Wife On Demand Page 4

  “Not a lot,” he agreed. She knew he was working hard on the Rose Library, and now there was some kind of problem with Concord House East. “But I do take Sundays off.”

  “Can you sit this Sunday afternoon?”

  “All right.”

  Hope nodded, her heart racing, not sure whether they had declared a truce or not. Not sure whether she wanted to declare a truce with him. She wanted to paint him, though, she knew that, so that was what she clung to.

  She dreamed about him for the next three nights, tumultuous, difficult dreams that she did not remember in detail. This was not an unusual occurrence when she was engaged in an involving painting, but it was deeply uncomfortable. She felt as though, now that he had invaded her dreams, she had nowhere left to run.

  Yet why should she think of running from Jude? She didn’t like him taking her father’s affections, but it wasn’t as if he was a personal threat to her.

  This was the kind of question her dreams raised, without offering an answer. But there was one problem the dreams solved—the creative one. If only she had the courage to follow her instincts, the painting would go well. If not, she might as well not begin.

  On the Sunday she greeted Jude nervously at the door, and led him to the sitting room again. There she had the silk chair exactly where she wanted it, three-quarters facing the window, her easel to one side.

  Jude stood casually scanning the arrangement, and then looked at her, waiting for her command. “Shall I sit?” he asked, as she hesitated.

  “Yes—no, would you like a drink?”

  “Not yet, thank you.”

  She was nervous, fidgeting, lacking all her usual certainty when she began a painting. He smiled. “Is this painter’s nerves?”

  “No, no...” She bit her lip.

  “If the time is wrong after all, I don’t mind. If your father is in, there are things we can discuss.”

  “No, no, the timing’s fine! Anyway, he’s not in. It’s just—”

  “What is it, Hope?”

  She took a deep breath, faced him, and said, “Would you let me paint you in the nude?”

  Instantly, his eyelids drooped, hooding his thoughts from her.

  There was a long pregnant silence and then he looked at her again. His gaze was searching, challenging; a flame flickered in its depths.

  “What is it you want to prove that you do not already know?” he said, with dry anger.

  The anger mystified her. And there was no way to answer him in words. “I—it’s hard to explain, but I don’t really know yet,” she stammered. “I mean, I don’t know how to put it.” If she could put it into words, there would be no need to paint, but that was as hard to explain as the rest.

  He heaved a breath. “Hope,” he began, and she sensed his deep reluctance. She was suddenly desperate for her painting. An urgency very close to the pressure of tears built in her, which was itself extraordinary, because if the need to make this picture was so powerful, why had she not felt it building up, but only the sudden eruption of it?

  “Please,” she said, before he could go on. “It’ll be good if you do.” She meant the painting.

  He took his lower lip between his teeth and squinted out the window behind her, and she knew he was going to say no.

  “Please,” she begged again, feeling like a fool, not understanding her own urgency. “If you don’t like it when it’s finished I promise I won’t show it or sell it.”

  Jude sighed like a man convinced against his better judgement, knowing he is being a fool. “All right,” he said,

  She was too relieved to smile. “Thank you. There’s a bathrobe in the guest bathroom, you know where that is.”

  He came back a few minutes later, the voluminous black towelling robe covering him. “Good,” she said, all business now, to relieve any embarrassment he might feel. “Do you remember the pose you had the other night? Feet apart, arms on the arms of the chair.”

  “I remember.”

  “Could you—adopt that pose again?”

  “Do you want me holding a glass?”

  She narrowed her eyes, visualizing it. “Yes, maybe.”

  “Give it to me now. I’ll have the drink after all. Whisky, please.”

  It was a curious about-face, but this wasn’t exactly a situation where one had a lot of precedent.

  Hope made the drink and handed it to him, and then went to adjust her sketching paper on the easel as Jude slipped off the robe and seated himself in the chair.

  “Thank you,” she said, looking to see that the light was falling on him as she wanted, then adjusted the position of her easel, and picked up her pencil.

