Lorelie Brown (6 page)

Or he was an expert in ignoring awkward situations.

“Martin.” Miss Vale greeted him with a brief nod. “Is my mother well today?”

“I believe so, miss.”

“Fine.” Miss Vale swept forward, away from Ian’s touch. His fingertips tingled with the need to get her back, but that wasn’t likely. Not with the haughty lift of her chin and the way she all but spit when she addressed him again. “You’re in luck. I’ve decided it’s simply easier to have you to tea than to deal with your incessant whining when my men throw you out bodily.”

He followed along behind her, stacking both his hands flat across his own back. No touching. Not her. Not that long, graceful sweep of her spine into neck and the delicate knots there. Her reddish hair had been swept and pinned up haphazardly enough that a wisp fell out to touch her collarbone.

“Just curious, but if you have me thrown out of the house, how would you be able to hear my whining?”

“I notice you don’t deny that there would be such.” That impish good humor was back in her expression. Her smile curved, her body canted toward him.

How much of it was real and how much was falsified? A fake designed to ease everyone around her and deflect. The curious part was what she hid. If she could so boldly admit insanity in her family, what could possibly be left as an enigma?

He wanted to peel her apart, see what mysteries she kept for someone with such a bold mouth. Truths could hide the deepest secrets.

But he didn’t have time for such nonsense. Etta still waited at their family home in Devon, along with his mother. If he knew them both, they’d be working each other into frenzied balls of worry. They were good women and didn’t deserve to have to fret the way they were. No one deserved to be blackmailed by a piece of trash like Patricia, much less his sweet, kindhearted baby sister.

Ian intended to do whatever was necessary to ease her heart. Best-case scenario would involve seeing Patricia in wrist and leg irons, marching into the bowels of a dank prison.

“Whether I whine or not is beside the issue.” He felt his mouth quirk, thought of her skin and the way she’d taste under his lips. “What matters is that we’re going to take a lovely tea
en famille
.”

She shook her head as she pushed open a pocket door. “This certainly isn’t a public sort of occasion.”

That much was apparent when she stepped in and revealed the room. At some point, the position and airy windows on the front street said it had likely been a parlor. The sofa toward the far end lent credence to the idea, as well as the marble-surrounded fireplace.

But that’s where the similarities to normal decorating ended.

The whole room was soft. A giant jumble of cloth and fabric and large pillows that had been stripped from the beds of giants. The entire south wall was covered in fabric, starting at the plaster medallion in the center of the ceiling and falling in gathers of pale, pale yellow. A line of half-done paintings leaned along the edge of the wall. They’d been stacked while still wet, as many had drag marks through the oil paint. Whoever had painted them lacked focus, as seven different subjects ranged widely from landscapes to nudes.

It took him a moment to spot Miss Vale’s mother, mostly because she was curled up in the corner of the room. If it weren’t for the fact that she were on a cushion only four inches off the ground, she might have been any woman of leisure in the afternoon. She had a pile of books at her elbow and another open in her hands as she flipped through speedily.

“Mama,” Miss Vale said, with a French-like accent on the second syllable. “I’ve brought company. Lady Vale, allow me to present Sir Ian Heald.”

Lady Vale looked up, her eyes slightly unfocused as she flipped onward two more pages, as if she weren’t able to switch activities. Then she grinned. She stood with a surprising amount of grace, tucking her pale yellow dressing gown around her waist and retying a lace sash.

“Oh, Lottie. You really shouldn’t have. I’m not dressed.” The protest seemed unauthentic from the avid way she inspected Ian from head to toe. “Though if one must be seen half dressed, how fortunate it should be by an attractive man. Perhaps you should leave me with him, Lottie. Better that than endure such strangely mixed company.”

Ian bowed. It was either that or gape at the woman.

Lottie’s response was curiously absent. Her lips still bent upwards in a smile, but there was something about it that looked un-right. She was only half there. It was her eyes, he was fairly sure. The bright spark that drove her normally had fled. The tiniest dots of red color flushed the tops of her cheeks, below thick lashes. “Mama, have you ordered tea yet?”

“They’ll bring it on the hour, I think. Always do. They think I can’t take care of myself,” she said with a charming smile directed at Ian. “A team of little rats, taking after their queen. That’s me, the servant’s queen. They do love me so.” She talked at a rapid cadence with endearing verve. She shrugged, which made the neckline of her gown gape. Her skin had a strange, bright red tinge across her neck and upper shoulder. Lady Vale looked more like a laborer who’d been too long in the fields than a lady who spent her time sheltered.

Lottie noticed too. She touched two fingers to the back of her mother’s neck, concern drawing her brows down. “Were you out today?”

“Nicolette went with me,” she replied with a guileless innocence that Ian suspected was wholly manufactured. “I wish to paint a bird’s nest in my tree. You should have seen the light over the river. The park is lovely this time of year.”

“You say that all year,” Lottie said with a gentle smile.

“It’s particularly true in the spring.” Lady Vale strode toward the windows then and yanked back the curtains. “Look! Look at all that light. It’s amazing. I was using it to paint my vision of the goddess Aphrodite. I want her streaming through the scene as if she’s been transported.”

“Mother,” Lottie said. “Please. I’m sure Sir Ian doesn’t want to hear all about that.”

In all honesty, he had no idea what the woman was talking about. Her avenues of conversation were easily transported to raptures about the fairly ordinary street views outside the window. He gave a small bow, as the polite thing to do. “Certainly don’t worry on my account.”

“See? Sir Ian is a man of taste, I’m certain of it.” She spun and leaned back against the windows, which made her gown part inelegantly. Her lower leg and knee were on display.

Ian coughed into his fist and averted his gaze. At some point, she’d drawn directly on a six-foot-square section of the wallpaper. Charcoal lines took a moment to coalesce into a roughly hewn face.

