A man built like a pugilist with iron gray hair and hard brown eyes opened the door. Beth stepped back in alarm, clutching her satchel to her bosom. This was a man one would find in a wrestling match or a brawl in a pub, not answering doors in Paris.
But no, he seemed to be Mac’s valet. Isabella had told her that the four brothers picked up their unconventional valets off the streets, thus saving them time and expense at the agencies. Curry had been a pickpocket, Bellamy a pugilist, Cameron’s valet a Roma, and Hart’s a disgraced clerk to a London financier.
The sneer left Bellamy’s thug like face when Beth said who she was. Looking almost polite, he directed her up three flights of stairs to the door at the top.
The studio covered the entire floor, with two huge skylights letting in the gray Paris sky. The view, on the other hand, was breathtaking. Beth saw across rooftops down the steep hill to the flat plain of Paris and cloud-bedecked hills in the distance.
Mac was perched on a ladder in front of an enormous canvas, his hair covered by a red kerchief that made him look like a Gypsy. He held a long paintbrush in his hand and scowled bleakly at his canvas. Paint splattered his hands, face, painter’s smock, and the floor around him.
On the eight-foot canvas that reared in front of him, the figures of a pillar and a plump naked woman had been roughed in. Mac was concentrating on the folds of a drape that just missed the woman’s intimate parts, but the model kept twitching.
“Stay still, can’t you?”
The model saw Beth and stopped wriggling. Mac glanced over his shoulder and also went still.
Ian moved out of the shadows. His hair was rumpled, as though he’d been scraping his hands through it, perhaps massaging one of his temples, as he often did. His gold gaze darted over Beth, and then he deliberately turned to look out the window.
Beth cleared her throat. “The porter at your hotel said you’d come here,” she told Ian’s back.
Ian didn’t turn.
“Cybele,” Mac snapped, “go downstairs and tell Bellamy to give you tea.”
Cybele squeaked, then spoke in a heavy accent. “I’ll not go near Bellamy. He frightens me so much. He looks at me like he wishes to lock his hands around my throat.” “Can’t imagine why,” Mac muttered, but Beth broke in.“It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. I only came here to apologize. To both of you.”
“What the devil do you have to apologize for?” Mac said. “Fellows is to blame, blast the man. He was told to stay away from us.”
Beth walked to the window, her gloved fingers closing tightly on the handle of her satchel. She looked up at Ian reflected in the glass, his face utterly still.
“You were quite right, Ian,” she said softly. “I should have sent the inspector away with a flea in his ear. I didn’t because I was curious about things that were none of my business. Mrs. Barrington always said curiosity was my besetting sin, and she was right. I had no call to pry into your family’s history, and for that I soundly apologize.”
“Very pretty,” Cybele sneered.
Mac leapt from his stepladder, threw a dressing gown at Cybele, took her by the ear, and pulled her with him out of the room. Cybele shrieked and swore in French. The slam of the door shook the walls, and then everything went silent Beth studied the unfinished painting as she gathered her wits. The painted woman gazed at the bowl of water at her feet. Patches of wetness suggested she’d just stepped out of it. She held a thin scarf across her back as though she’d been drying off.
It was a sensual painting, like the one Isabella had shown her, but Beth understood the difference right away. The woman in this picture was a thing, a curve of colored flesh. She was no more a person than was the bath at her feet or the pillar behind her.
The woman in Isabella’s picture had been Isabella. Mac had painted his wife, every stroke lovingly placed, every shadow carefully laid. Any woman could have modeled for this bather—only Isabella could have been the woman in her painting.
Beth turned from the easel and faced the solid upright that was Ian. “I bought you a present” He still didn’t move. Beth unlocked her satchel and pulled out a small box.
“I saw it while I was shopping with Isabella. I wanted you to have it.”
Ian continued to stare sightlessly away from her, the shape of his broad shoulders reflected in the grimy window. Beth laid the box on the windowsill and turned away. If he didn’t want to speak to her, there was nothing she could do.
Ian pressed his hand flat against the windowpane, still not looking at her. “How can you be to blame?” Beth dropped the skirt she’d caught up in preparation for leaving. “Because if I’d refused to speak to Inspector Fellows yesterday in the park, you’d never have seen him. I should have had him thrown out when he came to Isabella’s house and began those awful accusations, but I’m too curious for my own good. Both times, I wanted to hear what he had to say.”
Ian finally turned his face to her, keeping his hand on the window. “Don’t protect me. They all try to protect me.” Beth went to him. “How can I possibly protect you? It was wrong of me to poke and pry, but I fully admit I wanted to speak to Fellows to find out all about you. Even his lies.” “They aren’t lies. We were there.”
“Fellows’s interpretation of the truth, then.” One hand fisted on the windowsill. “Tell me what he said to you. Everything.” His gaze rested on her mouth as he waited for her words.