paint on to some canvas, I ask you? Of course I go to the opening of the Royal Academy of Art at the start of the Season, one’s got to. And we’ve got some fine Old Masters in our long gallery at Warley Park. Not that I care for them that much. It’s all a waste of time.’
‘How can you say that?’ She sipped her punch to quench her anger. It didn’t help.
‘That’s right—you enjoy that kind of thing, don’t you?’ He emptied his punch glass. ‘You do a few watercolours, I seem to recall. I’m surprised your father allows it. Well, good for you young ladies to have something to do, isn’t it?’
Cameo drank more punch. ‘It’s more than just something to do for me.’
‘Perhaps when you come to Warley Park you’ll allow me to show you the Old Masters in our gallery. You haven’t forgotten you and your parents are coming to stay at my estate, have you?’
She had forgotten. She’d forced the engagement from her mind. A dance with Lord Warley was penance. A long visit would be intolerable. Yet there was no chance of talking her parents out of it and she had to be polite. ‘I’m sure it will be most pleasant.’
‘Your presence will make it so, Lady Catherine Mary.’
She didn’t remind him that all her friends and family called her Cameo. She’d never invited him to, yet she gave the pet name to Benedict Cole without thinking.
Lord Warley smiled. It was his smile that made her uneasy, she reflected. It never reached his eyes. In contrast, Benedict Cole’s eyes had searched her soul.
Would Benedict Cole ever leave her mind?
Lord Warley pulled off his gloves, revealing each of his fingers in turn. Without warning, he leant forward and imprisoned her hands. ‘How pleased I am to have this moment alone with you.’
‘Lord Warley!’ Desperately she tried to extract her fingers, but his grip was too tight.
He squeezed them tighter. ‘You must allow me to make my addresses. I’m sure your parents will not object.’
Cameo wrenched her hands away.
‘Your addresses?’ Her stomach sank. His intentions were more serious than she’d feared.
‘Indeed.’ Putting his fingers together in a steeple, he said, ‘Our families are well connected. You will recall, of course, that your father was good friends with my own, God rest his soul.’
The late Lord Warley, the current earl’s father, had died while she was still in the schoolroom, studying under a governess with Maud. He’d been dark-haired like his son. But his eyes had been different—kind, although sad. Cameo remembered that.
‘My father thought most highly of yours,’ she vouchsafed. If it wasn’t for the family friendship she wouldn’t be forced to associate so closely with him against all her instincts. It made it all very difficult.
‘When I inherited Warley Park—you must know that it’s one of the greatest houses in England—I took on a great responsibility. I shall enjoy showing you the estate on your visit. You will be an ornament to it.’ Once more he glanced towards her bare décolletage.
Cameo wished yet again for a shawl to cover her upper body. She didn’t want to be an ornament to anything, even Warley Park, that great country estate in Sussex. It was even larger than the one belonging to her family in Derbyshire, which George was to eventually inherit.
‘It will be wonderful to see the Old Masters at Warley Hall.’ That was true at least. ‘I’m sure I’ll like them. But you may not find you like me. For a start, I’m most attached to painting.’
His smile became supercilious. ‘You’ll soon outgrow your childish hobbies.’
‘I assure you I’ll never outgrow painting,’ she said through gritted teeth. Why was it that women’s passions were considered so insignificant, as though they could easily be put aside for polite society? Did no one understand the passion that drove her?
Benedict Cole’s face flashed again into her mind.
He was a man who understood painting.
And passion.
Down deep her stomach rippled.
‘You’re young.’ Lord Warley licked his lips. ‘There’s nothing you could be sure about at your age.’
He had only been a few years ahead of George at school. ‘I might be young, but I do know my own mind.’
‘I appreciate spirit in a girl.’
Before Cameo moved he was on his feet. Looming over her, he pressed her backwards, hard, into the wrought-iron chair, banging her head against the trellis.
No! He meant to kiss her. She couldn’t bear it. Not with the memory of Benedict’s lips still burned on to hers. In a surge of strength she pushed him away.
Leaping to her feet, she seized her necklace as if it were a talisman. ‘I’d like to go into the ballroom.’
‘Yes, of course. The moonlight, your beauty...forgive me.’
As he took her arm, his eyes did not meet hers. Sickened, Cameo realised he wasn’t sorry at all.
She’d been right to avoid being alone with him. All her suspicions about him had been right all along.
Backed up against the trellis, Lord Warley had trapped her like a bird in a cage. Right where he liked a woman to be.
‘She look’d: but all
Suffused with blushes—neither self-possess’d Nor startled, but betwixt this mood and that.’
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
‘The Gardener’s Daughter’
‘What have you been doing, Miss Ashe?’
Cameo jumped. From her place by the window she’d been surveying Benedict Cole at work. He’d positioned her in a different pose today, half-reclining, but he hadn’t touched her once, just barked sharp commands at her to get the angle right.
He was behaving as if he had never kissed her. Two could play at that game. If he was going to use his artistic discipline, then she would use hers, too.
‘What do you mean, Mr Cole?’ she asked coolly.
He laid down his pencil. ‘It seems to me you have barely slept.’
‘How did you...?’
‘You’re pale and you have the slightest shadows beneath your eyes. They were not there before. What have you been doing all night?’
Did Benedict Cole miss anything? She could hardly tell him she had attended Lady Russell’s ball, then stayed up late drawing, desperate to make up for lost time, and when she had at
