Read Online The Witch of Painted Sorrows by Rose M J - Free Book Online Page B

us . . . belonged to me.
    I pulled myself up and walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and out into the grand foyer, with its glass-domed ceiling. I then moved into the drawing room, where I stood and gazed around the most excessive and elaborate room in the house.
    It was a riot of golds, reds, scarlets, purples, peacock feathers, ferns, palms, and orchids. From the turquoise and lapis tiles around the fireplace to the exotic Indian carpet to the ebony monkeys with ruby eyes holding up gold bananas outfitted with candles, the room was a marvel of opulence, style, and wit. How could she open it up to strangers?
    I was unaware that Monsieur Duplessi had followed me until he spoke.
    “She says she wants to call it the Museum of the Grand Horizontals. Quite an avant-garde concept, don’t you agree? A flirting museum. Centuries of artwork collected by France’s most revered courtesans.”
    The cold I had experienced before intensified. Taking a step away from the sudden draft, I felt cobwebs brush against my face and hands. No, this had been my father’s home, too, and one of the places I could feel close to him. He had eaten breakfast at the kitchen table every morning, munching on hot pastries the cook had just taken out of the oven. I glanced over at the grand staircase. He’d gone sliding down that banister, and been spanked for it—more often, he’d said, than he could count. I knew he’d found hiding places under the piano in the music room, inside a giant brass vase in the smoking room, and under the four-poster bed in Little Red Riding Hood’s ­chamber—some of the bedrooms in the house were named for ­fantasy or fairy-tale characters that might incite a gentleman’s imagination. Other bedrooms were designed to evoke a particular exotic time period or place. I had yet to go searching for the little things my father had told me he’d stashed away: marbles, a frog skeleton, broken pottery he’d found digging in the gardens that he was sure dated back to Roman times. If this house was taken apart, it could not become my refuge.
    “Are you all right? You look pale. I should not have said anything.” He was standing beside me and had taken my arm as if he was prepared to keep me standing if I became faint.
    “I’ll be fine, thank you.” I looked into his face, and he returned my glance. The moment lasted one beat longer than was appropriate. I looked away first, but even when I did, he didn’t take his hand off my arm, and my skin felt hot where he was touching me.
    The freezing air was gone now. The atmosphere around me had returned to normal. In fact, there was the faint odor of violets in the air. How was that possible? It was the dead of winter. Perhaps there was a bowl of potpourri in a corner somewhere, perfuming the room. There was almost gaiety in the atmosphere. As if the house itself was pleased.
    But that was impossible. A house didn’t have emotions or personality. I was simply overwrought, as my grandmother had been telling me since I’d arrived in Paris. And for good reason. Losing my father would have been bad enough, but how I lost him—that my husband had ruined my father, had in effect killed him by destroying his ability to salvage his reputation if he turned Benjamin in—was enough to test anyone’s sanity.
    “Are you sure you are fine?”
    “Yes.” Of course I wasn’t, but I couldn’t share how I felt with someone I barely knew. Fury filled me. How dare my grandmother make a decision like this without me. Maison de la Lune was my birthright. She had inherited it; she had not built it. Not created it. It was not hers to destroy.
    My eyes rested on an Ingres painting of a harem of sensual, naked women at a Turkish bath that hung above the fireplace. This one was far more evocative and erotic than the similar painting of the same scene in the Louvre. Heat rose up my neck, and I knew I was blushing. To be examining these with Monsieur Duplessi right beside me was brazen,