Lottie’s face.

Once the lines fell into place, Ian couldn’t see anything else. Her wide smile and the almond eyes slanted to the side, secretive.

Beside him, Lottie spoke in a calm, sure voice to her mother. “Why don’t you run upstairs and have Nicolette dress you in your new silk moiré? You haven’t had a chance to wear it yet, and I’m sure Sir Ian would find it beautiful.”

“Oh, that’s a lovely idea. I’ll be back in a moment.”

She disappeared out of the room in a tide of yellow dressing gown. The blue lace sash trailed out behind her, and long red hair fell down her back.

He shouldn’t say it. Shouldn’t say anything. He knew it, knew it as well as he knew that he’d find Patricia and serve her up to Etta on a silver platter for having tainted his sister’s memories of her short but happy marriage. The words burned like coals behind his teeth. “What’s it like?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Acting as parent to the woman who ought to be your mother?”

Chapter Five

Lottie’s chest became a tangled ball of tension. Rolling her bottom lip between her teeth gained her no relief. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

He watched her for a long, steady moment, making her blood turn to prickling wires inside her veins. She pressed her palms together for calmness.

When he turned away, her entire body unclenched.

She let out a slow, shaky breath.

No one ever asked. No one ever wanted to know.

With his hands stacked at the small of his back, he wandered the room. His head was bare, his dark hair soft and touchable. His steps picked carefully between pillows and low tables. At one, he stopped and bent to inspect a tumbling pile of her mama’s collection.

He had elegant bones in his wrists, peeking from beneath his starched cuffs. When he picked up a small skull, bleached white with age, he cradled it as if it was an expensive artifact rather than her mother’s eccentricity left upon a table.

He held it up toward a shaft of light that had managed to peek through the excessive curtains. “Is she an anatomist?”

“At times.” Her hobbies were endless, her interests varied. Few lasted long, especially when it came to motherhood and being a wife. “I believe that one was from an attempt at taxidermy.”

His mouth quirked. “Taxidermy?”

Lottie shrugged. “Which in turn was more about the painting. She was displeased with how she represented animals.”

He carried the skull over to the stacks of paintings below the windows. He bent slightly, and it was enough to draw his coat taut over his backside. “I see no animals in here.”

“She burned them.”

He straightened. In his eyes, she saw every word she left unspoken, the rest of that story. How terrifying it had been, how her mother had started in the fireplace and then dragged a burning, charred painting to the back terrace when it wouldn’t fit. Mother had wept the entire time. She’d damned her work as pointless, as horrible, as the worst expense of a destructive, self-aggrandizing indulgence.

Sir Ian said nothing. And Lottie was playing make-believe. Filling in the silences with things that she wanted to hear.

Except he’d asked. He’d seen the extent to which she’d been forced into the position of mothering her own parent.

Sir Ian was the only man—or person, for that matter—who’d ever dared to cross that unspoken boundary. When she called her mother mad or crazy or insane, everyone dismissed her. Told her she was exaggerating. Or those who knew and believed…consoled her.

“Arson is a rather unusual hobby for our class.”

“We encourage her painting, for the most part.” She flipped through a couple stacks, until she found her favorite of the recent batch. “She has a large measure of talent. Certain periods are better than others in terms of production.”

“Is that why you live in Chelsea rather than Mayfair?”

The painting wasn’t particularly large, only a foot across. Lottie propped it up on an easel. “Some of it, yes.”

“The rest of the reason?”

She smiled hugely. “So if Mother goes traipsing about the neighborhood in her shift and garters, it’s only a passel of other artists who see her.”

He held the tiny skull balanced in his palm as he neared her. “You’re teasing.”

“Oh, but I wish that I were.” She shook her head and stepped back to examine the painting. “But see? She’s not like most.”

“Beautiful.”

Lottie crossed her arms over her stomach and cupped her elbows. She took a deep breath, letting the comfort of the painting ease through her. Oil strokes showed two girls in white dresses. They faced away from the perspective of the viewer, toward an open window. Their voluminous skirts covered the bench they sat on, but a sad-eyed beagle peeked out from the one on the right.

“And yet Mama is not happy with it.” She reached out to trace the air above the window depicted. “This portion here. She doesn’t like it. Says the colors are off.”

“I don’t see it.” He stepped closer to the painting, which brought him nearer to her. “I know I’m no art expert. I went to Winchester, after all. But it’s perfect to me.”

“To me as well.” She rather liked a man who had no problem admitting his shortcomings. If they did so while praising her family, all the better. “I’ve tried to have her submit it to the Royal Academy, but she’ll have none of it.”

“It’s a moment of great friendship. The way their shoulders lean in together.”

Lottie and Victoria had had a lovely month, chattering and gossiping while they posed. Lottie’s mother had been in one of her good periods. “It is.”

“That’s you too. I can see it in the line of your back.”

“Oh, gee,” she said with dry humor. “And here I thought it was my red hair that gave me away.”

He cut his eyes toward her, mouth quirking. “How easily you wound me.”

He didn’t mean it. They’d had one of the most hectic afternoons she’d participated in for a long time, and yet he didn’t seem the least bit bothered, not truly. Worried and concerned, yes, especially when talking about Patricia or his intent to find her, no matter what the cost. He had intrinsic good humor that Lottie could appreciate. After all, she’d been seeking a little bit of that for herself for such a very long time.

The delicate chimes that wound through the room made her jolt. The gold-wrought fingers of the clock on the mantelpiece had ticked over a surprising amount. “What is taking Mama so long?”

Sir Ian blinked, his gaze shifting from her to the clock. “Has it been long? I thought women were forbidden by the rest of the fairer sex to dress in anything less than thirty minutes.”