An Experienced Mistress Read Free Page B

only asking for fifteen more pounds,” the woman said, exasperated.
    “And why make a row about such a trifle?”
    “If it is a trifle, why not pay it?”
    They argued about fifteen pounds? Will hardly believed it—especially if what Coventry said was true, and the artist did well. Perhaps the woman’s anger was only a result of being undervalued for too long. For God’s sake, the man should give it to her.
    Yet part of him hoped that the artist would not.
    “I cannot,” the artist told her.
    “Very well.” The woman’s voice grew quieter. “Then you and I are finished.”
    “Genny, don’t be so hard,” the man whined.
    Will slipped out of the doorway and back into the crowd.
    From this safe vantage point, he watched as the woman came out of the other arched doorway. Her eyes were downcast and her cheeks flushed pink with anger. As if short of breath, her full lips parted.
    She was the woman in the painting.
    No, impossible. This woman had waves of coppery hair; the hair of that Eve was straight and pale.
    Will studied the woman’s face as she scanned the crowd, spotted the friend with whom she’d arrived and rushed up to join her. Then he cast another backward glance at the painting that was just visible beyond the arched doorway.
    It’s her.
    Will felt something primal thrumming inside him, like the first distant rumblings of a wild storm. She was fascinating, available—and he would have her for his own.

 
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Two
     
    “I would not be so provoked if he had not lied to me!” Genevieve Bell ranted to her friend in the carriage. “Telling me he got twenty pounds for my painting, when he got fifty.”
    “Fifty pounds,” Ruth marveled.
    “Well, it’s worth at least that much. I worked my nails off on it. I was particularly pleased with the expression in the eyes.”
    “It may be you’re right,” Ruth said. “But I daresay no one would pay that much if they knew a woman painted it.”
    “No. But they might pay thirty.”
    Ruth’s silence was an eloquent expression of her doubt.
    Genevieve recalled, with painful clarity, the time she’d tried to sell a painting of Maid Marian. Percy Wentworth, a friend of hers who did portraits, very generously told a wealthy client about “his colleague’s” picture. The woman expressed some interest, telling Percy to bring his friend and the painting along on the next visit. Genevieve had thrilled at the prospect.
    But as soon as the lady saw Genevieve, she’d said that she was so sorry, but she was no longer interested in the subject of Maid Marian. Genevieve had felt as pathetic as a beggar girl at the back door, trying to sell her wilted watercress.
    And she later learned that the lady had commissioned a Maid Marian from another painter. A male one, naturally.
    The carriage wheels hit a rut in the road, jolting them both in their seats. “Well, I don’t care if they won’t pay much,” Genevieve said. “I’m tired of no one knowing the work is mine. If Ida can hang her paintings in the Royal Academy, why not I?”
    Ruth smiled sadly. At twenty-three, she was two years younger than Genevieve, and rarely offered unsolicited advice.
    Ruth seemed to already regret telling her the news about Ida, their mutual friend. Few women were chosen to exhibit at that prestigious institution, and now Ida Keating, no older than Genevieve, was one of them. And all Genevieve could think was it ought to have been her .
    “It isn’t just the money, you know,” she told Ruth after a few minutes. “He has injured my feelings. When he first wanted to paint like me, I did try so hard to help him. For him to deceive me, after all I’ve done for him...it’s the cruelest thing in the world.”
    “I know,” Ruth murmured sympathetically.
    “I used to say Cage was like a brother to me. We spent summers together in Yorkshire when we were children.” She sighed. “But it seems the truth is he doesn’t care a straw about me.”
    “He’s not