Curve Effect (A BBW Box Set of Contemporary, Science Fiction and Paranormal Romances) (30 page)

So, that makes him a serious artist.

She thought of the hallucinations that had lasted until she had stripped the linen and chain away. And then there was Percy’s outrageous behavior—the woman had pretty much stated that she was a muse and that Bryce was taking her place for the weekend. But Percy was a nutcase.

Or was she? Could all that male arousal be the product of one sliced up sheet and broken charm bracelet?

“I’ve wanted to paint you for months, but you never stop outside your apartment long enough to start a real conversation.”

He was standing on the patio’s threshold, a red and black kimono pressed against his lower abdomen. Bryce had a moment to wonder if he was still hard before she looked up to find him staring at her chest. She followed his gaze and realized she had dropped the protective shield of her arm while looking at the easel.

Her breasts were fully exposed--so was her own arousal. Her nipples were drawn tight, the areolas darkened in excitement from pale cherry to a deep red.

Diaz blinked once, slowly, his hand jerking against the kimono and what had grown to an only partially concealed erection. He pulled his lower lip into his mouth, licking it as he did so.

“To paint you like this.”

Bryce remained motionless. This really couldn’t be happening. Not the Percy thing, not sitting naked in front of Diaz with his body responding as if the sight of her was turning him on. She swallowed, her throat parched at the same time her mouth salivated over the outline of his ample cock pressed hard against what had been a loose pair of cotton shorts.

“Will you let me paint you?”

Soft and low, the question had all the sexual power of a full-throated purr. Bryce’s mouth twitched with the perverse desire to tell Diaz he could paint her white if he wanted to. She didn’t think it was possible for her nipples to get any tighter, but the idea of his coming—on her or in her—sent her body temperature spiking higher. Far from wanting to run, her initial response was to fully unfold in front of him. Maybe if the whole Percy thing was real, so was this.

No, Percy was a whack job
—an infectious one at that if Bryce was starting to believe there was any possibility that she really had been deputized by a runaway muse or that Diaz found her body inspiring.

“Bryce.” He whispered her name, a slight tremble running through his tensed shoulders. “You’re killing me here…yes, or…?”

Had he really just refused to acknowledge the possibility she would say “no”?

She reached for the kimono, hoping if it could wrap around his broad shoulders, it would fit her, too. “I don’t even know your first name,” she said, turning her back to him as she slipped her arms into the robe’s sleeves. Like her body cared what his name was. She’d been fantasizing about him from the first day she’d met him. And his good manners and frequent smiles had already challenged her resolve more than once to remain as distant from him as she was from her other neighbors.

“Walt,” he answered.

She didn’t need to see him to know he was smiling—pleasure filled his voice, the tenor and warmth enough to leave her sleepy and weak-kneed. But how could she acquiesce after all this time trying to be invisible to him?

Trying but not wanting.

She squelched the traitorous thought with a flick of her shoulders.

“It says ‘G. Diaz’ on your mailbox.” She turned around to find his hand extended to help her up, the line of his arm a direct draw to the thick bottom swell of his erection and the heavy handful of balls.

Praying he hadn’t caught the direction of her gaze, Bryce offered a nervous smile and shook her head “no”. Diaz’s hauling her up from the patio was not an option.

“I prefer ‘Walt’,” he answered and folded his hands behind his back, the motion pushing his cock closer.

“Well, someone has to.” A tiny snort possessed her at the thought of someone so sexy being named “Walt”. Of all the little bedroom—shower, living room and kitchen—fantasy names she’d dreamt up for G. Diaz, “Walt” wasn’t anywhere close to being on the list. Hell, even “Geronimo” had suggested itself.

“It’s the Anglicization of ‘Galtero’,” he explained.

“Why’d you choose that?”

“You’re just stalling, Bryce.” He tilted his head and winked at her before his gaze dropped to where her hands clutched the edges of the kimono together. He hadn’t been gentleman enough to find the sash for her, she noted.

