What the hell?

He saw through a haze of smoke the cold eyes of Inspector Fellows over the barrel of another Webley. Behind him was his brother Cameron, a hulking brute of a man, also with pistol in hand. Cameron’s eyes reflected the rage Mac felt.

A family affair. Nice shooting, Inspector.

Isabella was on the carpet, her black skirts spread around her, eyes wide with fear. Mac rocked on his weak legs, Payne’s pistol somehow still in his hand. He dropped it.

“Mac!” Isabella scrambled to her feet, her arms coming around him even as Mac crumpled.

He turned on her a look of fury. “What th’ bloody hell were ye playing at, woman?” he roared. “When a man has a pistol, ye run t’other way. That could be you shot daed on the floor, not him.”

“Mac, shut up.” Tears were streaming down her face. “Cease talking and stay alive for me. Please.”

Mac sank into the warmth of her body, even as Cameron’s strong arm supported him on his other side.

“Anything for you, Isabella, love,” Mac said. “Anything at all. You just ask me.”

“I love you, Mac.”

Mac turned his head and kissed her smooth cheek. Did anything smell better than this woman, so warm and sweet? “I love you, my Isabella.” He sighed. “I do believe I will lose consciousness now.”

The last thing he remembered was Isabella’s lips in his hair, her soft voice saying over and over that she loved him.


THREE WEEKS LATER


Isabella sat in Mac’s studio in her black dress with her hands in her lap. A bowl of yellow hothouse roses rested on a table next to her, a mix of rosebuds, full-blown flowers, and those that had already started dropping petals.

Mac was half-hidden behind his large easel, his painting boots and strong legs showing below the canvas, his formidable frown and red kerchief above it. He held the palette against his bare, tight arm, and scowled at the canvas as he slapped on paint. He still wore a bandage on his side where the bullet had barreled through his flesh, but he was healing well. A strong constitution, he’d said with a shrug. That was Mac, careless about the most important things.

Isabella’s limbs had grown at bit stiff with the sitting, but she knew better than to move. Mac might be focusing on one crook of her finger, and if she shifted, it would break his concentration. A petal fell from a flower, and she silently admonished it.

Mac lowered his brush and stepped back. He studied the painting for a long time, so long, frozen in place, that worry gnawed at her. She jumped up, damn the pose.

“Mac, what is it? Is it the pain?” She knew he hadn’t quite finished healing, no matter how robust he pretended to be.

Mac didn’t answer, his gaze fixed on the painting. Isabella glanced at it in curiosity, but she could see nothing wrong with it. It was a Mac Mackenzie painting, muted browns and blacks highlighted with brilliant tones of red and yellow. Isabella sat a bit primly, her coppery curls piled high on her head, one ringlet drooping down her cheek. A little smile hovered about her mouth, and her eyes sparkled with good humor. The painting wasn’t finished, but already it glowed with life.

“It’s lovely,” she said. “What is the matter? Do you not like it?”

Mac turned to her, a strange look in his eyes. “Not like it? It’s bloody wonderful. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Isabella made her voice light. “What, even more than the erotic pictures?”

“Those were different. This . . .” Mac pointed at the painting with the handle of his brush. “This is beauty.”

“I’m pleased that your high opinion of yourself has returned.”

Mac dropped the brush and caught her shoulders, never mind that he smeared yellow paint on her black gabardine. He studied her intently, the strange look still in his eyes.

“My love, Ian told me right after your father died that I needed to bare my soul to you. Well, here it is, the good and the bad of it.” He pointed to the portrait. “That’s my soul right there, crying out for you.”

Isabella looked at it again. The woman who was herself through and through smiled out at Mac.

“I don’t understand. It’s just a picture of me.”

“Just a picture.” Mac laughed, but tears wet his eyes. “It is just a picture. Of you. Painted by me, with love in every stroke.” He drew a breath. “That’s what I didn’t understand before. This is why my talent went away and now has come bursting back.”

He looked so joyous that Isabella wanted to kiss him, but she still didn’t understand. “Explain?”

“I can’t, love. I always thought my ability came from astonishing luck, or a drunken stupor, or lust for you. When I painted the erotic pictures, I assumed they came out well because I wanted you so much.”

She shot him a sly look. “But you discovered you didn’t want me so much?”

“No, I want you all the damn time.” His fingers went to the nape of her neck, caressing, warming, loosening her.

“You were explaining.”

He smiled. “It wasn’t the lack of drink that took away my ability, love; it was my own bitterness. I know that now. Once I sobered up I couldn’t shut out my anger at you for leaving me, and at myself for causing it. I buried my love, because it hurt me too damn much to feel it. And my paintings were awful. When I decided to let myself love you—just love you, what you are, no matter what you thought of me, it came flooding back.” Mac drew another shaking breath. “I think I can paint anything now.”

Isabella’s heart squeezed with sudden happiness, but she said, “There’s a flaw in your reasoning.”

“Can’t be. It’s what I feel.”

She shook her head. “You painted beautifully before you ever met me. I’ve seen your paintings from that time. They are excellent. Don’t pretend they’re not.”

“I think then I was in love with life itself. I was young, out from under my father’s fist, finally free of him. I could do anything I pleased. But then I met you, and my world came crashing down.”

Isabella wished she could fix this moment in time, with Mac’s body hard against hers, his eyes filled with naked emotion.

“Why did we make ourselves so unhappy?” she asked, half to herself.

“You were an innocent, and I was a debauched rake. I think it was inevitable that it wouldn’t work.”

