Highlander Undone Read online

  Addie wasn’t. She was far too familiar with artists and their ilk to expect to be paid more than cursory attention. Her family’s household had been perpetually filled with models, blowzy creatures who lounged about the withdrawing rooms in sheer silk kimonos during the breaks between sittings. Even in their dishabille, they had excited no more attention from her father and brothers than a bowl of fruit. A sack of a gown like this would hardly bring a flutter to an artist’s dispassionate eye.

  She waited, unable to keep her lips from twitching as Lady Merritt’s expression grew more forbidding with each passing moment. Lady Merritt responded to anything that caused her discomfort with a chill demeanor. She was nearly glacial now.

  A low voice—cultured, brushed with the faintest of Scots burr—came from the drawing room and a second later Wheatcroft reappeared again, stepping aside as he murmured a name.

  A man, his eyes fixed carefully on the ground before him, paused in the threshold. He was dressed much in the style of Gerry Norton and very thin, his leanness accentuated by the tight fit of his trousers and the jutting cheekbones. Beneath a velvet jacket he wore an ivory cambric shirt, its lace cuffs falling over his wrists, the soft, oversized collar turned over a hastily knotted red paisley cravat. Hesitantly, he stepped out onto the terrace and into the sunlight.

  He was extraordinary.

  He seemed fashioned of light, so pale and lithe and elegantly was he formed. Though his above-average height and the breadth of his shoulders suggested a medium bone structure, there was a sparse, finely drawn quality about him, a lean delicacy unusual in a man.

  His classic beauty was heightened by long hair, brushed back from his forehead, a rich, tawny color turning into gleaming gold curls at the ends. The effect was dramatic. He lifted his head, and Addie decided that light hadn’t fashioned him. Fire had.

  His face was sculptural, the fine, underlying bones dramatically visible. The hollows beneath his high cheekbones were scored with deep lines, the skin fitting taut, too taut, across his face, defining the shallow indentation of his temples. It looked as though all the spare flesh on him had been burnt away, leaving an unholy, tragic beauty.

  Slowly, he raised his gaze, almost as though he were afraid. Addie heard the breath catch in her throat.

  He had beautiful eyes, clear azure beneath a thick fringe of short sepia-colored lashes.

  He stared back at her and she was helpless to do anything other than gaze back, transfixed by his eyes, dimly aware of the dark-winged brows arching dramatically over them, the tiny lines—of laughter?—radiating from the corners.

  The thick drumbeat of her heart climbed to her throat.

  Suddenly, improbably, his wide mouth curved into a smile and she found herself smiling back.

  “You know each other?” Lady Merritt asked, clearly bewildered. “Well, of course, the artistic community is not so large that—”

  “No,” Addie heard herself say in an odd, faint voice as fear raced in to supplant that extraordinary sensation of familiarity, of . . . of elation. Such instantaneous rapport, such a strong, nearly primal attraction frightened her. The last time she’d felt it she had ended up making a terrible mistake.

  “I’m afraid I’ve never had the pleasure,” the man said, his gaze slowly releasing hers as he turned toward Lady Merritt.

  He reached out his hand. It shook, a slight but definite tremor.

  Addie’s eyes narrowed. Other signs leapt out at her: his rapid breathing, the fine sheen of sweat on his forehead, the way his gaze kept falling to the ground when he walked . . . he was nervous. Exceedingly so. His every move proclaimed it, even to the flush mounting his pale cheeks.

  The affinity Addie had instantly felt toward him returned full-bloomed, and this time without caution riding herd. She understood now that odd affinity; it was one of kindred spirits. Addie knew what it was to be tense with apprehension.

  And he was an artist!

  Many of her father’s and brothers’ colleagues were introverts who tried to hide their insecurities beneath a front of bravado. Some had even given up potentially lucrative careers rather than placing themselves under the abrasive scrutiny of society. To them, putting themselves forward was akin to torture.

  Addie studied Lady Merritt, who was just allowing her knuckles to be lifted to his lips. Her nose was inching higher by the moment. Obviously, she was still embarrassed by Addie’s dress and trying to hide it beneath a disdainful facade. Small wonder the man was growing paler by the second.

