by Shelby Reed
The frown creasing his brow deepened. “You caught me off guard.”
“I was trying to fix what’s wrong between us lately.”
“Do you know what that might be?” he asked with a faint, regretful smile.
She sighed. “Besides lack of sex?”
“I wasn’t ready last night when you showed up. I was tired.”
“Okay. But can’t you simply sleep beside me? I hate our separate bedrooms.”
“I keep you awake at night, especially if I have to get up for something.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” she said.
“But I do. Look, Sydney . . . all couples go through rough spots. You know I—”
The jarring gong of the doorbell pealed through the house, followed by the shushing sound of Hans’s footsteps as he crossed through several rooms to answer it.
The interruption hardly permeated Sydney’s focus. By God, she was feeling something . . . something good and bad and arctic, like she’d been doused with ice water. Something besides guilt for the first time in two years.
“Max? I don’t need more than just a touch.”
“I can have sex if I choose,” he said flatly, as though she’d accused him of being impotent. After the accident, they’d gone to great lengths together to regain his abilities, trying Viagra and even a miraculous medical vibrator that allowed him to climax. For a while, it had given them back their lovemaking. So why had he become so distant? What had she done to deserve it?
“I know you can have sex.” She picked up her coffee cup again just to give her hands something to do. “Why don’t you? With me?”
“We’ll talk about this later.”
“I think now is a good time.”
He didn’t reply, just stared at her in stony silence as though willing her to drop the subject. And in the glare of the sun, a flash of ebony hair like Chinese silk darted across her memory.
Her back came off the chair and she braced her forearms on the edge of the table. “Are you sleeping with that woman from the reception last night?”
He let out a bark of laughter. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Sydney had been ridiculous before, of course. The many nights before his fall from the cliff, when he would come home late and she’d question him. Ridiculous, he would say. You’re being silly and insecure. A week before the accident, Max’s accountant came to Sydney on the sly, unable to hold the truth any longer. He’d confirmed Max’s relationship with the office receptionist, the one who looked so innocent and peppy with her fawn eyes and fawn ponytail that swung to and fro. Love, sex—Sydney didn’t care what had compelled Max to cheat. She packed, moved into a pathetic rental, and locked herself in, trying to plot out a life without the man she’d loved and thought she knew.
And then, while supposedly drowning his remorse on the West Coast, he had plunged off the sheer face of a mountain in a futile attempt to save a climbing buddy, who died in the fall anyway. Max had dropped one hundred fifty feet and shattered three vertebrae. Maybe it was pity that drew Sydney back to him; maybe it was the fact that she hadn’t had time to get over their breakup before he was injured, but against her better judgment, she went when he reached for her. At first his remorse for his past infidelity, his newly loving manner, fed her trust like gentle summer rain. But now, the fragile peace they’d forged trembled like the coffee cup in her fingers.
“You don’t have to have sex with me at the drop of a hat,” she told him in a low voice as approaching footsteps grew closer. “But you do have to talk to me. And you do have to be honest.”
His expression softened and he stretched out a hand toward her, even though he couldn’t reach her from where he sat. “I will. I’ll—we’ll talk about this,” he promised, just in time for the valet to reappear in the breakfast room doorway.
“Mr. Hennessy is here,” Hans said lightly. “The houseboy is putting his bags in the guesthouse.”
Sydney glanced between the two men. Mr. Hennessy?
“He’s early,” Max said, wiping his unsmiling mouth with his napkin. “But show him in.”
And before another thought could cross Sydney’s mind . . . before she could draw another breath . . . Mr. Hennessy materialized in the doorway.
* * *
Colm stood at the threshold and watched the color in Sydney’s face drain away and return as two red spots on her cheeks. Nice, he thought. Beaudoin hadn’t warned her. To her credit, though, she pushed back her chair and rose, graceful, slim, immaculate. No makeup. She stood golden in the autumn sun that streamed in the windows behind her.
