by Shelby Reed
“Sounds great.” Colm’s features were unreadable, but he was nothing if not gracious, even in the face of thinly veiled contempt.
“We’ll grill outside,” Max added. “I make a mean New York strip.”
Sydney stared at him. They never grilled outside. Steaks appeared magically on their plates, full of hickory flavor and compliments of Hans’s fine service.
“I didn’t know you could grill, Max,” she spoke when no one offered a word.
“Maybe there’s still a thing or two about me you don’t know, my love.” He pivoted the wheelchair toward the ramp. “Cocktails at six, dinner at seven. Carry on.” But when the door closed behind him, Sydney laid down her palette and sighed. The magic was shattered. The painting didn’t look as tactile and promising as it had moments before.
She thrust her brushes in the jar of water. “You can go, Colm.”
“Okay,” he said, rising from the platform. “But this cutting out early is starting to worry me.”
“It shouldn’t. I work in fits and starts, remember?”
“I hope that’s it. I hope we’re not done here.”
She watched him put on his shirt, the double-sided comment echoing in her brain. Only when he left did she realize she had tensed every muscle, ready to flee.
Chapter Seven
Dinner was quiet except for the soft clang of utensils against china. Colm glanced at Sydney more than once, but she kept her gaze mostly downcast as though concentrating on her food, even though she only pushed it around on her plate with her fork. Her short blond hair fell forward, a protected, curtained place from a world where she was so obviously unsafe.
Most of all, unsafe with him. Guilt speared his gut. He knew desire when he saw it, and she wanted him. He wanted her, too, so much it took running thoughts of algebra equations and football to keep the erections at bay when he was alone with her in the studio. Only a little while longer and he’d have her. Physical attraction was only one small step with a woman like her; she had layer upon layer of emotional barriers, but they toppled quickly with a little careful attention.
She was making it much easier than he’d guessed she would.
Max broke the silence. “This is a celebratory dinner, by the way.”
“Really?” Sydney tucked her hair behind her ears and looked at him, surprise altering the distracted expression she’d worn all evening. “What are we celebrating?”
“A new artist. I’m going to Chicago to see her portfolio and woo her.”
Colm kept a carefully blank face, denying the scowl that wanted to seize his features. Max was passing off a goddamned veiled threat, and Colm wanted to knock him out for the way Sydney’s lips fell open.
For a moment no one spoke. Then Colm said carefully, “What kind of work does this artist do?”
“Mostly abstract, but with an eroticism that reminds me of Sydney’s earlier work. This one has that fresh, unsculpted element about her.”
Colm braced his forearms on the table and stared at him. Was the man evil, or was he just that mindless of Sydney’s feelings?
To her credit, she tilted her head and smiled. “When are you flying out?”
“Tomorrow.” He sawed at his steak, then gestured at Colm with his fork as though he were a piece of furniture. “Do you feel comfortable enough being alone with him now to let me go that soon?”
Colm sat back, waiting for her to volley.
“That’s not the point,” Sydney said flatly. “I knew you were planning to go to Chicago and San Francisco, but this really is short notice. When did you find out you were leaving?”
Max took a bite of his food and chewed for much too long before he replied. “Only this morning, Sydney. I didn’t want to interrupt your creative flow and pop the news on you. You and Colm appear to be working together in peace.”
Her expression stayed neutral, but those two telltale red spots appeared on her cheeks. “And how long will you be gone?”
“Ten days, give or take. This artist is having a couple of small showings I want to attend.”
She was quiet. Then she said, “I’m curious about her work. You’ll have to e-mail me photos.”
“I will.” Max lifted his wineglass. “To hopeful new artists, and a potential client,” he said, then took a long draught and smiled.
Sydney lightly sipped from her water glass, but Colm wadded his napkin and set it beside his plate. He was a whore, nothing better. He could take Max Beaudoin’s money. But he didn’t have to drink to his sick games.
