by Elle Pierson
Mick’s attention seemed to have stopped at the first part of her explanation. “Business Studies?” he repeated. She might just have confessed to an educational background in the circus ring or strip club.
Sophy couldn’t help laughing. “For the record, it’s going to ruin my sketch if your jawbone drops to the floor again,” she said, smudging a charcoal shadow with the side of her thumb. “And I might have taken offense at that raging scepticism if it hadn’t been the most boring three years of my life.”
“I wasn’t implying that you don’t seem commerce-minded,” Mick said hastily, then paused. “No, actually, I was implying that. You don’t seem at all commerce-minded.”
“I’m not,” replied Sophy, not offended. “Sorry, could you just move your arm up a little? No, the left one. Thanks. I learned to balance accounts and spin a marketing pitch with the best of them, but it was a steep learning curve. The statistics requirement was a bit of a stretch, and I hated all the group work. I still have nightmares about the words “class participation”. In art history and Classics lectures, you can just sit in the back of a dark room and look at beautiful pictures, you know.”
She grinned at him, and it belatedly occurred to her that they were getting on very well. Her shyness of him was breaking down into familiar friend status at a more rapid pace than she’d ever experienced. She just genuinely liked him.
“So, why didn’t you major in Humanities? It’s obviously where your interests lie.” Mick obeyed her silent gesture and turned his head to the left, giving her an excellent view of that gorgeous profile. He probably wished he had half as much nose, but Sophy thought it gave him a sort of…Caesar vibe. The tendons flexed in his immense shoulders and biceps, right down through the ropy cords of his forearms.
She had never found excessive muscles that attractive in the past, unlike Melissa who watched every televised rugby game for reasons that had nothing to do with the score or team pride. If she’d thought about it, Sophy would have assumed that physiques that large were dependent on a man spending a narcissistic amount of time with a weights machine and a protein shake. But, although Mick was clearly extremely fit, there was also an obvious genetic element in play, to judge by his bone structure and the size of his hands and feet. She wondered what his dad looked like and if he had any brothers.
Realising that she had been ignoring his question for several long minutes of ogling, Sophy flushed and said quickly, “It was my single attempt at practical planning. I knew I would probably be involved in my parents’ business at some stage, you see. They own the Cheesery on the Silver Leigh vineyard near Gibbston, and I’ve worked there on and off since I was fifteen. I’m an only child, and Dad really wants me to have a role, so…”
“Is that what you want? Or just what he wants?” There was an oddly serious undercurrent to the question, and Sophy looked up at him in surprise.
“Oh, it’s not a sob story. I’m not going to be forced to give up my art and report to the warehouse in chains. They’ll hire a manager when they retire, but it’s important to them there’s at least a nominal family presence. I don’t mind. It’s beautiful on the vineyard, and I quite like working on the production side. The process that goes into making the cheese is really creative. It’s fascinating.” She smiled. “And I’m good for free brie and camembert for life. Comes in handy when you’re still trying to budget like a student. Stone and marble sculpture isn’t a cheap medium.”
Without altering the angle of his head, Mick’s eyes flicked to the waiting block of Oamaru stone in the corner. “I didn’t initially realise this was going to be a three-dimensional project,” he said. He still didn’t sound very enthusiastic about it. “Do you prefer sculpture to sketching?”
Sophy looked ruefully down at her messy hands. “I suppose they both have their ups and downs. I suspect that if I want to make a living as a practicing artist, though, I’ll get more paper commissions than stone. I think the days of consistent employment as a monumental sculptor went out with the industrial revolution. I already sell quite a lot of charcoal portraits through online craft marketplaces. Combined with my wages from the bar, it’s enough to live on as long as I don’t develop a taste for fast cars and poker games.”
“Imminent danger there?” Mick asked lightly, those dimples winking out like stars making a brief appearance from behind a cloud.
“Well, I do play a mean game of Spider Solitaire, so you never know.”
Sophy worked in silence for another twenty minutes, momentarily losing her awareness of Mick, the person, and any lingering self-consciousness with it. He was deconstructed in her mind as a series of shapes and shadows.
She was so deep in the sketch that she jumped slightly when he spoke again. His voice was expectedly deep but more striking in its precise elocution than in register. He had already joined Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman on her mental list of people whose vocal rendition of the phonebook she would happily purchase. “Would it completely blot my copybook if I suggested that a bar doesn’t seem quite your scene?”
He wasn’t the first person to express surprise at Sophy moonlighting as a bartender. Her mother had been astonished, and Melissa had given it a week, less if Sophy was caught doodling on napkins. The bar was one of the busier nightspots right on the waterfront, saw a regular turnover of tourists every night and more than its fair share of drunken high spirits and poor decision-making.
Honestly, there were evenings when there was nothing she felt less like doing than heading into the centre of town to mix suggestively-named spirits for frat boys on holiday. For the most part, though, it wasn’t too bad. The extra money was useful, and she liked the music. She’d always preferred going dancing at a club, where it was loud enough that nobody had to make much conversation, to having to make small talk at dinner parties.
Academic cocktail functions and gallery openings, she placed somewhere in the fiery pits of hell.
