Here he stood again, staring at his closed door, fully and painfully aware that he’d behaved like a complete fool in front of Madelene Valmeyer.
Benedict ran both hands through his hair. He’d resolved he would be his best and most professional self. He couldn’t refuse to complete the commission, he reasoned, but he could put a distance between himself and Madelene. The idea of art as truth was overrated. It didn’t matter what he’d told Madelene about art showing up flaws and vanities. He’d painted plenty of portraits that were mere flattery. He’d made women younger and men thinner and taller than they really were. He’d made bony horses into thoroughbreds and plain children into cherubs. In fact, for him, flattery in portraiture had been the rule, except perhaps with Gabriella and those cruel and dangerous renderings. Even then, though, he hadn’t known his own mind as he created the pictures. He’d thought he was flattering her. She’d certainly taken them that way.
Benedict barked out a harsh laugh. He hadn’t known his own mind then, and it seemed he didn’t know it now. The moment Madelene came into his studio, all his resolution had flown out the window. No facade he could muster would stand before her lightest glance.
And so he’d shown her his real self, and she had shown him hers. The problem was, her real self was graceful and strong, while his was simply idiotic. He’d positively ranted at her, spouting disjointed nonsense about contradictions and destruction and the danger of being seen through an artist’s eyes . . . He must have sounded like a madman.
Except, somehow, against every possible rational expectation, Madelene had understood him. He saw it in her beautiful, complex, deep blue eyes when she looked up at him. She heard something beyond his harsh, confused words. She looked at him and saw something more than the cliché of the mad artist.
She’d seen him—his true self—and that simple thing had shaken him to his soul.
You want what I want, she’d said. Her hesitation was gone, and the fear in her eyes had cleared away. You want someone to see the real you.
Someone does. I do.
Benedict ran his hand through his hair. Contradictions again. So many contradictions. The need he felt was the need he feared. The desire to be seen could not compete with the desire to remain hidden. The desperate, terrible, killing wish for love was drowned by the fear of love, because love could destroy the person who counted on it for salvation.
How did he navigate these contradictions? How did he bring Madelene safely through them? Especially when he didn’t understand any of them himself.
And then there was another problem—the painting. Selene in her chariot. He’d taken his initial sketches of Madelene and had begun incorporating them into charcoal studies for the larger work, and he’d made a discovery that sent chills down his spine.
The picture was going to be good. No, not merely good, it was going to be great. Benedict could feel it. His hands told him. His artist’s eye told him. He was champing at the bit to take up his brushes and breathe life into the crude outlines. He would have to grind new colors, a whole palate of golds and silvers and creams and soft blues. He’d make the canvas glow, like moonlight glowed, like Madelene glowed.
The energy of that artistic desire terrified him as surely as the physical desire he’d felt when he’d touched her today.
What was she doing to him? And why? He’d known beauty before. He’d had it at his command. Artists attracted women, all kinds and all classes. He’d had his pick and his fill of them as he traveled across Europe. He’d been a young man then, full of enthusiasm for his art and the excitement of being an Englishman abroad in the teeth of the danger that was Napoleon’s reign. He’d decided to take full advantage of every chance he was offered, and he did.
When he’d met and married Gabriella, it was as if he’d laid claim to a thunderstorm. Nothing could be greater or more intense than their love for each other. And their hatred.
But even that had been nothing compared to this—this tiny girl who was so afraid she could barely walk into a ballroom without fainting. At the same time, when she stood in front of him here, she laid waste to the fortress he’d made of his heart with a heated glance and a few short words, and she’d left him standing in its ruins.
He’d barely even touched her.
What in God’s name do I do now?
“Nothing,” he said, to himself, to his drawing, to God and the whole of the world that waited and watched for his return, that would wait and watch to see how this girl fared under the attentions of Lord Benedict Pelham, who had killed one woman already.
He raised his trembling hand. He took the latest page of sketches by the edge. He’d tear it apart. Burn them all in the stove. Destroy every bit of work he’d done so far. Make it as if it had never been. Go back to Switzerland. Paint mountains and lakes, or simply throw his brushes into the lake and never disturb another living soul, not even his own.
He clenched the edge of the page in his fingers. Madelene’s gentle face looked up at him from the white sheet.
No one else had ever seen me in that way, said her voice in his memory. That’s why I came here in the first place, and that’s why I came back today.
I trust you.
She had not said that last part, not directly, but that was what lay under all the other words she did say. Not I love you, which too many women had said. Not I want you, although that was as clear as the sunlight reflected in her blue eyes. Madelene had expressed that she trusted him, and Benedict understood how difficult, how profound that was for her.
“Why?” he asked himself for the hundredth time. “And why would you give that trust to me?”
No one else had ever seen me in that way.
No one had looked, he answered his own memory.
You took my fear, and in its reflection you gave me beauty and courage.
“I gave you nothing,” he whispered to the drawing, as he had to the living woman. “But you have offered me everything, and I cannot accept.” He touched the corner of her eye on the paper, as if he thought to wipe away a tear. “It would be too great a risk for us both. Do you understand? I would hurt you. I would break you.”
No. Whatever else you’ll do, you won’t hurt me like that. You could have already, but you didn’t.
He turned away, shaking. It was nonsense. It was his imagination. Worse. It was the fevered wish of a broken heart. It was dangerous. It was madness. It had to be. It could not be anything else.
But what if it could? Benedict lifted his head. What if he accepted the trust she gave him? It would be a terrible thing. It would be a glorious thing.
What if he did?
What if he could? Could he at least try?
You want what I want. You want someone to see the real you.
But that cannot happen. Don’t you understand? Benedict drew his fingers down the page, caressing the drawing as if it had been her cheek. The world will only stare at us. They’ll measure us and judge us by all that we have been. By all that I have been. The truth of you will be buried.