  He took a step back, losing his balance. In a trice, Addie was beside him, catching his arm and steadying him.

  For all his angelic good looks, the gentleman obviously needed a champion.

  Well, now he had her.

  Steady on, laddie, Jack repeated silently. He’d understood that he’d been attracted to the young widow before he’d ever seen her and so had expected to be enchanted. He had not expected this devastating torrent of sensual awareness. He strove to keep his attention fixed on Lady Merritt, a big woman of some forty years dressed in a satin turban. Her countenance matched her voice, blunt and mulish. She was making stiff introductory sounds but try though he might, Jack couldn’t focus on her words.

  All he could think of was Addie.

  Before he had even really looked at her, before he had catalogued the form and features that summed up the woman named “Adelaide Hoodless,” there had been that one, intense moment of affinity. Her smile in that blinding instance had been filled with a deep, ineffable recognition. A recognition that had transcended the physical.

  But then he had looked at her. And immediately realized that the attraction he’d assumed would take place hadn’t taken into account that Addie could ever look like this.

  His whole notion about a sympathetic tendre was shattered, blasted in a second, blown like ashes in brisk wind, having no substance in reality. Because his reckoning hadn’t taken into account “sex.”

  Addie Hoodless epitomized the word.

  If only, he thought, forcing himself to stare at the lorgnette swinging from Lady Merritt’s bulwark-like chest, Addie had been a standard type of English lady, a handsome widow, or just a pretty girl. But she wasn’t.

  She looked like a gypsy’s randiest dream, her strikingly pale face framed by clouds of hair so deep a titian red as to appear mahogany. Her features were too decisive to be termed fine, too bold to be called pretty, with lush, full lips, strong, wide cheekbones, and long, exotic, heavy-lidded eyes the color of wild honey. Knowledge lurked in those amber eyes, knowledge and wariness and unawakened sensuality.

  Lord, thought Jack, frowning in a frustrated attempt to concentrate on Lady Merritt’s words. He was all but breaking out in a cold sweat, unable to drag his attention away from Addie who, having leapt to his side when he stumbled, was even now supporting his arm with her own, her breast pushed lightly against him.

  If only she’d back away, give him room to breathe, maybe he could recall the gentle infatuation he had harbored for these many weeks. As it was, it was all he could do to keep his face carefully averted as the scent of her drifted up, causing his nostrils to flare greedily.

  She smelled sun-kissed, as sweet as the honey color of her eyes. And that hair! Silky coils, glazed with plum-colored highlights by a late afternoon sun, bound in a loose, fragrant chignon.

  During the months of his recovery he’d occasionally wondered about Addie’s physical appearance. From the casual remarks he’d overheard, he’d assumed that she was handsome. Handsome . . . not devastating.

  And why the hell was she decked out in that, that garment? The lustrous, dense cloth eased intimately across her breasts, relating their fullness with each tiny movement. It shaped the saucy curve of her buttocks like a lover’s hand. It defined her long legs so clearly Jack had to avert his eyes or be caught with the images in his mind betrayed by the tight fit of Evan’s narrow breeches.

  He swallowed, ignoring her as she slowly withdrew her hand. If she turned, standing
close to him as she was, she’d rub against him once more. He clenched his teeth and noticed Lady Merritt staring at him with icy expectation.

  “So, he sent you to me to be taken care of, did he?”

  Jack frowned. Did she know about his convalescence here after all? Now not only did he risk looking like a satyr, but a stupid satyr as well.

  “Shipped you here to me. Without informing me beforehand. Don’t deny it.” The downward angle of her brows bespoke her impatience.

  Well, at least he would not have to deceive her. Or Lady Merritt.

  “Yes, ma’am. I am afraid so.”

  “Well? What do you do?”

  He frowned. “Do, my ladyship?”

  “I don’t have a portfolio on you, young man. No one has told me the least thing about you. I only know you have arrived at my door and that you are from Scotland.”

  He stared at her in confusion. Portfolio?

  “Lady Merritt,” Addie broke in, “obviously your guest is tired from his journey. Shouldn’t you order a small repast for him before you continue your inquiries?”

  Lady Merritt blinked, obviously startled. As was Jack. In all the months he’d listened to her, he’d never heard her use anything approaching the scolding tone she’d just employed.

