Chapter Thirteen #2
She didn’t reply, just waited patiently for his attention. He knew he was being rude, but he was pissed with himself, and with her, and with just about every other damn thing he could think of right now.
‘I looked at your drawing.’
Christ. He’d put his drawing of her on the easel in there. He’d intended it as a welcome gift, but given how things had panned out it was all kinds of inappropriate.
‘I shouldn’t have put it there,’ he muttered, washing his hands. ‘I’ll move it later.’
Another protracted silence, and then, ‘No … I’m glad you did. You see me differently from how I see myself.’
He could hear vulnerability in her quiet words, and, biting down on his lip, he finally turned to look at her.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
She was naked.
He rubbed his hand over the two-day stubble on his jaw. ‘You’ve taken your clothes off again.’
‘Yes.’
She leaned her shoulder against the door frame and crossed her arms lightly beneath her breasts. Frankly, it didn’t help him at all.
‘I want you to draw me again,’ she said. ‘I want to feel like the woman on the easel in there.’
‘Winnie,’ he murmured, walking towards her. God, she was too lovely. His artist’s eye saw a study of curves and slopes, and his body reacted to her as a man.
‘Don’t say no,’ she said, watching his face. ‘Tell me how to pose for you. Draw me again.’ He noticed how tightly her fingers dug into her upper arms, giving her away even though she was trying so hard to look relaxed. ‘Please?’
‘Don’t you already know?’ he said, refusing to drop his eyes from hers as he crossed the room, even though there was just a couple of feet between them now and he could practically feel the heat from her skin.
‘You are her, Winnie. You don’t need me or anyone else to validate you.
’ He took a step closer, within touching distance.
‘I’m sorry if I made you feel manipulated.
I didn’t mean for you to feel that way.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I want what you have, Jesse. I want to feel free, to be bohemian and liberated from the complications and strings of conventional romance.’
The light of hope in her eyes lasered into all of his dark corners, a main beam sweeping through his body, finding his secrets, exposing him for the fraud he was.
He’d been a fully paid-up member of the ‘fake it till you make it’ brigade, so much so that he’d believed his own hype.
He’d sold Winnie a pup, and now here she was fully invested, out on a limb and exposed, and here he was feeling like a con-artist selling snake oil.
He was close enough to smell the summer scent of sun cream on her skin, her only protection against him. It was nowhere near enough. If she knew the truth, she’d wear chainmail.
‘I can’t,’ he said. His fingers ached to trace the criss-cross of pale strap marks in the gold-dust of her shoulders.
‘Yes, you can.’ She backed into the room behind her and perched on the desk. ‘Like this?’ She moved from the desk to the chair, leaning back so her hair trailed down and her breasts rose up.
‘Not like that. Christ, Winnie.’ He dragged his hands down his face. This was torture.
‘How then? Tell me.’
She wasn’t going to let this go. He could tell her to put her clothes back on, of course, but he knew her well enough now to know that it would wound her fragile pride, probably enough to send her running and keep her away.
She’d taken too many knocks already from Needledick; he wasn’t prepared to be the next fool who hurt her.
But to do as she asked compromised him in ways he hadn’t imagined possible the first time he’d asked her to let her draw him.
In trying to bring her into the sunlight, he’d inadvertently opened up wounds so deep in his own chest that he constantly expected to look down and find his shirt soaked in blood.
He was sweating at night, fighting nightmares in his sleep, and his work rate was taking the hit.
He’d worked on only one sculpture over the last weeks, and it wasn’t even close to the commission he was supposed to be working on for a gallery in Chicago.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK.’
Her shoulders relaxed as she sat forward in her chair and rested her head in her cupped hands, elbows on the desk. Behind her on the easel, he could see his drawing of her perched on the rock outside. She surrounded him, and she didn’t realise it but she was threatening to engulf him.
‘If we’re going to do this, I want you to choose your own pose.’
He left the room and slowly gathered the things he needed. Sketchbook. Pencils. His sanity. Swallowing hard, he headed back into the room.
‘Is this OK?’
Winnie had tried out the desk, and then the office chair, and eventually she’d decided that if he wanted her to pose herself, then she was going to throw caution to the wind.
She wasn’t going to hide or pose in a strategic way to minimise exposure.
The whole point of this was supposed to be liberation, after all.
Jesse had paused in the doorway, and she turned her eyes to him as she waited for his verdict.
