Alec Mackenzie's Art of Seduction (Mackenzies & McBrides #9)(8)

Celia wondered what had happened to Mr. Finn to bring him such sadness. Had this younger brother died? Poor man.

To have to scratch a living teaching while mourning his brother and raising a daughter on his own must be very difficult. Mr. Finn had made no mention of a wife—which might mean nothing; some gentlemen never talked about their wives—but a baby would be in the mother’s care if the mother were alive, not the father’s. Likely he was a widower. Celia’s pity escalated.

Mr. Finn clapped his hands together, the sound large, and Celia jumped. “I know where ye need to start, lass. Sit there.”

He waved her to a stool before the easel that had been turned to catch the light from the window.

Mr. Finn took up a sheet of thick paper from the bundle on the table and attached it to the easel with swift, sure movements. A large box of drawing pencils, the expensive kind of true English graphite, came out of a drawer in a tall bureau. Mr. Finn extracted two pencils and whittled down the points with the knife for that purpose, lifting the pencils before his golden eyes to study their sharpness.

He handed Celia one pencil and set the other on a table, waiting for her to sit. Celia slid onto the stool uncertainly, jamming her feet on the bottom rung.

“What am I drawing?” she asked.

Mr. Finn slid his coat from his shoulders and dropped himself down on a chair, the gilded thing sliding backward a few inches. His coat landed on the carpet.

“Me.”

Celia blinked at him. “To see what I make of your nose?”

Another rumble of laughter. “No, lass. I’m thinking you need a few lessons in anatomy.”

He untied his shirt and pulled it off over his head, dropping the shirt on top of his coat, a puddle of pale cloth on black wool.





Chapter 3





Celia’s mouth went dry as a linen bag.

He sat not five feet from her, a large man with nothing covering his sunbaked torso. He lounged back in the chair, but he was straight and strong, unashamed, elbows on the chair’s delicate arms.

The collarbone she’d glimpsed when she’d found him in his nightshirt stretched to his shoulders, one of which bore a small triangular gouge. Red hair curled down his chest to a firm belly, both chest and stomach crossed with scars. The arms that had cradled his daughter held sinewy strength and were brushed with more scars.

He rested his right hand on the chair’s arm, palm down, fingers slightly curled. The hand alone was formidable, never mind the rest of him. The wiry hair on his arm was golden red, the hand, at rest, filled with potential power.

His fingertips were blunt, fingers broad. The man claimed to be an artist, but Celia could easily picture this hand around the hilt of a claymore or holding a musket, muscles working as he fought British soldiers to the death.

“Go on then,” he said in his rumbling voice. “We’ve started late, and I have other lessons today.”

Celia jumped, realizing her mouth had opened again. She snapped it closed and jerked her gaze from his chest to find him watching her, unsmiling, his golden eyes filled with something she couldn’t decipher.

She lifted her pencil and touched it to the paper, but she had no idea how to begin. Drawing had always come easily to her, but at this moment, her fingers would not move.

Perhaps the fact that she was sitting alone in a room with a man who was half naked kept her fingers stiff. The last time Celia had been found in a compromising situation, her mother had tried to force her to marry the gentleman in question. If her mother came upon Celia with this man, however, she’d do everything in her power to make certain no one ever knew. Scandal was only acceptable when it was useful.

At this moment, her duchess mother was comfortably far away on the other side of Grosvenor Square, Lady Flora was downstairs, and Celia and the drawing master were quite alone.

She took a deep breath, willed her hand to work, and brushed a dark line across the page.

Her brother’s drawing master had taught her to ignore what a thing was and to simply draw the form of it. He’d told her to block each part of the object with rough lines before going over them to clarify.

Celia studied Mr. Finn’s bare arm, willing herself to see it as a series of shapes instead of the arm she’d imagined pulling her close. The top of his wrist was almost a rectangle and arcs ran from that along his forearm. Muscles curved in long half circles from the underside to gather in a hollow on the inside of his elbow.

Celia slowly sketched the squares and ellipses to represent the hand, arm, and shoulder, but her pencil wobbled and the lines looked wrong. She could not pretend Ansel Finn was so many boxes and circles. She was aware of the blood that flowed under his skin, the heat of him coming to her across the small space, the aliveness of him. There was a great difference between drawing this man and sketching a vase of flowers.

“Don’t think about it too hard, lass.” His silken voice slid into her uncertainty. “Let your mind see, and draw what it tells you.”

Celia closed her eyes briefly, then fixed her gaze on his hand again. It lay quietly, the latent strength in his fingers reminding her of the whole man—a lion waiting for his prey.

Her pencil skimmed smoothly across the page, a gray-black line flowing from its point. She formed the curve of his finger, the crease at its middle knuckle, the blunt fingertip.

Celia drew a sharp breath as she looked at what she’d done. Not even a complete finger, but it already held more life than anything she’d drawn before.