“You’ve caught the trust between the dog and the child,” Jenny said. “Jock would give his life for those boys, and in his eyes, they can do no wrong. He might chastise them with an admonitory growl, but only when they’re older and ought to know better. I think that’s what you drew.”

“I drew a sleeping dog.”

“You drew a sleeping dog who is also part guardian angel. Jock holds all of Rothgreb’s confidences, you know. Lady Rothgreb says she had best die before the dog, so somebody adequate to the task can comfort his lordship in his bereavement.”

Elijah set the drawing aside. “The elderly can take a morbid turn with their humor.”

“The elderly have courage we can only guess at, like soldiers facing battle. That is a good sketch, Elijah. You should consider it for your portrait of William. Rothgreb would love it.”

Jenny would love it, and as he grew up and prepared to step into his father’s and Rothgreb’s impressive shoes, William would love it most of all.

“I was commissioned to do one portrait of both boys.”

He leaned forward to move the sketch to the bottom of the stack, and Jenny felt as if he was hiding her praise from view too. She turned to tell him as much when she caught sight of Elijah’s chest, naked beneath the gaping dressing gown.

“You’re not wearing a shirt or waistcoat.”

The corners of his lips turned up, the first real humor she’d seen in him—and at her expense. “You spent a half hour sketching me, and you’re only noticing this now?”

An hour sketching him, taking him apart visually and putting him back together on the page as a composition, a study. As he’d hunched over his letter, his chest had been a shadow she’d avoided.

“I noticed.” Though she’d noticed by omission. Her gaze traveled down. “What is this?”

“The cat…” He didn’t move, didn’t leap off the couch and hold the door open for her.

Jenny pushed the dressing gown farther apart, revealing two long, angry red welts running up Elijah’s belly to his sternum. “Timothy did this?”

She touched the welts, surprised they weren’t hot. Elijah’s stomach went still beneath her fingers, as if he’d stopped breathing.

“Timothy was an uninvited guest at a kiss,” he said. “An ill-advised kiss. He absented himself from the proceedings as best he could.”

As Jenny would absent herself from England after the holidays. Abruptly, her travel plans loomed not as a daring response to impending spinsterhood and artistic suffocation, but as a parting from everyone she held dear.

And her family would not understand, though Elijah would understand. She wanted to kiss his bare, warm belly, kiss the hurt and make it go away. She settled for running her fingers over the lacerations, while Elijah finished off his drink in one swallow.

“Genevieve…” He sat directly beside her, his flat abdomen exposed to the firelight, his expression suggesting he’d welcome eagles tearing at his flesh rather than endure her touch.

“I wanted to sketch you without your shirt, but I was afraid to ask. I wanted to sketch you—”

The look he gave her was rueful and tender. “You will be the death of me, woman.”

He sounded resigned to his fate, and Jenny liked it when he called her woman in that exasperated, affectionate tone. She did not like it quite as well when he hoisted her bodily over his lap, so she sat facing him and his exposed, lacerated torso.

“You will note the absence of any felines,” Elijah said, hands falling to his sides. “And yet, I must warn you, Genevieve, indulging your curiosity is still ill-advised.”

He thought this was curiosity on her part, and some of it was, but not curiosity about what happened between women and men. Jenny’s curiosity was far more specific, and more dangerous than he knew: she wanted to know about Elijah Harrison, and about Elijah Harrison and Genevieve Windham.

“My parents will be home in a few days, Elijah, possibly as soon as this weekend.” The notion made her lungs feel tight and the whisky roil in her belly.

He trapped her hands and stopped her from tracing the muscles of his chest. “It’s all right. I understand. Explore to your heart’s content.”

A pulse beat at the base of his throat. She touched two fingers to it. “It’s late, you don’t owe me—”

He kissed her, a gentle, admonitory kiss, like Jock’s cautionary growl.

She took his meaning: no more trying to coax enthusiasm from Elijah for her company, no more trying to inspire him to reassurances that he felt something special for her. He would permit her curiosity and nothing more.

The perishing, damned man was going to model kisses for her.

Jenny rose up over him, pushed his dressing gown off his shoulders, shrugged out of her dressing gown, and framed his face between her hands. If it was curiosity he was prepared to indulge, then curiosity she would give him.

