Seventeen #2
She closed her eyes, too embarrassed to look at him. “Aye?”
“To be honest, ’tis not my practice to share this with my sitters. It is far more potent, I think, if it happens without their notice, but you are a woman of the world. I assure you, it will work for you if you let it.”
“What, sir? What?”
“I can help bring your lover to mind through judicious use of his, er, methods of seduction—only the most proper ones, of course.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning,” he said shortly, “I can pour, I can praise, I can command. If I strike the note that brings him to mind, you will respond. Which path shall I follow?”
Jacket had charmed and cajoled, and after he hurt her feelings, he had charmed her even more. Cam would not waste a thought on that now. But the right words from Peter could turn what she wanted—what she had already begun—from a flame into a fire.
“I can pour,” she said. “You command me.”
For a moment he said nothing, then he nodded and stepped behind the easel. “Remove your gown.”
Flames roared through her. She sat up, finished the rest of the wine, and poured another. Then she loosened the silk and let it slide off the muslin.
He turned toward the canvas with a wry chuckle. “The muslin as well, please.”
Sheer terror flooded every nerve. “I’m not comfortable with that.”
“You have contrived to put yourself on a painter’s chaise in a remote studio. That is the natural outcome.”
Her hands shook as she brushed one shoulder off and then the other. The fabric slipped to her waist.
“Madam—”
“No more. Please.”
His eyes did a slow review. She felt adrift and more than a little frightened.
“Your breasts are generous. Offer them with generosity.”
She pressed her shoulders back, wincing with vulnerability, and felt her nipples lift higher.
She tried to master her breathing, but every nerve in her body was firing at once.
She, Cam Stratford, who had never sunbathed topless, who had never skinny-dipped, who wouldn’t even get in a hot tub alone with Jacket, had taken the plunge.
She could feel both the heat of the fire and the cool of the evening on her skin, and she held herself still.
It was thrilling to be exposed, and to pretend, even for a quarter hour, that she was always this bold.
“That’s right,” he said. “Now angle yourself toward me.”
She wished he would take her in his arms. She wanted to feel him command her with his hands, not just his words.
“I doubt,” she said with only a small crack in her voice, “this will be a painting for the dining room.”
“A private gallery, I should think. Though I would not put it past any man to let it fall into the sight of his acquaintances. How can they covet what they do not know exists?”
She imagined this painting hanging in Lely’s private office or tipped against the wall of one of his workshops, open to any curious eye, or in his bedroom where he could admire it while the real sitting took place. She wondered in how many rooms she could bring him pleasure.
“Your man is here. He stands over you. He is drunk, perhaps too drunk. Will he sleep or serve?”
“Serve,” she said huskily.
“Offer. And make it clear. He is barely able to stand.”
And there was Peter in her head, pulling at his boots, smelling of whiskey. He would need no encouragement. He would lower his breeks, scrabble at his shirttails, and thrust his way inside her, making up in blunt determination what he lacked in elegance.
She settled back on the pillows and turned her body seductively toward this unseen lover. The muslin at her waist was slipping, and she lifted the leg nearest Peter to stop it.
The fabric, so thin it undoubtedly offered a fine view of hip and thigh, ruffled slightly in the draft from the windows, but it was all the coverage she had, and she would not let it go.
She laid her right arm along the rise of her hip.
It was a brazen pose, and she was still quaking, but she liked the glow that had sprung up in Peter’s eyes.
He considered her from head to foot. “’Tis a very fine offer,” he said at last. “Very fine indeed. Let him take it, shall we, while I begin.”
He picked up his palette, and she closed her eyes.
The wine had loosened her scruples. She did not feel so frightened.
She liked his eyes upon her and had a sudden overwhelming desire to make him ache.
She very much liked his eyes upon her, but without the cover of the muslin she could not return to that gentle, inebriating rub against the arm of the chaise.
Her nipples peaked instantly at the memory, and the brushstrokes stopped.
She smiled, though the ache she had hoped to cause him had been visited upon her instead, sharper even than before.
She rubbed her legs together, like an evening cricket, but the pain only magnified.
It beat hard, like a heart, hotter with each thump.
She brought the heel of the folded leg closer… closer.
The throbbing pleasure of contact nearly made her cry out. Now if she could only lift herself against it, against his touch. She arched infinitesimally, and the charge went up her spine. She couldn’t let him see this. Or could she?
Again she lifted and again. It was a slow undulation of her hips, that’s all.
The instinctive movement to some internal music.
In her mind, though, her private Peter suckled those nipples, drawing them into a pleasing tightness, while his hand caressed her hip, then her thigh, dipping easily between her legs.
Slowly, slowly he stroked her, stoking the fire.
Cam slitted her eyes. Peter gazed upon her, his attention undivided. What did he see? The bare-breasted fiancé of an unworthy painter or a woman openly disporting herself before a man she hardly knew. She willed him to see what she saw, to feel the primeval pounding of desire.
Her lids fluttered shut, and the Peter of her dream was there waiting. His hands were in her hair, plucking her pins loose and combing out her curls. He spread them over her breasts, rubbing the strands between his palms and the taut flesh. She turned to meet his lips.
“Beautiful,” the painting Peter said, and so did the one lying next to her, just before his tongue met hers.
With a shift of her thighs, she let his fullness come between them, prodding her throbbing bud gently.
Ignoring her trembling, he brought his hand to join it, a perfect triumvirate—hand, mouth, cock.
At the easel, the painting Peter made a distracted noise.
He retreated to the shelves, searching for something.
When his back turned, she slid a finger under the muslin, hiding the motion behind her knee.
Immediately the glow turned hot. And this was Peter’s hand, obliging her, but he was growing rougher—oh, so rough—and his need bigger and bigger.
Her nipples tightened into ridged nubs of iron.