Portrait of Seduction (23 page)

“All right,” she said. “We’ll get to it then. You find a place to sit.”

“Sit?”

“I won’t have you injure your ankle further on account of the search. I’ll order a little food. Then we’ll find this bloody painting.”

Oliver did as he was told. Although he helped when he could, he accepted that his limitations and lack of knowledge about art were two distinct hindrances. He was left with the task of drinking good strong coffee, sampling a plate of cold meats and pungent cheeses, and watching Greta work. She was more methodical than he’d imagined. Perhaps her energy suggested wildness. Her attention to order and logic, however, was most impressive, like watching her prepare to paint.

Despite the coolness of the room, she wiped sweat from her brow. The curves of her hips and bosom seemed even more extreme in the flickering candlelight. Outside it was full day, but that windowless hideaway nearly erased such knowledge.

Soon the pile of paintings left to check dwindled. Greta found three more of her copies. The corresponding originals were nowhere to be found. A subsequent hour spent searching the manor from root cellar to attic revealed nothing.

“What does it mean?” she asked, angrily pushing damp hair from her brow.

“All right. So perhaps your uncle sold them.”

“But why? If he was willing to sell forgeries, why part with any of the originals? He knows how valuable they’ll be once people have money and the freedom to be opulent once again. The time to sell a masterpiece is not when Napoleon is charging across nations.”

“So if we assume your uncle is more sensible and shrewd, that leaves two possibilities. First, that he has a few select originals in hiding somewhere else.”

“I suppose. But you have no idea how he behaves, Oliver. Shoes in a line, sorted by color and age. Desk papers sorted by alphabet and date. He likes his systems, and he loves that this room was his design. It just doesn’t feel right to think he would have a second hideaway.” She slumped. “What’s the other possibility?”

“No. It’s all about the investment.”

“Then when would he ever realize they were gone?”

“Years from now, perhaps, after the fighting stopped.”

“By which time the discovery of your copies would mean the thief makes a clean getaway.”

“Stolen, then.”

The words hung heavy in the still air. Dark circles lined Greta’s lower lids, reminding Oliver that neither of them had slept. He curled a hand around the back of her nape, gently massaging with his thumb.

“Let’s find out what time it is and get some sleep. Worst case, we ask Herschel or even your uncle. If the paintings have been stolen, he’ll have to be notified.”

“That means revealing what we’ve done.”

“Don’t worry about that now.” He stood and kissed her slowly, softly. She tasted of coffee and sugar. Oliver wanted more than just a taste, but his ankle was a flaming horror. And he was tired. Wearily tired. “For now, we need sleep.”

“I’ll ask the housekeeper to arrange you a room.”

Disappointment hit him harder than he might have imagined. The meager reserves of energy in his body drained out through his toes. “Very well.”

Greta found a wobbling smile. “And then I’ll tell you how to get from your room to mine.”

Greta slumped onto her bed. The familiar smells of linseed oil and canvas swirled in the air. She was home. She was a vastly different woman than when she’d left, but the comfort of her own apartments remained a blessing.

She wanted to get up, to wash, to prepare herself for Oliver’s arrival. But the effort seemed too great. Floating on a cloud of exhaustion, she did not even fight the weight tugging at her eyelids. The bed was simply too lovely. When she vaguely heard the sounds of Oliver’s arrival, she could only manage a dreamy smile.

The sound of a door closing brought her to full wakefulness. She must have fallen asleep in earnest, because her tongue tasted wretched and the sky was dark.

“Greta?”

“In here,” she called to Oliver.

“Greta, what happened?”

The note of alarm in his voice wiped away the last vestiges of sleep. Her back ached. Her bottom was incredibly sore. She hauled herself off the bed, lamenting the smell of her own sweat.

Oliver stood in the studio that adjoined her bedroom. He was surrounded by dozens of her paintings—paintings that had been shredded and scattered around the floor.

Greta gasped. She stumbled forward, her legs numb. “What…?”

“How did this happen?” he asked.

“I…”

But the words would not come. She collapsed to her knees before a particular favorite. Although painted from her memories, she had always imagined it a faithful likeness of her mother and father. The work had been slashed with a blade. Strips of canvas fluttered as she picked up the frame, her hands shaking. A sob tore free of her chest.

“Who…?”

Oliver joined her on the floor. He set the painting aside and pulled her face away from that hideous sight. “Greta, look at me. Was the room like this when you came up here?”

“No! Of course not!”

“Did you hear anyone come in?”

“I…you did.” She dared meet his stern gaze. “Didn’t you?”

“No. I couldn’t chance meeting you during the day. Your maid, Marie, made that very clear.”

“But there was someone here. I heard them. I thought it was you.”

The set of Oliver’s jaw became more tense, more taut. “Someone broke into your room and ruined your work…with you asleep in the next room?”

Cold sluiced over Greta’s skin. She sagged, slumping from her sitting position. Oliver’s sure hands helped guide her to the floor. Only then, lying at eye level with the wood, did the enormity of the crime hit her. Ten years of work. Every mistake and every triumph. The complete record of her progress as an artist. Each had been ruined with equal callousness.

