by Liz Meldon
“Will you paint me?”
He said nothing, but his hand tightened around mine. Swallowing hard, I pressed the tube to his chest, waiting until his hand settled over it to retreat. I slipped away from him, taking a few steps back, then grasped the flowy fabric of my strapless yellow dress, the kind that stopped at my knees and cinched around my chest, and dragged it over my head. His gaze raked across my nakedness, stormy again.
“Paint me?” I asked softly.
The thought of sharing this with him made my chest tight. So far, Dean had told me all about his paintings. He had explained techniques, colour palettes, the differences between acrylics and oil paints. We had talked shop—but I needed to get inside, to know why he painted, why he hid it.
Why he’d freaked out and turned into a completely different person four days ago.
We’d talked a lot here, surrounded by pieces of his soul, but not about the things I wanted to talk about—things I wasn’t sure I’d earned the right to ask about.
Maybe it would be easier for him if he just showed me this side of him.
I ran a hand through my hair, gathering it and letting it fall down my back.
“Sir,” I said, my nipples puckering as he lifted that wild gaze to mine, “I want you to paint me.”
Dean inhaled sharply, clutching the coral rosé in a tight fist. I bit the inside of my cheek, waiting, worrying that I had pushed for too much. It was one thing to tell me about his art, to go into detail about the technical side of things—it was another thing entirely to show me this part of himself. But I waited, ignoring the little voice at the back of my mind that told me to take it back, to pretend I hadn’t asked—that I was just standing there, naked, for kicks.
Finally, an eternity later, his movements precise, measured, Dean set Coral Rosé on the desk, and anxiety prickled through me, until—
“All right.”
My eyebrows lifted, along with my heart, my smile. “All right?”
“We’ll need a few things first,” he said, sounding more Dom-Dean than he had all day. “Run downstairs and fetch as many pillows as you need. I want you lying down. There are spare linens in the storage closet just off my bedroom—pick the ones that can do with a bit of paint on them.”
I nodded, hopping to without being prompted. My backside gingerly protested the swift movements, the bouncing down tiled stairs, but I ignored that, too. Beaming, I went to the storage closet first, picking through the neatly folded sheets, all creased and smelling like lavender laundry detergent. Next, I grabbed every pillow off my bed, including the for-show ones that always ended up on the floor each night.
My heart thundered as I scaled the stairwell to the third floor, and I stopped in the doorway to catch my breath—to watch Dean as he picked through tubes of paint and tossed the chosen few into the middle of the room. To his credit, he didn’t appear stiff or anxious about sharing this with me. Instead, he seemed—focused. Brow creased, mouth in a thin line. It’d be easy for someone to read the look as anxious, stiff, but I knew that look.
It was the same look he wore whenever he was working out the logistics of a scene—when he was trying to determine which knot was appropriate for my restraints.
It was the kind of look that made my heart oddly happy.
Swallowing thickly, I padded in, and, without a word, started arranging our workspace—maybe playspace—on the floor, directly beneath the crest of the domed glass ceiling.
“You’ll be on your back,” he remarked, striding over and dumping an armful of paint tubes beside me. “I want you to be comfortable, so use all the pillows you need.”
His gaze flickered to my lower half briefly before he went back to the desk, picking through brushes now.
“Yes, sir,” I murmured, unsure if he’d heard me. Then, clearing my throat, I asked a little louder if I should take the pillowcases off.
“We’ll throw it all in the laundry,” he said over his shoulder, distracted, seemingly weighing the pros and cons of two brushes—one thick, weighty, the other thin, perhaps for detail work. “Don’t worry about anything. I’ll do my best not to make a mess.”
You always do. Nodding, I finished organizing the pillows, then settled atop the line. With a wince, I shifted them around, lifting my hips, legs, and shoulders as needed to make sure everything was supported. Head, shoulders, lower back, butt, knees. My faded bruises ached dully once I finally stopped moving; their bite had dissipated over time, but I still made sure to position the area so that I wouldn’t be adding too much pressure to it.
