“I imagine so,” Hattie said, when truly, she couldn’t fathom it.
Mhairi hummed an incongruously merry Celtic tune until they reached the entrance door to the inn. “Mrs. Blackstone?” she then said.
“Yes?”
She hemmed and hawed. “You think you’d have time to draw Hamish Fraser?”
“The lad who was chopping wood?”
Mhairi’s cheeks turned pink. “Aye.”
“Do you worry for him?”
Mhairi’s gaze dropped into her heather-filled apron pocket. “No, ma’am. No harm will ever come to him.”
Hattie wrung her hands. “How many miners work in Drummuir?”
Mhairi glanced up. “Three hundred or thereabouts?”
She tried to envision herself setting up an easel and a case full of water or oil colors in the damp school and have the villagers sit for her, one after the other. Impossible. The miners had little time to themselves during daylight hours except Sundays, and she’d have to stay here for months to paint them all. She supposed she could have them sit only for sketches, and then color them in at her studio …
She shook her head. “I might have a better idea.” And it involved speaking to Lucian.
She took her leave from Mhairi and rushed up the stairs and barged into their room, propelled by brightly burning determination. She came to an abrupt halt. The tub was back in the room. And Lucian was in it. His naked wet shoulders and his knees loomed over the rim; he fair overcrowded the vessel with his size. Her eyes squeezed shut reflexively.
“Sorry, love,” she heard him say, his voice a relaxed drawl. “I stop short at taking a bath in the dining area.”
Heather-and-pine-scented heat wafted toward her from the tub. Well, drat. She could flee and return when he was no longer so very naked. But her excitement would not be contained, and they were married, after all, were they not?
She opened one eye. “Do you mind?” she said.
His chuckled. “No.” Steam was rising off his skin in lazy swirls. With his thick hair wet and slicked back, nothing softened the hard contours of his face. He had never looked more like a vagrant, and rarely more intriguing. She gave a shake. “I need a camera,” she remembered.
He slanted his head. “What for?”
“The miners,” she said.
“The miners.”
“They don’t seem to have the habit of keeping photographs of their loved ones.”
“In a community remote and impoverished like this?” he said. “Not usually, no.”
She was trembling a little. How dramatic you are, Pom Pom. She paced a circle before the tub. “Imagine working in such a dangerous profession and then living with the added guilt of forgetting your loved one’s face.”
“Yes, imagine.” Lucian adjusted his position, sending water sloshing over the tub rim. “What did the women do to you?”
“Nothing,” she said defensively. “They were perfectly amiable.”
He was contemplating her with a mildly amused expression. She thought of his scars, below the waterline.
“The black lung,” she said. “It’s why you don’t smoke, isn’t it?”
“You’ve noticed.”
It had occurred to her during the walk back. “I have. I have not once smelled smoke on you.” It was probably why his scent was always fresh and his teeth still white. “Nearly all the men of my acquaintance are partial to cigarettes. They even claim they are healthful.”
He huffed. “Easy to claim anything. I’ve seen what breathing in black smoke does and I doubt there’s much of a difference in different kinds of smoke.”
She wondered whether being coated in dust and soot for years was the reason why he kept himself so fastidiously clean. He washed in the morning and at night, and the shower in his house in Belgravia was state-of-the-art.
She pulled a chair away from the table and sat, feeling overwhelmed.
Lucian was watching her closely now. “I’ll ask Mr. Wright,” he offered. “He has a camera.”
She shook her head. “I want a portrait of each one of them, and I’d rather not have the pressure of someone waiting for their camera. It’s over three hundred portraits.”
“You know how to operate a camera?”
“No. But I can learn. I feel …” She hesitated. “I feel this is something I must do myself.”
“I see.” There was a splash when he fished for the flannel. She watched from beneath her lashes, how he languidly drew the wet cloth over his skin and the muscle beneath—forearm, shoulder, chest, the back of his neck—and her mind stilled. Her eye, trained to analyze the composition of objects and the human form, was hopelessly riveted, for while Lucian had a brawny rather than an elegant build, the details of him were wonderfully, precisely done: the distinct lines of the pectoralis, the clean curve of his deltoid, the finely tuned interplay of his biceps and triceps as he worked the flannel. She wanted to paint him. Not as Hades, but as Hephaestus, god of the precious metals and mines, as he swung his hammer to forge weapons for the righteous …