Chapter Fifteen #3
She held in the smart answer on the tip of her tongue and carefully turned it over, then laid it down again on the paper. Jesse had framed his pencil and charcoal drawing in an ornate gilt frame, lending his already provocative subject a decadent, rococo air.
‘What do you think?’ he murmured, frowning. ‘A little too heavy on shading here?’ He traced his finger in the air over her hip.
She caught hold of his hand and moved it out of the way so she could study his drawing properly.
It was from just yesterday; he must have worked for hours to layer in so much life and detail.
He seemed to have captured more than her curves and her angles as she’d lounged across the chair with the arm flung above her head; he’d caught the essence of how she’d felt for a few hours with him. Braver. Womanly. In control.
‘I think it’s the woman I want to be,’ she breathed eventually, because she didn’t care one bit about the accuracy of his shading on her hip.
What took her breath away was the devil-may-care attitude of the girl gazing back at her from the drawing; she had a look in her eyes that said, ‘I’m sexy and we both bloody well know it.
’ She wasn’t encumbered by her past or frightened of her future.
She was totally in the moment, confident and relaxed in her own skin.
Jesse looked up from the painting to Winnie. ‘This is who I see when I look at you,’ he said softly.
‘It’s not who I see in the mirror.’ She shook her head, staring at the drawing. The woman in Jesse’s drawing might closely resemble her physically, but Winnie could only hope to identify with her attitude one day.
Jesse sighed, then caught hold of her hand and tugged her over to the grand cheval mirror standing in one corner of her room. Someone, Ajax maybe, had draped long strings of pearls around its old carved oak frame, a fitting boudoir mirror for the bohemian room.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked when he positioned her centrally in front of it, his hands lightly on her hips as he stood behind her.
‘Showing you what you should see.’
Winnie met his unwavering gaze in the glass.
‘Jesse …’
He shook his head, determined. ‘Here’s what’s gonna happen next, Legs. You’re gonna stop speaking now, and listen to me. If at any point you feel the need to interrupt me, don’t.’
‘Bolshy,’ she muttered, shuffling from one foot to the other, feeling awkward.
He shrugged. ‘I’m not kidding. No words except for mine.’
She sighed, pursing her lips and rolling her eyes, but all the same she found that she really wanted to hear his thoughts.
She’d asked him what he saw when he looked at her the first time he’d drawn her, but this was altogether different.
Then she’d sensed that he told her what he thought she needed to hear. This time he was shooting from the hip.
‘Let’s see,’ he said. placing his hands on her shoulders, his head on one side, considering. ‘Without wishing to make this into something it isn’t supposed to be, this really would work better without your dress.’
She opened her mouth to say something, but he shook his head. ‘No words. You can leave your dress on if you prefer.’
Winnie glanced down and wiggled her pale polished toes against the mellow wooden flooring, feeling the heat of his hands from her shoulders all the way down to the soles of her feet.
His thumbs brushed lightly over her shoulder blades, backwards, forwards, until finally she met his eyes in the mirror again.
‘You can take it off, if you’d prefer,’ she said.
He paused, and then raised his hands to untie her hair from the band holding it up. She watched him take care not to hurt her, working the band out until he could muss her hair with his fingers, snapping the band around his wrist.
‘Better.’ He smoothed his hand down from the crown of her head, over the side of her face and further down her neck.
‘Your hair is the first thing I noticed about you, Winnie. Probably the first thing most people notice about you. It’s sunlight and lazy, salt-tangled days at the beach.
It’s windblown streaks of gold on a cold autumn day.
Or it’s a tether to hold you captive, if I want to.
’ He wrapped her hair around his hand several times as he spoke to demonstrate, tugging it just hard enough to lift her chin up.
He didn’t glance away from her eyes as he spoke, even when he lowered his lips to the curve of her neck. ‘You see?’
She saw. Or rather she closed her eyes and felt. She felt the heat of his breath on her skin, and the slow, sure caress of his mouth.
‘Open your eyes,’ he said, letting go of her hair. Winnie did as he asked, watching his fingers play idly with the shoestring straps of her short summer dress.
‘You know what I noticed about you next?’ he asked, standing close enough behind her for her to feel the brush of his body.
Seeing them together like this highlighted the physicality of him; his height over hers, the breadth of his shoulders, the dark gleam of his hair.
