Chapter Fifteen

 

 

 

She slipped into the pair of yoga pants V had laid out for her, zipped up the hoodie and was out the door of the Meadowlark suite before she had time to ponder her choice. With no shoes but the nosebleed heels Myrna had convinced her to pay a small fortune for, she went barefoot to save her feet, making no sound on the marble and wood as she descended the steps and found the French doors that led into the garden standing open. The path was well lit and, no doubt, well travelled in the wee hours. She did her best work in the middle of the night. Why should Lex be any different, especially if he were troubled by dreams? Sometimes bad dreams could be just the thing for unleashing creativity, as though it had been frightened to the surface by the horrors of the dream world. Certainly the creative process had been a way of purging her night terrors, of finding her way back to her center when she got lost.

As she neared the open door, she slowed her pace, listening for the sound of chisel on stone, but she heard nothing other than the call of an owl from the forest beyond the lit garden. Quietly, carefully, she eased forward and peeked inside. The first sight of him left her breathless—an artist at work, her hero at work, a hero she had seen at his most vulnerable. In the vulnerability of his phobia, in the darkness of his nightmares, the hero had been transformed to a man and, God, she liked him even better for the transformation. His work was suddenly all the more powerful for the weakness, for the pain and fear from which it was born and for the staggering isolation from whence it was created.

On closer observation, the studio wasn’t as well-lit as she’d thought. He sat on a wooden stool in a pool of light coming from a free-standing, crook-necked lamp, like he was the focus of the sun, like everything beyond the bright circle was just peripheral. Her view of him was in profile, him perched in front of an easel sketching away. The hoodie he wore was identical to the one that now rested warm against her bare skin. He wore loose-fitting running shorts, and his feet were as bare as her own. The space was silent except for the quiet night sounds filtering through the back of the studio, which was a giant open garage door. His broad shoulders blocked out his efforts on the easel, and she found herself less interested in what he sketched than in the movement of his body while he sketched. She wished like hell he’d lose the hoodie. The thought of the man’s naked back, muscles bunching and relaxing while he drew nearly drove her to her knees. The power to transfer what was in the creative mind through the body and out into a medium the world beyond could see and appreciate was a power that she often thought about as a writer, but her medium of transfer, her way of bringing what was in her head to the world at large, was much more abstract. This man created a literal representation of his inner world. That thought made her heart race and, for a moment, her own art seemed woefully inadequate to the task.

It was as he shrugged out of the hoodie that the view of his naked back—and it was naked beneath—became secondary to the view of the sketch on the pad. She must have let out a little gasp of surprise, because he startled and turned to face her, dropping the charcoal, which shattered on the floor. The color in his cheeks rose in the incredible contrast of dark hair and pale skin, and he moved toward her, eyes wide with question.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…” She nodded to the fractured charcoal on the floor, then she moved into the room as though she were sleepwalking, eyes locked on the half-finished sketched which was disturbingly like looking into a mirror.

“I hope it’s all right. I… I should have asked.” His voice was little more than the breathless beating of his heart in his throat as he followed her gaze. “It’s just that I kept thinking about the way you looked when you came for me at the gallery.”

Though that was a discussion to be had, all thought of the gallery, all thought of anything that had been in her head just seconds before fled—power of speech not far behind, as she took in, for the first time, the man. The underside of his right arm and the area of flesh along the ribs beneath was a pale puckering of scars that rippled down over his hip and disappeared into his shorts, reappearing under the bottom on the outside of his thigh and stopping just above the knee. The room reeled around her and her vision blurred. There was no way she could have hidden her reaction, even if she had wanted to, and no way she could have ignored what she saw. Whatever it was that was between them, it had always been honest, and the man stood before her in nothing but his shorts and his marred, tortured skin.

“What happened?” She forced the words up through her constricted throat.

The blush on his cheeks deepened, but he didn’t flinch at her gaze, nor her question. He made no effort to move, no effort to cover himself again. Instead, he stood there tall and unmoving. “A car accident. A long time ago. Burns.” His breathing was fast and shallow as he knelt to pick up the broken charcoal. “I couldn’t get my shirt off due to other injuries. It doesn’t hurt.” He glanced up at her and offered a genuine smile. “I have full range of movement, muscles, tendons, everything. I just don’t wear my Speedo in public anymore.” He stood and deposited the charcoal on the edge of the easel, then he wiped his hands on his shorts.

