Highlander Undone Read Free

stubbornly refused to heal and strengthen, a body that blazed with internal fire for days on end. And later, after he’d begun the slow, fitful journey toward recovery, her voice had given him respite from the knowledge that somewhere there might be an officer who had grown as bloated as a leech on the deaths of soldiers. His soldiers.
    He’d never known a woman as intimately as he knew Addie.
    She liked Brahms and felt guilty for finding Wagner boring. She indulged a sweet tooth and disliked liqueurs. She preferred seascapes to landscapes and brambleberries to strawberries.
    But anyone in her immediate circle might know the same. Jack’s knowledge went far deeper.
    He knew that she turned her face to the sun like an apostate awaiting a benediction, for her brother was always telling her to mind her complexion. She was constantly asking her companions if they’d seen the flash of a certain bird in the shrubbery and thus he knew her gaze was often fixed beyond her companions. She was spontaneous in her appreciation of any number of subjects, from politics to art, from the ladybug that she lured to her fingertip to Burton’s search for the source of the Nile.
    And he knew that she’d married a man who’d beaten her and when her brother intervened, her husband had run him down with his carriage, shattering his leg.
    “I shouldn’t be twitting Addie if I were you, Ted,” Norton said. “She might refuse to act as your hostess this Season, y’know, and then where’d you be without a proper lady to chaperone all the little debs who’ll be flocking to your studio to have their portraits painted?”
    “Hardly flocks, old fellow. I already have accepted as many commissions as I can possibly honor and only a very few are debutantes.”
    “And pray whom are these willing prisoners to your art?” a new, female voice demanded in querying tones.
    “My dear lady!” Norton exclaimed. “We did not know you were in residence. Why didn’t Wheatcroft inform us when we arrived?”
    “Because he did not know to expect me,” his uncle’s wife, Lady Harmonia Merritt née Gate, replied. “I have only just arrived this moment back in England and, being told that my dear friends were down here at the cottage, came at once.”
    “What a delightful surprise,” Addie said, and Jack could hear the smile in her voice.
    “Addie, my dear, how pleased I am to see you are looking so much improved in health since the last time I saw you.” Her voice lowered. “You . . . no longer pine?”
    She could not mean that Addie pined for Hoodless? But then Lady Merritt, unless she was far more intimate with Addie than anything he’d heard suggested, would not know. Just as he was not meant to know.
    One of the men made a rough sound, as though in protest. Ted, no doubt. Addie answered quickly before he could speak. “I am well, thank you.”
    “And you, Ted, what is this about having commissions? You had best not think to bury yourself in the studio. As your patroness this Season, I have already planned a number of gatherings and fêtes at which I shall introduce you to those people you must know, and by whom you must be known, in order to achieve artistic prominence.”
    “I am, as always, humbled by your generosity and will be honored to oblige.”
    This gracious acceptance of what, to Jack’s mind, was nothing less than a direct order did little to placate the lady. “And do you think you should have accepted so many commissions without conferring with me? I must say I am worried. I should hate to see you waste your time and talent on painting some mushroom’s self-satisfied visage, to have it displayed above his dining table wall where only his shopkeeper friends will admire it.”
    It appeared his uncle’s wife was a snob.
    “Not at all. I have been commissioned to do a series of portraits of the officers who served so nobly in the relief effort of Khartoum. The Black Dragoons.”
    And with Ted’s words an idea bloomed in