They were a contrast in every way; his masculinity served to heighten her femininity.
No one had ever really made Winnie feel fragile before, but it was an accurate way to describe how looking at them together in the mirror made her feel.
She shook her head, not prepared to guess what Jesse was going to say.
‘Your eyes,’ he said, catching hold of her jaw lightly between his thumb and fingers, holding her face steady. ‘They lay you bare, Legs. Don’t ever try lying, because those eyes of yours will always, always give you away. They told me a million things about you within seconds of meeting you.’
‘They did?’ she whispered, staring at him.
‘She’s true. She’s ballsy. She’s hurt. She’s soft. She’s smart. She’s kind.’ He dragged his thumb across her bottom lip. ‘Your eyes told me all of those things right there on the kitchen doorstep before you even opened your mouth.’
‘Careful,’ she whispered. ‘You’re doing that unintentionally romantic thing again.’
Jesse swept her hair over one shoulder and then slipped his arm around her waist, holding her against him, his hand spanned flat over her stomach.
‘You’re very, very lovely, Winnie. You shouldn’t need me to tell you how a man could lose hours just looking at you. Is that sexist?’ He shrugged, unrepentant. ‘Maybe so and guilty as charged, but it’s just human nature. You’re the kind of woman who makes a man’s mind wander.’
Winnie didn’t know what to say, but then hadn’t he told her not to say anything at all? He held her close against him as he spoke, watching her eyes as he stroked his free hand from her shoulder to her fingertips.
‘You need to understand your own power, Winnie. Because it isn’t just about this –’ He broke off and nodded towards her reflection.
‘It’s not just the fact that you’re a crazy, sexy cross between angelic and filthy.
’ He laughed then, low in his chest which was pressed against her spine.
‘It’s so much more than that. Some people, they just seem to shine. You’re one of those people.’
He probably had no idea how much his quietly spoken words mattered to her, or how much strength she drew from his candid, admiring thoughts.
Or maybe he did; wasn’t that precisely why he was doing this, to build up her pride and her self-confidence?
Jesse Anderson was a walking, talking contradiction.
‘That’s what I’ve tried to catch in the drawing, the quicksilver of you.’
It was so stripped back and lovely that Winnie felt her heart contract, and she turned slowly in his arms to look at him.
‘No one’s ever looked at me that way before,’ she whispered.
A small half-smile tipped his mouth. ‘Yes, they have. Everyone does, Winnie. It’s just you that doesn’t see it.’
She caught her breath, enjoying the way his hands pressed her close against him.
‘You know what I see when I look at you, Jesse?’
He lifted one eyebrow, amused. ‘A bloody sexy Aussie?’
She laughed, but shook her head. ‘Well, yes, but I see other things too.’
‘This was about you,’ he said, already mentally closing down in that way he did.
‘And now it’s about you,’ she countered, stroking his cheek. ‘I see a man who’s hiding behind smoke and mirrors.’
Robbed of his smile, he looked wary and momentarily vulnerable.
‘You’re wrong,’ he said, his light-hearted tone an unintentionally perfect example of those smoke and mirrors. ‘What you see is what you get with me, Legs.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Well, what I see is a man who wants to believe his own mantra that love is complicated and difficult and counter-productive, but his eyes didn’t get the memo because they tell me that he’s emotional, and sensitive, and romantic to the core.’
‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ he said, cupping her face tenderly and proving her right.
Winnie turned her face and pressed a kiss into his palm.
‘I did have, for a long time.’ She hadn’t realised how wrong until lately.
‘Finally something we can agree on,’ he said.
‘We should probably stop talking now while we’re still friends,’ she said, her fingers moving over the warm, firm skin at the back of his neck.
‘Friends is good.’ He pressed his mouth against her forehead.
Winnie closed her eyes and leant into his body, inhaling the scent of him down into her bones.
His hands moved in her hair, and it was impossible not to tip her head back into his massaging fingers, and it was nobody’s fault when his lips found hers and they kissed.
It wasn’t the kiss of friends. It was no brief peck or absent-minded see-you-later.
It was the culmination of their sensually charged conversation; his affirmation that she was quicksilver in his blood, her confirmation that he was all of the good things he so hotly denied.
When he opened her mouth under his to slide his tongue in, his kiss said all of the things he couldn’t.