  “Of course. Certainly,” Lady Merritt muttered before adding, in a ruffled undertone, “but I think it poor of Morris to send me a Scot who hasn’t even the rudiments of conversation.”

  Jack felt his spine straighten with the implication that he was an uncouth Scot. His mother had been all but disowned by her grandfather, Lord Merritt, Earl of Luce, when she’d eloped with his father, a Scottish officer. Jack had seen his maternal great-grandfather only once, at his mother’s funeral. The man had looked him up and down and with perverse satisfaction pronounced him a savage little cub.

  Upon succeeding to the title, Jack’s great-uncle Cuthbert, Lady Merritt’s erstwhile husband, had been a bit kinder. But even Cuthbert’s rare letters had made clear he viewed Highlanders as being something just shy of barbarians, just as they also made clear that he secretly delighted in his Scottish relations’ supposed savagery.

  Well, Jack was tired, shaking with this damnable palsy, and in no mood to be grateful for scant grace and grudging obligation.

  “Lady Merritt, I may be nothing more than ‘the Scots lad shipped you,’ but I am also John Francis Cameron, grandson of the Earl of Luce, your husband’s great-nephew.”

  Lady Merritt froze in the act of ringing the bell for Wheatcroft. “Excuse me, young man?”

  “My mother was Beatrice Catherine Cameron, née Merritt.”

  Lady Merritt’s hand dropped. The bell fell against the table and rolled to the edge. “Damn, you say,” she breathed.

  Jack, already regretting his arrogant tones, shook his head in negation. “No, ma’am.”

  What the hell did it matter to him what Lady Merritt thought? She was studying him intently and Jack had a sudden, awful premonition that any minute now she would recognize her son’s clothes and demand their return.

  “You are the Scottish lad?”

  “Yes.” How many times did he have to agree? What did she want, a burr?

  Out of the corner of his eye he caught Addie’s grin. Not smile. Grin. It was utterly charming. Behind her, Wheatcroft had slipped silently onto the terrace.

  Lady Merritt’s eyes flashed with some unholy emotion and she clapped her big hands together.

  “And you are Cuthbert’s relation?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “You are the brawny, cudgel-wielding, kilt-wearing Scotsman?” She looked unaccountably pleased. The stiff, imperial manner she had used on their initial meeting softened. She stepped closer, smiling coyly at Jack and tapping him lightly on the hand with her lorgnette.

  “Excuse my unfortunate outburst,” she said. “But if you only knew the harangues I have been subject to on your account . . .”

  In answer to Jack’s expression of astonishment, she hurried on, her eyes aglitter. “Cuthbert is constantly holding your branch of the family up as an example to us of what a ‘real man’ should be. Your father was a soldier, was he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor, dear Evan and I were quite made to believe your family ate raw meat, wore animal hides, and bathed—on a seasonal schedule only—in icy lochs.”

  In fact, Jack had on more than one occasion dove into a lake soon after ice-out.

  “Indeed, you have been Cuthbert’s ultimate threat,” Lady Merritt continued. “He often swore that if dear Evan pursued an aesthetic discipline he’d send him to Scotland.” She shuddered. “Where your family would make a ‘man’ out of him.”

  “There is no family. I am the last of the line.”

  “No? Oh.” The news didn’t appear to awake any sympathy, only a vague interest. “I’m afraid I haven’t kept track of, ah, your family as perhaps I should have. But I will now. Especially now that I have discovered you are an artist.”

  The thread of the conversation was well beyond him. Though she had after all appeared to know he’d been sent by her husband to convalesce, she also apparently assumed he was an artist. Why?

  “Surely you can perhaps understand my elation upon discovering you are not the uncouth barbarian I have been led to believe, but rather an elegant artist.” Here Lady Merritt cast a speaking glance over Jack’s velvet jacket and silk cravat. “Hardly the typical Scots. They are so aggressively . . . masculine.” She said the word with excessive distaste.

  “Indeed, he is not,” Addie interjected forcefully.

  He tried in vain to keep from feeling affronted that Addie had so quickly relegated him to the ranks of—what had she called them?—fribbles.