Dean continued to rustle about behind me, stalking to and fro, adding brushes to the pile of paint. At one point he disappeared down the stairs, his footsteps like thunder, and I took a deep breath, staring at the gorgeous blue above. Not a cloud in sight. Another perfect Caribbean day.
He returned a few minutes later with two bowls of water and a paint-spattered palette—a parallel palette, he explained when he noticed me looking curiously, so that he could hold it in his free hand, the paints in the same light as his canvas. Me.
Gently, Dean cradled my chin. “I won’t touch your face, but I’ll go from your neck to the tops of your feet. Is that all right?”
Was that all right? He was the artist, not me. Dean could do whatever he desired with that brush. So, I nodded, my smile seeming to soften his gaze. “Yes, sir.”
He lingered there, his grip briefly tightening around my chin, before withdrawing and getting to work. Head lolled to the side, I watched him spurt paints onto his palette, but then thought better of it. The final outcome should be a surprise—although it wasn’t exactly a surprise that the first four colours he added were various shades of pink.
Dean leaned across me, starting with the fingers of my right hand. I jumped, the first sweep cold—startling—and then giggled. “Oh, that’s a bit cool.”
Dean smiled as he worked, the same easy smile I had found myself missing these last few days.
“I’m afraid I can’t heat my paints like I do with the oils.”
“It’s fine,” I insisted, shifting about on top of the pillows, making myself comfortable beneath the swirl of his brush. “It was just a surprise.”
He worked in silence after that, his hand flying, moving back and forth between the palette and my skin. Every so often, I heard the tinkle of the brush’s metal against the side of the bowl, the dab, dab, dab of it in the water. I stared straight up, not wanting to ruin the surprise for myself. I closed my eyes when the sky felt too bright. I let him work.
Until I couldn’t sit in the silence anymore. Until my curiosity finally got the better of me.
Dean had just crested my right shoulder, swirling the thinner of the two brushes he chose around the curve, when I said, “You told me you had a complicated relationship with your art.”
He exhaled softly, his breath warming my skin. The paint chilled my entire right arm, leaving it cool and sticky. I didn’t dare move a muscle, even though my elbow had started to itch and my fingers suddenly needed to crack every joint. Instead, I focused on the furrow of his brow, the downturn of his lips, waiting once more.
“My parents never approved of it,” he admitted at long last. His eyes narrowed slightly, as if recalling the memories. “They didn’t mind the doodling when I was young, but then I was gearing all my classes toward it, asking to be sent to visual arts boarding schools and the like. I wouldn’t shut up about it—the Royal College of Art in London, Slade, Goldsmiths, Saint Martin’s. America. Britain. I had citizenships for both, so my search was vast.” He chuckled coolly, dabbing his brush on the palette before sweeping it up the column of my throat. “Suddenly it wasn’t just doodles anymore—it was serious. I had a whole guest room transformed into a studio before either of them realized what was going on.”
“Bold move.” That had him smiling again, albeit briefly.
“My passion made me bold.” Dean sighed. “I think, when they realized I wasn’t going to grow out of it anytime soon, things ch
anged. They stopped supporting my little hobby. My father sat me down one day, just as I was choosing my subjects for the final two years of secondary school, and stressed the importance of more grounded specialties, along with an insane number of extracurriculars. By the end of the conversation, he had me enrolled in business, political science, advanced French, and higher-level mathematics. The workload and all the clubs I was suddenly in left no room for painting or sketching.”
“That sounds like my nightmare.” Seriously. I hadn’t been a top student by any means in either high school or university, but I was slightly above average and stuck mainly to the social sciences. Extracurriculars were out; I preferred to work part-time after school—to earn my own money.
Dean nodded at the nightmarish sentiment almost obligingly, but his gaze seemed far away as he continued to work.
“I wanted to please him and my mum,” he insisted, shrugging one shoulder. “I did well in all those subjects. High marks. Strong GPA. I was good at them. I could do them. I just never wanted to—I was happiest in the art room.”