“I’m terribly sorry about the Speedo,” she managed with a little hiccup of a sob.

“I know, right? Completely ruined my chances at the beach.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Lots of women like scars.”

When he only stood there looking a little lost, she wondered if she’d said the wrong thing. Then he offered her a tentative smile. “That’s what Dillon keeps telling me. Scars are a chick magnet, he says.” He motioned her on in and nodded to a small kitchenette off to one side. “Aware of my distress and my rather challenging night at the gallery, Cookie, living valiantly up to her name, has made chocolate chip peanut butter cookies and stuffed the jar there full of them. They’re a bit like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on steroids. I’ve already massacred at least a half a dozen. Help yourself while you still can. There’s water and soft drinks in the fridge.” He nodded to a low-slung leather armchair off to one side and perched once more in front of the drawing of her, then he added quickly, “It is all right if I sketch you?”

“Of course.” She nabbed a cookie and came to stand behind him while he drew, but when his efforts on the curve of her cheek slowed then stopped, she stepped back. “I’m sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?” she managed around a mouthful of cookie.

He shook his head. “It’s not that. It’s just that, well as lovely as you looked in that dress at the exhibition, stunning actually, it wasn’t the real you. It was all show for the event and for this nebulous Alexander Valentine you were expecting to meet.” He waved the piece of charcoal in the air dismissively. “Black-tie affairs are no less masked ball just because you can see people’s faces.”

“True,” she said, plopping down in the chair. “My feet may never forgive me for those damn shoes.”

“You’re real now.” He chuckled softly and looked down at the charcoal gripped delicately in his fingers. “Everyone’s a bit more real in the darkest hours of the night. And a lot more vulnerable.” He shuddered.

“Nightmares, you mean?”

He nodded, but then made a dismissive grunt. “I don’t sleep much.”

“Dreams about what happened at the gallery?” She asked, slumping in the chair so that her feet hung over one arm and her shoulder rested low on the other.

“Oh, no.” He offered a flirty smile that surprised her. “If I’d been dreaming about that, the dreams would have been far from nightmares.”

She felt his words like a caress, and a tingle ran down her body as though her skin were bathed in the expensive champagne from the gallery’s party. “Then I’m sorry that you weren’t dreaming about the gallery.”

“Me too,” he said, then he flipped the sketchpad to a blank page. “Is it all right if I sketch you? Like you are now, I mean.”

She nodded to the collection of female nudes tacked to a corkboard along one wall. “As long as I don’t have to take my clothes off.”

This time his smile was positively wicked. “If you take off your clothes, woman, I won’t be able to concentrate on sketching at all, and I’m not really in the mood to discuss my self-abuse problems right at the moment.”

She laughed and shook her hair back over her shoulders. “Self-abuse, oh pa-lease.” She shifted again to get more comfortable and the hoodie slipped down off her shoulder, leaving her neck and clavicle and the swell of one braless breast exposed.

“Leave it,” he said, when she started to zip the offending garment a little higher. “I want to sketch your erogenous zones.” And fuck if it didn’t feel like he had just touched her there on the nape of her neck and traced a calloused finger over her collar bone and down onto the top of her breast. He chuckled knowingly at the trail of rising gooseflesh along the path she had just imagined his hand following. “Did you feel that? My sketching you there?”

“You have eyes,” came her breathless reply. Then she caught a little breath and shivered. “Jesus, how do you do that?”

“There’s a connection between what I see and what I sketch. It’s a brain thing. That’s why people who are paralyzed from the neck down can still draw even without the use of their hands. But I think there’s a much bigger connection than simply exceptional hand-eye coordination. I think it’s the ability to translate into physical form what we perceive and how it affects us. I’ve read your books, Kelly. You do the same thing, only your vision is all internal, but it’s no less magic when you elicit the feeling you want in your reader.”

She shivered again and her nipples hardened. “I’ve never made a reader feel this.”

“Oh, I imagine you have,” he said. The look on his face was something beyond concentration, something very much like Kelly had seen in the eyes of lovers in good romantic films when they made love.

“It’s a substitute for touch,” she managed in a breathless gasp.

