Stroke of Genius (9 page)

There was silence for a couple heartbeats as she seemed to be thinking things over. Finally he heard a quiet “yes.”

“It’s not enough to follow fashion. If we want Miss Makepeace hailed as an Original, she must take the lead.” He stepped aside with a flourish. “I give you the new color combination I predict will take the
ton
by storm.”

Grace had arranged the two swaths of silk across her bosom diagonally just as he’d shown her, tucking the ends under her arms. Minerva’s jaw dropped.

“Oh, my dear, that’s…”

“That’s genius,” the modiste finished for her. “Pure genius, Mr. Hawke.”

“I can’t claim the credit,” he said with atypical humility. “Miss Makepeace picked the colors.”

“But you had a hand in it,” Grace said, coloring suddenly as she realized what she’d said.

Crispin shot her a complicit grin.
A hand in it, indeed.
His palm still itched to hold her.

“It’s lovely, dear,” Minerva said happily. “You’ll cut quite a figure for your come-out. So bold and unusual.”

“In a sea of sprigged muslin, she will stand out as a goddess, a lady of substance,” Crispin said with a deep breath. He hoped to be able to lay aside the puce serge soon, but his arousal was showing no sign of abatement. He didn’t dare glance at Grace. “And these are not colors every woman can wear, though I predict many will try.”

The modiste shot him her brightest smile. “I’d better
order more immediately.” Then she scurried toward Grace, tape measure and pins flying.

When he finally dared look at Grace, she was staring back at him, her expression as inscrutable as Napoleon’s Sphinx.

Was she angry? Relieved that he covered for her so well? As moved as he by their stolen moment?

He couldn’t read what she was thinking.

All he knew was that his cock was still ready to play. If his body didn’t settle soon, he might have to actually buy that abominable bolt of puce serge.

Most people have no idea what propelled them to their current place in life.

But Pygmalion knew to the instant.

And he never forgot it.

Eighteen years earlier

Peel’s Abbey, a Cheapside house of pleasure

“What do you think, Crispin?” the new girl named Olympia asked as she twirled before him in her fanciful gown. It had cost the earth. Every last cent she had. “Well?”

His mouth opened and closed but nothing would come out. She was a pink froth with feet, a delicate confection in the baker’s shop window and he could only press his nose against the pane.

Olympia was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life and ordinarily he’d rather talk about something beautiful than eat. But he couldn’t seem to make his voice work when she was around.

And even when it did, he couldn’t trust it to stay in one octave long enough to finish a sentence.

She laughed at him then. And chucked his cheek as if he were a child, even though he was as tall as she.

“I guess that’s a good answer,” she said gaily. “I only hope I render the duke speechless as well. Wish me luck.”

She waltzed out of the Abbey and out of his life as quickly as she’d come. She didn’t return that night. Or the next.

Evidently, the duke was robbed of the gift of speech as well and decided to keep her until he recovered it.

Madame was disappointed by Olympia’s sudden departure. She’d hoped her new girl would raise the social standing of the Abbey’s clientele. Along with raising the fees she could charge.

But the rest of the girls said “Good riddance.” Olympia was too old to work in the Abbey, they complained. Even though her previous soft life left her skin untainted and her teeth pearlescent, wasn’t she nearly twenty-five? And being wellborn meant she thought she was better than the rest of them.

But didn’t it go to show that ladies could find themselves soiled beyond repair just as easily as washer-women? And her thinking she was too good for the regular “gentlemen.” Olympia didn’t belong there, the other girls at the Abbey said.

Crispin agreed. What did a swan have to do with a bunch of mud hens?

At night in the garret, he thought of Olympia and her snowy white shoulders. And he discovered the miraculous way his twelve-year-old body could be tricked into believing she was right there with him, doing delicious, wicked things to him.

Even if she was the duke’s mistress now, he would love her forever.

And every time the moon showed its silver face in the grimy garret window, she would be his.

