Model Release (The Art of Domination #1) (9 page)

“Rilla was right,” I
said as I stood guardedly still and presented myself to Beal. “Too long for
me.” Part of me wanted him to agree, to tell me to put the boring slip back on
or maybe even the sweats so he could send me home.

Despite the loud tap of
my heels on the wooden studio floor, the photographer didn’t turn or look away
from his work fussing with screens and lights until I spoke up from a few feet
behind him. Now he spun to survey the image of me standing with a pool of
silvery lavender silk coiling around my shoes, fabric trailing behind me from
the direction I’d come.

I didn’t get a frown of
disappointment or a roguish grin from Beal. Either of those I would have been
prepared to endure, navigate. Instead, I saw that hawkeyed focus of a
photographer at work, of wheels turning behind sapphire eyes. My fatal weakness—the
dark, intent artist bristling with creative energy. My hormones surged.

“Perfect. Now we’re
ready,” he breathed.

And I shivered. And
stood at the edge of the set, heels just barely on the gray muslin screen. And
froze.

With wine warming my
veins and silk against my skin, with untamed curls tickling my cheek and my
shoulders bared by the sleeveless dress, with my sex wet and Nolan Beal’s
Jack-and-leather deep voice purring like a motor in the distance, I was in
danger of throwing away almost three years of good behavior. Because Beal had
noticed that stupid piercing. Because he put makeup and false eyelashes on me
and gave me a pretty dress to wear. And because I was so goddamn sexually
attracted to him.

When I felt the floor
shift almost imperceptibly, heard the muted steps of Beal’s cautious approach,
I prepared an apology. In a few short seconds, I rehearsed what I’d say to
excuse myself and my failings as a model, to escape before I ruined everything.
And how I’d ask for Cheri’s release before I went.

I was facing the
loveseat, and he was behind me, and I felt a caress against my shoulder. But it
wasn’t Beal’s hand. When I turned my head to look, there it was. He held out a
gray silk half-face mask with braided gray ribbon around the eyes and clear
crystals twinkling at the brow and over the cheeks. Fine silver lines that
looked hand-painted swirled along the bridge and contours of the nose, up along
the forehead. It was a carnival mask, a masquerade mask, a delicate shell of
shine and texture and shimmer that begged to be worn, that suggested glamour
and revelry… protected by anonymity.

When I didn’t take the
mask from him, when I didn’t resist, Beal slipped the elastic ribbon over my
head.

“Now no one has to know
who you are,” he said low.

But there was just us
two in the room, in the whole studio. It was like he was saying… even I could
pretend ignorance.

The music started from
a distance, not nearly so loud or harsh as what had been playing that morning.
But it was more demanding, emotionally. All the songs wept and sighed and
purred with female voices, chanteuses like Banks and
Jillette
Johnson crooning about loving too hard and paper cut hearts, the ‘hurts so
good’ kind of music. I sat down on the loveseat, my eyes closed, my hands
curled loosely in my lap, the cool air raising goose bumps on my legs to
mid-thigh where the slit in the dress parted and the silk fell to each side. On
my face, the mask felt surprisingly, pleasantly warm and textured and… safe. I
was beyond reach and beyond breach.

“Open your eyes, Iva. I
want you to look at me.”

And I did,
unquestioningly. Though most fashion photographers worked at a distance from
their subjects, using the zoom and the lens to make it seem like they were mere
feet or inches from the models, Beal was maybe a couple of yards from me.
Hardly more than the length of my body were I stretched out on the floor,
crawling for him. What a strange thought, no doubt stirred by the compellingly
erotic photographs I’d seen on his bedroom wall. Stirred by the curiosity of
what it would have been like to be treated that way, wanted that way, taken
that way. Stirred by what I knew it used to feel like to give myself over to my
passions. And safeguarded by a mask giving me anonymity, permission to at least
entertain unwise, reckless, dark and sexy thoughts.

