A Lady of Talent by Evelyn Richardson Read Free Book Online

the time being, at least, portraits, and the money they brought her, were far more important than reputation.
     

Chapter Six
     
    Survival, however, was not uppermost in Cecilia’s mind several days later as she emerged from Turner’s lecture at the Royal Academy on the perceptions of nature and the use of color. She was still so wrapped up in all that Turner had had to say on the subject that she descended the curved staircase in a fog, paying so little attention to what she was doing that had she not been holding on to the slender banister she surely would have stumbled. She started across the checkered floor of the vestibule heading toward the traffic of the Strand, and ran headlong into one of the marble columns that supported the vaulted ceiling of Somerset House’s impressive entry.
    “Lady Cecilia!” A deep voice tinged with laughter revealed that it was a man rather than an architectural element with which she had collided.
    “I beg your pardon.” Doing her best to overcome a sinking feeling that she knew the identity of the person she had run into, she forced herself to look up into dark eyes glinting with amusement. “What ever are you doing here?” Cecilia quickly stifled the irrelevant thought that when he was smiling as he was now, the Earl of Charrington was a very attractive man indeed.
    Sebastian grinned. “I might ask the same of you, though I suspect the answer would be that you have been attending a lecture at the Royal Academy. As to what I have been doing here, I have been at the Royal Society listening to what my friend Charles Babbage has to say about the calculus of functions.”
    “The calculus of functions?”
    He laughed outright at her stupefaction. “Yes. It is a hobby of mine—mathematics, that is.” Sebastian had not realized the effect their first meeting had had on him until this moment when he had her at a disadvantage. The first time, he had been overwhelmed to discover that the woman of his dreams was actually flesh and blood. He had fallen victim to her air of competent professionalism—that and her obvious intelligence and knowledge that were so evident in every corner of her studio. He had come away from the encounter feeling very dull and very provincial indeed.
    It was not often—in fact almost never—that Sebastian doubted his intellectual superiority, but this woman, by her very self-assurance and composure, had somehow made him feel like the veriest schoolboy, or, at the very least, a worthless fribble who did nothing but cater to the whims of his beautiful fiancée. He had not been aware of how much it rankled until this very moment, when he took great delight in watching an uncomfortable flush suffuse Lady Cecilia’s cheeks and a self-conscious look creep into her large hazel eyes.
    C. A. Manners welcoming patrons to her studio was formidable indeed, but Lady Cecilia caught off guard and adorably flustered was completely enchanting and utterly irresistible. Sebastian was suddenly seized with the most ridiculous and almost overwhelming urge to sweep her into his arms and kiss the gently parted lips until she was breathless. “Yes, I find mathematics to be an absorbing distraction—a source of inspiration and predictability in an otherwise uninspiring and unpredictable world.”
    If she had been regarding him with mild confusion before, Cecilia looked utterly bewildered now. What had ever possessed him to admit such a thing to someone who was almost a complete stranger, a woman he had met only once before in his life?
    But suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, she smiled. It was a smile that was both reassuring and intimate, a smile that made him feel comfortable and strangely lighthearted. “How interesting. I had never thought of mathematics in quite that way before. For me, being forced to do sums when I longed to read or to draw was torture. Geometry was a little better because at least it was something I could see, but algebra...” She shook her head in