“Uhm…no. I wouldn’t call it stalling. You want me to strip for you,” she answered. “Well…strip again. And yet I don’t really know anything about you.”

“Not from a lack of trying on my part.” Leaning back against the apartment’s exterior wall, he folded his arms over his chest. “And, to answer your question, do I look like a ‘Galtero Diaz’?”

He looked, she thought, like a wonderful mix of many things. She knew he was paler in winter—at least he had been when he moved in. But right now the olive green eyes were set deep in a face tanned to a burnished gold-brown she couldn’t hope to achieve with her wholly Germanic heritage. His hair was a jet black that, when he tilted his head like he just had, threw off natural highlights of deep silver. And he was certainly taller than any of the Hispanic men she knew. He must be pushing 6’3”.

She shrugged. “Maybe a little, Walt.”

“So now you know my first name. What else is it going to take to get you naked and inside my apartment?”

He threw another bad boy wink at her. She blushed, enjoying the way Walt was playing with her. She looked down to where her bare foot brushed against the linen.

That couldn’t really be the key, could it?

What else could it be?

Bryce gave a weak nod in the direction of the fabric and bracelet. “I guess you could start by getting a bag for those?”

“Is that a ‘yes’?”

His grin was infectious and she forced herself not to return the smile. “It’s a ‘maybe.’”

He was still smiling, seemed incapable of doing anything else. “Better than a ‘no’.”

Holding one hand up, he cautioned her against running away. When she promised she wouldn’t, he dashed back into the apartment. Returning a few seconds later, he scooped the fabric and bracelet into the bag and offered it to her.

“Could you carry it inside?” She felt slightly paranoid, but even the brief contact of the material against her foot had threatened another psychedelic panorama.

Walt bowed and extended his arm toward the apartment’s interior in invitation. She wanted to reach out and put the palm of her hand flat against the tanned muscles of his back, feel them ripple as he straightened. She imagined running her finger down his body, just as he had stroked her. And then she envisioned him naked and flat on his back, her tongue teasing the full circumference of his balls before she licked her way up to the swollen head of his cock.

“Still not sure?” he asked.

His low purr brushed against her visions of him staked out on the patio’s rough concrete. Blushing, she dipped her head and stepped inside the apartment. She was going to embarrass herself—badly—if she didn’t immediately stop fantasizing about him.

Stopping in front of the black leather couch, she turned and frowned at him. With the patio door open the last fifteen or so minutes, the apartment’s interior had lost its air conditioned coolness. She grimaced at the thought of her bare flesh against the leather, of the way it would stick and peel in a drawn out manner when she moved, reminding him of how much flesh she had just hidden inside his kimono. “Where do you want me?”

“In my bed.”

Dizzy, instantly so, she leaned against the couch. “Excuse me?”

Oh…it’s…uhm.” He stopped and a golden peach blushed beneath his tan. He pointed in the direction of a closed door. “It’s the richest looking room in the apartment, which goes with the style I had in mind.”

Brows raised, she scanned the front room and kitchen. The furnishings were far removed from what she would consider inexpensive. The leather couch was part of a three piece set accompanied by a solid mahogany coffee and end tables. A mahogany entertainment center housed a sound system and forty-two inch television.

She hadn’t been in that many of the neighboring apartments, but she was pretty sure their interior furnishings were more like her own—a mismatch of self-assembly pressboard papered with wood grain. Next to the closed bedroom door was another room that seemed to serve as a makeshift studio with a second easel and some blank canvases in view. So, he essentially had two bedrooms, while the cost of just a one-bedroom apartment left Bryce riding city buses.

“I never see you go to anything that looks like a job,” she said, disbelieving he paid for everything just from commissioned portraits. He did go out for extended periods, often returning late at night, but the hours seemed too erratic for work.