“Spread your legs,”
Beal ordered. It was a simple, subtle command. No theatrical growl or
authoritative bark. Not even a stern note to his voice. He didn’t have to force
it. He simply wanted and said so, and I did it. I spread my legs, parting my
knees four or five inches.

My panties showed, the
cream silk hiding my trimmed mons and the slickness of my flushed sex. I knew
exactly what Beal saw through the eye of his Nikon as it snapped at me,
devouring the images. Prim pose, thousand-dollar heels, high end designer gown
juxtaposed with curls that floated just a little too wild and free, a crystal
beauty mark, and the immodest flash of silk panties.

Without being told,
without thinking, I pressed my knees together but drew them up to balance the
stiletto heels on the loveseat cushion, feet spread to again reveal the
moistened crotch of my panties. Beal’s Nikon kept at me, kept lapping up the
movements, the moments. Through the camera lens, Nolan became a voyeur watching
my every move, every passing expression, focusing on that incongruous flash of
cream silk between my legs. The knowledge made me even wetter. The sight of the
ridge growing in the man’s rough denim jeans made me throb.

“Yes, that’s it,” Beal
muttered a few times, camera working with carnal ferocity that mounted like the
rhythm of driving sex. Then, when that cadence should have been nearing its
climax—the end of the film roll, perhaps—the clicking abruptly ceased, and
Nolan lowered the camera. Like pulling out to keep himself from finishing, to
keep us suspended in this moment of bristling energy. He didn’t come any
closer, just stared—at my face and my mask and my flushed lips, at my hands
folded over my knees and the glossy French manicure Cheri had given me, at the
swirl of lavender silk spilling over velvet cushions and winding on the floor,
at my cream silk panties and my pussy.

A mirthless smirk
twitched only briefly at one corner of Beal’s mouth. “You understand, don’t
you, Iva Moreau? You feel it. Yes, I think you do,” he said softly, voice
notably solemn for reasons I could not guess. “I admit I didn’t expect you to
get it.”

My head lolling against
the sofa back, my spine arching and pushing my chest forward in a foolish and
indiscreet display of the desire steeping my body, I repeated lazily, “Get it?”

“The story,” he
answered. “The dress, the hair, the poses…. They all set a scene that is
supposed to suggest a whole… a whole series of events encapsulated in one image
of one moment. The thoughts evident in the subject’s expression and posture and
attitude—in her head—those are the movement in a static frame.”

In a reckless breath, I
asked, “What am I thinking?” Not what was Iva thinking. What was the woman in
the mask thinking? What was the woman in the silk dress and silk panties
thinking as she maintained her demure expression while showing her pussy to a
camera, to a photographer, and ultimately to the world as voyeur?

Beal dared two steps
forward, boot heels sounding heavy and somber on the wooden floor. He moved so
steadily and with such deliberation and control that the cross hanging against
his chest did not swing or sway at all. I wondered if he was getting ready to
pounce… almost
hoped
.

“You’re thinking that
you are tired of being such a lady—the quiet and the control and the waiting…
waiting… waiting,” he whispered, then paused to raise the camera and snap two,
three, four more rapid-fire images from an angle higher and closer than the
last. “The couture gown and the silver stilettos say to people you are
untouchable while they dare someone to touch you.”
Click-click-click
.

This time the shutter
snap was like an intolerable bristle, a hard tickle in too tender a spot. I
shifted, letting my legs close and fold to one side on the sofa cushion. With
the back of the dress also having a V shape, the gown slipped down one shoulder
a few inches, threatening to bare more skin. A half-moon of my deeply pink
areola peeked past the silk. My eyelids sank low under those thick, heavy
lashes, as the whir of the camera motor advancing frame by frame also wound a
coil of tension at the core of my sex.

At the height of that
building pressure, the camera paused again. In a leaves-on-rough-sidewalk
whispery drawl that for its contrast to the click and whir was just as gripping
and persuasive and arresting, Beal continued, “You’re wet with the sensuality
of the silk against your prickling skin, and with the tension in your legs and
back and shoulders from the posture and the power and the blatant sexuality of
the heels. You’re giddy with the power of being so alluring and yet so
unobtainable and what you know that does to everyone who sees you.” Another
step brought him to the edge of the set, boot toes skirting the end of the gray
fabric. “Show me, Iva.”

