Vixen In Velvet. Loretta Chase

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       Chapter One

      BRITISH INSTITUTION.—ANCIENT MASTERS. This annual Exhibition is the best set-off to the illiberality with which our grand signors shut up their pictures from the public—making, in fact, close boroughs of their collections.

      —The Athenaeum, 30 May 1835

       British Institution, Pall Mall, London

       Wednesday 8 July

      He lay naked but for a cloth draped over his manly parts. Head fallen back, eyes closed, mouth partly open, he slept too deeply to notice the imps playing with his armor and weapons, or the one blowing through a shell into his ear. The woman reclined nearby, her elbow resting on a red cushion. Unlike him, she was fully dressed, in gold-trimmed linen, and fully awake. She watched him with an unreadable expression. Did her lips hint at a smile or a frown, or was her mind elsewhere entirely?

      Leonie Noirot’s mind offered sixteen different answers, none satisfactory. What wasn’t in doubt was what this pair had been doing before the male—the Roman god Mars, according to the exhibition catalog—fell asleep.

      If anything else was in Leonie’s mind—her reason for coming here this day, for instance, or where “here” was or who she was—it had by now drifted to a distant corner of her skull. Nothing but the painting mattered or even existed.

      She stood before the Botticelli work titled Venus and Mars, and might have been standing on another planet or in another time, so completely did it absorb her. She stood and stared, and could have counted every brushstroke, trying to get to the bottom of it. What she couldn’t do was escape it.

      If anybody had stood in her way, she might have throttled that person. Oddly enough, nobody did. The British Institution’s Annual Summer Exhibition continued to attract visitors. It drew as well numerous artists, who set up their easels in the galleries, in order to copy the work of old masters. These artists made annoying obstacles of themselves while they desperately exercised what might be their only opportunity to copy works from private collections.

      Nobody stood in Leonie’s way. Nobody pontificated over her shoulder. She didn’t notice this, let alone wonder why. She hadn’t come for the art but for one specific reason.

      A most important reason … which she’d forgotten the instant her gaze landed on the painting.

      She might have stood transfixed until Doomsday, or until one of the caretakers pitched her out. But—

      A crash, sudden as a thunderclap, broke the room’s peace.

      She jumped, and stumbled backward.

      And hit a wall that oughtn’t to have been there.

      No, not a wall.

      It was big, warm, and alive.

      It smelled like a man: shaving soap and starch and wool. Two man-sized gloved hands, which lightly grasped her shoulders and smoothly restored her to an upright position, confirmed the impression.

      She turned quickly and looked up—a good ways up—at him.

      Ye gods.

      Or, more accurately, ye god Mars.

      Perhaps he wasn’t precisely like the image in the painting. For one thing, the living man was fully clothed, and most expensively, too. But the nose and forehead and mouth were so like. And the shape of the eyes especially. His, unlike the war god’s, were open.

      They were green, with gold flecks, like the gold streaks in his dark blond hair. And that was curly like Mars’s, and appealingly unruly. Something less easily definable in the eyes and mouth hinted at other kinds of unruliness: the mouth on the brink of a smile and the eyes open a degree too wide and innocent. Or was that stupidity?

      “In all the excitement, I seem to have put my foot under yours,” he said. “I do beg your pardon.”

      Not stupid.

      More important, he’d been standing too close, and she hadn’t noticed. Leonie never allowed anybody to sneak up on her. In Paris that could have been fatal. Even in London it was risky.

      She kept all her misgivings on the inside, as she’d learned to do eons ago.

      “I hope I did you no permanent injury,” she said. She let her gaze drift downward. His boots were immaculate. His valet had polished them to such a fearsome brilliance, the dust of London’s streets could only stagger away, blinded.

      His green gaze slid downward, too, to her footwear. “A small foot wrapped in a bit of satin and a sliver of leather doing damage? Odds against, don’t you think?”

      “The bits of satin and leather are half-boots called brodequins,” she said. “And my feet are not small. But it’s gallant of you to say so.”

      “In the circumstances, I ought to say something agreeable,” he said. “I ought as well to produce a clever reason for creeping up on you. Or a chivalrous reason, like intent to shield you from falling easels. But then you’d only decide I was an idiot. As anybody can see, the offending object is some yards away.”

      She was aware of somebody swearing, about three paintings to her left. From the same direction came the sound of wood scraped over wood and the rustling of a heavy fabric. She didn’t look that way. Girls who didn’t keep their wits about them when gods wandered their way got into trouble. Ask Daphne or Leda or Danaë.

      Today’s fitful sun had decided to stream through the skylight at this moment. Its rays fell upon the gold-streaked head.

      “Perhaps you were captivated by the painting,” she said. “And lost track of your surroundings.”

      “That’s a fine excuse,” he said. “But as it’s my painting, and I’ve had ample time to stare at the thing, it won’t do.”

      “Yours,” she said. She hadn’t looked up the lender’s name at the back of the catalog. She’d assumed the masterpiece must belong to the King or one of the royal dukes.

      “That is to say, I’m not Botticelli, you know, the fellow being dead some centuries. I’m Lisburne.”

      Leonie collected her wits, brought business to the front of her mind, and flipped through the pages of her mental ledger, wherein she kept her private compendium of Great Britain’s aristocracy as well as important tidbits from the gossip sheets and her gossipy customers.

      She found the entry easily, because she’d updated it not many days ago: Lisburne meant Simon Blair, the fourth Marquess of Lisburne. Age seven and twenty, he constituted the sole issue of the greatly lamented third Marquess of Lisburne, whose very recently remarried widow resided in Italy.

      Lord Lisburne, who’d lived abroad, too, for these last five or six years, had arrived from the Continent a fortnight ago with his first cousin and close friend Lord Swanton.

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