  “I don’t normally do a sketch first,” she explained, to ease the funny tension in the air. “But because I won’t have you to sit on a regular basis I’ve got to give myself something to work from when you’re not here.”

  After that there was silence as she worked.

  In a very direct way, she was aware of the tension and relaxation of various muscles, the potential power in him that was part of her reason for wanting to paint him. She would need a trompe l’oeil technique to give him the quality she wanted, to make him stand out from the canvas the way he stood out from life. She wanted him three-dimensional against a flat background, like a stone lion in front of the wall of a building.

  On that level, she was aware of his sex. It was an essential part of the way she would present him, it was part of the reason she had needed to do him in the nude. The sculptors of those old stone lions she had once gazed at all over Europe had almost always carved the lion’s sex organs, and now she knew why.

  But she rarely painted portraits, and she had not done a nude man since her time with de Vincennes in Paris. That had been easier than now, because there had been others in the room, and she had known the sitter only as a sitter. Here and now, she was aware of Jude on another level, too, on the level of Jude Daniels the man. She knew it was affecting her, and that it would enter the drawing and her paint, but exactly what would be there she would only know as she saw it.

  She spent all her time sketching only him, because she could paint the background without him, and she wanted detail. But she hurried, because she was eager to get some paint on the canvas while he was there. After less than an hour, she thrust aside the sketch. “Please take a break,” she said, and began to squeeze out oils onto her palette.

  Neither of them had spoken after that first explanation. Hope never could chat in that first interpretation of the subject onto canvas, she hated to be distracted and would not stand interruption. Sometimes, when she was painting a seascape and insensitive strangers came too close or became too invasive she would use the most tersely rude expression she knew to get rid of them without affecting her concentration.

  Conversation with a subject might contribute to building rapport, but Jude made no such demands on her. He had sat silently, using the time to think, she imagined, or perhaps just to rest from too much stress.

  Jude got up and, without resorting to the bathrobe, refilled his glass at the drinks chest. As she covered her palette with the creams and browns and peaches she would need for his skin, she watched him. He stood with his back to her, the light from the window falling on him, and stretched first one and then the other arm above his head; and she wanted to paint him from this angle, too, the long flow of muscle under skin, from neck to ankle. His skin glowed, like a painting of a Victorian child, but the muscles underneath were clearly hard. She would enjoy the challenge of getting that down on canvas; she could almost feel the contrast of soft and hard...

  He turned and looked at her and there was a curious little shock as their eyes met. For a long moment neither of them spoke, nor smiled. Hope felt oddly defenceless, and realized suddenly that, in sketching him, she had lost the armour of her dislike for him.

  “Ready?” he asked, and she nodded mutely.

  She had always been better at putting what she saw straight into paint: with the pencil there see
med some middleman officiating between her and the paper, but with paints the intermediary was eliminated.

  Besides, he was not the sort of subject to do in pencil. His being itself called out to be translated into the thick, rich texture of oils.

  Slowly, slowly, the rapport she needed built up, until she was so much her eyes that took in the sight of him she almost became him.

  He was tanned almost all over, but he nonetheless had the marks of the labourer on his skin, of a darker neck and throat. There were no clear demarcation lines on his arms, but his forearms, nevertheless, were also a shade darker. He had been working outdoors on the Rose Library site for most of a long, hot summer.

  The marks on his lower torso were sharp. The line of his bathing suit was low, and the skin suddenly was pale. That gave his flesh a natural prominence, as though light just caught the one area of skin. She would need no trompe l’oeil effect for that: light and shade would do it.

  The underbelly of a sculpted stone lion was more hidden, but when you looked, it was often astonishing how much secret prominence the sculptor had given his sex.

  Now she cracked the code of what was moving her—she was standing in front of and just below a monumental lion. That was the image she had in her unconscious.