One day a few weeks later, Crispin was carrying in the case of wine Madame had bought to serve the “gentlemen” before they chose their girl for the evening. She’d probably water each goblet to make it go further, but it gave the place a touch of elegance to serve a French vintage, she said.

Crispin doubted anything other than a lit brand could add elegance to Peel’s Abbey.

He no longer feared Madame would sell him to the molly house. He was big enough to help protect the girls now if one of the patrons got rough, and Madame had taken several commissions for his chess sets. She even provided him with better materials for his carving, but he knew there was more he could do. More he wanted to do.

He just wasn’t sure what.

Crispin arranged the wine bottles on the dusty cellar shelves, laying them on their sides, a long row of borrowed elegance doomed to end their days fermenting in whoremongers’ bellies. Then as he climbed up the rotting stairs, he heard her voice in the front parlor.

Olympia.

He leaped up the steps, two at a time. And he never descended those stairs again. She’d come for him.

The only thing he retrieved from the attic to take with him was the scrap of linen embroidered with the initials CRS. And the only thing left to show he’d been there at all was a half-finished set of chess pieces.

Perhaps there was a unique element in this particular stone that made it harder than usual. Perhaps there was a flaw, a deep cleft embedded in the marble that kept the stone from revealing its hidden form. Try as he might, Pygmalion couldn’t bend the stone to his will. Which, of course, made him all the more determined to succeed.

“Don’t slouch so, Grace,” Minerva said as they rode along in their hired barouche. It was the most fashionable time of day to see and be seen in St. James Park. They were almost required to be there. “But perhaps you might manage not to sit quite so tall at the same time.”

If you didn’t want tall offspring, you ought not to have married such a tall man,
danced on the tip of Grace’s tongue, but she merely said, “Yes, Mother.”

It was pointless to argue. She compromised by leaning more heavily on the armrest, listing a bit toward the outer edge of the carriage. That brought the bill of her shovel-shaped sunbonnet nearer to the level of her mother’s outlandish hat. Grace wasn’t sure, but she thought she spied two dead turtledoves artfully arranged amid the lace flowers and other frippery.

The thing must weigh half a stone!

“Smile, dearest. We must be seen to be enjoying ourselves.”

Claudette, who was seated opposite them, had no problem with that directive. She’d decked herself out in
her finest secondhand frock and preened with the best of them, looking down her Gallic nose at the foot traffic.

“I might be riding backward, but I am riding,” Grace’s maid said. “If those ladies must walk, why do they not stay home?”

“Perhaps they prefer to walk.” Heaven knew Grace would prefer to be almost anywhere else. She hadn’t written in days and she chafed at not being able to record the stories that twirled in her mind. She wished she’d at least brought along a book.

Anything but Reverend Waterbury’s
Mysteries of Mythology. The eerie similarities between her erotic dream and what had happened in truth at the modiste’s shop had kept her away from that book.

She’d also managed to steer clear of Crispin. Once word circulated that the illustrious Mr. Hawke had been impressed enough by his latest subject to secure a voucher at Almack’s for her, the
ton
’s interest in Grace Makepeace was thoroughly piqued. She and her mother had been invited to countless interminable teas, so society matrons could satisfy their curiosity.

Claudette gleaned intelligence for them from the servants’ grapevine. She told her employers after their first tea that rumors about the exquisite beauty of Grace’s hands had traveled from house to house.

“So
bien sur
,” Claudette had said, “you must never, never remove your gloves in public. A woman’s best asset, she is always a man’s imagination.”

So Grace kept her “capable” hands carefully begloved at all times. Between their social obligations, fittings for her new gown and the “at home” afternoons her mother arranged, her days were a blur of mindless activity. Grace had been able to plead truthfully that she was too busy to return to Crispin’s studio so he could do the casting for her sculpture.

But sooner or later, her mother would remember she wanted that sculpture done and there would be no help for it.