I nibbled my lower lip and looked skyward. My parents had always been so supportive of whatever I wanted to do—even when I showed up at their condo in Portland with the news that, hey, your baby girl wants to escort! They had been behind me one hundred percent my whole life, even when I made mistakes. In fact, they welcomed mistakes if it meant I learned a lesson. I couldn’t imagine either of them quashing something I was as passionate about as Dean was with his art—but then again, my dad didn’t run a multibillion-dollar empire.
“When I finished, I applied to university like they wanted,” Dean told me. The shift in his tone caught my attention—the tightness of it, the curt way he spat a few of the words. “They were thrilled—academic scholarships to Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard. And I just wanted to paint.
“I tried to combine the worlds. I… I even,” he chuckled, “did a presentation for them with my proposal to open an art gallery in New York. Business and art. I thought it would make me happy. Mum thought it was cute. Dad told me to pick a school.
“I wanted to make them proud. They had such a rough go of it with my older brother. That had always been the way, and I never wanted to be a burden. I saw what they went through reining in Richard—I couldn’t do that to them. So, I agreed to the path they chose: I did a joint degree program at Harvard for law and business. Walked out with a Juris Doctor and a Master’s in Business Administration. Not a speck of the creative anywhere, unless you counted the odd graphic design course.”
“That sucks, sir.” It didn’t suck that he was fortunate enough to have a world-class education in two different fields, both of which allotted him the opportunity to make some serious money. What sucked, in my opinion, was the fact that his family had stomped on his passions, his dreams, and forced him into something that he didn’t want. Dean was a gifted artist, and while I knew nothing about professional artists, maybe he could have gone into graphic design, or book illustrations, or something that made him happy.
Something that he didn’t feel the need to run away from for two months with an escort.
“Before I decided on Harvard, I toured the campuses I was most interested in with my mum and sister,” he continued, softer now, distractedly, almost like he was telling the story to himself. “My father told my brother to clear out my studio. He figured I’d given up on art—and that it would be easier if someone else moved my work for me while I was gone.”
Dean paused, leaning in with the smaller brush to do something that felt very intricate at the base of my throat. When he straightened, he set that one aside on the sheet and went back to broader strokes with the larger brush.
“My… My brother had a party on our property. Got drunk with a bunch of his friends while our father was at a conference. Trashed the house. Had a bonfire out back…and used my work for kindling.”
“What?” I nearly bolted upright, and would have, my eyes wide, had it not been for Dean working on my chest. Still, my heart thundered, waves of anger crashing through me. “He—he burned your work?”
“My parents insisted he just misunderstood what was expected of him,” Dean muttered, each word laced with bitterness. “They blamed the alcohol, his friends… Never mind that he was probably drunk and high at the time. He was supposed to move it all into a storage unit at the back of the property. Richard had other ideas.”
What an asshole. I bit the insides of my cheeks, my unpainted hand curling into a fist.
“Every last thing was gone. Sketchbooks. Oil paintings. Wood carvings. Canvas, paper—all of it. We came back from a midnight flight and walked into chaos. Mum lost it. I tried to corral all the drunk uni students away from my sister, who was only eight at the time. Then I saw the fire. I smelled…” He swallowed hard and shook his head. “Richard told me himself. Asked why the paints smelled so bad when they burned. When I walked in on you in my gallery, I had some absurd flashback, and all the emotions I didn’t get to show that day… It’s no excuse, but—”
“Dean, I’m so sorry.” I touched his knee, seeking out his gaze, even if he refused to meet mine. “That’s awful. What he did—that’s…psychopathic.”
I winced, knowing I probably shouldn’t insult his brother—but there was that familiar smile again, like a ray of sunlight breaching the storm clouds.
“Ah, yes, well, that’s my brother for you,” he told me. Sitting cross-legged at my side, he lifted his knee, then leaned down to kiss my hand on top of it. When I returned that hand to the ground, resting it flat atop the sheet, the heat of his lips remained.
