The Reluctant Nude - Meg Maguire [5]
She shifted in her chair. “You can guess, if you want. Although I can’t imagine what conclusions you’ve managed to draw, two hours into knowing me.”
“You’re tan.” Max scanned the uneven tone of her arms and neck and the tops of her breasts. “But not from a swimsuit. From a T-shirt. Sometimes a tank top. You work outdoors. With saltwater.”
“Why on earth do you think that?” Her tone told him he was right.
“Your hair…it has the look of the ocean about it. And you smell like the sea.”
“I haven’t been to a beach in weeks. And doesn’t everything here smell like the sea?”
He ignored her question. “Profession-wise, you do something that no one appreciates.”
“Excuse me?”
“You strike me as rather combative. I think maybe you have a job that goes unlauded. Something to do with biology,” Max said, divining his impressions from her no-nonsense style of dress and the air of practicality and curiosity that surrounded her. A hundred tiny clues that spoke volumes. “I think you do something that you love very much, and also I think that you would much rather be doing it now, instead of being trapped here in this dusty studio with me.”
“That’s true.” She seemed glad of an invitation to slight him.
“And I think you will be very difficult to work with.” Max smiled to himself.
“Oh do you?”
“May I call you Fallon?” he asked primly, sketching again.
“Fine.”
“Fallon,” he said, and he felt them shiver in tandem from the intimacy with which the word left his lips. “I question your motives for being here. Or rather, I fail to find any.”
“I have my reasons.”
“They are not in alignment with those of the man who has commissioned me.”
“You disapprove of the kind of patron my fiancé is. Is that it?”
Max shrugged. “Even the most distasteful patron will eventually die. It is not the patrons I hold to a high standard.”
Her eyes narrowed again. “I see.”
“Would you like to know something, Miss Frost? Fallon?” He held her gaze, caught there against his will for a long moment. “I do not believe you have a fiancé at all.”
She fidgeted with the hair elastic on her wrist, face blank, eyes cold and steady. Too steady. “Oh?”
“Certainly not one you care about.”
“Why do you say that?”
He cleared his throat and crossed his arms over his chest. “Because I’m asking you to pose for your lover, and you’re giving me a woman who looks like she’s waiting for a pap smear.”
Fallon blushed deeply. “Well, if this job’s not to your liking, why are you agreeing to it? You said you don’t need the money.”
“Have you ever been given seven hundred thousand dollars, Miss Frost?”
She froze, all the pink draining from her cheeks. “No.”
“Then you will just have to trust me when I say it makes life a hell of a lot more pleasant.”
“Fine,” she said, icy. “And you know, incidentally, maybe it’s you I’m not comfortable with. Ever think of that?”
He smiled. “This is no more for me than a photograph is for the camera that captures it. It’s the man on the other side that you have a problem with. I think maybe, you and I, we feel the same way about this man. Your fiancé. I think maybe we’ll both do as we’re told if the price is right.”
She held the pose but her tone turned deadly. “You watch yourself.”
He smiled deeper and licked his lips. “No matter. This is only the first day. I will figure you out soon enough.”
“Why do you even need to?” she asked, pissed.
“Have you seen my work?”
She nodded. “Pictures of it, yes.”
“Well, perhaps it is time you met some of your contemporaries in person.”
Chapter Two
Fallon exited through the studio’s rear door into a small vegetable garden. Beyond it lay a long expanse of yard, wild with tall grass and wind-twisted trees. The smell of saltwater and tomato plants yanked at her, trying to pull her into some indeterminate memory.
Scattered around the immediate area were a dozen marble casualties, busts and full-sized figures, all broken. She approached the closest one, a nude woman, a bit overweight, her elbows out, hands clasped behind her head. A great hunk of white stone was missing from