Perhaps Grace could have a small accident and break her pinky. That might do the trick.

It would have to be the right hand, so I can still write.

Beneath her kidskin glove, a stubborn ink stain marked the third finger of her left hand. Her retelling of Reverend Waterbury’s myths was coming along nicely when she could find time to write it all down, though Pygmalion’s tale was giving her fits.

She hoped to finish the whole set while they were here in London so she could submit it to the same house that published the
Mysteries of Mythology.
Her whimsical version of the stories would be a good companion piece for the reverend’s dry, scholarly work.

And it would mark her as a real writer, not merely, as her mother claimed, a scribbler of daydreams.

“Oh, I say! There’s Mr. Hawke! Yoo-hoo!” her mother sang out, waving her hanky like a flag of surrender.

Don’t look,
Grace ordered herself with sternness. The man made her feel things. Jumbled-up things. Forget-your-own-name things.

Wicked things.

She had to look.

Crispin alighted from an open carriage on the far side of the broad parkway. Grace’s belly twisted like a pretzel while he ambled up to the ornate front entrance of a white stonework townhouse. The gilt-trimmed door opened almost immediately and he was ushered inside by a servant in scarlet livery.

“Oh, he must not have heard me,” Grace’s mother said, plopping back in her seat. “But seeing him reminds me. I feel perfectly horrid that I’ve kept you from your sittings with him, dear.” Her fingertips drummed on
the armrest. “Perhaps we should stop and inquire for him at that house, so we can express our regrets. Obviously whomever he is visiting is at home and as long as we’re there, he can introduce us—er, I mean you, Grace. After all, this is such a lovely neighborhood, I’m certain you’d benefit from meeting—”

“
Non, madame,
“ Claudette said with a vigorous shake of her head.

“I don’t understand, girl. Why should we not stop?” Minerva asked.

Claudette leaned forward confidentially. “Because the woman who lives in that house, she is no lady.”

“Well, we’re not one to stand on ceremony, Claudette. After all, our Grace isn’t titled yet either.”

“
Non, madame.
You miss my meaning.” Claudette sent Grace’s mother a knowing sidelong glance. “The woman who lives there is—how you say?—a high flyer.”

Minerva’s brows drew together in puzzlement.

Claudette cupped her lips and stage-whispered. “A courtesan.”

Minerva’s hand flew to her mouth.

Grace looked away from the gilt-trimmed door. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Hadn’t he admitted that very first time she posed for him that he counted courtesans as his dear friends?

Evidently his
very
dear friends.

There was only one reason for a man to darken the door of a such a woman. The fact that the assignation was blatant and in the bald light of midafternoon made it even more wicked somehow.

Did he frequent this one especially or were there several who enjoyed his visits?

Her chest constricted at the thought. Any woman he touched would feel that loss of control, that dangerous wanting.

Now Crispin Hawke had managed to make her feel something she never expected.

She laced her fashionably gloved, “capable” hands on her lap and prayed she wouldn’t be sick on the spot.

Pygmalion was forced to do something he disliked intensely. Ask for help. So he turned to his mentor, Aphrodite, who understood him far too well for his comfort.

“Crispin, you naughty boy!” Olympia Sharp extended a beringed hand as he entered her exquisitely appointed parlor. “Where have you been for the past month?”

“Pining for your beauty, as always, Olympia.” He brought her hand to his lips and brushed her knuckles.

She pulled her hand away and presented an expertly rouged cheek to him. “Come, give me a real kiss and I’ll forgive your lies.”

“You’re sure I’m not interrupting anything.” Crispin gave her a dutiful peck and settled into the chintz-covered wing chair opposite her settee. “I could come back another day.”

“No, no, the interrupting has already been done and not by you.”

Olympia rang for tea. The butler nodded and gave her the obeisance due a duchess before he hurried to do her bidding. She turned back to Crispin and sighed dramatically.