  And the glass in his hand was wrong. What she needed was both hands holding the front of the chair arms, like the lion’s paws. Hope laid down her palette and brush—she needed a break to relax her tensed muscles anyway—and stepped to the chair.

  “The glass,” she said softly, her voice cracking as if she had not spoken for days. She had almost forgotten the power of speech. Jude ignored her outstretched hand and bent down to put the glass on the floor beside the chair.

  She did not get the message. “Your hands,” she said next. “Can you put both hands...” But it was impossible to describe, and she reached for his hand to draw it to the front edge of the chair arm.

  “Hope, don’t touch me!” he ordered quietly, a second too late: she was already pressing his strong fingers to curve down and grip the silken chair arm.

  At her touch, as if it had been waiting for the signal, Jude’s body leapt into full, hard arousal.

  Chapter 4

  Her gasp of indrawn breath was the only sound in the room. Hope stared helplessly for an immeasurable moment of time at that aroused flesh, then, unwillingly, her gaze rose to meet his.

  At the look in his eyes her pent-up breath left her with a small grunt, and she realized that she still had both her hands on his. She withdrew from the touch with a spasmodic jerk, and then, trying to keep her eyes from falling again to that engorged flesh between his thighs, licked her lips and swallowed.

  She shouldn’t be reacting like this. Male models did get erections, it was just something that happened, there was no reason to—

  “Hope,” he said, in a dry, rough voice.

  She closed her eyes and turned her head away. He wanted her. Jude Daniels desired her. Her blood burned and sang with the information, rushing and roaring in her ears, her brain, her body. Chills climbed up her back and around to her breasts like caressing hands. Her legs were hot, melting. Her throat and mouth parched.

  The wall of her hostility went down with a roar, and what was behind was revealed to her senses with terrifying directness. The heat of raw desire smoked in her blood, her muscles, her brain.

  He had not moved, was completely still with watching her. Now his hand reached and he clasped her wrist in an inarguable grip. Her flesh leapt under his fingers, his touch sending waves of heat and desire through her.

  “Hope,” he said again, and drew her helpless hand to his face and buried his mouth in her cupped palm.

  “No, Jude, no!” she whispered, because she was deeply terrified by the heat of passion that lashed through her, like a wild animal faced with a forest conflagration.

  Now he stood up, his nakedness a primitive threat, his arousal overwhelming her, the dark, dark flame that flickered in the depths of his eyes melting her like wax. He took her hand and laid it inexorably on his male sex, and watched her face hungrily as her eyes fell shut and her neck became too weak to support her head. She moaned in a mixture of shock and desire.

  Then she was wrapped in his arms, and he kissed her mouth with a ferocity of passion she had never dreamed existed. Her whole smouldering being went up in an explosion of flame, and she wrapped him in it, her arms going around his neck, her body pressed to his, her mouth open hungrily, devouring, being devoured.

  His arms pressed her so tightly his bones met hers, but the pain was transmogrified into pleasure in her, as darkness seemed to envelop her in waves. When he tore his mouth from hers and bent to kiss her neck she felt starved. She moaned her hunger to the air, her hands pressing him, holding him, her head falling back to offer her throat, crying aloud with each thrill of his lips over her skin.

  With urgent, possessive hands he dragged aside the collar of her shirt and kissed the exposed skin of her upper breast, then, as her head fell weakly forward, back up to take possession of her mouth.

  He was grunting, murmuring; words of passion and desire assailed her ears and burned their laser path through her already overheated system. “Hope, I want you; how I have wanted you.”

  “Jude!” she cried. “Jude!” Again his mouth came up to smother hers, his tongue licking over her lips with hungry fire as he held her head and tried to get enough of her.

  She fell backwards, half onto the sofa, Jude on top of her. His aroused sex, marble hard, pressed against her body, and she moved upward against it, crying something, words she could not comprehend, into his ear.

  He dropped onto the floor and dragged her down with him. Now she was on top of him, her legs spread, her sex forced against his sex, melting her, melting her, over and over again, in waves like the sea.