“Of course it’s a substitute for touch,” he said. “It’s the connection to the flesh that I’m no longer capable of having in the real world. It’s tactile voyeurism. It’s everything I can’t experience, but dream about.” He huffed out a little breath. “When I’m not having nightmares, that is.”

“Jesus, that’s… That’s uncanny.” She was suddenly struggling not to squirm in the chair. “Do you do this with all your models?”

“God, no! Of course not. I don’t know them. They don’t know me. I…” He stopped sketching for a second and looked around the room, as though searching for the right words, and Kelly felt the disconnect as surely as if he’d been caressing her breast then stopped. “I have no intimacy with them. When I sketch models for a given commission for which I have a deadline, I sketch them…I don’t know…once removed. It’s not personal. It’s a job. They do theirs, and I do mine, and it’s as if we’re all working with a barrier between us. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t feel that with you.” He began to sketch again, and she leaned back and closed her eyes as the champagne-bubble feeling returned in force. She might have moaned. Just a little. And he might have done the same in return.

“You know what you said about self-abuse,” she finally managed, struggling to breathe.

He only grunted in reply, his hand moving at speed over the sketchpad, which he didn’t look at. His eyes remained locked on her.

“Well, what happened at the apartment when we were together…”

“There’s a connection, Kelly. That’s all I know. I know you aren’t the kind to take advantage. I knew that from what Dillon’s nephew had said. You gave me the first true intimacy I’ve had since the accident. Does that sound like taking advantage to you?” He laid the charcoal down on the easel and began to stroke the sketch with his ring finger, blending and shading, and she practically came out of the chair, the response of his touch was so strong. Her nearness to orgasm was startling and a little bit frightening.

“Are you fucking feeling this?” she gasped. “How can this be? How can I feel what you’re doing on that sketchpad?”

“Of course I’m feeling it. How could I look at you, at your response, and not?”

“Jesus, Lex. Jesus!” His eyes were on her but his finger still stroked the paper on the easel. “If you don’t stop…”

“Do you want me to stop?” His voice cracked with the last word. From where she sat, she couldn’t tell if he had a hard-on, and though his voice was as tight and breathless as her own, he clearly wasn’t touching himself. One of his hands gripped the edge of the sketch pad and with the other, he made strokes and circles on the paper, blending, shading, evening out the tone. She knew that, of course she knew that, so why the hell did it feel like what he was doing to a simple charcoal drawing, he was doing to her body?

“Of course I don’t want you to stop,” she gasped, shifting against the phantom sensation of what she imagined his fingers were doing to the sketch of her. “Oh… Oh, God! I definitely don’t want you to stop!”

The room dissolved in the sound of heavy breathing and moans and grunts, some hers, some his, all blended together. In the beginning, she might have been posing on the chair, but the situation had devolved to the point that she could not have held still if her life depended on it, and there was no other word for what she was now doing in the chair but writhing.

From behind the easel, Lex stood and gave the stool a hard shove, knocking it over with loud ka-thunk on the floor that resulted in a throaty curse. He mantled the sketch of her like a hawk over its prey. When she could focus through the growing fog of arousal, she saw that he once again sketched with the charcoal, his hand moving with a motion not unlike how she would want him to stroke her right now with her so close. How she had fantasized about him stroking her since that night in the apartment, even though she tried not to. And she couldn’t keep from wondering if he were stroking the drawing there, right where she needed it. His other hand still rendered and smoothed and shaded and moved across her body, until the only thought she could hold in her head was the thought of his hands drawing her, drawing her, drawing her ever closer until she could stand it no longer, then she arched her back. With a startled cry, she dragged a breath into her lungs as though it were her last. She tumbled out of the chair, hitting the floor hard with her ass, bruising an elbow and thumping her head on the stone tiles as she convulsed and shivered, and the world dissolved into pinpoints of light behind her tightly clenched eyes.

She heard the deep-chested groan, followed by a hard thump from behind the easel and, when she opened her eyes again, he was on his knees beneath it, one hand cupped to the front of his shorts, the other braced against the floor as though he feared gravity would disappear and it would toss him into the void. His eyes were wide, darkened with lust and with, quite likely, the same look of shock mirrored in her own. His bare chest heaved and shuddered over and over again. Kelly couldn’t stop watching him, couldn’t take her eyes of the quiver of muscle, the sheen of perspiration, the clench of charcoal-dusted fists and, for an instant, she wished like hell that she could draw him.