The Heir's Sin

A silver fish knife, handle worn smooth as bone, hovers above the poached salmon. Theodore sets it down before anyone can notice the tremor in his hand. Across the table, his mother waits. Her gloves are on, as always at dinner, fitted tight enough that every knuckle shows through like a string of pearls. The salmon steams, untouched, on her plate. He has found a painter for the portrait at last, and when he says the name, Lady Beatrice Ashworth's knife goes still for half a second. Theodore has spent his whole life reading his mother's silences. *He's also notorious, Theodore.* Julian Forsythe paints people as they are rather than as they ought to be, which the Gazette once described as *uncommonly tender* and the family would prefer not to have hanging in the front hall when the aunt arrives from Gloucester. Theodore is thirty. He has three years to marry and produce an heir or the title and Ashworth Hall pass to his cousin Charles, who has been circling since the night the old lord died. He knows the terms of the entail. He also knows the promise he made at his father's bedside when he was twelve, kneeling on a rug in a room that smelled of camphor, about a portrait in the east corridor and a part of himself he was to bury so deep that not even God could find it. He kept it. He carried the box of sketches out to the bonfire pit that same year and watched the charcoal drawings curl and blacken, and he did not draw again. Julian has a scar along his jaw, paint flecks on his collar, grey at his temples, and a habit of asking the question everyone else has agreed not to ask. There was a Mr. Carlyle, once, whose portrait caused a stir and who left England for Florence three weeks after the exhibition closed with no fixed date of return. There is also a courtship tea with a young lady Theodore has never met, a sketchbook that should not exist, a box behind a wall, and somebody who knows enough to set a deadline and wait. A historical MM romance of country houses and London studios: a portrait sitting, an entail, and two men deciding whether to run or stay and fight. The romance is closed-door.