She shrugged. “The money’s decent,” she said simply. “And I can essentially take up residence behind the bar all night. I leave the circulating and wrangling to the waitresses and bouncers.”
The workroom was very quiet, and she could hear the faint, even sound of Mick’s breathing. Usually, the sounds of chisels, welding irons and rock music flooded the entire wing, but most of the students had disappeared off to lunch or were playing hooky at the summer festival. It was the waterskiing competition on Lake Wakatipu today; she knew that Melissa and Dale had the morning off to go and watch.
She realised with a flash of guilt that Mick might have wanted to see it too. He was only in town for the month, while the exhibition was running, and he’d already admitted that he hadn’t visited Queenstown since a family skiing trip when he was six. She knew only that he was Auckland born-and-bred, but mostly worked out of London these days. The old icy wall had come down at the brief mention of his family, so that topic was clearly off-limits. She could take a hint. She felt similarly hostile when people questioned her about her love life. It was the main reason why she didn’t call her paternal grandmother as often as she should. Her Grandma had actually introduced her in public as “my spinster granddaughter”.
“I’m sorry, Mick. I should have realised you might prefer to spend your morning off having a look around the town,” she blurted, at the precise moment he asked abruptly, “Is there a reason you aren’t seeing someone?”
They both paused.
“Where did that come from?” Mick sounded a bit bemused, as if it were her words that were inappropriately personal.
“I don’t – what?” Sophy faltered. She looked up and met his frowning gaze, her fingernail scratching absently at the charcoal tip of her pencil. A tendril of unease unwound in her stomach. He wasn’t…making a pass, was he? She had no desire for their budding friendship to disintegrate into a smile-nod-and-flee acquaintance. It was already unlikely they would stay in touch after next month, since the man acted like Facebook was the social media equivalent of walking naked down t
he street, waving your dirty laundry, and Sophy had an aversion to awkward silences on the phone.
No. There was no personal or sexual interest in his face. She had several times caught him looking at her in the vaguely affectionate way that men viewed their younger sisters.
Something about that was not quite as satisfying as it should be.
“What do you mean, is there a reason I’m not seeing anybody?” Sophy asked, and winced. She had pitched for sharp and achieved witchy. Her snottiness probably made it perfectly obvious why she was single. Rapid affront followed. “How do you know I’m not seeing anyone?”
Mick took another swing at her self-esteem by looking taken aback.
“Are you?” he asked bluntly.
No, she wasn’t, by choice and because it made her happier. It was intensely irritating to suddenly feel defensive about her very full, very meaningful life.
“I don’t really do relationships,” she said eventually, and ridiculously.
It was probably a damning indictment on her character that she wanted to ask him about his parents just so they could both retreat into a safe, sulky silence.
“You don’t really do relationships,” Mick repeated.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Sophy had started up a nervous tic with her pencil against the parchment board. She forced herself to put it down, and immediately started playing with her reading glasses instead. “Look, I’m all for sex and romance in theory.”
Oh my God.
Mick rubbed his jaw. “Right,” he said after a pause. “I tend to prefer the former in practice, myself.”
Was he laughing?
“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy sex.”
Oh my GOD, Sophy. Remember when you were too shy to speak to him? Maybe you should revisit that.
“I just prefer intimacy, you know, in moderation,” she went on, a bit desperately. “For a short time. Then I’d rather do something else.”
Like what? Knit?
“That’s very sensible of you.”
He was openly grinning now, the bastard. The discovery that he was as big a dick as the rest of his gender broke the embarrassed constraint. She threw a crumpled ball of paper in his direction, falling short by about six feet.
“I start going stir-crazy if I don’t get enough time by myself,” she explained, smiling reluctantly. “I just – I like my space, my own time. I like not having to answer to somebody every day. I start to feel claustrophobic in a relationship. Men expect you to go out, text them, talk, have sex, and it’s all the time. Don’t you find it exhausting?”
“Well, it depends on the type of sex,” Mick said, straight-faced. “And here I thought you were such a nice girl.”
This time, she weighted the ball of paper with an eraser, and it found its target.
“I’m ending this horrendous conversation right now,” she announced, laughing. “You don’t see me asking why you aren’t seeing anyone.”
Her light-hearted observation effectively ended his amusement as well as the topic. Smile dropping away, he made a strange movement, a sort of half-shrug, half-flinch, and turned from her.
Sophy’s own laughter vanished. She stared at his averted profile, the rigid set of his wide shoulders, with concern. She found the whole thing a bit puzzling. Mick clearly had doubts, in her opinion totally unfounded doubts, about his attractiveness. But his self-abasement seemed out of character. Unlike men who relied on a thin façade of cocky swagger to cover a lack of integrity, there didn’t seem to be anything superficial about Mick. Nor would she have put him down as the type of man to place that much importance on appearances.
Somebody had done a hell of a number on him.
She doubted he would really understand her need for solitude, either. Mick was as efficient with speech as he seemed to be with most other things; he didn’t waste words on idle chatter. But he wasn’t an introvert. On the contrary, she thought he might be a bit…lonely. In the short time she’d known him, he had revealed glimpses of a natural inclination toward physical affection. Several times, he had reached out to touch her shoulder or squeeze her hand, but with a hesitancy that suggested he was used to being shrugged off or pushed away.