“Hennessy.” With a boisterous enthusiasm most likely for Sydney’s benefit, Beaudoin wheeled back from the table and rolled toward Colm. “Welcome! Sydney, do you remember our new friend?” He directed the question without even looking at Sydney, but Colm glanced her way.
She definitely wasn’t happy. “What a pleasant surprise, Mr. Hennessy,” she said. “Max didn’t tell me we were expecting you.”
The left wheel of Max’s wheelchair brushed the leg of Colm’s jeans. When Colm looked down at him, the man’s hand was extended, waiting to crush the hell out of anyone idiotic enough to take it. Colm let a grudging smile touch his lips as he accepted the handshake and Max once again gripped like a steel trap. He was a strong bastard, there was no question. His arms were lean and muscled from pushing himself around.
“Sydney,” he said, without turning his cool gaze away from Colm’s face, “meet your birthday present.”
Colm cleared his throat and looked at her.
She’d seated herself again, fingers white-knuckled on the arms of her chair. “What?”
“Colm is an experienced art model, darling.” Max’s voice echoed in the massive room, sounding unnaturally friendly and somewhat higher than Colm remembered. “I thought it might be nice to have you work from the real deal rather than go into the city and snap photos of college kids. Your work comes to life when you use live models.”
Sydney’s pleasant mask never faltered, but her blue eyes narrowed. “When did you arrange this?”
“A couple of weeks ago.”
Her eyebrows drew down. “But last night you two acted like you didn’t know each other.”
“We didn’t want to ruin the surprise,” Colm said, coming to the rescue. “We felt it was a good time to see if you’d be receptive.”
“And was I, Mr. Hennessy?” She was speaking to Colm, but she glared at Max. “Receptive?”
“I thought you and Colm would get along fine or he wouldn’t be here,” Max said.
“And now it’s my turn to decide the same, I suppose.” Irritation shortened her words.
“Absolutely, darling.” Beaudoin’s good humor returned, high wattage and out of place. “Come in, Colm, and have some breakfast.”
Colm pulled out the chair at Sydney’s right elbow and sat. “Just a cup of coffee would be great.”
With timing as impeccable as his high-shined wing tips, the valet appeared with a tray holding a mug and a silver coffeepot, and set the mug before Colm.
Colm eyed the bar in the corner. The half-filled decanters winked at him in the morning sun.
“Last night you didn’t tell me you were a model, Mr. Hennessy.” Sydney held her cup steady while the valet poured. Her tone held a slight note of accusation, but when Colm glanced at her, she smiled sweetly and sipped her coffee.
“Max was being kind when he called me experienced,” he said. “I pose occasionally at the colleges in the area. There’s not much to being a model.”
“I beg to differ. You have to have strength, stillness, and patience to hold the poses, especially for me. Do you think you’ll be able to manage standing buck-naked in a drafty studio, unable to move for an hour at a time?”
The ornate antique chair squeaked as he sat back to meet her direct gaze. “You can’t scare me off that easily.”
“How do you feel about working with other models intimately? Have you ever done anything like this? Remember
, it’s erotic art.”
“Colm and I have discussed all this, Sydney,” Max said from the other end of the massive table. “This is your birthday present. No interrogation is necessary.” He added a smile, but Sydney didn’t return it. She looked from one face to the other, then wadded her napkin and set it beside her coffee cup.
“Well, it appears you’ve thought of everything.”
“And yet you don’t seem pleased,” Max added, his mild expression fading. “Would you like me to ask Colm to leave?”
Colm swallowed a mouthful of coffee and waited as hot color flooded Sydney’s face anew. Beside her plate, her hand clenched the napkin. “What if I said yes?”
“Sydney—”
“I’m just stunned, especially since you know how I feel about working with only one model in the studio.”
“We can bring in more from the city,” Max said. “Would that suit you?”
She appeared to think about it and then stared out the window, the light limning her profile.
Max glanced at Colm and gave his grapefruit bowl an impatient nudge. “Sydney? Is this yes or no?”
Jesus, Colm thought. Sydney was tired of the toys Daddy brought her. Maybe if Daddy would ask her what she liked once in a while . . .
