PortraitofPassion Read Free Page B

friends.”
    “What was that business about her giving me leave to call
her by her given name?” It had seemed to Simon as if she were warning Henry
that should he fail to attend her on her morning ride, she would turn her
attentions to him. And that wink! What did she mean by winking at him?
    “Oh I had warned her that she would cause damage to her name
by inviting a young gentleman to use it. She merely smiled. She has this way of
smiling as if she knows a secret that no one else is privileged to know, and
said—and I remember it exactly as it was such a strange thing to say—‘one of
the most wonderful things about living outside Society is that I need have no
fear of damaging my name, as no one knows it’.”
    Simon said nothing, for what was there to say to that?
Living outside Society indeed. Where did she think she had been tonight? She
had been at one of the ton’s leading hostess’s annual ball. Where did
she think she went when she attended Anna Forsythe’s salon in Paris? Even Mrs.
Forsythe, for all her sordid past and banishment to the continent, still
traveled on the fringes of Society.
    “They’ll know her name after tonight,” he finally said.
    “They knew it all over Paris,” Henry replied.
    Simon lifted one dark brow in question.
    “They were clamoring for her to paint them,” Henry answered
the unspoken question.
    “So she is a well-known artist then?” Simon inquired.
    “You don’t know?” His cousin was clearly surprised. “I
thought you had put that much together at least. But of course not, or else you
would not wonder how she knew your father.”
    “What?” Simon asked.
    “Beatrice Morgan,” Henry prompted. When Simon did not reply
he added, “Bea Morgan.”
    It took him a moment and then, “B. Morgan? The portrait
artist?”
    “The same,” Henry assured him.
    “But— I had no idea he, I mean she, was a woman.”
    “She is.”
    So that was how she knew his father. His father had bought a
number of her early works. He had even commissioned her to paint his portrait.
The portrait still hung above the fireplace in the dining room of his town
house where it had held that honored spot for years.
    “But how can that be possible? She is a young woman, what,
five and twenty perhaps? My father began collecting B. Morgan’s works nearly
ten years ago, before the portraits, when they were landscapes. I remember the
first one he brought home, a beautiful painting of an old fountain overgrown
with bright red and yellow flowers. He gave it to my mother for Christmas. Yes,
ten, maybe eleven years ago.”
    The carriage came to stop and Henry sat up once more.
    “She must have started quite young as she is six and twenty.
She’ll be seven and twenty next month.”
    “You seem to know a lot about her considering you told me
not half an hour ago that you know very little about her.”
    “She mentioned it to me once. She dreads the month of June
and her birthday in particular as her father died just before her eighteenth
birthday.”
    “Who was her father?” Simon asked.
    “I’ve no idea. I haven’t asked and she hasn’t offered. Nor
do I know who her mother is. But I suspect they were Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, minor
gentry or perhaps well-to-do merchants, as she is clearly well-educated. Better
educated, really, than any woman I have ever known.” The carriage door opened and
Henry stepped down onto the street before his town house. He leaned back in
long enough to say, “She is a beautiful woman, and amusing and intelligent. I
enjoy her company and believe she enjoys mine. She isn’t trying to trap me into
marriage, Simon. It was one time, years ago, and I learned my lesson.”
    “So well that you kissed Miss Morgan on the terrace outside
a crowded ballroom for the entire world to see?”
    Henry slammed the carriage door and bolted up the steps, his
raucous laughter fading away as he entered the front door to his home.
    Simon watched his cousin as he disappeared through the