Stroke of Genius by Emily Bryan Read Free Book Online Page A

after, but not until nine o’clock. Good day, Mr. Hawke.”
    Crispin watched her go. The full sunlight in the atrium rendered her gown nearly transparent and hewas treated to a glimpse of her long legs beneath the palla.
    Once she disappeared around the corner, he strode over to the canvas and yanked off the sheeting.
    The sketch was of the woman who’d invaded his dreams for the past month. The wanton succubus caused him to wake with either an aching cockstand or a damp sheet and a flush of pleasure like he’d never known.
    Only to be followed by yawning emptiness when he realized she was but a dream.
    Capturing her on canvas had started as a lark. A fortnight ago, he told Wyckham that he was drawing a sketch without a model. She was his ideal woman, he said, the one his soul was destined for, even though he knew she was nothing more than mist. He thought capturing his dream nymph on canvas would make sense of the recurring night phantom.
    Instead it only cemented her image more firmly in his brain.
    And he never fancied he’d meet her in the flesh. Now that he knew her name, he doubted he’d ever be free of her. Not that he would act to make his fancies real. The idea was laughable.
    “Do you think she saw it?” Wyckham said from behind him.
    “No. She wouldn’t have left so quietly otherwise.” Crispin picked up a bit of charcoal and added a tiny mole near the figure’s elbow. Then he tossed the sheeting back over the easel again. The fine linen billowed over the portrait. Anyone viewing the sketch would never believe Miss Grace Makepeace hadn’t sat for it personally.
    And in splendid nakedness.

Chapter Five
    No one knew for certain why Pygmalion shoved people away, but one suspected the reason was rooted in his past. A past he guarded as if it contained diamonds and pearls.
    Twenty-five years earlier
    Peel’s Abbey, a Cheapside house of pleasure
    The bells of St. Paul’s chimed the hour. Seven of the clock. The “gentlemen” would be coming soon. Time to make himself scarce just as soon as he finished scrubbing the corridor outside Madame Peel’s chamber.
    “No, Leo, I don’t hold with such things,” young Crispin overheard Madame tell one of her best clients. Leo was a longtime customer and one of the few allowed to enter her inner sanctum. “It ain’t natural.”
    “But that’s what makes it so very lucrative. My friend runs the cleanest molly house this side of the Thames. Your bootblack boy is a likely lad. I assure you he’d be well treated. A regular pet, that one.”
    “He’s too young,” Madame protested.
    Crispin heard her bracelet tinkle merrily and pictured her imperious gesture in his head. The girls always said he had more imagination than a body needed. Even though Crispin knew the sparkly gems in Madame’s bracelet were only paste, he thought it a thing of beauty. A bright spot of color in a world of gray.
    “The boy’s only five or maybe six.”
    “But big for his age,” the man said. “And so very comely.”
    There was a long pause and the boy in question leaned closer to the crack in the door to Madame’s private chamber.
    “You’re only against it because you figure the mollies cut into your business with some of the upper crust,” the man said with a laugh. “You’d be well compensated for the boy.”
    In the silence that followed, Crispin didn’t dare breathe. Something inside him shivered once and then went perfectly still, a wild young thing hiding from the predator sniffing nearby.
    “No,” she finally said.
    He released the breath he’d been holding.
    But even a lad of five or six knew Madame Peel’s “no” was only a deferred “yes.” If Peel’s Abbey had a few lean weeks, the answer would change in a heartbeat. He knew it as surely as he knew his own name.
    Crispin knew lots of things. He’d lived at the Abbey all his life. After the pale, dark-haired woman he called mother died of a fever there, Crispin toddled around the pleasure house,