Oliver had left her and was moving around the rooms, but Greta could hardly see anything beyond her tears. Great heaving sobs launched out of her chest. Part frustration, part fear, part blinding anger—she could no longer hold it in. She cried until her throat burned and her lungs ached. Everything she had ever completed of her own imagination, her own initiative, all destroyed. No amount of crying would ease that hurt.

When she despaired of being comforted ever again, she felt Oliver’s arms close around her. He pulled her onto his lap and held her, tightly at first when she needed something solid to fight. Then his touch became gentler as her fervor ebbed. Soon he was stroking her hair, stroking her cheek and neck. All she could do was lie there, limp, spent, buoyed by the man who had come to symbolize such strength and surprise.

“I searched the rooms,” he said at last.

Ah, she thought. He had left her to cry, but for a reason. She never should have doubted—not of Oliver.

“And?” she croaked.

“I found a Prussian army knife on your vanity table.” He swallowed so loudly that she heard it. “Greta, it was Karl’s. The design of it matches what we were issued upon accepting our commissions.”

“He would do that to me? To my paintings?”

“When we were younger, ruining property was his means of garnering attention. He still wants something from me.” In the palm of his hand he revealed a slip of paper. “He wants to meet me in Salzburg in three days.”

“To what end?”

“I know not. Perhaps more of this contorted charade. But Greta, he will pay for what he’s done here. I will make sure of that.”

“Promise?”

He helped her to a sitting position, despite how her spine seemed made of wool. “Look at me. I…” His voice broke off with a hitch. He looked away, his mouth tight.

Greta pushed past her hurt and grief. She found the resolve to sit up of her own volition, then snuggled closer to him. But she kept enough distance to see his face—
needed
to see his face. “What is it?”

“I would break into houses for you, apparently. I would conceal your uncle’s money-making schemes. I would make love to you with no possibility of a future. All of these things I never thought I would do.
For you.
” He shook his head. Greta laced her fingers together at his nape. His breath, so agitated and warm, caressed her cheek. “But protect you? Keep you safe? That was instinct from the first moment I saw your face. Now, to see you hurt this way… I cannot imagine leaving that unanswered, no matter the perpetrator. Greta, I’m so sorry.”

Heat, a wondrous heat, bloomed beneath her sternum. She needed to swallow a few times before she found her voice again. The emotion swelling inside her was simply too much to readily overcome.

“You blame yourself? For this?”

“Not for the crime. But you were asleep in the other room. He’s so altered that I hardly know him anymore. He could’ve just as easily slit your throat as one of these paintings.”

Reflexively, she touched the healed slice on her neck. Black spots cluttered her line of sight, blurring her image of Oliver’s fraught expression.

“I don’t know what I would do if something had happened to you.” He kissed her, so softly. “I love you.”

Greta clutched the muscled solidity of his back and shoulders. He loved her. God, what would she do with that knowledge? Their circumstances had not changed. His admission made her strong, but strong enough to defy her uncle and all of good society? She had never fancied herself that sort of fighter.

So she thrust it all aside. She could not answer his declaration with one of her own, nor could she push him away—and reclaim an appropriate distance from this handsome, gallant servant. Instead she opened her mouth, tasting the salt of his skin. He tensed, but not for long. Her tentative kiss become more certain, more frantic. Needier. She might have died in her sleep. Oliver could’ve been caught or killed on her foolhardy mission.

It was all too much.

She dug her nails into his biceps, then found his mouth with hers. Their kiss was an explosion, not a tentative hello. Tongues met, thrusting and dueling. The heat between them ratcheted to a quick boil. Because on top of the terrible possibilities that hadn’t come to pass, he was still not hers to keep.

Oliver stretched back along the paint-stained floor. He dragged Greta with him, his moan filling her mouth. The blunt hardness of his erection nudged her hip. Greta’s arousal, banked throughout the long and exhausting day, flared to life. She had teased him and hid with him and raced him. Now she straddled him, yanking her skirts up to her thighs. She dove back down for another kiss.

Threading his fingers into the hair at the base of her skull, he twisted. The clench of soft pain felt good—so good. It was a biting distraction from all the genuine pain still awaiting her. She trusted Oliver so implicitly that the rough treatment became a further arousal. Not daring to question such a strange perversion, she simply groaned as he twisted again.

With eager hands she unbuttoned the dirty black shirt that obscured his perfect torso. One button popped free and pinged across the floor. Soon he was naked from the waist up. Such a beautiful man, so alive, so perfectly symmetrical. His hands gripped her thighs, her backside. The sensations blended with the visual feast he presented. Greta kissed him again, tasting, exploring, before traveling down the strong line of his jaw, his neck, his chest.

“I want inside you,” came his harsh words. The vibrations rumbled under her lips, down into her throat.

