Miserable with embarrassment, Marina gave up trying to retrieve the book. What was the point? It was too late to save her pride. He now knew her shameful secret.
Fergus raised his head and shot her another puzzled look. “They’re all of me.”
“Not all of them,” she said defensively.
The arch of his eyebrows said it all. “Everything close to finished is.”
The mortifying fact was that he was right. Over the past week, she’d tried to concentrate on the landscape, she really had. Achnasheen was as dramatic and beautiful as any country she’d ever seen. But every line she put on the paper to depict mountain or sea or tree lay lifeless against the white. While even the roughest sketch of Fergus Mackinnon conveyed a vigor and power that she’d never before achieved in a portrait.
Although she remained dissatisfied with her work. Some essence of the man continued to elude her. Which was why, or at least so she told herself, she kept trying to capture his image with her pencil.
Could her cheeks get any hotter? “It doesn’t mean anything.”
His glance was skeptical. “No?”
“No,” she repeated with emphasis, feeling childish and flustered, and worst of all, as defenseless as a chick that had fallen out of its nest.
Because while Fergus might be misguided in many of his opinions, he wasn’t stupid. He’d know what these drawings meant—that Marina thought about him night and day. That she thought about him so often, she couldn’t think of anything else.
“What about the duke’s commission?”
“I need to go away to finish it. I’m not getting anywhere here.” She raised her chin in a show of defiance. “In fact, I’ll go tomorrow.”
She waited for him to protest, as he had every previous time she’d said she must go. Then struggled not to mind when no objection emerged. Instead he studied her with shrewd eyes that seemed to see right through her bravado to the confusion and longing in her traitorous heart.
“So that I stop haunting your imagination?”
Diavolo, she was right. He understood exactly what those sketches meant. “If I don’t see you…”
“Maybe you’ll miss me.”
She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. The inescapable truth was that she would miss him. This stubborn, confident, commanding man held her in thrall in a way that nobody else ever had.
“I doubt it,” she lied, feeling even more like a gauche schoolgirl.
“Give it up, lassie. The evidence is all against you.” He stepped back and leafed through the sketchbook, taking his time to study each drawing. “You want me as much as I want you. The proof is here in black and white.”
Her hands opened and closed at her sides, as she fought the urge to fly at him and grab the book away. “You’re so smug,” she said through her teeth.
He paused at a watercolor she’d completed last night. It showed him talking to her father. The candlelight fell across his hair and face, creating a striking study in shadow and light. “I like this one.”
So did she, apart from what it revealed about her obsession with her dictatorial host. “It’s not bad,” she conceded grudgingly.
He closed the book and set it aside on a boulder. “You just kissed me as though you were dying, and I was your last chance at a breath.”
She’d thought her cheeks couldn’t get any hotter. She’d been wrong. “You saved my life.”
“So if Jock had pulled you off that cliff, you’d kiss him, too?”
“Maybe,” she said, knowing she fought a losing battle but too stubborn to give in. She was at least as stubborn as Fergus. That was one of the many reasons any affair was doomed before it began.
“Liar,” he said without rancor. Before she could protest—even if he was right—he went on. “What I cannae understand is why you’re putting both of us through this torment, when a simple yes opens the gates to heaven.”
She wanted to accuse him of conceit, while the bitter truth was that she suspected he wasn’t exaggerating. When he kissed her, she heard angels singing and the clouds parted in glory. Imagine what he could conjure up if they went beyond kissing.
“You know why,” she muttered.