“I couldn’t say,” Beth replied after an all-over surveillance.
“But she certainly is very pretty.”
“I wish I were beautiful enough to be a model.” Katie sighed. “Not that I would. Me dear old mother would whip the skin off me. Dreadful wicked ladies they must be, taking off their clothes to be painted.”
“Perhaps.” The woman disappeared around the corner with her cluster of friends, lost to sight.
“And what about him? He looks like an artist.”
Beth glanced to where Katie indicated, and froze. The man didn’t have an easel—he lounged on a bench with one foot on it and moodily watched a twitchy young man glob paint on a canvas. He was a big man, barely fitting on the delicate stone bench. He had dark hair touched with red, a square, hard face, and enticingly broad shoulders. Beth’s breath poured back into her lungs as she realized the man was not, in fact, Lord Ian Mackenzie. He looked very much like Ian, though, the same forbidding face, the same air of power, the same set of jaw. But this man’s hair shone redder in the sunlight, he having set his hat on the bench next to him.
He was definitely another Mackenzie. She’d read that Hart, the Duke of Kilmorgan, had traveled to Rome on some government business, she’d met Lord Cameron in London, so by process of elimination, this must be Lord Mac, the famous artist.
As though he felt her scrutiny, Lord Mac turned his head and looked straight at her.
Beth flushed and snapped her eyes back to her blank paper. Breathing hard, she put her pencil to the page and drew an awkward line. She let herself become absorbed in the line and the next one, until a shadow fell over her paper. “Not like that,” a deep voice rumbled.
Beth jumped and looked up past a watered silk waistcoat and a carelessly tied cravat to harsh eyes very much like Ian’s. The difference was that Mac’s gaze fully met hers instead of shifting away like an elusive sunbeam.
“You’re holding the pencil wrong.” Lord Mac put a large gloved hand over hers and turned her wrist upward.
“That feels awkward.”
“You’ll get used to it.” Mac sat himself down next to her, taking up every spare inch of the bench. “Let me show you.”
He guided her hand over the paper, shading the line she’d already drawn until it looked like a curve of the tree in front of her.
“Amazing,” she said. “I’ve never taken drawing lessons, you see.”
“Then what are you doing out here with an easel?”
“I thought I’d give it a try.”
Mac arched his brows, but he kept his hand on hers and helped her draw another line.
He was flirting with her, she realized. She was alone with only a female companion, she’d been blatantly staring at him, and this was Paris. He must have thought she wanted a liaison. The last thing she needed was to be propositioned by yet another Mackenzie. Perhaps the newspapers would print reports of Ian and Mac fighting over her. But the hand cupping hers didn’t give her the same frisson of warmth that Ian’s had. She dreamed about Ian’s slow, sensual lips on hers every night, and then she’d jump awake, sweating and tangled in the sheets, her body aching. She glanced sideways at Mac. “I met your brother Lord Ian at Covent Garden last week.”
Mac’s gaze snapped to her. His eyes were not quite so golden as Ian’s, more copper-colored with flecks of brown. “You met Ian?”
“Yes, he did me a kindness. I met Lord Cameron as well, but only briefly.”
Mac’s eyes narrowed. “Ian did you a kindness?”
“He saved me from making a grave mistake.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“Nothing I wish to discuss on top of Montmartre.”
“Why not? Who the devil are you?”
Katie leaned around from Beth’s other side. “Well, that’s a bloody cheek.”“Hush, Katie. My name is Mrs. Ackerley.” Mac scowled. “I’ve never heard of you. How did you manage to scrape an acquaintance with my brother?” Katie glared at Mac with Irish frankness. “She’s a bloody heiress, that’s who she is. And a kind lady what doesn’t have to take rudeness from the likes of forward gentlemen in a French park.”
“Katie,” Beth admonished her quietly. “I beg your pardon, my lord.”
Mac’s sharp gaze flicked to Katie, then back to Beth. “Are you certain it was Ian?”
“He was introduced to me as Lord Ian Mackenzie,” Beth said. “I suppose he could have been an impostor in an excellent disguise, but that never occurred to me.” Mac didn’t look impressed with her humor. “He never would look directly at me.”