McClairen's Isle: The Reckless One by Connie Brockway

Author:Connie Brockway
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 0440226279
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2000-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The girl had an aversion to him.

Carr led Favor Donne up toward the picture gallery. Earlier she’d claimed she would not be happy until she’d viewed it and then only under his tutelage.

Her fingers danced above his sleeve on the point of breaking contact. Very odd conduct if she were, indeed, occupied by the spirit of his wife, a wife who’d loved him devotedly, passionately and yes, demonstratively. At least in the earlier years of their marriage.

He was still wondering what to do with her should she prove to be Janet. He couldn’t very well marry the chit. What if he did and a real accident befell her? He could offer her a position as his mistress, but Janet had, when all was said and done, been a prude about such things. She would not let him touch her until after they’d read their vows. And, too, as he’d already noted, the girl could barely tolerate touching him.

He was not wrong. He’d seduced many women. Yet all evening she’d put herself in his way. How to account for that, except with Pala’s explanation, that the girl was directed by Janet’s spirit.

He’d had his doubts after the scarf incident but her pursuit of him had been so persistent, having such an element of compulsion, nay, desperation, in it that he’d begun to believe Pala. Besides, the girl did not even know her body housed another tenant.

So he’d acquiesced and here they were, standing before one of Titian’s conceits. He’d invested much of his wealth in artwork, jewels, and manuscripts.

“I like the color blue. Particularly peacock blue,” Favor said, glancing sideways at him. Dark eyes, he noted, overly dilated and nearly black. Like her hair. Fetching but odd.

“A lovely shade,” he allowed.

During the course of their walk here, she’d made several such random comments. She liked shellfish. She found violin music stirring. She announced that she’d read Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding and clearly expected him to be scandalized. He told her he’d never read either and that he found reading tiresome. Clearly disconcerted, she fell into a lengthy silence from which she roused herself only to make more sporadic, disconnected comments.

The girl could not have so little—or such inane—conversation. Earlier, he’d overhead her talking easily and rather wittily to Tunbridge. Perhaps what he was seeing was Janet’s unseen influence and these burbles of erupting nonsense were the result of being possessed.

They stood staring up at Titian’s masterpiece some minutes before he grew bored. “Shall we continue?”

He led her by a deplorably murky Flemish painting to something he truly enjoyed, a landscape of near mathematical precision by Poussin, entitled Dionysus at the City Gates. The Greek theme appealed to him no less than the analytical purity of the composition. He’d always admired Greek architecture and, to some extent, the Greeks. Not as much as the Romans, of course.

“Lovely,” Favor murmured.

“Not only lovely but precise,” he instructed. “See these buildings in the background. They are all structures represented in their correct location in Athens.

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