“I see this as a challenge, Max,” she finally spoke. “I’ll take your suggestion and get started on the next show immediately. Let me go upstairs and change into my work clothes.” She stood again, elegant and cool in her white sleeveless blouse and unwrinkled khaki shorts, offered Colm a polite smile, and headed for the door leading to the foyer. When she reached it, she paused. “I didn’t ask if you were ready to begin so quickly, Mr. Hennessy.”
“I’m ready,” Colm said, feeling Max’s gaze on him.
“Wonderful,” Max said. “I’ll show you to the studio while Sydney gets ready.”
* * *
I’m not going to ask how you plan to do this,” the man in the wheelchair said, his tone cold and clipped. “Just do it and do it quickly.”
Colm folded his hands behind his back and walked alongside Beaudoin as they crossed a rocky section of yard leading toward a stone cottage. The terrain was uneven and when Max hit a rock he couldn’t maneuver over, he cursed and pushed in vain at his wheels.
Automatically, Colm reached to help the chair forward, but Max’s head snapped around and he shot Colm a venomous glare. “Don’t touch the chair. Ever.”
Hands held aloft, Colm stepped back and picked up his pace, a cold knot forming in his gut. This was a hell of a game. Why would Beaudoin want to trap Sydney in infidelity, anyway? Had she already had affairs? She didn’t seem like the kind. She didn’t seem like any kind except closed off, pissed off, and probably lonely. Colm knew what it was to love someone in a wheelchair, to ache over the vibrant being that person once had been, and the agony of guilt that followed. It was possible things had cooled between Sydney and Beaudoin, but if Colm read her right, it had little if anything to do with the wheelchair. Max was a real bastard.
He reached the cottage door and waited for Beaudoin to catch up with him. Max was panting as he rolled around Colm to unlock the studio door. A twinge of sympathy seized Colm for an instant, but he banished it. This man wasn’t pitiful. He was underhanded and manipulative, cut from the same cloth as so many of the people Colm had met in the sex trade. Colm was no better. He recognized his own self in Beaudoin, and it sickened him.
The pungent smell of turpentine filled the air as they entered the building. A ramp led down into a single, sprawling room floored in golden oak planks, its walls white-washed and hung with myriad canvases.
None were erotic. They were portraits: old men and women with craggy features, smooth-faced children and cherubic babies. Lithesome figures of women. Rubenesque, Colm thought, studying one painting of a chubby woman whose mouse brown hair had slipped from its bun and snaked down her milky back.
His fingers fisted and unclenched. He wanted to touch; the textures and features were so tactile. There was a luminosity to each work here that her erotic art didn’t yield. Colm pictured Sydney’s brush lovingly stroking the ivory-smooth flesh of the Rubenesque painting, the passion in her face as she worked, the fierce concentration that would be there, such a disparity to the coolness she wore like a costume—and fought the urge to adjust himself in his jeans. The image was more erotic than anything he’d seen in the gallery last night.
He stepped off the side of the ramp and wandered to the center of the studio, where he examined the easel covered with a paint-spattered sheet, the rickety-looking side table beside a seventies barstool where she sat to work; the outdated boom box which boasted a CD and cassette player. That, too, was splashed with paint. Beyond her station, toward the middle of the room, sat a naked wooden stage. The model’s platform. He wondered how many hours he would spend equally naked atop it before he reached for Sydney and she came to him. Maybe they would have sex right there on the bare wood. It would dig into their skin, but he wouldn’t feel the splinters. He would bury himself as deep in her as he could and feel nothing but the pleasure. No guilt. He would play the game Beaudoin’s way, and Sydney would lose.
“. . . And I don’t need to tell you drugs are strictly forbidden,” Beaudoin was saying from the top of the ramp. Colm had nearly forgotten the man was there.
“I don’t do drugs,” Colm said. “An Avalon rule.”
“This isn’t Avalon. Azure isn’t your pimp here. I am. Keep in mind who’s paying you and we’ll get along just fine, Hennessy.”
