“You must. I can’t sleep. I’ve never had so many ideas, never been so ready to work. Do you know what that’s like? As if my fingers and my brain are going to burst. Every time I see you, it all spreads in front of me with so much clarity, this perfect vision of what I have to paint. What I was meant to paint, what I was put on this earth to create. And then you disappear, and it’s gone. No, worse. It’s there, like a dream when you’ve just woken up, and you can’t quite touch it.”
He stopped to catch his breath, as if he’d been keeping the words at bay for too long, and they had come out of him too quickly. His arm was snug around her elbow. He smelled a little bit like the house itself, of wood and smoke but also soap, that same intimate scent that had drawn her in a week ago. She turned her face away, but it was too late. Her ribs hurt. Of all the stupid things, to be in love with the smell of soap.
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Go ahead and pretend you don’t feel it.”
“I don’t feel anything at all, except a big heap of admiration for your technique. Tell me, how many housemaids have you lured in this way?”
He stopped in the path and set down the basket and turned toward her. His white breath curled around hers, and his cheekbones were stained the most edible shade of apple pink. “None.”
“Well, you sound like an expert.”
Harry was frowning down at her, in such a way that even the most cynical and sensible girl in the world would want to smooth away the furrow in his brow, to push back the lock of hair on his forehead and tuck it under his cap. To let him do whatever he wanted to her.
Until the next girl turned up.
“All right,” he said. “Fair enough. I know I sound like an idiot. I’ll take you back to the house, and we can pretend we’ve never met before. If that’s what makes you feel better, Olive. If that’s what will make you happy. I guess, if we do, I’m only back where I was a week ago, all restless and frustrated, wanting to just get drunk and forget about everything. Thinking there was no point in anything, that I was all by myself in the middle of a wilderness. But just tell me one thing, Olive. Give me one little word.”
“What word is that?”
“Just that you felt it, too, even if it was only an instant. Tell me I wasn’t alone up there, Olive. God knows I’m sick to death of being alone in a crowded room.”
She picked up her basket and turned away, back up the path toward the gap in the wall on Fifth Avenue. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She started walking. “Because you won’t leave it at that, will you? You’ll want me to come up and pose for you again, and you won’t stop until I do, and it will ruin me.”
He tried to take the basket back, but she wouldn’t let him, and they walked in silence out of the park and up Fifth Avenue. When they reached Sixty-ninth Street, she said, “You’ll have to go on without me. We can’t be seen together.”
“But you’ll come upstairs tonight. You must.”
She didn’t reply.
“I won’t touch you, I swear. I won’t say a single word until you see the finished painting, and you can see for yourself what I mean. You’ll see that you can believe in me.”
She turned and stood on the corner, waiting for a delivery wagon to pass by. The horse’s hooves thudded in the road; the wheels creaked. A gust of wind caught the edge of her hat, swirling with the first snowflakes of winter, and as she grabbed the crown with her hand and started across Fifth Avenue, she heard Harry’s voice floating behind her.
“Excellent! I’ll see you tonight!”
Nine
JULY 1920
Lucy
“Shouldn’t you be putting on your glad rags?”
“My—?” Lucy was elbows deep in a pile of documents, looking for the latest rider to the Merola contract.
“Your sparkling raiment.” Philip Schuyler rested a hand against the edge of the desk, his gold signet ring tapping against the dark wood. “Or, at the very least, your dinner dress.”
Lucy looked at him blankly. “I don’t have a dinner dress.”
That wasn’t a problem for Philip Schuyler. Her employer was elegant in evening dress, his white tie impeccably tied, discreet mother-of-pearl and ebony studs marching the way up his lean chest. The stark black and white set off his light tan, his blond good looks.
“Then you’d best find one, hadn’t you?” he said, and, for a mad moment, Lucy’s mouth went dry and the color rushed to her cheeks as bedtime upon bedtime of fairy tales came flooding back to her.
But it was only in fairy tales that Cinderella was invited to the ball.
Mr. Schuyler said jovially, “Have you forgotten? You’re wining and dining that art dealer fellow, Ravenel—or dining, at least.” He pulled a long face. “I regret to report that Delmonico’s sold off their wine cellar last year thanks to those Philistines in Congress.”
Delmonico’s. Ravenel. Lucy drew in a deep breath, thankful for the pile of documents that ostensibly demanded her attention, thankful for the heat of the day that explained away the flush in her cheeks.
Thank goodness Mr. Schuyler had no inkling of what she had been thinking! What a fool she would look, daydreaming of being plucked from her papers by the prince, like Cinderella from the ashes.