With This Kiss: Part One by Eloisa James Read Free Book Online

replace the tack to keep the paint from drying out.”
    In all, there were eleven different colors. One was cadmium red, but there were others that she hadn’t seen before: a beautiful deep green, the color of a cedar tree. A blue that was so clear that it looked like a summer sky. Another blue that shaded into violet, the color of twilight over the sea.
    She scooped up the box and trotted up the stairs, heading for her bedchamber.
    The duke stepped out of the library, and she heard Lily explaining the gift. She froze at the top of the stairs when her father called her name, looked down, and saw him standing with his arm around Lily. They looked uncannily similar.
    “No letters,” he stated.
    “I do have to thank him.”
    “A brief note that will advise Colin it is your last letter.”
    She nodded.
    “I’ll write him for you,” Lily said cheerfully. “But only once, unless he replies. I would never write the way you did, Grace, without getting responses. You were far too kind to him.”
    Grace made it into her bedchamber and closed the door before she started crying, which was quite an achievement.
    In all her years of correspondence, she had received at most one letter every few months. Of course, some of Colin’s letters might have gone astray. But she had stopped pretending that he was writing her as often as she would wish.
    Yet, if he was in love with her sister, he might well write Lily. The pain hit her so hard that she actually sank to her knees on the carpet, clutching the wooden box, wondering how one lived with a broken heart, especially when one’s beloved is married to a sister.
    It was humiliating to think about how she wrote him long, boring letters, as if she were his maiden aunt. Worse, each one had been a love letter, though he hadn’t known that.
    At last she got to her feet, walked over to her writing desk, and wrote a short note, thanking Colin for the paintbox and explaining that her father felt it was no longer appropriate for them to correspond. Then she sat down and made the best painting of her life.
    It was a miniature, no bigger than her palm. But she painted it on a small square of canvas, so that, if wrapped in silk and carried in his breast pocket, it wouldn’t fade or chip, like the watercolors she’d sent him before.
    It was a portrait of Lily, laughing.
    Grace worked all night, surrounded by candles that kept burning out, so she had to replace them, rubbing her eyes. She had to finish. She had to put Colin out of her mind, give him this last gift.
    Then it was finished. Lily gazed out of the picture, with all her laughing exuberance, her innocent seductiveness, the sweetness that stopped her from becoming vain.
    It was very tiresome to love one’s rival, she thought before falling, exhausted, in bed.
    When she woke up, late in the afternoon, the painting was dry enough to be sent off. She wrapped it in silk and then a soft piece of vellum, and went downstairs to give the packet to her father to be dispatched to the Admiralty.
    When she unwrapped the vellum to show him, he held the miniature very delicately in his huge hand and stared at it in silence for a moment.
    “You have a great talent, Grace.”
    She knew he was right. She had captured Lily. It was the only thing she had to give Colin, since he didn’t want her.
    The duke reached out with his other hand and caught her against his side. “All this love you have inside you, sweet pea… it will make some fellow very happy.”
    She nodded. She was exhausted, but she also felt clean and emptied out. Her love wasn’t gone, but she was ready to let it go.
    She had built an imaginary thing between herself and her childhood friend. But adult relationships didn’t spring from letters. They came from the sort of happiness that Colin had felt when he saw Lily across the ballroom, and when he kissed Lily’s hand.
    That was an adult relationship. Someday, someone would feel that for her. But it wouldn’t be Colin.
    “Thank you,