The Painted Lady Read Online Free PDF Page B

storeys, can you?
    His other aunt was already dabbing at her eyes. “After all, lots of people dress up their doggies.”
    * * * *
    The duke found his cousin in the estate office, as usual, going over some figures before dinner. “Charles,” he said, taking a seal across the desk, “do you think I am missing something?”
    Warberry’s face went white and the quill pen snapped in his fingers.
    “Good God, man, I am not accusing you of pilfering from the accounts! I wouldn’t be asking this now if I did not trust you completely.”
    Some of the color came back into Charles’s complexion. “Just what is it you are asking, then, old man?”
    Kasey fiddled with the silver inkwell. “I want to know if you think I am missing something in my life.”
    Charles laughed. “You? Devil take it, cuz, you have a fortune and a title. You have the looks of a blond Adonis—”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    “Oh, you didn’t mean you have every female between the ages of sixteen and sixty tossing her cap at you? Six different estates, the finest horses money can buy or breed, entrée to all the clubs. Lud, you have everything a man could ever want.”
    “But is it enough?”
    “Deuce take it, you must have been talking to Lord Granleigh again, he’s that eager to see Lady Phillida off his hands. Convinced you that a man needs a wife and children, eh?”
    “You cannot think that makes a man complete, or else you’d have a wife of your own by now. You’re eight years my senior and you’ve never taken a bride.”
    Charles pretended to shiver at the thought. “I’ve never seen the need to tie myself to one woman for the rest of my life. No title to pass down, don’t you know, no property to be lost if I didn’t produce little butter stamps to inherit. Besides, in my experience a wife is more trouble than she’s worth.”
    After thinking about his conversation with the painted lady, Kasey had to agree. The kind of marriage he was envisioning, with both parties going their separate ways, could only complicate a man’s existence no end, if it did not end it in a duel. “No, I was speaking of spiritual fulfillment, I think.”
    Charles sat back in his chair, frowning at his cousin. “You went to church with the aunts last week, didn’t you? That ought to put paid to any religious fervor. Jupiter, you aren’t thinking of becoming one of those Reformers, are you? Or joining a monastery?” He laughed out loud at the notion. “No, that’s out of the question. You wouldn’t last a week without women.” He noticed that his cousin was not laughing along with him. “Come on, old chap, you are beginning to scare me.”
    “I am beginning to scare myself, too,” Kasey confessed, staring at his hands. “Do you think I am insane?”
    “What in the world... ? I’ve known you since birth, and I’d swear you are as sound as I am.”
    “It’s ... the painting.”
    Charles waited, but when His Grace did not add anything, he sighed. “Ah, the painting. Well, old man, I never did comprehend why you burned yourself to a stump with that business. I don’t suppose anyone but another artist could understand the need to be slopping about in paint smocks.”
    He straightened his own immaculate cuffs. “Eccentric bunch, artists, but that’s not to say they are insane. As for your hiding the work away where no one can see it, well, you said yourself you never wanted to give the gossipmongers any more to chew on. It’s enough they broadcast every dasher you dance with and every opera singer you escort to dinner. You’d have no privacy at all, if you showed your paintings. You know how people are always laughing at that lordling who’s forever putting on his own plays. And it’s not as if you need the money they’d bring if you tried to sell them. If they are worth anything, that is, other than as curios of a dilettante duke.”
    Kasey had never considered the worth of his artwork, and did not now. He was on his feet,