Eight

As a boy, Elijah had argued vociferously with his father that Christmas ought not to fall in the dead of winter. How was a fellow supposed to be good at the very time of year when keeping mud out of the house was an impossibility? How was he to avoid snitching a treat or two in that season when the kitchen was the only consistently warm room in the entire, cavernous Flint family seat?

How was a young man to avoid breaking the occasional vase when the weather was too cold to let off high spirits in the out of doors, and his younger brothers must plague him without ceasing and challenge him to a cricket match against their sisters in the portrait gallery?

As heat ignited in Genevieve Windham’s eyes, Elijah felt the same sense of consternation, of temptation and reward colluding to foil a man’s good intentions.

The devil was not some wrinkly old fellow savoring of brimstone and perdition. Eternal damnation came in a lavishly embroidered nightgown, had warm hands, and kissed like…

His mind went blank as Jenny brushed her mouth over his again. She’d trapped him with those warm hands, cradled his jaw in a grip both gentle and unbreakable. Her kisses were like brushstrokes, creating the contours and shadows of a yearning not entirely sexual.

Though sexual enough. Drink hadn’t dulled Elijah’s base urges one bit, but then, he’d barely opened the bottle when Jenny had come wafting into his room. Images of genies and odalisques went winging through his brain as Jenny took a kissing-tour of his features.

“I like your nose, Elijah. Were you teased about it as a boy?”

She teased him, kissed the indelicate feature that rendered him drunk on the scent of jasmine, then sat back as if to study her brushwork.

“I like your eyes too.” She ran her tongue over his eyebrows, and Elijah groaned. He planted his hands on either side of her waist as if to steady himself, lost any semblance of balance as a result, and went on the offensive, lest the blighted woman part him from his reason.

He lashed his arms around her and covered her mouth with his own. She tasted of whisky and sin, of curiosity and all that was irresistible in a beautiful female late at night behind a locked door.

He’d checked that lock twice, and as Jenny’s fingers tangled in his hair, Elijah was glad he had.

Dangerous, stupid thought. A bacon-brained enough scheme that Elijah broke off the kiss and rested his forehead on Jenny’s heaving chest. “We have to stop, Genevieve. Did your brothers tell you to apply perfume to your breasts?”

He didn’t realize the extent of his non sequitur until he beheld the confusion in her eyes.

“They did not.”

“Your scent is stronger here.” He nuzzled her throat. “Jasmine and insanity.” A lovely combination. Her pulse raced at the base of her throat, matching the throbbing behind his falls.

“Genevieve.” He swallowed and tried again. “Your nightgown sports a number of bows, my dear.”

She smoothed her hands back through his hair, a caress that rippled over his skull, down his spine, and went right, straight to his bollocks. “Elijah, what—?”

He untied the first bow with his teeth, mostly in the hope that, because teeth were not as dexterous as fingers, some sanity might return between bows number one and six.

“Never, ever put the bows on your nightgown or your chemise in the front,” he warned as he undid bows two and three in a similar fashion. “A man can take only so much temptation.”

He glanced up at her, hoping for a cooling of the passion in her eyes.

God help them both, she was smiling a smug smile. Elijah stopped and canvassed his self-restraint. What she wanted, whether she knew it or not, was to be driven beyond the bounds of a self-discipline so ingrained she mistook it for her soul.

Obliging her would kill him, leave him to expire in a ditch of guilt, misery, regret, and plain old heartache.

These thoughts passed through his mind in the time it took Jenny to caress his hair again. “Elijah?”

He undid bows number four and five, exposing the soft swell of luscious, jasmine-fragrant breasts. “Undo your hair, Genevieve. Undo it completely.”

She reached up, making her breasts shift under the gossamer of her nightgown. Were he in his right mind, Elijah would probably have recognized the exact type of silk she’d used from the way it reflected and absorbed light. In his present condition, he had access to only small increments of vocabulary and reason.

Soft, sweet, hot, luscious. Dangerous.

He had full complements of determination, though. In that moment, he had more determination than Genevieve Windham could conceive of, because one more thought managed to materialize in his mind as she shook out the golden glory of her hair.