Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy #2)(83)

It felt intimate, revealing. As if he’d unlaced her stays. And what treasures awaited him. Sheaves of paper, neatly wrapped in oilcloth and tied with efficient knots—knots that would do a sailor proud. Small bundles of brushes, smelling faintly of turpentine. And rows upon rows of her little bottles of ink and cakes of pigment. Of course, for Gray, the array of colors did not particularly impress. Rather, it was the care and precision with which they were packed that caused a sharp pinch in his chest. In this trunk was everything of delicacy, beauty, and painstaking care. Everything he admired in her, laid open for his examination, with no veneer of lies to obscure his view.

He looked his fill. He touched each item in the trunk, skipping his fingers from one object to the next. He couldn’t bring himself to lift one out. Until a small, leather-bound book wedged along one side caught his attention. Hooking a fingertip under the spine, he eased the volume up, and a title greeted him: The Memoirs of a Wanton Dairymaid. His shout of laughter rattled the bottles in their straw-buffered rows. So this was the one book she’d selected for the journey? A ribald novel?

Gray tipped the book into his hand. The binding was strained and the pages swollen—as though the entire volume had been dipped in water and dried. The cover fell open to reveal an elaborate frontispiece, depicting a buxom dairymaid wearing a straw bonnet, voluminous petticoats, and a knowing smile. On riffling the pages, it immediately became clear that the book’s expanded bulk could be credited to the addition of numerous pen-and-ink illustrations.

He recognized her deft hand and eye for detail immediately. He flipped through the pages, past vignettes of the dairymaid and her vague-featured gentleman engaged in a courtship of sorts: a kiss on the hand, a whisper in the ear. By the book’s midpoint, the chit’s voluminous petticoats were up around her ears, and the illustrations comprised a sequence of quite similar poses in varying locales. Not just the dairy, but a carriage, the larder, in a hayloft lit with candles and strewn with … were those rose petals?

I’ll be damned.

Gray was fast divining the true source of the French painting master’s mythic exploits. More unsettling by far, however, as he perused the book, he noted a subtle alteration in the gentleman lover’s features. With each successive illustration, the hero appeared taller, broader in the shoulders, and his hair went from a cropped style to collar length in the space of two pages.

The more pages Gray turned, the more he recognized himself. It was unmistakable. She’d used him as the model for these bawdy illustrations. She’d sketched him in secret; not once, but many times. And here he’d nearly gone mad with envy over each scrap of foolscap she’d inked for one crewman or another. His emotions underwent a dizzying progression—from surprised, to flattered, to (with the benefit of one especially inventive situation in an orchard) undeniably aroused. But as he lingered over a nude study of this amalgam of the real him and some picaresque fantasy, he began to feel something else entirely. He felt used.

She’d rendered his form with astonishing accuracy, given that it must have been drawn before she’d any opportunity to actually see him unclothed. Not that she’d achieved an exact likeness. Her virgin’s imagination was rather generous in certain aspects and somewhat stinting in others, he noted with a bitter sort of amusement. But she’d laid him bare in these pages, without his knowledge or consent. God, she’d even drawn his scars. All in service of some adolescent erotic fantasy. And now he began to grow angry.

He had been handling the leaves of the book with his fingertips only, anxious he might smudge or rip the pages. Now he abandoned all caution and flipped roughly through the remainder of the volume. Until he came to the end, and his hand froze.

There they were, the two of them. He and she, fully clothed and unengaged in any physical intimacies—yet intimate, in a way he had never known. Never dreamed. Sitting beneath a willow tree, his head in her lap. One of her hands lay twined with his, atop his chest. The other rested on his brow. The sky soared vast and expansive above, gauzy clouds spinning into forever.

The hot fist of desire that had gripped his loins loosened, moved upward through his torso, churning the contents of his gut along the way. Then it clutched at his heart and squeezed until it hurt. Somehow, this illustration was the most dismaying of all. So naïve, so ridiculous. At least the bawdy situations were plausible, if sometimes physically improbable. This was utterly impossible. To her, he’d never been more than a fantasy. It occurred to Gray that more secrets might be packed within these trunks. If he sorted through her belongings, he might find the answers to all his questions. Perhaps answers to questions he’d never thought to ask. In spite of this, he let the lid of the trunk clap shut and fastened the strap with shaking fingers. He’d suffered as many of her fantasies as he could bear for one day.

It was time to acquaint her with reality.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Reality was hitting Sophia hard. Or rather, kicking her hard, and leaving bruises the size and shape of a goat’s cloven hoof. Reality was making her ache all over, in muscles she hadn’t known she possessed. Her first day as ship’s cook had been novel, amusing. She’d experienced the thrill of competency and earning her own keep. Each fire built, each potato peeled, each squirt of milk into the pail was a small triumph. Just a few days later, she was fully prepared to admit defeat. Manual labor was not romantic in the least, and only dimly satisfying, in the way chewing rock-hard ship’s biscuit satisfied one’s hunger—begrudgingly, and at considerable expense of effort.