* * *
Colm headed straight to his cabin after the miserable dinner, dialing the house in Silver Spring on his cell phone as he went. Amelia was sleeping again, so the nurse couldn’t put the phone to her ear for him to talk to her. She slept so much. Beyond healing. Maybe it really was escape, a black hole where reality didn’t exist—the reality Colm had given her.
The thought echoed in his brain as he climbed the steps to the cabin porch. He slammed the door hard behind him and strode straight to the shower, stripping as he went and leaving his clothing in a trail behind him. He felt so filthy. The shower beat hot on his shoulders, hot enough to sting his skin, and he let it, burning himself with its fire, nothing as hot as the hell he secreted away. He braced his palms on the shower wall and hung his head, breathing the steam in slow inhalations and cleansing away the mud clouding his conscience until the water turned cold.
When he climbed out, someone knocked at the cabin door. He wrapped a towel around his hips, not bothering to dry off whatsoever, and crossed the living room to answer it.
Sydney stood there in a paint-stained man’s shirt and torn jeans, her blue eyes wide in the glow from the porch lights. Her gaze darted down his body and away before she said, “I didn’t mean to drag you out of the shower.”
“I was done.” He fought the urge to shiver in the chilly night air and leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb, enjoying the sight of her a little too much. “What can I do for you?”
She hesitated. “I know it’s late, but can you come pose for a while? I feel a sudden drive to work on your portrait.”
“Let me get dressed.” He backed up and opened the door wider. “Come in.”
Glancing at the threshold as though it were the line between her feet and hell’s fire, she shook her head. “I’ll meet you in the studio.”
“It’ll just take a second. We’ll walk over together.”
But she backed off the porch, her arms wrapped around herself as though he were something menacing, as though she sensed the threat he was. And before he could say anything more, she’d disappeared into the darkness.
* * *
Sade wound serpentine vocals around Sydney’s senses as she mixed colors on her palette, tan, more white, less burnt umber, a touch of crimson. Her hands were shaking. This wouldn’t bode well for the portrait, but she didn’t care. She needed to paint, to remember who she was—not the statue to Max’s Pygmalion, not some ingénue anymore, but herself, the self she’d lost. Maybe Max was planning to replace her with the artist from Chicago. She knew him well enough to recognize the signs, and finally understood that the tension between them in the last few weeks had been leading up to the moment at dinner tonight when he mentioned his new client. Doubtless Sydney would never know the truth, but the mere suspicion fed the late-night drive she was experiencing to get something, anything, on canvas, to remind herself of the artist she was . . . and at long last to paint what she loved. Bodies in motion, love and emotion and faces of all kinds, ugly, beautiful, mesmerizing.
She would start with Colm, beauty personified. She would entangle him with other models in compositions of muscles and flesh and lithe limbs, and find her deepest desires again through the voyeurism of an artist’s eyes.
Tonight’s dinner didn’t matter. Max’s threats didn’t, either. Nor Max.
Colm hardly made a sound when he entered the studio, closing the door softly behind him. She didn’t look at him until he reached the platform,
where he shucked his leather jacket, kicked off his shoes, and stripped off his long-sleeved T-shirt without asking her what she wanted for this session.
Sydney decided not to break the peace with unnecessary conversation. She worked a brush into her palette and added the gleam to his image’s shoulders cast by the work light. His pectorals were firm, sculpted, his nipples hard from the draft in the studio. When he shivered, she ignored it and kept working. His expression was as set and determined as she felt tonight.
It wasn’t enough, the shoulders, the chest. Setting aside her brush and palette, she stepped out from her workstation and approached him. “Brace your palms behind you and lean back on your arms.”
A look she couldn’t identify crossed his features but he obliged her, asking no questions. And with only her own pounding heart granting her courage, Sydney reached down and unfastened his fly, pushing the buttons through their corresponding holes with shaking fingers. His skin was hot against her knuckles. He smelled like shampoo and lime soap. He didn’t ask why she was doing what she was doing.
