Model Release (The Art of Domination #1) (6 page)

And right on cue….

My cell vibrated in the
pocket of my slacks, and my spine went stiff and jerked me straight in the
chair even before I had the chance to recognize the buzzing sensation. My head
filled with one thought: Nolan Beal. And my god but something had to be wrong
with me; I had to be overly tired or coming down with something, because I
instantly… got wet. Achingly so.

Oh, who was I kidding?
There was definitely something wrong with me, the same thing wrong with me when
I’d almost flunked out of college during my wild girl artist phase. I liked the
artist life and the bad boy painters and sculptors and musicians
and photographers
. I liked sleeping all
day and staying up all night dancing and drinking and talking art. I liked….

I
had
truly liked the smell and sound of Nolan Beal’s studio and
Nolan Beal himself. Of photo chemicals and expensive cosmetics, sweat and
perfume, and on him… orange and cinnamon and rum. Of pulsing music and a
rough-around-the-edges voice with a smooth, deep center that suggested worldliness.
I had liked it when he loomed over me and breathed hot against my ear, and it
had been all I could do to hide the fact that he was sending shivers down the
opposite side of my body with each word, like he had cross-wired my brain.

Now I slide the phone
from my pocket and read the message sent from an unfamiliar number: My studio
in two hours, Brown Eyes.

“Problem,
ma petite
?” my grandfather asked.

I
hm’ed
at that question, without looking up from the screen. Yes, a problem. “Maybe,”
I murmured absently, as I wondered how Beal had gotten my cell number. Only now
did I realize I’d left his studio without giving him any of my contact details.
Certainly, Cheri could have given him my number. That possibility sat sour and
heavy in my stomach; I could imagine the hell I was going to catch from my
little sister for helping her—for
interfering
.
For bulldozing through her free will, as she liked to say with an actress’s
gift for drama.

Good god, what if she
was there tonight? The possibility tensed every muscle in my stomach, back,
shoulders, neck, like I was turning to stone.

“Maybe?” Pop repeated.

I stared up blankly at
the question. My thoughts were too consumed—with the horror of the possibility
of Cheri witnessing what I was going to have to do tonight—to really track the
current conversation. “Oh, um, no,” I told Pop as I pushed away my coffee cup
and rose from the table. “Just… just some confusion over some, um, social plans
I have tonight.”

When I bent over to
kiss Pop’s temple, he grabbed and squeezed my hand. His fingers were warm and
rough, momentarily comforting. “It’s good, Iva. Go out and have some fun with
your friends. You girls, you and Darcie, you’re too old for your ages these
days. I don’t like that.”

The weight and
melancholy of his voice tugged hard at my insides, a yearning to chase that
sadness from him. “We’re fine, Pop,” I said,
always
said when these family hurts rose up to haunt us. “We’ve
just got so much up in the air. That’s a good thing—lots of possibilities and
opportunities.”

Which was the blindly
optimistic way of reframing the fact that both my older sister and I had small,
quiet, confining jobs at the center of lives under construction. At
twenty-eight and twenty-five, respectively, we weren’t where we wanted to be or
where we’d imagined ourselves at this age. My mental image was clear and solid:
my elder sister a history professor at an Ivy League university, my younger
sister a world-traveling archaeologist or architect or whatever Cheri wanted to
major in this week, and me a successful professional painter mentoring youth in
the arts. And we’d all get together every holiday at Dad’s house and take those
hokey family portraits at the foot of the staircase. Where we’d caught
sixteen-year-old Darcie having her first
real
kiss after sneaking in thirty minutes past curfew. Where I’d broken my wrist
bannister-sliding when I was ten. Where Dad had almost dropped Cheri on her
head when she was a newborn just coming home from the hospital with him and our
step-mom, Lynn. Naturally, Darcie and I always told Cheri that Dad
had
dropped her on her head.

