Chloe sat down, feeling self-conscious. Charlotte quickly pulled a huge chef’s apron over her head and sat down with a large pad of paper in her lap. She started sketching, the quick, sure movements of her wrist the only thing Chloe could see. At first Charlotte asked her a few questions, but Chloe could see that she didn’t really want to talk. So Chloe fell easily into silence and started thinking about Will. Will last night … in the corridor … in the carriage, in front of her house.

Charlotte’s hand trembled. What in God’s name was happening to Chloe? The self-contained, earnest little girl she’d met the night before had transformed into a passionate woman, glowing at every pore with sexual interest. Could it be that she, Charlotte, was the naive one? She simply didn’t see the world as it was until Alex came along and … Charlotte scowled violently. She wasn’t sure she liked this new world, full of roving husbands and maidens feverish with desire. But—perhaps it was Charlotte who was feverish and she was writing the emotion onto the face of a sedate little Dutch maiden? Charlotte looked down at the sketch in her lap, and at the sheafs that had fallen like snow around her chair. No. Her pencil didn’t lie. It never had. The thought steadied her and she began sketching faster, trying to capture Chloe’s restraint, the quality of extreme self-control that was so fascinatingly balanced by glowing sensuality.

Charlotte had fallen into a rhythm by an hour or so later. And she was getting somewhere. Bits of certain sketches had something she wanted. She’d caught a look in Chloe’s eyes, for example, somewhere in a page on the floor. And she had a beautiful, calm chin and throat tossed off in coal, not pencil, also drifting about the floor. The portrait was beginning to tumble itself together in her head, when there was a sudden interruption. A sharp knock sounded on the door of the studio.

“What the devil!” Charlotte said in a completely unladylike manner, jumping to her feet.

Chloe’s mouth fell open for the second time since she entered the studio. She had never heard a lady swear like that.

Charlotte was furious. Chloe had relaxed only about ten minutes ago. Her shoulders had been strained and unnatural for forty minutes. Everyone knew not to enter this room during working hours.

A large dark hand gripped the door and swung it open. As soon as Charlotte heard a voice telling Campion that no, he wouldn’t wait and be damned with him, her heart flip-flopped. It was Alex, genially dismissing Campion’s protests. He must have followed the butler right up the stairs, because normally Campion would never have permitted an unchaperoned man to enter the upper floors of the house.