“It seems I’m once again without a protector.”

“Honestly, old girl, you change lovers more often than my man Wyckham changes his socks.” Crispin leaned back, totally at ease. “Who was it this time?”

“Viscount Tottingham.”

“Deep pockets, that one, by all accounts.” Crispin
hooked an ankle over one knee. “Never say you broke the poor man’s heart.”

“Don’t you mean the
rich
man’s heart?” The courtesan loosed a musical laugh. “Not hardly. His heart was never in danger, but something else was nearly broken.”

Crispin chuckled with her. “Do tell.”

“Totty and I had been keeping company for several weeks and he’d been very generous.” She fingered her elegant filigree necklace. A cabochon sapphire large enough to choke a horse winked in the hollow of her throat.

“But he no longer is?”

“No, tightfistedness wasn’t one of his faults, but alas, discretion was,” Olympia said with a lift of one shoulder. “He drew funds for me from his wife’s considerable pin money account and so we were discovered.”

The butler arrived with an ornate silver service and finger sandwiches on a heavy tray. He deposited the repast on the low table set before Olympia.

“Thank you, Hobson. I’ll pour out.”

Once the butler withdrew, Olympia continued while she prepared Crispin’s tea exactly the way he liked it. No sugar, only a smidge of milk. “Last Wednesday—that was his regular afternoon, you know—who should arrive on my doorstep but his wife.”

“Viscount Tottingham married above himself as I recall. His wife’s father is the Duke of Ghent, isn’t he?”

“Indeed and his daughter lacks none of his imperiousness, let me tell you. Under different circumstances, I feel certain I should have liked her enormously.”

Olympia handed Crispin his tea. He inhaled its spicy fragrance. She had the aromatic blend of leaves shipped in special from India, just for him.

“In any case, Lady Tottingham was newly arrived in town after a stay at their country estate and found him
not at home.” Olympia took a sip of her own tea. “She was spitting mad and lost no time in tracking him down.”

“How did she do that?”

“Let’s just say their servants know whose money pays their wages. One of them directed her to the ledger books.”

“And she suspected he was here when she checked her account.” Crispin shook his head. There was something to be said for slovenly record-keeping.

“How the man could have been so simple is beyond me.” Olympia rolled her luminous eyes and then gave Crispin a sly wink. “Fortunately, the viscount had another attribute that compensated for his mental deficiencies. But, in any case, he heard his wife coming up the stairs and what does the man do but jump out my boudoir window!”

“Good God, just because I started that stupid rumor about how I got this infernal limp.”

She shrugged. “It was the talk of the
ton
for weeks when you were first injured. I suppose he figured if you could do it, he could, too. And he really didn’t want to face the viscountess just then.”

“Your chamber is up a flight, isn’t it?”

“Two, actually.”

“That had to hurt.” Crispin rubbed his thigh in sympathy. “Did he break anything in the fall?”

“No, but my poor hydrangea will never be the same.” Olympia took a dainty bite of a finger sandwich and washed it down with tea. “Took to his heels through my little garden, vaulted over the fence and disappeared down the alley. I had no idea the man could run so fast.”

She set the cup down with a slight frown. “Pity he was rather quick at other things, too.”

Crispin stifled a laugh. He always claimed that Olympia, like the home of the gods she was named for, never
aged. He saw now that wasn’t strictly true. She used more paint than ever, but it failed to conceal the faint blue under her eyes. At her temples, tiny veins showed through thinning skin. Her swanlike neck, always a prized asset, now sported the beginnings of a wattle.

Concern pricked him. “Are you all right? Do you need anything?”

She smiled and leaned across to feather her fingertips over his cheek. He felt as if he was twelve years old again, but this time, no longer desperately in love with her.

“Dear boy. Don’t fret for me. My lovers are merely amusements now, in any case.”

Crispin thought her smile seemed forced. “You’re sure?”