Yes, a clear, solid
image of a home life that never changed, where family members never died or ran
away or moved and never called. Where Mom had never abandoned us as toddlers
and Dad hadn’t had that heart attack three years back. Where Pop, in a fit of
grief and temper, hadn’t told Uncle Geoff that he wished his ungrateful elder
son had died instead of my father, before sending Geoff away for good.

“I don’t like my girls
to be sad,” Pop reminded me, as though reading my thoughts with the blue eyes
he had passed to Cheri via Dad. Unlike our younger half-sister, Darcie and I
had Mom’s brown eyes. I didn’t remember her, but there were photos, as proof.

“I know, Pop,” I said
before nuzzling my cheek briefly against the coarse gray hair on the top of his
head. “We’re just getting ourselves situated. No worries.”

So I told him. So I
told myself as I headed back to my place next door to get ready for my meeting—
my session
—with Nolan Beal. Despite my
nervous stomach and unstable knees, this was just a task like any other, one of
the things I had to do to protect my sisters while we all got our lives in
order. It was aggravating. It was galling. But I could tolerate it, like
paperwork and taxes and cardio. Necessary inconveniences. So I told myself.

Two hours later,
though, climbing that cramped staircase in the Cathedral again, I questioned my
judgment in trusting Nolan Beal and his nonsensically cooperative (if patently
lascivious) offer. I lagged, dragging my fingertips along the textured wall,
patterns muted by thick layers of white paint. I debated.

My gut said Beal was
too sly by half, obviously insincere, and dangerously hedonistic. Yet it wanted
me to do this anyway, because he was also sexy and commanding in that
devastatingly cavalier way that made every end point in my body—from fingertips
to toes, nipples to clitoris, even the hair standing on end at the back of my
neck—bristle and
throb
. And now my
knees were trembling again. As I stepped out into the unexpected silence of the
seventh floor corridor, facing the now closed black lacquered doors, I held my
breath to fight off the fear I was about to hyperventilate.

My head told me this
was about as smart as a recovering addict sitting down for tea with the
neighborhood dealer. Even just this morning, being immersed for only a few
minutes in all that pretty chaos of the studio, familiar compulsions had come
scratching at my veins, the back of my throat, the core of my sex. Sensory
memories of my three deadliest sins—dancing, drinking, and sex—overwhelmed me
then as they did now, as I knocked at the glossy black doors and faced Stan
when he answered. I used to think the fact that these sins produced art was my
saving grace. As Stan and his Hawaiian shirt swung aside to open the way for
me, I doubted.

Yet it was Stan, my
logical side reminded me, who convinced me to accept Nolan Beal’s offer. I was
sure he would have been surprised to know it. The assistant’s distressed
reaction that afternoon when Nolan had struck our bargain, when Stan had tried
desperately to dissuade the photographer by reminding him that they needed
those photos of Cheri for their upcoming exhibition, indicated the risk on
Beal’s part was real. So even my logical side was telling me to go through with
this. To suffer the embarrassment and the torturously familiar temptations like
this was just a line at the DMV. Grin and bear it and get it done.

Just
don’t for a second let yourself enjoy it, Iva
.

There wasn’t anything
pleasant, to be sure, in the painful skip I felt in my chest or the sloshing
wave of nausea swirling inside my stomach when I saw the photographer again. He
wasn’t even looking this direction and I was feeling the same panic I had the
first time we’d made eye contact.

What’s
he going to do to you, Iva?

From behind, the
sculpted musculature of Beal’s tanned back tapered gradually into his lean
torso. Because he obviously worked out, the contour along his spine was
pronounced and as flowing as Michelangelo’s David. I didn’t think I’d ever
wanted to touch something quite so much—or resented the urge so thoroughly.

No tattoos. I wasn’t
sure why I expected, even
wanted
,
tattoos. Not the kind like my grandfather had.
Pop’s
were military, meaningful; they said something about where he had been and what
he had done with his life. On Beal, I expected whatever was hip at the moment,
maybe something tribal on a bicep or something wicked and
gothy
on his chest or arching along his back from shoulder to shoulder. That was the
stereotype, I guessed. And if he had at least fit stereotype, I could have at
least relied on that to anticipate him… and to disregard him.