She didn’t know him well enough to address the issue. It was the sort of thing that she would hesitate to raise with her closest family and friends, for fear of provoking a confrontation, let alone an acquaintance of a few days. Besides, she’d humiliated herself enough with the accidental compliments about his face and body.
Sophy cleared her throat.
“I think I’ve almost finished this particular sketch,” she said, a little too loudly. “If you wouldn’t mind sticking around for just another half hour or so?”
Mick glanced at his watch.
“No worries,” he said, a thread of relief touching his voice – because of the subject change? Because he could make an escape in thirty minutes? “My shift doesn’t start until three.”
Sophy went to the window and adjusted the drapes to let in more light.
“I think a standing pose if that’s okay,” she called over her shoulder. “Hands on hips?” Turning around, she tried to be impersonal in her observation. “And if you could bring your right leg forward. Yes. No – actually, do you mind if I just…?”
At his nod and suddenly imperturbable expression, she approached and slowly placed one hand on his arm, tugging it into position. She usually felt a bit uncomfortable doing this, even with the paid professional models who likely couldn’t care less. She realised that a lot of people thought nothing of casual touches, but putting your hands on another person’s body or allowing them to touch you always had an element of intimacy. She thought that was one reason why most people wouldn’t want to so much as brush hands with someone they disliked.
That wasn’t the problem with touching Mick.
Her palm flattened against the swell of his chest muscle to push his shoulder back, and she felt the faint shudder that moved through his torso. Looking up instinctively, she met his intense gaze. His grey eyes dilated to near black as they fixed on her mouth. If she hadn’t been deprived in the height department, their faces would have been close enough to feel the fan of breath against cheek. As it was, she could still see the flickering of lines at the corners of his eyes and lips, and the texture of his skin beneath the dark blur of stubble.
Unconsciously, her fingers closed into a fist, her nails scraping his skin as they curled. He made a hoarse sound in the back of his throat, and his jaw angled toward her. Her heart was racing. His hands came up and clasped the curve of her hips, his palms cool and coarse through the thin viscose of her dress. Sophy was swaying forward into the sheltering curve of his body when he straightened with an abruptness that almost cricked her neck.
Away from the warmth he generated, Sophy stood blinking, running her hand up her arm, chasing the line of goosebumps which raced up the back of her wrist like mercury rising in a thermometer.
From a safe distance, Mick stood watching her, troubled, one hand clasped to the back of his solid neck.
She could think of nothing to say. She couldn’t really think, period.
Stupefying lust. Not just a myth, then.
Dreading his next words, Sophy’s flight instinct was in full force when he eventually suggested, with deliberate calm, “Maybe we ought to come back to the sketch another day.”
Good idea.
The day had been going reasonably well until she’d started touching him and repeating the word “sex” about sixty-five times. Mick had managed to overlook the shirtless absurdity of his own role, and concentrate on the enjoyment of watching Sophy in her element. She was flushed and pretty in the sunny white studio, smudged up to the elbows in charcoal, stone dust rising in gentle puffs from the floor to stain her bare legs.
He’d been a bit concerned about her safety working in such a dusty environment, but she’d cracked the windows as soon as they’d arrived and reassured him that she wore a protective mask when she star
ted the actual sculpting. There had been a faint bristle to the words. Obviously, no one got between the woman and her work, an ethic he could appreciate even if he didn’t entirely approve. The sights and sounds of her asthma attack were engrained on his psyche.
He’d been surprised by how much and how immediately he’d enjoyed her company. The strong physical attraction had initiated at the hospital, but he had thought that her intense shyness would make the hours-long sketch session heavy going. Instead, she had visibly relaxed around him, comfortable in her domain with her tools of the trade, and continued to flourish. The opened-up Sophy was his personal nightmare: bright, kind, bloody funny, and so beautiful he found it hard to keep his focus on her directions.
By the time she’d breathed in his face and rubbed up against his bare chest, he was attracted, aroused, filled with dread, and subsequently acted like a complete ass. He’d been millimetres from kissing her when some semblance of sanity had returned at the eleventh hour. The realisation that he’d lost track of his surroundings, the time, place, everything but his fucking hormones, including his intellectual awareness of Sophy, had shocked him into retreat. He’d had no idea where she was at mentally, how willing a participant she was in the moment, whether he was sharing or forcing something. It went against the grain of both his training and his personal code of conduct.
Pull back. Refocus.
And a cold bloody shower wouldn’t go astray.
Apparently he never learned his lesson. It was a sobering thought.
The ease of the day was clearly over. Sophy hadn’t been able to make eye contact with him for a good ten minutes. She was holding the sketch under his nose for his approval now, keeping her eyes fixed on the parchment like she’d never seen it before in her life.
Mick forced his own grim focus to the preparatory work. It was excellent. It was clearly his body, and yet it wasn’t a portrait of him. There was a cipher quality to the figure. He could pick out the suggestion of individual features, the firm delineation of bones and muscle, but there was a suitably godlike obscurity in the total effect.