She leaned forward, permitting him room enough to fit the large, firm head of his cock against her entrance. Oliver stilled. Their eyes met. Greta did not look away, no matter the blush flaming across her cheeks, as he slowly, achingly pushed inside. She gasped and he moaned, until he was buried to the hilt in her welcoming body.

The waiting was too much. Filled, utterly filled, Greta shifted to find relief from the building tension. Oliver clasped her outer hips with the wide span of his calloused hands. He gripped so tightly that the muscles of his arms and pectorals tensed, standing out in glorious relief. Strong and sure, he guided her movements—up and down, sometimes grinding in a circle, until she caught the delicious rhythm.

With her palms spread flat against his tight abdominals, Greta made good on the vulgar comment he had said with such a straight face. She
rode
him. She took the full, wide length of him with each plunge. Her breath came in fitful gasps as she tossed her head back. The tension built and built until a scream perched at the back of her throat.

Oliver grabbed her shoulders and brought her low across his chest. He circled her torso with his vise-like arms, thrusting upward.

“Not a sound,” he whispered against her ear.

“Can’t—”

“Not a sound, Greta. Hold it in.”

Her teeth sank into the resilient flesh of Oliver’s shoulder. She did as she was told, no matter how much she wanted to scream and shake. To her surprise, the pleasure intensified. It had nowhere to go, gathering and throbbing from her core until it burst over her in a blinding rush.

Oliver awoke to find his arms empty.

He and Greta had struggled back to bed, their bodies satiated and limp. The pain in his ankle was all the more potent after the last tremors of his climax had faded, but Greta had helped him with silent patience. She had undressed him, bathed him, rubbed his aching muscles—just as she promised. He remembered drifting off to sleep with the image of Greta in his mind, her back turned as she washed herself, as if overcome by a modesty their lovemaking should have burned away. She had slipped into bed beside him, her body fitting his with sensual ease.

But now she was gone.

That realization roused him like the alarm of a fire brigade. He sat up in bed, swinging his legs over the side. Sheets twisted and tangled around his thighs. He thrust them aside and prepared for the lance of pain when his bad ankle took his weight.

“No, don’t,” was Greta’s soft command.

Wearing a green wrap, she was sitting cross-legged on a nearby bench. Her sketchpad lay open across her lap. Charcoal smudged her fingertips and the apple of one pale cheek. Her hair remained a tangle of silken blond ringlets, cast artlessly over one shoulder.

She was safe.

Oliver slumped back against the pillows, his arm flung over his eyes. But the images followed him there, even with his lids pinched shut. Slashed paintings. The door left cracked open. A knife laid with perfect precision among the bottles and bobbles atop her vanity table. His mind was not so kind as to leave him with those nightmarish possibilities. Even though he knew, in his gut, that Karl had been up to his old, destructive tricks, he could not deny the vividness of his imagination. Oliver could have returned to a ruined studio, only to find Greta soaked in her own blood, stretched lifelessly across the bed. The image slammed into his chest, right over his heart.

He had told her that he loved her, and she had not found the courage to return those words. But Oliver had no regrets. Finding her dead, with those words of love never said aloud—that would have been beyond regretting. That would have poisoned a very dear part of his soul.

Never one to believe in wars that could not be won, no matter his experience to the contrary, he refused to allow himself any more time to indulge in morbid fantasies. Greta was alive. She was as alive and vibrant and maddeningly sexy as ever a woman could be.

And he would make Karl pay for the hurt he inflicted.

He dragged his arm away from his face and sat up, his whole body aching from their shared passions. It was a beautiful ache.

“You snore,” she said with a smile.

“I do?”

“Ja.”

Oliver smiled. “I’ve never stayed with anyone long enough to learn that.”

Greta stopped sketching and tipped her head. “Have you been in love before?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Terrified.”

“You never seem it.”

“Discipline.” He turned on the bed and grabbed a nearby blanket to cover his nudity.

“Spoil sport,” she said, her grin playful.

“You’re covered.”

“I was sketching you.”

“May I see it?”

Greta shrugged and pushed heavy hair off her shoulder. “Don’t expect much.”

He edged off the bed, but she stopped him before his foot touched the floor.

“I’ll come to you,” she said.

Sitting side by side on the bed, Oliver could smell the soap she had used to wash. His mouth watered as if she were a succulent meal for a starving peasant. But he set aside the lustful reaction to concentrate on her work.

Greta laid the book across his lap, then looked away. He found himself staring at sketch after sketch of his nude body. Perhaps she had moved the sheet, or perhaps he had tossed in his sleep, but the sheet had slipped to a rather revealing angle. She had rendered the line of his thigh where it met his hip and the line of his torso. On another, she had drawn just his hand. Another was a detail of his mouth, nose and eyes.

In each one, Oliver saw the flashes of genius that made her such a vibrant artist. Every stroke of charcoal had
life.
Movement and breath. There was no other way to explain it. But he also saw a woman who thought rather highly of her subject. He could not believe he was that handsome. Her bias made him a god.

He set the drawings aside, his heart full for reasons he could not articulate. She had not said that she loved him, but those drawings felt like just such an admission.