How to Impress a Marquess(2)

“There, there.” She hugged the distraught artist. “Don’t let the horrid Lord Marylewick distress you. He has the sensibilities of a dishcloth.”

She impaled George with a glare. “You see, Lord Marylewick, it’s about capturing the ethereal and fleeting. Those moments when the beautiful morning light illuminates the garden in all its blues, greens, and golds. It is not a representation of reality, but a sensation captured in time. A sensual impression of a moment. And philosophically, we could argue that all we have are mere impressions of a greater reality.”

George’s mind had left off after the “impression of a moment” part. With Lilith now standing beside the painting, he could see the resemblance in the flowing gown and hair and splotches.

“Lilith!” he barked. “That had better not be your impression in those ethereal blobs.”

By God, she was a grown toddler. He couldn’t turn his back on her for a moment or she would be playing near fire or gleefully shedding her clothes for some filthy-minded artist. He didn’t wait for her answer but seized her wrist and dragged her through the nearest door, which led to a paneled study with a leather sofa stacked with pillows. Cluttering the walls were paintings of pale-skinned, nude ladies gazing off to some sorrowful horizon. Luckily, these paintings appeared to be from King George III’s reign, when Lilith hadn’t been born yet to pose for them.

He shut the door behind them. She sauntered to the mirror and began to curl her locks around her finger and then let them unfurl in spirals about her cheeks. There was a dangerous, ready-for-battle tilt to the edge of her mouth, lifting the little mole above her lip.

“Lilith, did you pose for that…that…Tart Amid Blue Pigeon Cack painting? And in a rag even a Covent prostitute would think twice about wearing for fear of attracting the wrong clientele?”

Anger flashed in her eyes for a half second, and then a delicious smile curled her lips. A warm shiver coursed over his skin.

“And what if I did?” Her eyes, the color of coffee, gazed at him from under her thick lashes. He couldn’t deny their sultry allure. “What would you do? Tuck me away to another boarding school? But I’m all grown up.” She shook her head and made a clucking sound. “What to do with a grown woman who dares to have a mind of her own?” She snapped her fingers. “Ah, why not control her by taking away her money?”

With gentlemen and ladies of his set, he might say that he “spoke on the level” or “gave the news straight.” There was nothing straightforward or level about Lilith. She was all curves and turns. Conversing with her was akin to Spanish flamenco dancing with words.

“I never took your money away,” he said, feeling like a weary father cursed with an errant, irresponsible child. “And if I truly controlled you, I would never have consented to your living with your father’s cousins. Your grandfather warned me about the Dahlgrens. Nor would I have consented to use his hard-earned money for this ridiculous party. Or allowed you to pose for illicit impressions of fleeting moments.”

“Good heavens, I never posed for anyone! The painting was in the man’s imagination—that mental faculty you are woefully missing, darling. I merely dressed as the muse in the painting as a lark for the exhibit opening.” She tossed back her wrists. “You know, a muse who inspires artists to great heights of fancy.”

“Lilith, the only people you are inspiring are unsavory men to low depths of debauchery.”

“Unsavory men?” She raised her arms and draped her gauzy shawl across his head and over his eyes. “I didn’t know you found me inspiring, Georgie.” The peaks of her unbound breasts lightly brushed against his chest. Ungentlemanly desire pooled in his sex.

“Lord Marylewick,” he corrected in a choked voice and pulled her garment from his person. “And try to behave with some semblance of propriety.”

“Propriety, propriety, propriety.” She tapped her finger on the side of her mouth, as if she were searching her memory for the meaning. “I remember now. It’s when you address a lady, such as myself, as Miss Dahlgren.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize I had addressed you inappropriately. But if one insists on acting like a child… You are, what? Three and twenty, and continuing to romanticize this ramshackle lifestyle that any lady of good sense would—”

“It’s the Lord Marylewick patronizing play!” She clasped her hands. “I adore it! In fact, I know every line. Wait. Wait. No, don’t continue.” She withdrew the cane and hat from his hand, letting her fingers flow over his skin. “Allow me.” She placed the hat over her head, the flowers sticking out around the brim. She scrunched her eyebrows. “It’s high time you grew up, my little lamb, and threw yourself to the wolves of high society.” She croaked like a stodgy man of seventy-five, not George’s thirty-one years.

