Page 24 of Meet Me at the Anvil

“And I'm grateful for every minute you've been displeased with me. To have the fullness of your attention is...”

He trailed off, and shook himself, tucking that hint of a smile back under his guise of impartiality.

Then he opened his coat, pulled something out of his breast pocket.

“I asked a clerk for the supplies to write a letter. I thought I should explain myself. To Martin, or to you. But as they often do, words failed me.”

He held it out to her. Her brow wrinkled as she took the thick folded parchment and charcoal from him, turning it over and finding all of it blank.

“It's not your collection, but perhaps you might find better use in it than I would.”

Diane looked from him to the blank paper slowly, perhaps several times. She tried ardently not to crush it to her chest with the feeling that was overcoming her. How long she had spent pretending not to look at him, and he had noticed the absence of her gaze upon him?

She turned her eyes fully on him, holding him fast in her eyes.

He kept his gaze trained forward, though he must have been aware of her stare.

“One more silly whim.”

“What is it?”

“Would you let me draw you?

“I would let you," he said after several moments, but the very sentence seemed incomplete. Like there other things beyond draw he could have added in. He brushed the unspoken thoughts away, and looked to her, a softness in his eyes.

“How would you like me?” he asked, with the frankness as if he were asking where he belonged in a seating chart.

Diane bit her lip, and tried to refrain from responding immediately with something far too scandalous. She held her tongue pressed to her teeth for a long moment, before she nodded to the field just beyond the fence they leaned against. “Lay down.”

He quirked an eyebrow, but said nothing. She watched as he removed his coat and stepped over a fallen gap in the fence, and found a dry bit of grass to lay in.

Diane followed close behind, and as soon as he was settled, she sat down right against him, her hip touching his. She laid out the parchment over his chest and stomach, leaning her side against his as she readied her charcoal.

“Quite the intimate arrangement,” Liam noted as she made the first few lines on the page. He lifted his head enough to check that they were indeed hidden from the village’s view by the hill.

“I need a steady surface to work on,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could, brushing the barest of strokes over the paper to frame out his face, lightly enough that the graphite would blend into the paper if she rubbed her fingers over it.

Liam only hummed, a note that seemed to suggest he didn’t entirely believe her motives. Diane arched an eyebrow, but made no reply.

She held herself as still as she could, settled gently against him, taking at first only the most fleeting of glances at him, the way she was used to. The lines she traced against the page at first were so vague in shape they were almost meaningless.

Still, with every additional glance at her subject, searching for the details in his statuesque brow, her gaze lingered more. As the lines began to form features, she nestled closer, leaned a little more into his warmth.

She held her breath as she lifted a hand to his face, to brush back his hair that the wind had moved. That one touch, the tip of her finger against his temple, felt a dozen times more intimate than the way her hip was against his. She watched the way his eyes fluttered closed, savoring that small touch.

How fortunate she was, that the wind gave her several more excuses to touch his face again, as she drew out the heavier lines of his brow and nose.

Before she realized it, more than an hour had gone by without a word spoken, only the warmth of the sunlight over them, the heat of their bodies so close to one another, him lying on his back in the field, her curled up against him, a bastion against the cool spring wind.

How much of her was becoming entangled with him. His hand rested on her back, making gentle sweeping strokes. His tracing over the folds in her dress, mapping out the curves and planes of her side echoed the movements of her pencil.

Diane only came back to herself from the reverie of sketching him, when she realized she was not in the practice of drawing clothes. At least, not on a person. Always in a lump of shapeless folds on the floor or a curtain of cloth falling away from the body.

She had sketched out the vague shape of his neck and shoulders of course, reclined in the grass, but she had yet to detail them the same way she had carved the intensity of his eyes into the page.

She swallowed, her hand sliding from his temple, down his cheek. Her heartbeat quickened as her fingertips traveled down his neck, pressing aside some of his collar. Before she could truly contemplate it, her fingers were digging into the knot of his cravat, loosening it.

The hand that had loosely traced her form drew around to her ribs. She closed her eyes and basked in the heat of his palm through her stays, the thumb that drew up against her breast, teasing the hardened nipple through her stays and linen dress.

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