It was eight at night,
and Beal didn’t look like a moment had passed since I’d left, as he whirled
from a little knot of
other
models
and activity to face the sound of my footsteps. My breaths squeezed unevenly up
through my tightened throat in a staccato beat of shallow huffs that would
barely have stirred a hair. Why had I assumed we’d be alone, just the
photographer and assistant and I? Small mercy I didn’t see Cheri in the group.

“The brown-eyed girl
returns,” Nolan said as he sauntered toward me with a disconcerting display of
firm muscle shifting under smooth skin, still bare-chested. Maybe the jeans had
changed, but I was trying not to stare.
 
It still hurt to look at him in the way it hurt to look too closely at
the sun. The hair was still perfect, and he still smelled like the pages of a
glossy men’s fashion magazine, the kind with ads and samples for expensive
colognes the average guy would never be able to afford or even pronounce. He
wore a smile that was no more than a suggestion, an impression, or maybe just
my wishful thinking seizing on something that wasn’t really there. Just lights
and makeup and Photoshop, this whole place, all these people.

Now one thick, neat
sable brow twitched in a moment of what might have been surprise or…
satisfaction as Beal looked me in the face, then up and down. “No makeup.
Clean, loose hair. Comfy, zippered sweats that are easy to get into and out
of,” he observed, and numerous parts of me shivered under his scrutiny.
“Someone might think you know the way this works, Miss Moreau. You have a
background in modeling?”

This question annoyed
me, as we both knew I was too short and weighed too much to be a model in any
traditional sense. I wasn’t heavy or stumpy, but I also wasn’t the lanky,
willowy, long-limbed type required for fashion and lingerie modeling. Tipping
my head impatiently to one side and grimacing up at Beal, I bit out a curt, “No.”

“Then as an artist,” he
said with a smug grin—not
asked
,
stated, like I’d answered more than one question with considerably more than a
one-word response. Like I’d helped him win a bet to which I wasn’t party.

My annoyance cut the
adrenaline and sensory noise vibrating through my body, steadying me, affording
me a moment to catch my breath. “Let’s get this done,” I told him, and I was
proud of myself for keeping a firm, unaffected tone when I was anything but.

Beal lifted his square
chin and peered down his strong, straight, model-perfect nose at me. “Right to
business, just like this morning. That how you always operate, Miss Moreau? No
pleasantries or dawdling or rose-smelling?”

Ironic, I thought, that
his small talk came off as particularly pointed and
purposeful
, like a verbal Rorschach text. But why would he need to
assess me?
 
What exactly was he hoping to
find out? And
then
, what was he
planning on doing with that information? The sudden anxiety that he was looking
for a way to renege on our agreement gripped the base of my spine like a fist.

“Your dime, remember,”
I growled through clenched teeth, recalling his earlier insistence that his
studio was his realm, a place where he directed the creative bedlam, controlled
it, bought and paid for it.

I pointedly leaned to
one side to look past him at the audience pretending not to watch us from the
corners of their eyes: ferrety Stan, the caramel blond Rilla (so the assistant
had called her), another shirtless male model with messy golden hair and a
strangely familiar rock star look to him, the little slip of a brunette I
recognized as the makeup artist I’d seen that morning, and a
malnourished-looking redheaded teen girl sporting raccoon-
ish
black eyeliner and skater flannel over ripped jeans.

“Am I working with
them?” I asked, voice cracking briefly. I tried to swallow the tremor as I
heard it, but by then it was too late.

Those dark
dark
blue eyes
registered his keen attention to my reaction. “No, I was just wrapping up with
them. It always takes a while to transition, though. You mind, Iva? Rather we
worked alone?”

“No,” I blurted, my
negative reaction being split between the suggestion that I would
want
to be alone with Beal and the
unnerving intimacy of hearing him use my first name. Luckily, my response
actually sounded like I was answering his questions instead of cursing in
distress. “Can we just—?”