“With the pensions from my past amours and the trust you established for me, I could live comfortably for several lifetimes.” Her smile faded a bit. “Whether anyone comes along to fill Totty’s shoes or not.”

In all the years he’d known her, Olympia had never been alone. After a ten-year stint as the duke’s mistress, she cut a glittering swath through the upper crust. Olympia had a string of blazing
affaires du coeur
with lesser aristocrats, scandalously wealthy merchants and even a few influential statesmen. If her bed stayed cold for longer than a week, it was undoubtedly because she was exhausted.

Imagining her alone now made Crispin’s chest constrict.

“But enough about me,” Olympia said brightly. “I love to hear what the best investment I ever made is doing. What are you working on now?”

Crispin couldn’t deny her this pleasure. She’d earned it.

A well-educated girl, Olympia had behaved foolishly and lost her virginity to a married man. When her family
cast her out, she landed briefly in Peel’s Abbey, where Crispin was raised. But a beauty like Olympia with a mind to match wouldn’t sell herself so cheaply. She spent every cent she could scrape together on a gown that would do credit to a princess and placed herself in the path of a duke.

He scooped her right up and her wit and beauty, bolstered by his title and money, made her the toast of the London demimonde.

But Olympia didn’t forget her friends. She ventured back into Cheapside and pulled the talented boy she’d met there out of the sad little house of ill repute. She paid to send him off to study art with a master on the Continent, where his innate gift could be nourished and developed.

So Crispin told his mentor about the multifigured equestrian piece he was doing for Lord Brontwell’s country estate and the sculpture of Diana he was planning. He mentioned the commission he’d just accepted for the Fall of Troy and the disturbingly lifelike bust he recently completed of Lady Sheppleton’s pudgy nephew.

“And when she saw it, she was speechless for a full quarter hour,” Crispin said. “Her husband insisted on paying me a bonus. For the rare gift of her silence.”

Olympia laughed, then cocked her head at him. “While you’re regaling me with all these doings, your eyebrows are jousting over that fine nose of yours. There’s something else, I think.”

He neglected to mention his work with Grace.

“A young lady, perhaps?”

Crispin shifted in his seat and then leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I could never keep anything secret from you.”

“Not even the calf-love you bore me all those years ago,” she said with an indulgent grin.

“Who could blame me? You were a goddess.”

“A goddess who wanted nothing to do with despoiling a child. But you were a very tempting boy, I’ll give you that. So tall and mature for your age. That shock of raven hair and those enormous gray eyes of yours. You tempted me sorely.”

Olympia had never been less than frank in matters of the flesh, no matter how shocking. Crispin wasn’t surprised to hear that she’d considered initiating him into manhood even at that tender age. He’d wanted her with youthful desperation at the time, but thanked her better judgment now.

Olympia was his friend and more a mother to him than the one who bore him. His memories of her were hazy. All he had of her was that scrap of linen he’d squirreled away in his secretary desk drawer.

He couldn’t bear to part with it. It was his one link to his shadowy mother and to the wellborn, anonymous gentleman with the initials CRS, who made a bastard of him.

Since Olympia lifted him from the gutter, his love for her was as deeply filial as any mother could wish.

He was grateful she wasn’t also his former lover.

“Good thing you could draw,” she admitted. “I sent you away for both our sakes.”

Crispin blessed her every day for it.

“But you’ve pulled me off topic,” she said, and Crispin discreetly failed to point out that she was the one who veered their conversation into the past. “Tell me about this girl of yours.”

“She’s not my girl.” Crispin dragged a hand over his face.

“What’s the trouble? Is she married?”

“No, I wish she were.”

Olympia chuckled. “Ah yes, I forgot. A husband
would be no impediment for you. You could simply add her to your Unhappy Wives of Inattentive Husbands Club and bed her promptly. Is she at least betrothed?”

“Not yet.” He spilled the whole tale, including his vivid dreams and the sketch he’d done of Grace before he even met her.

