Eye of the Beholder by Emma Jay

Chapter One
     
    Grayson Adams put the final touch on the
painting and sat back in his chair, lifting his hand to his jaw as
he considered the product. The details were as perfect as he could
make them, but the painting lacked anything…special.
    “I need a new muse,” he murmured. Something
different, unique. A virgin, maybe, a girl raised in the strictures
of society. The forbidden aspect such a thing would generate would
infuse passion in his work again.
    His current model flipped her skirts down and
sat up. “So you want a poke now?”
    He moved his chair back, needing distance
from her, from the painting, which didn’t please him as it should.
He could understand her misconception. He’d painted her in the most
intimate of poses, had touched her body as he arranged her, but the
gestures stirred no reaction in him. Perhaps that was why her
painting didn’t.
    “Not this time,” he said.
    She pouted and rested her fists on her hips.
“You gave the other girls a poke. They spoke well of your
attributes.”
    He reached into his pocket and drew out the
silver coins, adding a few extra to the agree-upon amount. He
dropped them into the palm the girl opened reflexively.
    “Thank you for your time. My man will see you
out.”
    Once she was gone, he turned the painting to
the wall. Perhaps he’d like it better once he had some
distance.
    No one in society realized the man dancing
with their virginal daughters made his living painting women in
seductive, intimate poses, spent his days in a garret with naked
women who smelled of sex. He moved among the elite, finding
pleasure in his secret. Grayson Adams, youngest son of the Baron of
Cricksham, made a fortune selling erotic art that outstripped his
oldest brother’s inheritance.
    And wondering how he could seduce one of them
into modeling for him.
    Now, with his new idea, the idea to paint a
virgin, his desire to socialize increased. He rose, stretched, and
went upstairs to dress for the evening.
     
    ***
     
    Sarah Dusenberry edged closer to the wall, a
glass of lemonade in hand, and watched the dancers whirl across the
floor in clouds of pastel. The musicians to her left and the hum of
conversation to her right overwhelmed her senses, and she longed to
slip out the French doors onto the patio. But the doors were some
distance down the wall and moving toward them put her at risk of
conversation with other guests. The possibility held no appeal.
    Her mother insisted she attend these events,
and as Sarah grew older, her mother grew more manic. Sarah was
one-and-twenty, and now attended two balls a week. She was
irritated and exhausted—and no match for the sixteen-year-old girls
spinning across the floor on the arms of the most eligible
bachelors London had to offer.
    Her mother’s target wasn’t a man with money,
but a man with a name. Sarah had a large dowry, though not quite
large enough to tempt the titles her mother craved. Not large
enough to account for her wild hair, long nose and tart tongue,
which she wielded in a desire to keep her independence.
    Murmurs ran through the crowd and Sarah
followed their gazes to the door.
    Her breath arrested in her throat. Grayson
Adams stood in the doorway, surveying the group before him.
    The Rebellious Baron, they called him, though
that was his father’s title, and he was unlikely to inherit, since
his much-older brother had three sons himself. Still, Sarah admired
no one in society more. In addition to being handsome—though not
fashionably so with his broad shoulders and broad features, his
hair longer than dictated, and allowed to curl, his sideburns
trimmed, his jaw perpetually unshaven—he was the man who made these
balls endurable, though of course he didn’t attend as many as she.
That was the only joy she took as she prepared herself each
evening—the anticipation of seeing him.
    She’d never spoken to him and he never stayed
long, but she thrilled in his presence as long as he was in
attendance.
    His