may as well know that I’m nearly always prickly,’ she said, moving past him and into his rooms. It was all pretty much as she might have expected a bachelor apartment to look like. The furniture was functional rather than pretty and there was a general air of disorder that was strangely welcoming. There were books piled up on the mantelshelf, interspersed with bottles and glasses. Gloves and a hat tossed carelessly on a side table by the door. Bills bursting from the drawers of a small writing desk and cards of invitation stuck at crazy angles in the frame of the spotted mirror propped up on it. And, permeating through the familiar dusty smell that rented rooms always seemed to have, the distinctive aroma of linseed oil.
‘You never used to be,’ he said as she drew off her gloves and tossed them on the table next to his. They landed in a kind of tangle, which looked peculiarly intimate, almost as though they represented two invisible people, holding hands.
‘When we knew each other in London, I always thought you were...sweet,’ he said with a wry twist to his mouth, as though he was mocking himself, or the memory of her.
‘You couldn’t have been more wrong,’ she replied tartly, as she tugged the ribbons of her bonnet undone. ‘My sisters always used to call me Thistle.’
‘Thistle?’
At least the revelation had wiped that sardonic look off his face. He was openly curious now.
‘A variation on Amethyst. I always wanted people to call me Amy, but they invariably ended up following my sisters, and calling me Thistle, or Thistly, because of my prickly nature.’
It was probably why they’d all been so thrilled when she’d come back from London in pieces. She’d been strict with them, coming down hard on their faults because her mother had stressed that, as the eldest, she had to set them all an example and she’d been flattered and pleased, and done her best to make her mother proud. What a waste of effort that had been!
She tossed the bonnet aside in the same way she was mentally tossing aside all the expectations her family had ever had of her. With determination. She’d stopped feeling repentant by the time she’d returned home after her trip ‘round the Lakes’ with her aunt. Ever since then she’d been angry. The most she’d been guilty of had been naïveté where this man was concerned. Had it really been such a terrible sin?
But now she jolly well was going to sin. She’d already been punished for crimes she hadn’t committed, so there really was no point in not committing them.
‘What would you like me to call you?’ His face looked quizzical as she scanned the room, looking for somewhere to sit down.
‘I don’t really care,’ she said. ‘I just want to sit down and get my breath back.’
‘Then come through here,’ he said, indicating a door to his right. ‘To my studio. I would like to capture your features as they are right now, all flushed and breathless.’
He hurried through and went straight to a table from which he selected paper and charcoal.
‘Sit, sit,’ he said, waving his free hand towards a couch under one of the many windows which she could tell would flood the room with light during the day.
She sat, rather disgruntled at his very far from lover-like behaviour. He hadn’t offered her any refreshment, he hadn’t paid her any compliments and now he was scurrying round, adjusting lamps and candles around the sofa. Then he went back to his stool and started sketching her without saying a word and only looking at her with the dispassionate eye of a workman.
Had she got it wrong? He had said he wanted them to become lovers, hadn’t he? Or had she imagined it? Got herself all worked up and gone through that agonisingly embarrassing interview with the apothecary—much of which had to be conducted in signs and gestures—for nothing?
He tossed the sheet on which he’d been working aside and got abruptly to his feet.
‘Now for your hair,’ he said and stalked towards her. ‘I want it loose, tumbling round your shoulders.’ Before she could protest, he’d yanked out half-a-dozen pins and was undoing her tightly bound braids. She clenched her fists in her lap. It was beyond infuriating, the way she felt at having him so close. Her heart was pounding, her breath kept catching in her throat and her lips felt full and plump. And he hadn’t said or done anything to produce this reaction. He was treating her as though she was just...a subject. An interesting subject he wanted to draw.
But then, as he started to fan her hair out, spreading it like a cloak around her shoulders, something happened to his eyes. They sort of...smouldered. And the lids half-lowered. His fingers slowed in their task and, instead of just arranging her hair to catch the light, he kept on running the strands through his fingers, as though he was getting the kind of pleasure she’d got from stroking the barn cat when she’d been little.
‘It’s so soft,’ he murmured, never taking his eyes from it. ‘So beautiful, and lustrous and soft. It’s a crime to bind it up in braids and shove it under an ugly bonnet the way you do. You ought to have it always on display.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, her cheeks heating. To think she’d felt hard done by because he wasn’t saying anything lover-like. Now he’d gone to the other extreme, uttering such absurdities. Besides, her bonnet wasn’t ugly. Not any longer. It was brand new and quite the prettiest article of attire she’d ever owned.
* * *
Nathan quirked one eyebrow at her petulantly clenched mouth. It was as though she felt uncomfortable with his flattery. He looked at her plain jacket, recalled the positively dowdy way she dressed and wondered if she was deliberately hiding her beauty. He supposed being seduced and abandoned when she’d been so young had taught her a harsh lesson.
So why had she decided to come to him like this? He studied her face, the tense set of her shoulders, the way her mouth seemed to settle naturally into a bitter line, and wondered again how she had lived these last ten years.
It couldn’t have been easy, with an illegitimate child to care for. Society was harsh upon unwed mothers, while the men who’d seduced them got away scot free, for the most part.
She hadn’t been the real villain of the piece at all, he suddenly perceived. She’d been damaged by what had happened in their youth, too. It had made her treat him badly, but then perhaps her experience had soured her against men. Perhaps she hadn’t known that he had a heart to break, having been used and tossed aside by some rake.
On a pang of sudden sympathy, he said, ‘One day, I’d like you to tell me about that little girl’s father.’
‘Sophie?’ Her eyes widened. Then she frowned. ‘Why?’
She clearly didn’t want him to pry. Perhaps it was still too painful to speak of, even after all this time. Perhaps she was reminded of the man who’d fathered her, every time she looked at that abundance of fair hair, or into those intelligent and rather mischievous blue eyes.
‘Forgive me. You are correct. That has nothing to do with this, does it?’
‘No.’
‘Then why not take off your coat?’ he suggested with a smile.
‘My coat,’ she repeated, looking down as though she’d entirely forgotten she was still wearing it.
‘Here,