She didn’t offer an explanation.
On the last two buttons, he sat up and caught her hands. “Don’t.”
She felt herself flush. “You want to do it yourself?”
“No. It’s just that I hurried to get here and I sort of . . . went commando.”
“Commando?”
“No underwear.”
The flutter in Sydney’s stomach intensified. Her fingers flexed as she studied him and tried to think. What would the old Sydney do? Back away. She didn’t want to back away. She wanted to jump off the precipice, drown in these feelings and ascend as someone new. She wanted to paint this night a different color.
“Commando doesn’t bother me.” She nudged aside the protective hand he’d rested on his fly and undid the last buttons. The hair of his groin was silky, darker than the hair on his head. She let her knuckles brush it in passing; she let his fly fall open naturally without pulling it wide to expose him. Appraising his entire position, she crooked one of his knees on the stage, angled the other to dangle off the side, and stepped back, squinting with an artist’s eye. “Good.”
When she returned to her easel and glanced at him, he was staring at her, his green eyes intense. Her gaze strayed to his fly. He was hard, darker, ruddier flesh obvious through the opening in his jeans, though not jutting out.
Sydney bit her lip and went to work. Sexual arousal wasn’t uncommon with erotic art models. That was all he was. A model for her purpose.
The lighting wasn’t right. She stopped and adjusted her lamp. “Turn your face to the left,” she instructed. He did, but it wasn’t right. She maneuvered the lamp again, then gave up and crossed to the platform to pose him again herself.
Gently grasping his chin, she turned his face aside. Her thumb accidently grazed his full bottom lip, and heat crept up her neck. After practically ripping open his jeans without his permission, it seemed silly to be embarrassed, but somehow touching his mouth felt more intimate.
“Sydney.”
“What.”
He caught her hand and to her astonishment lifted it back to his lips, laid a kiss on her paint-stained thumb, then her forefinger. And what was so very awful was that she let him; she simply stood there and watched him kiss her fingers one at a time, her body going fluid and hot and weak.
“Look at these colorful hands,” he murmured, biting the knuckle on her ring finger. “A little rough, a lot talented.”
She couldn’t speak. For all its lack of invasiveness, his slow, thorough caress was the sexiest thing any man had ever done to her. When he reached her pinkie, he licked the tip, paint-stained and all. Her throat had gone dry; she didn’t pull away. The proverbial question between man and woman hung there, a potent third party, until he voiced it. “What do you want?”
Sydney cleared her throat. “I’m not entirely sure.”
“Then let’s start right here, this moment, just you and me.”
Her gaze shot to the door; she thought about locking it.
“Do you want this?” he asked, and without waiting, lifted her wrist to his mouth. Oh, God, his tongue found her pulse and traced its tender spot. Flicked. Soothed. She leaned into him; her hand found his thigh for balance and she felt his hardness. With a jolt, she withdrew from his grasp and stepped away.
“I want to finish this portrait, and the next one with you and the other models. I want to finish them both before you leave in ten days, and I want them to be flawless.” Her delayed response to his question came too rushed, blatant defense against a force she couldn’t truly fight. The words trembled at the end, the same way she trembled inside as she backed all the way to her easel and bumped into it like a dolt, nearly knocking the canvas to the floor.
Colm said nothing, just leaned back on his hands again and resumed the position she had arranged, those godforsaken jeans open at the fly, promising ecstasy.
“I want perfection,” she repeated. And he was. He was seraphically beautiful, everything she’d ever wanted in a subject—in a man. She picked up her brush and made some brisk, gestural strokes on the canvas. Despite the declarations, this was the furthest thing from perfection she could create—this damned canvas quickly turning into a sloppy mess. This state of her life. But she could pretend. She could pretend everything slid across the surface in smooth, exquisite detail, that each of her days slid flawlessly into one another, that she didn’t desire this man she’d known less than a week; that Max hadn’t set Colm before her, all but served like a buffet dinner; and that she wasn’t betraying Max’s trust while not feeling guilty for it.
