Free The Beautiful One by Emily Greenwood Page B

was hardly a recipe for happiness. “You know, my dear, it’s not a good idea to have all your connections with people be based solely on your appearance.”
    Lizzie crossed her arms, her fair, elegant eyebrows crimping tensely. “I wish I could just go back to Malta. Can’t you convince him to send me back? He doesn’t want me here anyway.”
    â€œMalta won’t be the same,” Anna said gently. “You know that.”
    â€œBut we had family friends there, and I know they would take me in.” She frowned and tugged a loose strand of her Botticelli hair into her mouth. Anna gave her a governess-ish look and Lizzie pulled it out again.
    â€œGrandville won’t let me stay beyond the month, will he?” she said. There was no whine in her voice, as might have been expected of a thwarted, pampered young lady, but rather the awful calm of someone who’d already faced too many hard truths. “He’s going to send me away at the end of the month.”
    â€œLizzie, I know he hasn’t been welcoming. But maybe if you just be yourself, he might come around in his own fashion.”
    â€œHe’s my only remaining connection to my father,” she said in a voice tinged with huskiness, “and I’m certain he was once a good man.” Her lips pressed together unhappily. “But I don’t understand him.”
    â€œI think you will have to be the one who makes the effort to establish a connection,” Anna said, though she wasn’t confident it would make any difference, because he was only tolerating Lizzie out of duty and guilt.
    â€œIf it doesn’t work, you have to convince him to send me to Malta, or…”—Lizzie’s brow drew together fiercely—“or I’ll make him want to send me a lot farther away than the next girls’ school.”
    â€œOh, Lizzie, don’t be foolish.” Anna caught her eyes and made certain she was really listening. “You do realize that you won’t be able to make him do anything he doesn’t want to do? You may be clever, but Lord Grandville isn’t the kind of man to be manipulated.”
    The mutinous expression in the girl’s eyes did nothing to reassure her. “Lizzie?” she prompted.
    â€œI understand,” she said in a dull voice. She bent down and gathered the sketchbook and pencil she’d put down when she’d found the owl.
    Anna accompanied her as they made their way to their rooms, wondering how wrong it would be to finish the painting on the wall of her bedchamber herself and tell the viscount that Lizzie had done it. But what difference would it make anyway, in how he felt about his ward? Her scheme, which had initially seemed sensible, now looked like the clutching-at-straws idea it had always been.
    * * *
    â€œThe chit’s flown. Miss Bristol’s decamped I tell you, Rawlins,” the Marquess of Henshaw said to the burly young man standing in his study, where the gloom of a rainy evening was being kept at bay by a substantial fire. “I gave her a month to make her decision, and when I came for her yesterday, the girl was gone. What a minx!”
    Henshaw had been thwarted, Jasper Rawlins knew. But there was also an unmistakable note of glee in his voice, as if a gauntlet had been thrown down for him. Jasper would have laughed at the idea of Anna Bristol being a minx if this hadn’t all been so important.
    When he’d sold The Beautiful One to the marquess, he’d known his fortunes as an artist were finally on the rise. It had taken Jasper two months of moments stolen from his work as Dr. Bristol’s apprentice to create the drawings. He’d known the pictures were special, had seen his talent coming to fruition as he’d captured her hidden beauty.
    It was a beauty only he had had the vision to see—even her own father hardly noticed her. There was something different and fresh about her, and it