Colm was squelching the urge to tell him to screw himself when the man added in a more subdued tone, “I’m aware you’re curious about this situation.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“No.” Max’s mouth twisted into a smile. “I’m going to tell you anyway. If Sydney passes this test, I plan to ask her to marry me.”
Holy shit.
“Sydney is everything to me. I molded her into what she is today—beautiful, talented, polished. I took her for granted once, but now I see the value of what I nearly threw away. I’m certain of what I want, and I want her. But not unless she’s as trustworthy and loyal as she appears.”
Colm wandered back to the easel and fingered the edge of the sheet. “Has she done anything to make you think you can’t trust her?”
“I don’t like the way she looks at other men. Deep into their faces, like she could swallow them. I’ve never seen such intensity. She did it with you last night. Surely you noticed it.”
All of a sudden it became clear. Weren’t cheaters always the first to suspect infidelity in others? “She hardly looked at me,” he said, and meant it. “She seemed skittish and uncomfortable last night.”
“Well, you could have fooled me. Like most women, she’s no doubt vulnerable to . . .” He looked Colm up and down. “Something like you. I don’t want her to be like most women. She has to prove that she isn’t.”
“Wouldn’t a prenup be easier?” Colm murmured, running a finger beneath the sheet to peek at what was beneath. Looking at the man was twisting his stomach.
Max ignored the question. He wheeled backward to open the door. “Do what you’re supposedly so goddamned good at and if she folds, come straight to me.”
Colm nodded. “I do have one question. You’ve paid me to do this whether I succeed or not. How does that work for you?”
“I’ll pay you double if you succeed.”
“You mean intercourse, not just foreplay.”
“If you want to walk out of here with your hands full of cash. Do it right and I’ll pay you and you’ll go. No long good-byes. No emotional bullshit. She might be hurt, but I can hurt her much worse than you ever could, Hennessy. Do your job and get the hell out. You have two weeks.”
This really wasn’t about money—or trust. It was about keeping Sydney up high and pretty on her shelf. For an instant Colm was tempted to go easy on Sydney. Even if he didn’t, even if she didn’t pass the test, she’d probably be better off w
ithout Max. Then he thought of the money. Double what he’d been told, and all to take a woman to bed like he did at Avalon nearly every night. All to wrap himself around a rare beauty like Sydney and then be done.
He thought of Amelia. Of the bills, and his dream to quit Avalon.
Two weeks. He would do the job and then get the hell out.
Chapter Four
Sydney paced the long expanse of the studio while Colm changed in the small bathroom. She’d given him a robe for the sake of modesty, and for her own sanity. She didn’t need him naked to begin the portrait, but by God, if this is what Max wanted, this is what Max would get.
Challenge, indeed. Why had he done this to her? He knew how she felt being alone in a studio with a man. She always, always worked with two or more models, and he knew that. He knew her past, knew what she’d gone through with her mother’s boyfriend and the fathomless, insidious damage, so why had he disrespected her this way? Her stomach somersaulted for the fiftieth time since Colm Hennessy walked into the dining room. Maybe Max didn’t know her after all. She thought herself utterly transparent, but maybe they had lost each other. She’d always looked to him for guidance to steer her in the right direction, much as she considered herself his partner and protector when he was vulnerable. She’d trusted him blindly too often.
And perhaps he’d trusted her just as mindlessly. She wasn’t the same young fool from four years ago, or the sympathetic, still-enamored woman who came back to him after he fell. Not anymore. She didn’t want an agent or a father figure. She wanted love; she wanted to be allowed to love, but Max was playing games she didn’t understand, loving her in fits and starts, and she hated it.
Sometimes she hated him.
When Colm emerged from the bathroom, she jerked awake, averted her eyes, and returned to her easel, where she fiddled with her brushes in the pregnant silence. He sat on the edge of the modeling platform and waited. After a painful length of time, in which she felt she’d adequately built a barrier between them, she looked up. “Let’s get started.”