Because he asked,
because he ordered, I did. Because I loved the simplicity and the pure fucking
relief of handing all the power and all the decisions over to him. Because it
felt so good and so natural and so free to be her—the woman in the story—right
now. I let my weight slide to one side, so that I lay curled on the loveseat, a
mass of thick brown ringlets as my pillow. One arm stretched out above me, hand
dangling loose over the end of the cushion. The other I bent and draped over my
hip, elbow behind me, fingertips teasing naked skin where the neckline of the
dress gaped as the silk edged even farther down my shoulder. The skirt of the
dress no longer concealed my legs or my panties at all, swept back completely.
But I remembered to cross my ankles, like a lady.

Nolan put the Nikon to
work again, surveying me from toes to crown. Now I could see tension in his
shoulders as well and in the tautness of his deeply defined abs. Another step,
onto the set, over me. “All that power and allure comes at a price, doesn’t it,
Iva?” he coaxed, advancing the story. “Because sooner or later that pretty body
in that sexy, expensive clothing is going to want to be used. It’s going to
need to deliver on all those promises. You’ve been untouchable for too long. So
you’ve got to keep pressing, don’t you? Keep pushing. Keep teasing. So that
eventually someone
takes
what you’re
offering before you can snatch it away.” The camera sank away from Beal face,
still handsome in its perfect angles and shadows, but now grim with tension.
“How are you going to press, Iva? How are you going to push that promise too
far to take back?”

Feeling challenged,
feeling defiant, petulant, I crawled up onto my trembling knees heedless of the
fact that the gown actually fell completely away from one flushed breast—just
as I turned away from Nolan Beal. I let both sides of the dress, the whole
bodice of the gown, fall to my waist and bare my shivering back to the
photographer and his camera. Then, with the skirt of the gown neatly, elegantly
gathered away from my ass and over one arm, I gripped the carved wooden frame
of the sofa and looked over my shoulder in calculated, flagrant invitation.

The camera ticked away
furiously, until I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep still anymore. The lips
of my sex were tingling, my inner walls almost convulsing, like I was close to
a climax without so much as a caress. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I actually
whimpered or gasped or mewed in surprise and distress and need when Beal
finally silenced the camera in favor of his own voice again.

“Pull down your
panties, Iva.”

I stopped looking back
at Beal, my fingers going white with my grip on the scrolling woodwork. Even I
was shocked when I shook my head vigorously no. “That’s not the moment,” I
insisted in a breathless rasp. “Rip them off.”

He sounded like he was
right behind me, made me jump, when he growled, “There’s a fine line between
art and life, Iva. Between pretty pictures and actually being taken hard by a
man. You know what I’m going to do if I touch you. You say that again, you
better be prepared.”

Far too late for that
kind of caution. Maybe before I’d put on this gown, the stud. Maybe before the
mask….

“Rip them off.”

I yelped when he did
it. At the force of the silk tearing and my knees sliding on the velvet. At the
warmth of his skin and his hand and the firmness of his body against mine. At
the harshness of thick denim against my bare legs and the hard buckle of his
belt gouging shallowly into my flesh. At the climactic
click-click-click
in the second before the camera rolled discarded
onto the couch beside me.

In an instant, one of
Nolan’s strong, deft hands dipped under my arm and across my chest to grip and
knead one aching breast, my nipple a pinpoint of fire. The other hand dipped
between my legs, middle finger tracing the line of my slicked lips before
driving deep inside me. Beal’s full lips were hot satin on my shoulder, my
neck, the lobe of my ear. His velvet tongue played contrast to the scruff of
stubble around his mouth, and my skin tingled, stung, burned, rolled and
crawled at the overwhelming wave of contradictory sensations. It was a
sensualist’s perfect moment. Better than I remembered—better than it had been
back then. Behind the mask, something cold and ashen flared with live flame.