  “I only wanted to introduce myself, ma’am, and now that I have, I will remove at once to the nearest inn.”

  Instantly Lady Merritt laid a restraining hand on his arm. “You’ll do nothing of the kind. I won’t hear of it. You’ll stay here at Gate Hall with me. I insist! After all, you are my husband’s only living relative.”

  Her lips twitched with unsuppressed glee. “And once the Season starts, I insist you stay with me at my Berkeley Square address and allow me to sponsor you. That’s why Mr. Morris summonsed you from his Scottish workshop and sent you to me in the first place, isn’t it?”

  Mr. William Morris. He’d overheard Norton and Phyfe discussing him on the terrace. Things began to make sense. Lady Merritt had mistaken him for an artist she’d been half expecting, a man sent from the workshops of the liberal Scottish craftsman William Morris. That he was also her husband’s relative only made his appearance at her home more likely to her mind. His thoughts raced.

  He’d planned to pose as a dilettante, not as an actual artist.

  “He expects me to introduce you to the right sorts of people as well as the local artistic community. And dear Mrs. Hoodless’s brother is quite the premier member of the exclusive little stable I’ve gathered, isn’t he, Addie?”

  “I am sure Teddy would agree,” Addie said with a wry smile. Jack turned and his eyesight blurred with the sudden motion. Spending so many minutes upright after being abed so long had taxed his much-depleted strength. He could feel a fine sheen of perspiration start on his forehead.

  “Really, Addie,” Lady Merritt was saying, “I realize it is hard to appreciate genius in one’s own family, but you do not give your brother enough credit.”

  “Why should I, when he is always there ahead of me, taking it?”

  Caught off guard by her unexpected sauciness, Jack burst out laughing. She smiled a bit sheepishly at him. “My brother has many sterling qualities, Mr. Cameron. Modesty is not one of them.”

  “I often find modesty a convenient virtue. It pretends to hide what it wants others to discover,” Jack said.

  The effort of the descent from his third-floor chambers along with having spent so many minutes on his feet was taking its toll on him. He reached into his jacket pocket, silently blessing Wheatcro
ft for his foresight as he withdrew a brilliant cerise square of silk and dabbed his forehead, trying to make the gesture appear an affectation rather than a need. He didn’t want Addie’s pity. Though he could use it.

  “And in ‘hiding,’ puts up a signpost directing one’s attention?” Addie asked.

  “Precisely, ma’am.”

  “I shall henceforth consider my brother’s boastful declarations a moral victory. False modesty being the worse offense.”

  Lady Merritt had stood uncharacteristically silent during their exchange, her gaze flitting with avid interest between them. “You will stay, then, won’t you, Jack? I may call you Jack, mightn’t I?” Jack noticed she didn’t offer him the use of her Christian name in trade. “At least stay until Cuthbert arrives back in England with our son.”

  Wheatcroft, who’d played silent sentinel to the entire proceeding, cleared his throat. “In which room would milady care to have the young gentleman’s luggage sent?”

  “The northeast corner, the one with the view of the river. As soon as you’re settled we shall begin planning your introduction.”

  Jack turned sharply and to his utter mortification found he needed to brace a hand on the back of one of the wrought-iron terrace chairs in order to steady himself. He’d be damned if he’d allow himself to clutch the cursed chair with both hands.

  “Perhaps,” Addie said, “that is, I would be pleased to help in my own small way.”

  “What a munificent notion!” Lady Merritt piped. “Mrs. Hoodless enjoys a splendid reputation amongst the ton. She has aristocratic connections, you know. Her husband was a war hero and her mother a Sommerset of the Sommerset Comptons. Once you have her endorsement—along with my own, of course—your reputation will be made!”

  Addie colored, not the fresh pink stain of a flustered belle, but a wave of deep rose flooding her gold-glazed cheeks. “Lady Merritt overstates my influence. But whatever aid I might render, I shall gladly extend.”

  It would be completely unscrupulous to allow her to do so. His plan had been to fade into the background of her brother’s studio, to be an innocuous and unremarked presence there, not to be the recipient of her championship or inveigle himself into her life and use it to spy on her brother’s clients. The very idea was offensive. And impossible to refuse.