“Kind of makes me happy I’m an only child.”
“Well, siblings aren’t all bad,” Dean remarked, smirking a little. “My sister is lovely. Spoiled. A bit petulant sometimes. But we’re worlds away from Richard. Always have been.”
“Do they know you still paint?”
“No,” he said without missing a beat. “If my doodling comes up in conversation nowadays, it’s usually a joke. I’ve made a lot for myself in my career, so I suppose it’s funny to my parents—the idea that I wanted to be an artist instead. I do most of my painting in private now. You’re the first person to have seen any of my pieces in years, actually.”
My eyes watered at the news, and I looked up, purposefully, blinking a few times to keep the tears at bay. The fact that he trusted me enough to show me this—it had me all warm and fuzzy inside. I mean, he could have told me to go screw myself. He could have called Candace when I broke the rules and rooted through his private, personal art collection. He could have sent me home. Dean didn’t need to do what he had done today.
Despite what had happened, the paddling, the anger, I still felt safe with Dean. He had been making me feel safe for weeks now, which was so crucial in our relationship. Trust. Safety. Openness. The fact that I, in turn, had made him feel safe enough to share this side of himself with me…
Well, the idea had tears welling again, swarming my field of view.
“Thank you for showing me all this, sir,” I murmured, twitching when his brush swirled around my left nipple. “And for telling me… I’m sure it isn’t easy to talk about.”
Another one-shouldered shrug as he switched to the smaller brush. “It’s been years since the fire. I should be able to talk about it.”
“Still—”
“Don’t look so upset for me, Belle,” Dean said, fixated on his work. While he might have been smiling, his shoulders remained tense, lifted. “For all their nonsense, my family means well most of the time. I love them. I wouldn’t work as hard as I do for them if I didn’t, but…”
“What happened to you, no matter how many years ago, wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It was cruel, sir. You didn’t deserve that. You didn’t deserve to lose—” Pieces of your soul? I made a face; that was a bit dramatic, even if it was true. “You didn’t deserve to lose all that hard work and dedication.”
All because his brother had gotten drunk with his fr
iends, at that. If I had a sibling, and he or she did that to me, destroyed something I had poured my heart and soul into, that I loved as much as Dean loved his work, my dad would ream them out from here to kingdom come. It wouldn’t get swept under the rug. The guilty party would be punished—severely.
“Yes, well, it’s done now. It happened. I’m afraid none of us can take it back.”
I bit the insides of my cheeks again to let the conversation go—because it seemed like Dean wanted it to end. Lying as still as I could, I stared up, unfocused, ruminating on the injustices of his past. Sure, Dean had led a very privileged life, but that didn’t take away from the fact that what they’d done to him, to his passion, was wrong. It wasn’t okay. Not by a mile.
Not that my opinion mattered, either.
Dean worked in a heavy silence for some time after that, finishing my chest, my left arm. By then, I was dying to know what he was doing—how he’d decided to paint me, and if I didn’t keep talking, I might sneak a peek.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Belle?”
The paintbrush whispered down my belly, over the new little roll below my navel courtesy of all the delicious meals my Dom had prepared for me.
“Can I ask you another question?”
“Besides that one?” He glanced over his shoulder, grinning impishly when my eyes narrowed. “Of course, Belle. Go on.”
“Why did you hire an escort for this trip?” I’d wondered it from the moment I met him—why a man like Dean needed to hire someone for company. Couples played Dominant and submissive in the real world, sometimes part-time, sometimes every second of every day. Dean required a somewhat intense partner, someone willing to play the part no matter the situation, and I personally had been enjoying myself—too much. Couldn’t he find a willing partner elsewhere and save himself two hundred and fifty grand?
“I’ve actually never had much luck with submissives in my day-to-day life. I’ve had a few, but they never lasted long,” he admitted after a moment’s consideration. Cool, thick paint slicked up the V formation between my thighs, and I squirmed, biting back a giggle.