Isabella slid her hands across his bare shoulders. His skin was warm and firm, muscles solid beneath it. “You make yourself out to be such a bad man, but you’re not. You took care of me from the night you met me, and you’ve never stopped. You take care of everyone you love.”

Mac looked affronted. “I am a debauched rake, my darling. I’ve spent years cultivating my disreputable reputation. Remember how I taught you to take whiskey neat and sit on my lap and kiss me in front of my friends?” He deflated, the humor leaving him. “I wanted to make you bad like me, because I knew I’d never be good enough for you.”

“You were always good enough for me,” Isabella said, her heart in every word.

“Sweetheart, you wound me. A rake has his pride.” Mac slid her hands from him and held them in his. “I’m busy baring my soul to you, Isabella. Let me continue.”

“If you wish.”

Mac took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and sank to his knees. The movement hurt him, she could tell from the way his grip tightened on her hands.

“Look at me.” Mac spread his arms, still holding her hands so that their arms moved out to the sides together. “What do you see?”

Her blood heated. “A very handsome man I happen to be married to.”

“A wasted man. I am nothing. I can make pictures come out of my hands when I’m not feeling sorry for myself. That is all there is, what you see here at your feet.”

“No . . .”

Mac’s voice went hard. “All there is, Isabella. Everything else—the joker, the wild bohemian, even the debauched rake—is what I’ve pasted on to keep the world from overrunning me. But it’s all fake. I use that façade to keep you from seeing and despising me.”

She smiled. “If I believed that, I never would have married you.”

“I didn’t give you much bloody choice, did I? You were right to leave me, because I took what you gave me and threw it carelessly away. And now here I am, charging in and telling you that you’ll take me back, whether you like it or not.”

Mac released her, letting his hands fall to his sides. His eyes held undisguised fear and love, and a pain she’d never seen before. “But this time, it is your choice,” he said. “If you don’t want me back, I’ll go. I’ll take care of you as I did before, without obligation, without you having to bother with me and my obsession for you.”

Obsession. Isabella had seen the paintings in Payne’s hideaway in the rookery in Marylebone, the pictures of herself that had made her ill to look upon. They were destroyed now, but they’d been painted from obsession.

Her gaze slid to the painting Mac had just finished, and beyond that to the stack of the nude paintings he’d turned to the wall so that no servant who chanced up here would see them.

Mac had painted all of those pictures of her from love. Payne had painted from crazed jealousy and a strange need. There was a difference, and it was plain to see from the picture that now rested on Mac’s easel.

Mac loved Isabella, truly loved her.

It was obvious in everything he did.

“Mac,” she said in a quiet voice. “Being with you has always been my choice.”

Mac looked up at her with such stark astonishment that her eyes brimmed with tears. “No, I forced the choice upon you,” he said.

She smiled, feeling her mouth shake. “No. You never did. I chose.”

Isabella touched Mac’s face, loving the hardness of his jaw, the rough of his whiskers.

“Bloody hell,” he whispered.

“Poor Mac. You are on your knees for nothing.”

A sudden, rakish smile split his face. “Not for nothing, my sweet. I’ve decided to do it properly this time.”

He was decadent, which made Isabella adore him. He was also half-naked with a gypsy scarf on his head, which made her crave him. She suddenly wanted more than anything to fall against him and have the pair of them land in a happy tangle on the floor.

“Do what properly?” she made herself ask.

“Court you. I’m supposed to be the model gentleman courting a lady, remember? Spilling out my heart in my studio is not the way.”

“I like it,” Isabella said. “It’s perfect.”

Mac’s eyes darkened. “Do not tempt me to ravish you until I’ve done this properly. I’ve never done anything properly with you.”

“Very well, if you must.”

“Isabella Mackenzie.” Mac took her hands again, still on his knees. “There is something important I would like to ask you.”

Isabella’s heart beat swiftly. “Yes?”

“I’ve asked some friends to help me. Will you walk with me over to the window?”

“As you wish.”

It was difficult to be calm while he was being so mysterious. He rose with some difficulty, and Isabella pretended she didn’t notice the soft grunt as he got to his feet. She followed him across the room to the window, whose curtains had been pulled back to let in the light.

Mac flung open the window, and early November air poured into the room. He leaned out and shouted, “Now!”

A band struck up a tune. Isabella peered around Mac and saw the little Salvation Army band, directed by the lady sergeant, pumping away enthusiastically. Next to it stood Cam and Daniel and Mac’s club friends.

They were holding something. At Mac’s bellow, they unrolled and held up a banner that read: “Will You Marry Me?—Again.”

Isabella burst into tears. She turned around to find Mac next to her on one knee, something clutched in his hand.

“The first time I had no engagement ring,” he was saying. “I made you wear one of my rings, remember? It was so big you had to hold it on.” Mac opened his hand, which contained a thin gold ring encrusted with sapphires and one large diamond. “Marry me, Isabella Mackenzie. Make me the happiest man in the world.”

“Yes,” Isabella whispered, and then she turned and shouted it out of the window. “Yes!”

The crowd below cheered. Daniel whooped and punched the air, and Cam was laughing as he dropped the banner, drew out his flask of whiskey, and toasted them.

Mac got to his feet and crushed Isabella against him. “Thank you, my love.”

“I love you,” Isabella said, her heart in every word.

He nuzzled her. “Now, about that baby we were trying to conceive.”

Isabella went hot with excitement. She’d kept the secret for a week now, wanting to make certain Mac was fully healed before she sprang the news on him. “I don’t think it will be necessary to try any longer.”