet he wanted nothing more than to throw down his pencil, walk up to this particular combination of form, color, and interplay of light, and—
He looked down at his sketchbook instead. Not that it was much help. He’d produced several drawings already, one a general outline of the entire tableau, one a study of her profile and her hair, one of her midsection, and one of what he saw in the mirror.
“Do you know, Freddie,” she said, “before I returned to England, I thought surely your experience with Lady Tremaine would have left you brooding and resentful. But you are the same man you always were.”
It was just like Angelica to raise unexpected topics. He looked at the empty canvas he had prepared.
“It’s been a long time, Angelica. Four years.”
“But are you completely recovered from her?”
“She wasn’t an illness.”
“From the loss of her then?”
“She was never truly mine.” He took a sharper pencil from his box. “I think I knew from the very beginning that we were on borrowed time.”
He’d been gloriously happy with Lady Tremaine. But there had always been an element of deep anxiety to his happiness. When she had reconciled with her husband, he’d been heartbroken but not bitter—because it had not been a betrayal, but only the end of a wonderful era of his life.
He flipped to a new page in his sketchbook and drew Angelica’s shapely calves, wishing his hands were his pencils, that as the drawing took shape, he could slide his palms across her cool, soft skin.
Lady Tremaine had once told him that Angelica was in love with him. Freddie rarely questioned Lady Tremaine’s pronouncements, but this particular one had come when Lady Tremaine had decided to reunite with her husband, when she no doubt wished that Freddie too would settle down with someone. Anyone.
If Angelica had been in love with him she had certainly said nothing of it, ever—and she had never been one to censor her words around him. And even if Lady Tremaine had been right, four years had passed, a long time for affections to remain constant from far away.
He glanced back at Angelica. Her head was bent, her attention absorbed in her book. She was even jotting down notations in the margins. A seduction this wasn’t.
“I think that’s enough for today,” he said, closing his sketchbook. “I’ll step outside.”
Angelica would not say that she had been in love with Freddie forever. Forever meant the mist of time, the blurred years of childhood. Her love had a definite moment of origin at a much later point, when she had been seventeen, he eighteen.
He’d come home following his first year at Christ Church. And she, set to join Lady Margaret Hall that autumn, had plopped herself down on a picnic blanket not far from him as he painted on the bank of the River Stour, to ask him as many questions about Oxford as it pleased her and to critique him as he worked. (She didn’t paint herself, but she had an excellent eye. And she was exceedingly proud of the fact that she’d been the person who’d explained to him, four years prior, that one did not use pure white for highlights, but a paler shade of the color one wished to highlight.)
She had been eating a tangy, firm-fleshed peach, tossing pebbles into the river—hardly wider than a bathtub—and telling him he needed to mix more blue into his green if he wanted to capture the proper deep hue of summer foliage. She was never sure whether he heard her on that particular tip, because he did not say anything, but instead clamped the filbert brush he was using between his teeth and reached for an angled brush.
Then and there lightning struck. She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before, her oldest friend all grown-up, and wanted nothing more than to be that filbert brush, to feel his lips on her, and his tongue, and the firm pressure of his teeth.
But whereas she’d been a confidently commanding friend, always certain that their friendship would gracefully weather all the advice and criticism she fusilladed his way, she’d proved completely hopeless as a seductress.
He did not notice the new frocks and hats she bought for enchanting him. He did not grasp that her effort to teach him to dance better was to give him an easy opening to kiss her. And when she talked excessively of some other man, in the hope of arousing jealousy on Freddie’s part, he only looked at her quizzically and asked her was this not the same man whom she could not stand earlier.
The better approach would have been to confess her love and declare herself as a candidate for his hand. But the more her subtler efforts at winning his heart failed, the more cowardly she became. And just when she’d come to believe that perhaps he simply could not form a romantic attachment to an independent woman, he had to fall for the glamorous and audacious Lady Tremaine, who cared for no one’s opinion but her own.
When Lady Tremaine had left Freddie to go back to her husband, Angelica’s chance had finally come. He was distraught. He was vulnerable. He needed someone to take Lady Tremaine’s place in his life. But when she’d gone to him, she’d stupidly said, I told you so, and he had asked her, in no uncertain terms, to leave him alone.
She finished dressing. He was outside the studio, waiting for her. During the four years she’d been away, he’d lost the baby fat that had still clung to him when he’d been twenty-four. And while he would never be quite as chiseled as Penny, she found him incredibly lovely, his features as gentle as his nature.
Even when he’d been chubbier, she’d still found him incredibly lovely.
“Can I offer you a cup of tea?” he asked.
“You may,” she said. “But I’d like to return your favor first. Are the photographs you took of the painting ready?”
“They are still in the darkroom.”
“Let’s see them.”
His studio was on the top floor, to take advantage of the light. His darkroom was one floor below, about eight feet by six feet in dimension, not much bigger than a closet. In the amber-brown glow of a safelight, the apparatuses for development were neatly laid out, with the sink, the baths, and the negative lamp along one wall, a worktable along another. Bottles of clearly labeled chemicals lined shelves built into the walls.
“When did you assemble a darkroom here?” He had taken up photography after her departure—after Lady Tremaine’s departure, to be more precise. Once he’d sent Angelica a photograph of himself and she’d pasted it into her diary.
“I don’t remember the exact date, but it was around the time your husband passed away.”
“You sent a very kind condolence letter.”
“I hardly knew what to say. You almost never mentioned him in your letters.”
He applied a slight pressure on the small of her back to guide her deeper into the darkroom. She loved the warmth of his hand—he had large hands that could nevertheless paint the most extraordinarily delicate details. For years she’d gone to sleep thinking of caresses from those strong and skilled hands.