Page 62 of These Violet Delights
“Good lord,” she murmured, loud enough for him to hear. “I’m petrified.”
“Frightened? The woman who risked burning up to rescue a cat?”
“I…can’t explain it,” she said with a sigh. But she could. “I’m afraid. Afraid everyone will find out something about me when they see this, suddenly know what I feel when I look at you. It’s…terribly exposing.”
Alasdair watched her steadily, the light flashing off his spectacles obscuring his eyes. “And what is it that you see? What are you afraid they will know?”
That even this short distance between us is agonizing. That I would give anything to be back in the library, thrown over your lap, sealed to you in passion, with no obligation but to chase whatever fancy takes us.
Without answering, she tied on her smock and reached for the pencil again. Then, pulling in a deep breath, she aimed it toward the yawning stretch of blank canvas.
“Your hand is trembling.”
Violet bit down on her lip, hesitated, closed her eyes. “I want to get it right.”
“You will,” Alasdair gently assured her. “No one sees me as you do.”
They fell silent while Violet completed the drawing then set about mixing her paints. The wobbles never left, but she found greater confidence with every stroke. As the hours evaporated and the honeyed light faded, that fear she had given voice to came true—there was more than just Alasdair in the painting, but some of her, too, the affection she felt for him shining through in the heroic tilt of his head, in the noble space he occupied, imposing but not overpowering, in the special attention she had paid to capturing the slanted shadow his spectacles cast across his cheek.
Everyone will know I’m falling in love with him.
How could I possibly care?
“It isn’t finished,” she warned, putting her brushes down for the day and working the creaks out of her fingers. Alasdair drew his shoulders back, forcing an audible pop from his sternum as he unfroze from the pose he had held admirably for so long. “Lord, what if you hate it? Remember, there’s far more to do. You don’t even have both legs yet…”
“I won’t look if you don’t want me to.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” she said, sighing, scrunching her eyes shut while she awaited the verdict. “Just please don’t call it silly.”
Alasdair approached the easel as if it were a feral, cornered beast. When at last he had the courage to behold it, she saw the breath catch in his chest. His eyes softened, and for an agonizing spell he was speechless.
“Is this truly how you see me?” he asked in a whisper.
“I…didn’t want to include any birds or symbols,” she said. “Just you as you are. There’s no need for anything else when the subject is dear.”
He was reaching for her again, closing the narrow gap between them, when someone loudly banged the gallery door open behind them. They flinched and jumped apart. It was a maidservant going room to room, announcing that dinner would soon be served.
Violet wiped her hands down her smock, smoothing the fabric against her stomach. She could sense him sliding behind the genteel wall of manners that ought to dictate his every thought and deed.
“We will have to arrange another sitting, Miss Arden. The piece already shows promise,” he said, bowing and turning on his heel to walk toward the doors that had just been opened. Violet stayed in the dying embers of the sunset, watching the wetter areas of the canvas dry. The edges crisped, the colors settled into themselves, and the watery sheen dulled down to a satisfying matte. It was good, she thought, perhaps her best work yet, but something about it made Violet turn away in terror. She wondered if he sensed what she did, that time was slipping away from them. Once he left Pressmore, the world would impede, and she could do nothing but hope and pray that he held firm.
To what? There is no formal understanding between you, just kisses and implications.
She felt sick all through dinner. Alasdair must have noticed, for she caught him staring with concern after the soup was taken away. A jovial mood pervaded the table despite Violet’s sulking, and with great excitement, Lane reported that the road conditions had improved markedly. Violet slumped lower in her chair.
Later, in bed, that sickness blossomed into a fever. Maggie and Winny swore she did not feel warm to the touch, but Violet had convinced herself of her grave illness. She shivered under the blankets, willing the sky to unleash another storm and hold them all hostage for a few more days. Preferably months. When sleep came, it did so like spilled ink bleeding across a page. In her nightmare, she wandered a barren field of waist-deep snow, following distant shouts, sometimes from Alasdair, sometimes from what she knew to be wolves.
She tore awake dripping with sweat.
Anything was better than the nightmare, so she wriggled under the warmest shawl she could find and left Winny and Maggie snoring peacefully. A house in winter, dressed in moonlight and haunted by unseen breathing bodies, was hardly better than a nightmare, but Violet refused to go back to bed. She wandered, her cold ankles sliding together for the wisps of warmth each time they rubbed. And she didn’t know where to go but felt called to retrace her steps back to the gallery, now empty and dark as a tunnel straight to hell.
The portraits on the wall followed her with their flat and painted eyes. She found her easel, marking her progress by the slats of silver moonlight slicing lines across the marble floor. Her careful footsteps sounded like hard slaps to her own ears. Stopping in front of the painting she had begun that day, she sank into herself, seeing only the unfinished, cloudy areas, the flaws. Something moved in the shadows then drew near; something brushed her shoulder, and she stifled a scream, flying out of her skin.
“Softly,” said a familiar voice. She turned and found herself drawn into an embrace so encompassing it instantly banished the chill. Alasdair. “What are you doing out of bed?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, tucking her hands against thehot plane of his body. His shirt was rumpled and undone, open far enough to reveal a broad swath of bare, furred chest. She had seen him naked standing at the water’s edge, something from myth, Hector bathing in a crystal stream, and the remembrance of it made her swoon into his grasp.
Her reputation was already tarnished, and if he meant to be hers forever, truly forever, then what was the harm? They had always been headed toward this; from the moment he took her into his arms by that stream and held her to his wet body, they had been careening headlong to this deeper embrace. Violet expected him to resist her, to reject the openness of the gallery and the inherent danger, but instead he pulled her closer, locked her to his chest, and pressed her down against the wicker sofa along the wall. The paintings above them clattered with the force of it, and Violet felt all the air rush out of her. No resistance. No objections. He was hers at last, or they were each other’s, or they were already one mingled thing.
