Free Rapturous Rakes Bundle by Georgina Devon Nicola Cornick Diane Gaston Page A

the wicked angel. Beneath its point the fig-
    ure came to life, wings folded neatly, the line of cheek
    and jaw giving the impression of strength and grace,
    head bent, as if in devout contemplation of sin. On the
    evening of the fourth day she laid her scribe aside and
    considered the engraving. She knew at once that there
    was something wrong with it. The problem was not in
    the execution, but in the finished picture. She had
    given the wicked angel Lucas Kestrel’s face.
    It was undeniable. The detail was perfect: the high
    cheekbones, the hard line of the jaw, the watchful
    eyes, the mouth... Rebecca put her head in her hands
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    The Rake’s Mistress
    in despair. All this time she had been shutting Lucas
    out of her thoughts by concentrating on her work. She
    had refused to think of him, refused to dream of him.
    Yet he had come to haunt her nevertheless, taking life
    beneath the point of the scribe and showing her just
    how foolish she was to think that she could dismiss
    him.
    Rebecca pushed the bowl away dispiritedly. She
    knew she should have spent longer practising on old
    glass before she started work on the crystal, but she
    had been desperate to finish the commission, desperate
    for the money, if she were truthful. And there was no
    real need to despair, for Lord Fremantle was likely to
    be very pleased with the work. She would deliver it
    to the Club in the morning. It was undoubtedly
    amongst her best work. Technically it was beautiful
    and perfectly executed. It was what it told her that was
    worrying.
    Rebecca stood up, wiped the palms of her hands on
    her apron and walked restlessly across to the window.
    Night had fallen long since and the lights of the Je-
    rusalem Tavern twinkled faintly in the dusk. A distant
    murmur of voices drifted on the night air.
    Rebecca turned away. She knew that she should put
    in some time on her accounts, which consistently re-
    fused to add up. The mere thought of it made her head
    ache.
    She wished with fierce longing that her uncle,
    George Provost, was here with her now. She had never
    felt so alone as she did these days, not even when she
    had been a child and her parents had died and she and
    Daniel were obliged to go their separate ways. George
    Nicola Cornick
    75
    and his kindly wife, Ruth, had taken her in and over
    the years she had become much attached to them, but
    now she had no one. She knew that she had tried to
    bury her grief in her work, but every so often it would
    bubble up as it did now, making her eyes sting and
    her heart ache.
    Rebecca had never minded working on her own be-
    fore. Engraving was a solitary profession, but she was
    beginning to realise that there was a difference be-
    tween working on her own commissions with the buzz
    of the workshop going on around her, and working in
    silence because she had lost all her colleagues.
    With a little sigh, she went into the storeroom and
    took out an old wineglass that she used for practice.
    Now that the angel was completed, she needed to start
    practising birds of prey. She went back to her desk,
    sat down and picked up her diamond-point scribe and
    the little hammer. Stipple work engraving was slow
    and expensive, for each dot was placed individually
    on the glass with utter precision. For Lord Lucas Kes-
    trel’s commission, however, nothing but the best
    would do. Her professional pride demanded it.
    She picked up her engraving scribe and the little
    hammer that she used for stipple work. She placed the
    scribe against the glass and tapped it gently.
    An agonising pain shot through her left wrist, so
    sharp that it felt as though she were hammering into
    her own bones. Rebecca cried out, dropping the ham-
    mer so that it spun away across the bench. The glass
    fractured all the way around the top and broke off
    cleanly in a band half an inch wide. Rebecca felt sick-
    ness rise in her throat. She grabbed the edge of the
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    The Rake’s Mistress
    desk to steady herself, then sat down and clutched