Page 80 of A Scandalous Kind of Duke

Juno made a show of scrutinizing the leaf she had picked, while saying, in an admirably casual tone, “Hmm? Don’t know what you mean.”

“Liar,” Livia laughed, snatching the leaf from her hand. “You went to the schoolroom one day and we hardly saw you for a fortnight while you painted up a storm. You hardly ate or drank, and Mama was ever so worried, and then you said you wished to study art abroad and become an artist. And Phoebe said, but then no one would marry you, and you said you had no wish to be married and if Father meant to give you a dowry, you’d rather it went to your studies than to a husband.”

Juno gaped at her. “That was ten years ago. You were barely thirteen. How do you remember all that?”

Livia shrugged. “I remember things. And I remember that your painting frenzy started the same day that Leo, I mean, the duke, abruptly announced he had to leave.”

Juno had no response to that.

“No one else noticed anything, and I’ll never tell a soul,” Livia said. “I just wondered. And?”

“And I’m afraid you’ll have to keep on wondering.”

She clapped her hands. “I knew it! But you and the duke are friends now, which is nice. Anyway, you are my inspiration, to make my own money. I’m perfectly content to be alone, just like you.”

* * *

What she neededto do was scrape Leo from her mind like paint off an old canvas.

All these wretched questions could fly out the window too. Livia’s memories had only roused more questions. Had Juno become an artist because she had truly wanted to? Or had it been nothing more than an adolescent impulse driven by a broken heart, for the same reason Leo had married?

Back in her studio, Juno opened the leather portfolio holding her secret drawings of him. She did not know why she had kept them. She never looked at them. She simply did a drawing, when the urge came upon her, and shoved it in with the rest.

Time to burn the lot. After one final look.

She leafed through the pages, moving back through time, the artist in her noticing the changes in her skill and style, the woman in her reliving where she was as she drew each one.

And there was her record of the day it began: a messy sketch of Leo in the meadow of wildflowers, under the old oak tree, rejecting her and breaking her heart.

On this page, her seventeen-year-old self had written: “I have two passions: Leo and art. I cannot have them both, so I shall devote myself to art. If I cannot have Leo, I shall have no one.”

Oh, dear heaven, how verydramaticshe had been.

She had completely forgotten these vows, yet she had made them come true, like wishes.

Or curses.

There was a sort of magic to that.

With otherworldly calmness, she reached for her sketchbook and she began to draw. No surprise that the image that emerged was of him. Again and again. She put them in the dossier.

She had loved him, the foolish infatuation of a girl. Now she loved him again, or still. Before, she had been a girl, looking for a place to belong. Now she was a woman, with a wealth of experience, who had carved her own place in the world.

Nothing ever stays,she always said. If only that were true. She wished her heartache over her parents hadn’t stayed. She wished her feelings of inferiority toward her cousins hadn’t stayed. She wished her feelings for Leo hadn’t stayed. But all these feelings stayed. They haunted her.

Enough,she scolded herself, and shoved the drawings back into the portfolio, and shoved the portfolio into the armoire with all her other secret things.

She was veering dangerously close to moping and pining. Juno did not mope, and she most certainly did not pine. It was like crying for the moon to come down, which was pointless and even undesirable, because the moon was much better off up there in the sky, and what would she even do with the moon if she had it? She ought to simply cherish the wondrous experience of joining with him, body and soul, if only for a few minutes. True, he had hurt her, but she had always known it would hurt in the end.

But what she had not known—what she saw now, in the tip of a pencil digging into a mockingly blank page, in the emptiness of her studio, in the loneliness of her bed—was that she would keep throwing glances at the doorway, looking for him: leaning in the doorway, his eyes crinkling as he favored her with one of his playful smiles. Another image formed in her mind, with painful vividness: their eyes meeting, Leo shouldering off the doorjamb, pacing toward her with that lazy, focused intent, taking her in his arms, kissing her—

A sound came from below. She froze, listening.

Was that—a male voice, talking to Mrs. Kegworth? Were those—booted footsteps, coming slowly, easily, up the stairs?

He was here.He was here!

* * *

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