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brush so that eight-year-old Hecuba looked every inch the miniature
monarch.
    Rushmore apparently saw the resemblance. “Bloody hell,” he
whispered.
    Hecuba saw an opportunity and seized it. “My mother hated
wasting time and energy defending her talent on account of her sex, so after
she married my father she took his surname as a pseudonym and let all the
customers and critics assume she was a man. Of course this meant she couldn’t
paint portraits without revealing the truth, so all my mother’s paintings were
landscapes. Except these four. These she painted for herself and for her
family. They ought never to have been auctioned off. She meant them to be my
inheritance.”
    He took a deep breath and finally asked the question she’d
known he was waiting to ask. “ The Thief ?”
    “My father,” she said with a sad smile. “He taught me
everything I know.”
    “Bloody hell,” he repeated then fell with a thump into a
nearby armchair.

Chapter Three
     
    John Rushmore glanced from the painting to the woman and
back. The blanket she was clutching around her was only a shade away from the
impossible green of the tunic in that painting of her as a girl. He’d stared at
that portrait for years now, wondering how on earth the artist had gotten that
shade of green to stay so vivid when every other artist’s colors went black and
dark with age. Hecuba green it was called, and decades later it was still as
rich and lustrous as the day C. F. Jones had first raised a hand and put brush
to canvas.
    And Miss Jones had been there to see it happen.
    John was hit by a wave of envy so strong that he had to
clench his teeth against the force of it. “Tell me about her,” he said, greedy
for anything he could learn about the artist he’d idolized for so long. The
fact that C. F. Jones was a woman did nothing to change the fact that she was
also a genius.
    The artist’s daughter looked at him in surprise then
shrugged and took a seat on a nearby ottoman. In the firelight she appeared
mysterious and otherworldly, a Delphic oracle or Pythian priestess come forth
to utter strange truths. He waited like a proper supplicant until she began to
speak. “Her name was Cynthia. Her aunt had paid a tutor to teach her
watercolors, like any genteel debutante, but my mother convinced him to teach
her oils as well. She loved painting people but my grandparents considered
female painters shocking and scandalous—they would have cut her off if she
painted from life, as other female painters have. Her landscapes became rather
fashionable at one point and sometimes she had to ask my father to act as a
go-between with galleries and would-be patrons. They made a game of it, but you
could see it hurt her that she couldn’t claim her work openly without risking
scandal and penury.”
    The ghost of the little girl she’d been passed briefly over
her face. John heard an echo of his brother’s laughing voice. At least it
wasn’t one of your landscapes. “I know something about how she must have
felt,” he said quietly.
    She met his eyes then and smiled, her expression warm and
open. John took a quick gulp from his glass—the whisky was a less dangerous
intoxicant than a smile from Hecuba Jones. He watched a raindrop slide from her
hair to her neck, the droplet gleaming like a gem in the firelight. The memory
of their kiss slipped through him and left echoes behind like ripples of wind
on the surface of a formerly still and untroubled lake. The green blanket had
slipped off one shoulder to show the curve of her upper arm and the ivory strap
of her chemise. His fingers itched to slide beneath it, to pull it down her
arm, to slide both chemise and blanket down and bare the breasts he’d felt
against him when he’d waltzed with her in a gallery surrounded by the paintings
of other men…
    Whereas now she sat in a room surrounded by her mother’s
most intimate portraits—and they belonged to someone else.
    John lurched to his feet and pulled