‘You have no idea how much I’d love to sculpt you exactly like that.’
His dark eyes travelled across the length of her reclining body, taking in the way she’d draped herself sideways over the armchair, head thrown back, one arm outstretched behind her, her legs tossed carelessly over the other arm as if she were completely relaxed after a long soak in the bath.
She’d angled her body slightly into the room, hiding nothing from his gaze or his pencil.
He laid his things down on the desk, came to her and touched her outstretched hand.
‘Relax your fingers,’ he whispered. ‘Imagine you’re alone.’
Concentrating, Winnie let her arm drop and go heavy.
‘Lift your head up for a second,’ he said, sliding his hand under the weight of her hair when she did and trailing it over the arm of the chair.
‘Arch your back a tiny bit more?’ he whispered, and for the briefest of seconds he slid his hand into the gap between the small of her back and the chair and pressed his fingertips lightly against her skin to show where. ‘That’s perfect.’
His gaze moved to her legs, and with the same light touch he eased one knee inwards towards him. ‘Like this,’ he said. ‘It accentuates the curve of your hip.’
Winnie feared that her skin wasn’t strong enough to stop her heart from beating out of her chest, and that he must know from the flush on her neck that his quiet words and every feather-light touch set a new fire beneath her skin.
She watched him silently retreat to collect his sketchpad and pencils, and then drag the easel around to position it so he could stand and study her.
‘You can close your eyes if you want to,’ he said as he started to draw. ‘Imagine you’re alone and completely relaxed.’
Winnie didn’t close her eyes. ‘I don’t want to imagine I’m anywhere but here.’
Jesse paused for a second and swallowed, his pencil hovering over the page.
‘Tell me how you feel right now,’ he said, changing tack as he resumed drawing.
It was Winnie’s turn to stall. ‘Womanly,’ she said eventually.
‘Womanly is good,’ he murmured, shading. ‘What else?’
‘Brave,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’m braver now than I was when I first came to the island.’
‘As I recall it, you were pretty brave coming over to take your donkey back on that first afternoon,’ he said drily. Had that really only been a little more than a month ago? So much had happened, it felt like far longer.
‘Dutch courage,’ she said, smiling a little at the memory.
He nodded absently, studying her and then returning to the easel again.
‘So. Womanly and brave,’ he said. ‘What else?’
He’d reverted to his safe ground, the place where he was the in-charge guy who knew how to be cool, and she the pupil being taught freedom.
‘Sexy,’ she said quietly. ‘I think I feel sexy.’
Jesse laid his pencil down and stared at her.
‘You think you do?’
She nodded, and he crossed the room, slow and assured, and dropped onto his knees in front of the chair.
‘Don’t just think it, Winnie. Know it. You were right earlier. You’re Venus,’ he said. ‘So very, incredibly sexy.’
‘Jesse?’ she said. ‘Will you do something for me?’
He nodded, wordless.
‘Take off your T-shirt?’
He looked for a moment as if he might refuse, and then he reached down with one hand and pulled the hem up and over his head and chucked it aside.
Jesus bloody God. They went from artist and model to man and woman in the space of a heartbeat.
His skin was drenched in sunshine, and countless hours of sculpting and olive farming had given him fireman-worthy shoulders and lean biceps to match.
The atmosphere in the room had already been charged, but Winnie thought that if someone struck a match right now the whole barn would go up in smoke.
‘I want you to teach me,’ she said. ‘Teach me how to turn my head and my heart off.’
‘I’d need to touch you for that,’ he said, trouble in his dark gaze.
Winnie stared at him. ‘I know.’
For a moment he closed his eyes, and he looked at Winnie like a man on his knees saying his prayers.
‘It’s not a conscious thing,’ he said, opening his eyes again. ‘You still need to let yourself feel everything, to experience it all, to be in the moment.’
She nodded, otherwise completely still, and then he dipped forward and placed a kiss over her navel. She felt the heat of his mouth, and the brush of his hair on her skin as it fell forwards, and then the skim of his lips as he drifted up over her ribcage.
‘Don’t move,’ he murmured, raising his eyes to hers as his kissed the lower swell of her breasts.
She watched his mouth, his slow tenderness, breathing in sharply when he closed his lips over her nipple.
His eyelids drifted down, a dark sweep of lashes on his cheek as his tongue slid over her flesh, making her moan lightly because it felt so damn good to be this wanted.
His fingers moved to close over her other breast, giving her more, enjoying her more.