Page 22 of These Violet Delights
“Wax,” he told her, seeming to lose his train of thought before gathering it up again. His eyes had changed color, his breaths coming faster, rasping his voice. The air sizzled around them, charged, as if a tempest gathered just for them on this otherwise clear day; Violet felt it through her entire body. “I weathered all manner of far more dire dares swimming the River Cam. My contemporaries at Cambridge were determined to give the waterman the challenge of a lifetime.” He shook his head and stared away from her at a distant memory along the stream, a thought hidden in the lightening fog. Coming back to himself, he glanced down and plucked a leafy twig from her hair, flicked it away, then carefully stooped to scoopher into his arms. He did as much with no trouble, for she seemed to be merely the burden of a single folded blanket. “This look rather suits you.”
“Does it?” Violet wanted to roll her eyes but couldn’t decide if he was having fun at her expense.
“Yes. It’s more how I remember you,” he said, his voice softening. “A Peaseblossom among the hollyhocks. Certainly, the shrieking from the other day was familiar—”
“Shrieking?” Violet tensed in his arms.
“—and how you and I were the most hardheaded of the bunch. How you loved endlessly quoting speeches at us…” he went on, frowning, looking at her askance as he carried her into the swirling mist. “ ‘She is but little, but she is fierce.’ ”
They broke away from the water’s edge, angling toward the charming stone path that picked its way up to the house proper. “So much for a Cambridge education, Mr. Kerr. The line is: ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce.’ I can shriek it if that will help you remember it better.”
He was silent for a moment, then laughed. “Exactly so.”
“Ha! Is that what you think of me?” she asked, finding that his golden eyes had not veered from her face. And the intensity of it…She was suddenly grateful for the cold, worrying she might melt like a candle left in the sun under the scrutiny of those eyes, and that was to say nothing of the heat radiating from his chest. Renaud—no, the Frenchman, as he must now be known—was all sharp angles. They had never embraced to this extent.Don’t think of the wordembrace,you idiot, this is purely functional.But how could one not feel the alluring texture of the man through his sodden, sticking clothes, the unexpected cushioning softness of his chest and arms? Violet’s eyelashes dipped, and she scolded herself, demanding her body reject the urges that flooded through her at his touch.
Remember who he is, the things he said.
“I don’t know quite what to think of you, Miss Arden,” he replied, shrugging her.
It was becoming very hard to remember. Violet quickly changed the subject. “Do you ever wonder if we’re still in these fields somehow? Catching frogs, and playing, and not a care in the world…Still there, but we just can’t see it.”
In her desperation to change the subject, she hadn’t considered most genteel company would find such an observation incredibly bizarre. Mr. Kerr only frowned, drawing his heavy brows down as if giving the question real merit.
“Like an underpainting.”
Terrible. She had wanted to like him less, not more. How bothersome to entertain that her first conceptions of him were incomplete. Well. They couldn’t make the rest of the journey in silence, not when her head had begun blasting out so many questions. “How did you come to know so much about art?”
“A friend at Cambridge ran in the right circles. He brought me around to the right exhibitions, made the right introductions, and then I had some success discerning nascent talents in London. Lady Edith enjoyed the idea of me filling the house with art of the apostles and so on, so I was sent to Madrid, Florence, Vienna…”
Florence! Violet almost moaned with jealousy. “Yet you never considered learning the art yourself?”
“Maybe I did, briefly, but I doubt anyone would take interest in how I observe the world.”
“That’s very sad. I find it a relief,” she said, wearing a private smile. “Like a…confirmation, you see, proof that the world is as I see it. I’m so often stuck in my head, held captive in it; sometimes painting is the only thing that can pull me out of it.” She shook her head and closed her eyes tightly. “Myaunts tell me I am a strange person, and that the men must never find out or I will die a spinster. But Miss Bilbury supports herself with her paintings and teaching, and I could do the same. Lord, Mrs. Richmond would scream if she knew that I had just admitted all of that in front of you.Violet Arden, you strange, silly girl,” she said, pitching her voice up, mimicking Mrs. Richmond. “Close your mouth this instant!”
“But there’s little harm,” he added for her. “Given our circumstances. Our families.”
“Yes, exactly. Perhaps there is comfort in that.”
There was comfort in his arms, too, though Violet at least knew better than to say that one aloud.
“We may speak freely, then, as other men and women cannot,” he said, breathing out as if relieved, the rush of air ruffling the front of her nightgown.
“Yes. Besides the matter of our families, I have sworn off men entirely,” Violet declared.
For some reason, that made him smirk.
“Oh? Any reason in particular?”
“You can imagine the inspiration well enough,” she said quietly, coolly. “You were there for it. I will never be humiliated like that again.”
“The woman who made a spectacle of herself in your aunt’s home? I barely heard her. I was studying the art, and my attention remained fixed there.”
It was her turn to smirk. “Studying thebadart.”
“Monsieur Moncelle is not completely without talent.”
Violet sat up straighter in his grasp, twisting.