He regretted coming here. He should have driven home to gentle, fictional Colette. And when they hauled Lilith into police court, he would say to the judge, “You see what I must suffer?”

“You need a husband to temper your reckless ways, young lady,” she continued her performance. “One who meets my approval. Someone like me—controlling, overbearing, starchy, and unbending.” Her old man voice began to fall away as her pitch rose in a crescendo. “A husband who will dress you in lace, place you on a cold marble pedestal, silence your voice, bleed your wild heart dry, and destroy your gentle, yearning soul.” After delivering this melodrama, she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and fainted onto the sofa.

He crossed his arms and gazed at her supine and curvaceous body. “I don’t recall using the terms ‘destroy your gentle, yearning soul.’ It has always been my objective to ‘shatter’ or ‘squash’ your wayward soul. And I have never fainted in my life.”

She opened one eye and regarded him. “Ah!” She jumped to her feet and pointed at his face. “I saw it. Don’t deny it. Your lip trembled. You wanted to smile.” She clenched her hands into tight balls. “Fight the urge with that iron will of yours. Fight it! First smiling, then a tiny chortle, and then before you know it, full-blown, vulgar, belly-deep laughter! And then where would you be? Almost human.”

He really did have to squelch a smile. “Miss Dahlgren, I am not devoid of proper emotions. But unlike you I temper them with sense, you know, that mental faculty you are woefully missing, darling,” he said, splashing her own words in her face.

“What would I do with something as horrid as sense? I want wild, overpowering feeling, passion, zest. ‘More happy love! more happy, happy love! / For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, / For ever panting, and for ever young; / All breathing human passion far above…’ That’s Keats, dearest,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t recognize it.”

“But I recognize what you are doing.”

“Oh, but I do many things.” She fluttered her eyelashes, sending a heated tremor through him. “What particular thing is this?”

“Last week, you came to me with a sob tale of not having enough funds to buy clothes or pay the grocer. I advanced you ten pounds. And here you are in indecent rags, pretending to be a ridiculous muse, and throwing a party—”

“Exhibit opening, not a party.”

“Don’t try to distract me from the matter at hand. Ever since you were a child, you have teased and danced around the matter of your atrocious behavior.”

“And you know so much about my childhood from those few days I was allowed to leave school and visit Tyburn at Christmas.” Fire flashed in her eyes, but her voice remained creamy. “Such special times. They were like a beautiful illustration in Town and Country.”

“I would hardly call it that.”

“I would.” She waved her hand as if she could conjure the scene in the air. “The children are gathered around the adorned tree, speculating about the gifts Mama and Papa have given them this year. Maybe it’s a bicycle or that lovely china doll from the shop window. An enormous Yule log roars in the fireplace while the adults, their cheeks and noses reddened from spiced wassail, laugh over old stories of Great-Aunt Millicent and the recalcitrant poodle, Lord Bertie and the silly hat, or such.” Her chuckle, at first light and musical, turned bitter. “Only I wasn’t in that lovely picture like you, the golden boy, and my adored, precious half-siblings. I was ten pages over in the tiny article ‘Ways to Hide the Child Who Doesn’t Fit into Your Shiny New Debrett’s-Worthy Family.’” She spun on her heel, putting her back to him.

She had the smallest toehold on his family, having issued from the unfortunate elopement of his aunt by marriage and her first husband, the roguish John Dahlgren. When Lilith was five, her father had died in a duel after cheating at cards. By then, he had already lost his wife’s substantial dowry on poor business investments. When her mother married George’s uncle, Lilith, the human embodiment of a bad memory, had been sent away and fair-headed, beautiful babies created in her place.