Artistic License (5 page)

Mick took another swing at her self-esteem by looking taken aback.

“Are you?” he asked bluntly.

No, she wasn’t, by choice and because it made her happier. It was intensely irritating to suddenly feel defensive about her very full, very meaningful life.

“I don’t really do relationships,” she said eventually, managing to pull off an impressive blend of inanity and pretension.

It was probably a damning indictment on her character that she wanted to ask him about his parents just so they could both retreat into a safe, sulky silence.

“You don’t really do relationships,” Mick repeated.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Sophy had started up a nervous tic with her pencil against the parchment board. She forced herself to put it down and immediately started playing with her reading glasses instead.

“Look, I’m all for sex and romance in theory.”

Oh my God.

Mick rubbed his jaw.

“Right,” he said after a pause. “I tend to prefer the former in practice, myself.”

Was he laughing?

“I’m not saying I don’t
enjoy
sex.”

Oh my GOD, Sophy. Remember when you were too shy to speak to him? Maybe you should revisit that.

“I just prefer intimacy, you know, in moderation,” she went on, a bit desperately. “For a short time. Then I’d rather do something else.”

Like what? Knit?

“That’s very sensible of you.”

He was openly grinning now, the bastard. The discovery that he was as big a prat as the rest of his gender broke the embarrassed constraint. She threw a crumpled ball of paper in his direction, falling short by about six feet. 

“I start going stir-crazy if I don’t get enough time by myself,” she explained, smiling reluctantly. “I just – I like my space, my own time. I like not having to answer to somebody every day. I start to feel claustrophobic in a relationship. Men expect you to go out, text them, talk, have sex, and it’s
all
the time. Don’t you find it exhausting?”

“Well, it depends on the type of sex,” Mick said, straight-faced. “And here I thought you were such a nice girl.”

This time, she weighted the ball of paper with an eraser and it found its target.

“I’m ending this horrendous conversation right now,” she announced, laughing. “You don’t see me asking why
you
aren’t seeing anyone.”

Her light-hearted observation effectively ended his amusement as well as the topic. Smile dropping away, he made a strange movement, a sort of half-shrug, half-flinch, and turned from her.

Sophy’s own laughter vanished. She stared at his averted profile, the rigid set of his wide shoulders, with concern. She found the whole thing a bit puzzling. Mick clearly had doubts, in her opinion totally unfounded doubts, about his attractiveness. But such self-abasement seemed out of character. Unlike men who relied on a thin façade of cocky swagger to cover a lack of integrity, there didn’t seem to be anything superficial about Mick. Nor would she have put him down as the type of man to place overwhelming importance on appearances.

Somebody had done a hell of a number on him.

She doubted he would really understand her need for solitude, either. Mick was as efficient with speech as he seemed to be with most other things; he didn’t waste words on idle chatter. But he wasn’t an introvert. On the contrary, she thought he might be a bit…lonely. In the short time she’d known him, he had revealed glimpses of a natural inclination toward physical affection. Several times, he had reached out to touch her shoulder or squeeze her hand, but with a hesitancy that suggested he was used to being shrugged off or pushed away.

She didn’t know him well enough to address the issue. It was the sort of thing that she would hesitate to raise with her most beloved family and friends, for fear of provoking a confrontation, let alone an acquaintance of a few days. Besides, she’d humiliated herself enough with the accidental compliments of his person.

Sophy cleared her throat.

“I think I’ve almost finished this particular sketch,” she said, a little too loudly. “If you wouldn’t mind sticking around for just another half hour or so?”

Mick glanced at his watch.

“No worries,” he said, a thread of relief touching his voice – because of the subject change? Because he could make an escape in thirty minutes? “My shift doesn’t start until three.”

Sophy went to the window and adjusted the drapes to let in more light.

“I think a standing pose if that’s okay,” she called over her shoulder. “Hands on hips?” Turning around, she tried to be impersonal in her observation. “And if you could bring your right leg forward. Yes. No – actually, do you mind if I just…?”

At his acquiescent nod and suddenly imperturbable expression, she approached and slowly placed one hand on his arm, tugging it into position. She usually felt a bit uncomfortable doing this, even with the paid professional models who likely couldn’t care less. She realised that a lot of people thought nothing of casual touches, but putting your hands on another person’s body or allowing them to touch you always had an element of intimacy. She thought that was one reason why most people wouldn’t want to so much as brush hands with someone they disliked.

That wasn’t the problem with touching Mick.

Her palm flattened against the swell of his chest muscle to push his shoulder back and she felt the faint shudder that moved through his torso. Looking up instinctively, she met his intense gaze. His grey eyes dilated to near black as they fixed on her mouth. If she hadn’t been deprived in the height department, their faces would have been close enough to feel the fan of breath against cheek. As it was, she could still see the flickering of lines at the corners of his eyes and lips and the texture of his skin beneath the dark blur of stubble.