“Can we talk while you paint?” Colm’s husky voice broke the silence, and Sydney startled.
“No,” she said quickly.
“How long are you going to ignore what’s happening here?”
She loaded her brush and globbed too much paint on the figure’s neck. “Nothing’s happening. Nothing’s going to happen.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, “Dinner was a son of a bitch tonight.”
The brush on the canvas went still, then resumed. Sydney knew what he referred to. “I’m not afraid of being replaced.” Not anymore. Whatever Max could deliver at this point was nothing compared to the list of things she feared, starting with Colm.
“When was the last time he touched you?” he asked, as though the conversation were idle chitchat, as though he were asking about her ho-hum day and not framing a brutal observation of her fast-dissolving life.
She tried not to look at him and failed. He was holding his pose, his muscles taut, skin glowing in the spotlight.
“I’m starting to care about you.” Colm didn’t move, and yet his statement shook the room.
Care. More than want. Deadlier. Another way for her to fall before she’d even flown.
She swallowed the ache in her throat and applied more paint to the canvas, but this time mixed in too much crimson and turned the gleam on his shoulder a dusky pink. “Shit.” Suddenly, all the anger from the last few weeks rose up like a dragon and breathed fire into her limbs, her veins, her brain, her heart. “Shit! Shit! I hate this!” She grabbed the canvas off the easel and threw it against the nearest wall, where it left a wet smudge of flesh tones before it hit the floor, facedown.
Ruined.
She hadn’t planned to cry. Hadn’t even known it was coming. But suddenly she was weeping, and when Colm said her name she turned away, rubbed her face with her hands to scrub away the weakness, but it was no use. It felt good to fall apart. She’d needed this far too long.
When she heard his bare feet on the wood floor, felt his hands on her shoulders, heard his soft, “Hey,” she turned into his arms and let herself be held. Held against a bare chest, warm, smooth, lime-scented skin, and a fiercely beating heart. Life, beauty. Art. He was living art.
All the taut rage bled from her through her tears. Like a cloudburst, it was over in minutes, but she stayed in his embrace, reveling in the way he st
roked her hair and murmured indecipherable nothings of comfort against her temple. Max had never held her like this, even before the accident. Had he ever loved her as a person, a woman? Something more than as his novice, or a possession in his collection? She should be flattered, little Sydney Warren from Nowhere, Nebraska. A half-hysterical giggle rose in her chest. She should be destroyed. She was neither. Only distantly curious.
Who the hell was the man she’d spent four years trying and failing to know?
Somehow, in the course of a few days, she felt like she knew more about Colm—not the mundane details, but the essence of the canvas and its meaning—than she’d ever gleaned about Max.
Colm was a good man. It seeped from his embrace and into her bones, and she knew it as well as she knew her own soul.
Sydney couldn’t have said when the drift of his hand over her head turned sensuous; maybe with the first shiver of pleasure it brought as his fingers combed her hair back from her cheek and smoothed it behind her ear, copying her own habitual gesture. She nestled in tighter to his chest, unfolding her arms where they’d been tucked against him like a bird afraid to spread its wings. They slid tentatively around his neck and then his cheek was on hers, prickly from a day of not shaving and deliciously warm. She wanted its mild scrape on her skin.
She wanted him.
“Syd,” he said, his hand cupping her jaw. That was all. He was the only person who’d ever called her that, and she loved it. She had never been Syd until now.
He didn’t swoop in and kiss her; if he had, she would have startled and flown away. But his mouth slid along her jaw, feathery, sinuous and dangerous enough for her knees to sag beneath her. He would hold her up if she started to fall. She knew that about him. Colm would catch a woman falling before him.
She couldn’t look at him. She closed her eyes, tipped her head back and in doing so, asked for what she truly wanted.
More.
Chapter Eight
