“Would you care for company?” He hesitated. “Because I, too, would like to complete this commission as friends.”

Charlotte instantly opened her mouth to refuse until she turned and caught a glimpse at what lurked beneath Rutledge’s closed, tight expression.

Loneliness.

Something that had been her constant, awful companion since she was a child. Something that superseded all the promises she’d just made to herself to put more distance between them.

“I’d like that,” she heard herself say.

He smiled at her then, a genuine one that crinkled the corners of his silver eyes and exposed a slight dimple along his left cheek. All the air in the room was suddenly sucked out. Her knees actually went a little weak, and the aching want and need deep within her roared back to life. Charlotte put a hand on the edge of the scaffold to steady herself. She could not do this. She could not harbor this sort of desire for a man she was supposed to be working with. She could not allow herself to become infatuated like a pitiful, moon-eyed schoolgirl when everything she had truly wanted and worked so hard for was finally in her grasp.

She needed to be better. At the very least, she needed to be far more careful than she’d been this far. “We should go,” she mumbled.

“Of course,” Rutledge said, seemingly not noticing her reaction. “I’ll fetch my coat.”

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Flynn studied Charlie Beaumont out of the corner of his eye.

The boy had been as skittish as a feral cat since they had left the grounds of St. Michael’s and wound their way through the darkened streets, eventually slipping into the welcome warmth of the tavern. As they had walked, Beaumont had kept his head down and had kept a physical distance as though Flynn carried the plague.

Though Flynn couldn’t say that he’d been overly relaxed either. Everything that had been said in that studio had left him wildly out of sorts. Not to mention Beaumont’s casual gifting of a canvas so exquisite that it had stripped Flynn of words. He had known deep down that Beaumont was skilled—Lisbon had told him as much, even if he hadn’t wanted to hear it at the time. What Flynn hadn’t realized until he’d rolled out those paintings—paintings Beaumont had dismissed as mere copies—was that the boy was breathtakingly gifted.

And not only gifted but humble. And wise and generous. And kind.