Unconsciously, her fingers closed into a fist, her nails scraping his skin as they curled. He made a hoarse sound in the back of his throat and his jaw angled toward her. Her heart was racing. His hands came up and clasped the curve of her hips, his palms cool and coarse through the thin viscose of her dress. Sophy was swaying forward into the sheltering curve of his body when he straightened with an abruptness that almost cricked her neck.

Away from the warmth he generated, Sophy stood blinking, running her hand up her arm, chasing the line of goosebumps which raced up the back of her wrist like mercury rising in a thermometer.

From a safe distance, Mick stood watching her, troubled, one hand clasped to the back of his solid neck.

She could think of nothing to say. She couldn’t really think, period.

Stupefying lust. Not just a myth, then.

Dreading his next words, Sophy’s flight instinct was in full force when he eventually suggested, with deliberate calm, “Maybe we ought to come back to the sketch another day.”

Good idea.

***

The day had been going reasonably well until she’d started touching him and repeating the word “sex” about sixty-five times. Mick had managed to overlook the shirtless absurdity of his own role and concentrate on the enjoyment of watching Sophy in her element. She was flushed and pretty in the sunny white studio, smudged up to the elbows in charcoal, stone dust rising in gentle puffs from the floor to stain her bare legs. He’d been a bit concerned about her safety working in such a dusty environment, but she’d cracked the windows as soon as they’d arrived and reassured him that she wore a protective mask when she started the actual sculpting. There had been a faint bristle to the words. Obviously no one got between the woman and her work, an ethic he could appreciate even if he didn’t entirely approve. The sights and sounds of her asthma attack were engrained on his psyche.

He’d been surprised by how much and how immediately he’d enjoyed her company. The strong physical attraction had initiated at the hospital, but he had thought that her intense shyness would make the hours-long sketch session heavy going. Instead, she had visibly relaxed around him, comfortable in her domain with her tools of the trade, and continued to flourish. The opened-up Sophy was his personal nightmare: bright, kind, bloody funny, and so beautiful he found it hard to keep his focus on her directions.

By the time she’d breathed in his face and rubbed up against his bare chest, he was attracted, aroused, filled with dread, and subsequently acted like a complete ass. He’d been millimetres from kissing her when some semblance of sanity had returned at the eleventh hour. The realisation that he’d lost track of his surroundings, the time, place, everything but his damn hormones, including his intellectual awareness of Sophy, had shocked him into retreat. He’d had no idea where she was at mentally, how willing a participant she was in the moment, whether he was sharing or forcing something. It went against the grain of both his training and his personal code of conduct.

Pull back. Refocus.

And a cold bloody shower wouldn’t go astray.

Apparently he never learned his lesson. It was a sobering thought.

The ease of the day was clearly over. Sophy hadn’t been able to make eye contact with him for a good ten minutes. She was holding the sketch under his nose for his approval now, keeping her eyes fixed on the parchment like she’d never seen it before in her life.

Mick forced his own grim focus to the preparatory work. It was excellent. It was clearly his body and yet it wasn’t a portrait of him. There was a cipher quality to the figure. He could pick out the suggestion of individual features, the firm delineation of bones and muscle, but there was a suitably godlike obscurity in the total effect.

Clearing her throat, Sophy pointed at the page and explained how she would sculpt a raised tattoo of flowering vines over Hades’s torso to signify the presence of Persephone. Her fingernails were cut short and workmanlike, but were painted in pink and white stripes. The smartphone leaning dangerously from the pocket of her loose dress was a similarly aggressive shade of candyfloss, which seemed a crime against an otherwise perfectly decent model. She was the most overtly feminine person he had met since his kindergarten days, when small girls usually came bedecked with bows, ruffles and sparkly purses.

If he’d previously thought about it, he would have said his taste in women leaned more toward the tomboy type. He couldn’t imagine Sophy sprawled on the couch with a beer, shouting her displeasure at a poor ref’s call. She certainly wouldn’t be able to
play
sports with her asthma. In fact, outdoor pursuits in general seemed like a tremendously bad idea. He could feel his blood pressure rising at the very thought of taking her camping, away from the survival response time for medical assistance.

There was no reason why he should be this attracted.

Shit.

It wasn’t an issue. He had no desire to get involved with anyone at this point. And look at them, for Christ’s sake. It was as if someone had mixed up the casting calls for a flowery chick flick and
Terminator 5
. He felt three times larger and at least twice as ugly as he actually was just standing near her. The chances of her reciprocating anything other than wary reluctance seemed to hover around zero.

“I’ll just lock up my stuff and then let you get back to work,” Sophy was saying as she stacked together her papers and pencils.

Shaking off his worsening mood, Mick went over and closed the windows, double-checking the lock fastenings out of habit.

“The security here isn’t optimal,” he commented. “Any halfway-competent thief could break these locks in less than ten seconds.”

Sophy looked a bit amused and slightly more relaxed, which was a welcome relief after several long minutes of watching her hair all but crackle from the tension racketing up her spine.

“We all have a secure office space to leave tools and valuables,” she said. “I don’t think anybody would leave laptops or jewellery or anything behind at night. It’s mostly only WIPs that are left in the studios.”