  His hands pressed along her back, trying to eliminate the border between his flesh and hers, as if he could drag her inside his own body and so become one with her. She felt their hard, bruising pressure against her flesh, and her blood churned and pounded in answer, waves against the rock of his hard touch.

  Their mouths clung, as she held his head and he pressed her body all along its length, into his. She felt his hands between her legs at last, sending shooting sparks of sensation through the clouds of desire that smothered her, then one hand dragged up the material of her shorts, and his fingers found their way to her centre and pulled aside the fabric that covered her. And then, with one long, urgent, uncontrolled thrust, his body pushed deep into hers.

  They groaned into each other’s mouth, and her head swam in the blackness of too much pleasure. He did not thrust into her again, but began to press her buttocks rhythmically, moving her impaled body against his, so that she was assaulted by sensation within and without.

  She suddenly burst with the flower of pleasure, lifted her mouth from his, arched her neck and cried over and over as the waves of sweet, exquisite ecstasy coursed through her, honey on her nerves and nectar in her blood.

  “Jude, Jude, Jude!” It was her own voice, crying his name. He pulled her tightly to him as the pleasure subsided in her, then rolled over, taking her with him, so that he was above her, supported on his arms, gazing hungrily down into her eyes.

  “You are so beautiful!” he cried hoarsely. “Hope, let me see it in your face, let me see it again, come on, come on...”

  He thrust into her repeatedly as he spoke, long, sure strokes that drove her blind with sensation and renewed pleasure. She clung to him, writhing, spreading her legs as wide as she could, as though only thus could she take in the full size of him, hungrily pushing up against the thrust to meet his body that much sooner.

  She began to cry out again as the pleasure climbed to a peak in her, and then stopped writhing to press up hard against his thrusts as the blinding sensation hit her, a notch higher this time, while she arched her neck, panting and crying her surprise to the world.

  He kissed her hungrily, ruthlessly. “I knew i
t would be like this!” he said. “I knew we would drive each other mad!”

  He pulled out of her then, and she moaned, but it was only to tear her clothes off and toss them aside. He knelt between her legs, pressing her thighs apart with strong, trembling hands, then muttered something and thrust into her again.

  She lost track of time. There was nothing but the madness of physical joy, of impaling herself and being impaled on the instrument of her pleasure, in every posture, every way that existed and then more, of him answering her body’s wild cry of demand, over and over and over, in and in.

  After endless time she had been stripped raw by pleasure, down to the very marrow of her bones. There was nothing left, only pleasure and the stars.

  “Jude, no more,” she gasped at last. “I can’t take any more!”

  “No more?” he growled, as if her words ignited yet another level of passion in him, and he thrust so powerfully she was driven along the floor underneath him. On his arms above her, he crawled after, and drove into her again, then wrapped a hand under her hips to stop her escaping him again, and held her there to take the force of his driving passion, like a battering ram against the stronghold of her soul. “No more, Hope? No more?”

  Nothing anywhere had ever prepared her for what came next. The doors of her soul burst open, and a fountain of utterly unbearable excitement rocketed through her system and out to the very ends of the earth. She died, and was born, in the same moment, and her soul was naked and exposed to the dangerous embrace of the universe.

  She wailed the cry of her transfiguration, and only then did his pleasure explode, burning her, and him, so that the rhythm of his pounding broke, and he heaved and writhed against her, crying her name, as the fire consumed him.

  He raised his head to look into her eyes, then covered her mouth with his, and subsided against her.

  They went to his apartment. What had happened was not enough, they both needed more. She was barely inside the door before he kissed her, pressing her up against the wall. He was aroused again.

  “You’re like fire in my blood.” She knew it was true, because he was fire in hers, consuming her with almost unquenchable desire. She pressed against him, and his hands caught her buttocks and lifted her up so that her legs embraced him, and he carried her to his bedroom.