“Amazing. You know, the women at the Abbey told me your mother was a gypsy,” Olympia said. “They’re a mystical lot. It’s not unusual for them to see into the future. If you saw this girl in your dreams, that seems to confirm gypsy blood.”

“Rubbish,” he said. “Grace was just an idea rolling around my head, a figment, a—”

“A dream that came true,” Olympia mused into her teacup.

He scowled at her. “Do you want to hear the rest or not?”

She waved him on.

Crispin told Olympia about his commission to do Grace’s hands and her planned assault on the
ton.
“She means to marry a title.”

“And you want her.”

“Yes.” The word blurted out his mouth before passing through his brain. “No.”

“Which is it?”

“I don’t know, dammit.” Crispin stood and paced the length of the room, his walking stick digging into the rich Persian weave of Olympia’s carpet with each step. “She…irritates me.”

“Hmmm,” Olympia purred.

“Don’t ‘hmmm’ at me.” He stopped and glared at her. “What does that mean? Hmmm!”

“Nothing at all, dear. I’m just thinking.” She put her teacup aside and clasped her hands together with obvious glee. “What about her irritates you?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “The way she talks, the way she thinks…Blast it all, she’s even a virgin!”

Olympia pursed her lips. “That’s a flaw easily remedied.”

“Yes, but I’m not ready to be leg-shackled,” he said, resuming his pacing. “A man doesn’t play with a virgin unless he’s prepared to pay dearly for the privilege. With his whole life.”

“So you want her, but you don’t want to marry her.”

“But I’ve been…” He closed his eyes and felt the warmth of her breast under his palm again. Her little gasp when he tugged her nipple was burned into his brain. Now the memory leaped to his cock afresh. No, he would not torment himself again. “I’ve behaved stupidly.”

“That’s quite an admission coming from you, my brilliant friend. How stupidly? Have you tried to take her maidenhead?”

“No.” Only in his sweaty, sticky wet dreams. “A man’s cock may lead him where his brain fears to follow, but so far, I’ve not traveled to that damnably desirable country.”

“You want to bed her but not wed her.”

“I believe we’ve established that fact.” He flopped back into the chair and stretched out his bad leg. He almost asked Olympia if he might have something stronger than milk in his next cup of tea, but getting schnockered wouldn’t help his predicament. He threw up his hands. “I don’t know what to do.”

Olympia giggled. Then she chuckled. Then she laughed till tears streaked her cheeks.

“I’m glad my plight amuses you,” he said without mirth.

She swiped her eyes. “Well, it appears so simple to me. You’re the genius. I don’t know why you haven’t seen the obvious solution.”

“If you care to enlighten me, madam, I’d be profoundly grateful.”

“My dear boy, if this Grace is intent on marrying a titled gent, then by all means, you must help her. Do all you can to see her suitably wed to the sort of nobleman who will assist
your
cause.”

He frowned.

“Find her a fellow with a title in his hand and one foot in the grave.”

Crispin tried to imagine Grace agreeing to a match with someone so much older. He shook his head. “I know she’s set on a title, but I don’t think she’d go that far to get one.”

“Pity. Lots of young girls stomach a gouty old goat long enough to make a marriage legal,” Olympia said. “And then when she’s a merry widow, there you’d be to console her.”

Crispin pictured Grace in black. If the warm brown silk made her skin come alive, black would wash her out completely. No, she wouldn’t make a merry widow, even if she despised her husband.

“Then match her with a rake,” Olympia suggested. “And while he’s tomcatting around London, you can gallantly step in to warm her lonely bed. That way, everyone gets what they want.”

That scenario rang truer in his mind. He’d consoled many an unhappy wife. It was almost a public service. Crispin was just doing his small part to brighten the lives of the unloved.

But he resisted seeing Grace yoked to someone who was bound to give her grief. Crispin wanted her with an ache that was almost a sickness.