The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [27]
“Because he can’t have the real thing,” she said through quaking lips. “Ever.”
He finally stepped into his jeans and hiked them up his legs. “Ah.”
“Ah?”
“You don’t love him?” he asked.
“No. And you already knew that.”
“Do you love someone else? Someone who is gone, or who you cannot have? Another woman’s man, perhaps? Or another woman?”
“I don’t love anyone,” she said. “Not like that.”
He buckled his belt. “Have you? Did you?”
She hesitated, feeling the warmth in her cheeks again. “No. Never.”
He nodded, somber. “But this man, he loves you?”
“No. I don’t know. Not love… It’s very complicated.”
Max nodded, slowly, and turned away.
She studied his tattoos. Infraspinatus fossa. Scapula. She addressed his back. “Don’t act like you pity me.”
“You read so much into the spaces between words.”
“My sex life is none of your business, anyway.”
He turned to face her again, catching her eyes in that inescapable pull. “Right now, and for the next ten weeks, your body and its history are the center of my universe. Everything.” He gestured, fingertips to his chest then waving out to encompass the studio. “It is all in your orbit. And you—your body—you’re as cold as the stone I’m using to render it.”
Fallon bit back a hundred retorts as a flash of heat and anger coursed through her pulse points. She took a deep breath, and slapped him.
Only a slight flare of his nostrils and a coloring where her palm struck evidenced Max’s surprise. He didn’t speak for several breaths.
He licked his lips and cracked a tiny smile. “Better.”
Max let Fallon luxuriate in her anger for some time. He let himself luxuriate in what had happened. She’d surprised him—he hadn’t expected her to agree to touch him. He certainly hadn’t expected to catch her enjoying it. Reveling in it.
For the past two weeks, he’d been easy on her. She was good company, he’d discovered. Clever, and a pleasurable if contrary conversationalist, the sort of person he’d been missing for a long time now. He’d dismissed his inclination to unnerve her at every opportunity. Whatever reward brought and kept her here, it was strong, and she wouldn’t be scared off by him. She’d be a challenge, but she wouldn’t waste his time, he didn’t think. Not on purpose, at least. He’d get there with her. Professional and symbiotic, he’d concluded. Acceptable.
But then dear God, those hands on his bare skin. Max hadn’t seen that coming. He wasn’t a prurient man. He wouldn’t have pushed her to that if he’d known how…affirmatively his body would respond. But then those hands—smooth and cool, like glass lost at sea for unnumbered years, the opposite of his calloused, scar-rasped ones. He clenched and unclenched his fists in wonder, remembering how impossibly soft her fingertips had been.
She’d set him on fire with that cool touch. The contact had made him give in to fantasies he’d been diplomatically suppressing for two weeks. His wrists, actually bound. Her hands, touching, teasing. Peeling his briefs down, taking him in her hands and stroking until his cock ached for relief. Her eyes on him, equally greedy. He’d caught those eyes on him before, curious and carnal, but always cold. But this time…this time she’d looked so hungry he’d just about felt her lips wrapped around him.
Across the studio, Fallon stared out a skinny louvered window, one of many Max had scavenged and installed in his unending quest for better light. She toyed with the mechanism, the wooden slats casting shadows in wide stripes, then narrow ones, then wide again, across her head and shoulders. She looked calmer but she still buzzed with that electricity he’d felt in her fingertips. He walked over as casually as he could affect.
She turned to look up at him for a moment. She flipped the slats closed with a snap and wandered to the front of the house.
“Aren’t you going to apologize for hitting me?” he asked provocatively, following her.
“Aren’t you going to apologize for enjoying that experiment just a little too much?” She turned enough to showcase her condemning expression and stopped before