“Oh, I paint here or at the client’s place, depends on where and when the muse claims me.” He had moved to the master bedroom’s door, one hand holding the small bag with the sheet and chain, the other resting on the doorknob. “You don’t mean to tell me that you’ve been paying attention?”

Her turn to blush—again. She looked away and hoped he hadn’t caught her body’s involuntary confession of just how much attention she’d been paying to his schedule.

“I’m just naturally observant,” she said when she could tell he wouldn’t move until she answered.

“‘Naturally observant’…really? So all the times I’ve tried to get you to talk to me over the last seven months for more than a minute at a time—you were flat out avoiding me?”

He opened the door and the click of the handle drew her attention back to where he stood. Her gaze landed on the sculpted lines of his bronze-brown shoulder. His body partially blocked her view of the bedroom beyond, but, from what she could see, they went together—Diaz and the room. The four-poster bed and dresser had been shaped from dark mahogany that matched the living room set. The bed coverings were a cascade of burgundies and chocolates in silk and velvet, with a touch of dark purple and gold trim. The room and its owner were both rich in texture and color, their surfaces demanding to be touched and admired.

“Well, if you won’t answer, will you at least come and lie down?” He moved to the bed and began to mess it up, pushing one side of the bedspread and top sheet toward the center until he had shaped a den for her to nestle in.

“I won’t answer because you’re fibbing.” Surely all those “hellos” of his when they passed going to or from their apartments had merely been good manners on his part. And she’d mainly given him mumbled replies in return, hoping it would sink in that she didn’t need him to waste his time on her even if his little attentions fueled her hopeful fantasies.

“I’m not.” He was staring at her again, eyes roaming her body. Her face, the bit of exposed cleavage where she held the robe shut, her hips and the bare curving legs. He gave the bag a little shake. “Where do you want the toga and bracelet?”

Shit,
he was holding proof that she hadn’t hallucinated Percy’s visit. And if the muse’s accoutrements were the cause of his intense interest, how long would the effect last if she wasn’t wearing them? When would he notice the too small breasts mismatched with wide hips and a stomach that curved out as much as her ass did?

“Earth to Bryce.” He spoke softly, his attention seemingly occupied with absorbing the details of her body.

She stared at him, her mind blank with rising panic. “What?” she managed after a few more seconds of silence.

“The toga, where do you want it?”

“Is that what it’s called?” she asked, stalling while she looked for someplace to put it where she could touch it without him noticing.

Surprising her, he blushed as he answered. “Technically, no. Women…well, most women, didn’t wear togas.”

The way he lowered his gaze disarmed her and she took a wild guess at the cause of his sudden embarrassment. “You mean only disreputable women wore togas?”

Diaz took a deep breath and looked back up. She felt the heat of that slowly raised gaze and the strength of her body’s reaction.

“Or the occasional goddess.” He didn’t give her time to fumble out a response. He blinked, then grinned at her. “So where do you want it?”

“The bag?” she asked. Just to be sure. If he was offering something else…

He nodded, his smile firmly cemented on his face.

“Under the pillows,” she answered, hesitating, knowing it wasn’t too late to leave.
If she wanted to.
“I think.”

“Sounds like a safe place.” He stuck the bag under one of the pillows and then fluffed the rest of them up before patting the mattress.

Slowly, Bryce crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. It was the closest she’d been to him since leaving the patio and every cell of her body was aware that if she moved another inch to the left, she would be touching him. Reaching out, Diaz caressed her white-knuckled hand. She had a death grip on the robe’s edges and he whisper stroked the back of her fingers.

“The robe has to come off, Bryce. That’s the way it works.”

She studied his face. His gaze had taken on a faraway cast. The mouth was soft, contemplative, and she wondered what it would be like to kiss him or have him take the tip of her breast into his mouth. With her body still covered in a light sheen of sweat, she could almost imagine the glide of his tongue over her nipple and up the slope of her breast, climbing until he reached the hollow of her throat. She heaved a big sigh at the thought, her hands beginning to shake.