Evening Star (Star Quartet 1)

Alex was still admiring his handiwork when Giana returned, breathless, a large package under her arm.

It was a painting. He could feel the frame through the paper wrapping as he tore away the ribbon.

“It’s me,” Giana said behind him.

Alex propped the painting up on Giana’s desk chair and took several steps back to look at it.

“Mr. Turner painted it,” she said when he was quiet for several moments. “He was noted

for his landscapes, of course, but Mother convinced him to put me in one of them.”

Alex stared at Giana’s image, smiling at him innocently, her vivid eyes, not quite the right color, he saw, wide with wonder. She was dressed in a dark blue riding habit, standing next to a tall black stallion, her gloved hand holding his reins. Creamy-textured woods and hills filled the background. It was almost the Giana he had seen in Rome. “When was it painted?” he asked quietly.

“The Christmas of 1846.”

Before Rome. Six months before Rome.

Yes, he thought, there was innocence and trust on the young girl’s face. He realized he would give almost anything to see that look on her face now.

“I had it shipped from London,” she said, nearly dancing around him in her anxiety. “I did not know what you would like for Christmas—you have everything. I thought perhaps—” Her voice trailed off, for he was eyeing her with a bemused smile.

“You have given me a present beyond anything I could ever imagine,” he said. “May I hang your portrait in the—my—library?”

She drew a relieved breath. “You really like it, Alex?”

“I like both the younger and older versions of Georgiana Van Cleve.” Did you give me the portrait to remember you by?

“Come, Giana. I’ll wager Leah has already pulled Mrs. Carruthers and poor Delaney out of bed.”

In fact they found Leah sitting on Delaney’s bed, her legs curled up beneath her, tearing open one of the several presents he had brought her.

“You’ve come to save me,” Delaney said, fumbling to place over his eye the monocle Alex had given him as a joke. “Lord, it’s only seven-thirty in the morning, a morning I might add after an evening of grog. Can it be, Alex, that we had such energy and dedicated greed when we were boys?”

“We had much more,” Alex said, grinning. “ Remember the Christmas Father gave us hatchets?”

“And poor Mother had a dining table with only three legs for her Christmas ham. But you were the elder, all of eight years old, as I remember. I was but a babe in arms, innocent as the Christ Child.”

Leah laughed with delight at a gold nugget set in a delicate petaled flower, which she held dangling on a slender chain. She flung her arms around Delaney’s neck, hitting him squarely on the nose with the necklace and dislodging the absurd monocle.

Giana watched Delaney reduce Leah to giggles again as he replaced the monocle and espied her with a monster eye. He had arrived two days before, laden with presents, and when he had rested his eyes, Alex’s eyes, on her face, all the anxiety she had felt about meeting him had melted away. There was a gentleness about Delaney, a kindness that banished any feeling of unease in his company. He delighted in affecting her English accent, the monocle held in mock snobbery against his eye.

“It appears,” he had said, holding her at arm’s length, “that I am to be an uncle twice over.”

“If you would get yourself married,” Alex had retorted, “I would have the honor of spoiling some nieces and nephews of my own.”

“My dear brother,” Delaney had said, his eyes twinkling just as Alex’s did, “there are so many ladies. I simply cannot make up my weak man’s mind. And you have hooked the most beautiful of them all.”

“I am not a fish, sir,” Giana had exclaimed, laughing. “I do hope you don’t encourage Alex to grow a beard like yours. He is so dark, he would look like a northern black bear.”

Delaney stroked his full light-brown whiskers. “Alex is far too conceited to cover his handsome face. And I, Giana, alas, I am cursed with a weak chin.”

“Giana, look at this.”

Leah ripped open another of Delaney’s presents, a pale green jade lamb about the size of an apple.

“It has a hole in its head,” Leah cried, thrusting her thumb into the opening.

“For your pens, my pet,” Delaney said. “Now, Leah, would you please spare my modesty? You’re quite embarrassing me in front of your stepmama.”