His Mistress by Morning by Elizabeth Boyle

her hemline.
    She didn’t imagine they would take her word for the matter.
    “The garters, Lottie!” came the shouts. “Show us your garters!”
    Finella nudged her in the back with her elbow. “Oh, dear heavens, gel, show them your garters.”
    “I say not!” Charlotte protested. Quince could make all the changes she wanted to her life, but her wish had never included lifting her skirt on a public street.
    She shot them all a haughty glare and huffed her way up toward the steps.
    It didn’t help when she heard Finella explaining behind her, “She had too much to drink last night,” in a whisper that could have been heard in Brighton. Charlotte turnedaround to protest this as well, only to find the saucy woman winking at the lot of them. “Any wagers on the color of my garters, gentlemen?” She swished her skirts back and forth, giving them a good view of her ankles.
    The crowd roared with laughter, and to Charlotte’s horror wagers started flying. She doubled back, caught Finella by the elbow, and towed her up the steps, the laughter, wagers, and jests following like a pack of hungry, baying hounds at their heels.
    “Now that was a fine way to treat the lot of them,”
    Finella scolded as she tugged her arm free and cast a look of flirtatious longing back at the crowd on the street. She even had the audacity to blow a kiss at Boxley.
    Gads, the cheeky earl must be twenty years Finella’s junior!
    But before anything more could be said, the door opened to reveal a short, thin man. A pair of spectacles sat perched on his nose and his bald head glistened in the sunlight streaming through the transom above the door.
    Arbuckle . It had to be, given his rough-hewn hands and the blotches of paint on his rumpled shirt.
    “Mrs. Townsend,” he enthused. “You did come! I feared you wouldn’t make it today. Such rumors about you of late.”
    Charlotte flinched. Seeing the name on an envelope was one thing, but being addressed so…well, it was a bit disconcerting. She really needed to discover what had happened to Mr. Townsend, and as quickly as possible.
    That, and the answers to a thousand and one other questions about how it was that no one seemed to realize that she wasn’t this infamous creature. Not even Arbuckle seemed to notice, for he’d taken her arm and pulled her into his house like a protective uncle. Hehanded her pelisse to the housekeeper and then led her to the stairs.
    “Radiant! You are radiant this morning. Green is the perfect color for you. Delightful! Wonderful!” He waved his hand as if it held a brush, taking broad strokes and filling her ears with a monologue of praise. “The next time I paint you, I intend to do you in green. Not that you aren’t perfect the way you are in the other portraits, but the possibilities, my dear girl.”
    “Diana at her morning adulations,” Finella offered.
    “An excellent suggestion, Mrs. Birley!” the man said, his eyes sparkling with delight. “From Helen of Troy to Diana. It will be the centerpiece of my exhibition next fall.”
    Charlotte’s head spun. Mrs. Birley? When had Finella gained a new name as well?
    Meanwhile, as Finella and Arbuckle began to haggle over her services as the model for this next composition, Charlotte did her best not to gape at the art dotting the walls.
    Engravings, drawings, sketches, and watercolors.
    Of people, of horses, of vistas lush and green.
    She stopped before one of them, a small painting of a meandering stream, with a soft green meadow spreading out from its verdant banks. There, beneath a tree, sat a woman, her skirt ruffled by an unseen breeze, which also pulled at her bonnet strings. The painting wasn’t finished, but that hadn’t stopped Arbuckle from hanging it.
    There was something so wistful, so sad about the scene that Charlotte sighed.
    “Don’t even try,” Arbuckle told her.
    “Pardon me?”
    “Don’t even offer for that again,” he told her. “I tell youevery time that it isn’t for