His Black Pearl (4 page)

Chapter Six

Gnawing on the end of an already chewed brush, Hallie stared at the finished canvas. It was dark, disturbing, and, worst of all, it wasn’t the piece Aaron had commissioned her to do. Neither were the other six finished pieces.

She turned, dropped the brush into a can of cleaner, and walked to the couch. Plopping down onto the soft cushions, she stared at the commissioned piece. She had completed about seventy percent, with just the finer details remaining -- the pearl, her face, shadows and veining.

No longer allowing Aaron into the studio, she had given him a progress report last night. To say he had been displeased would be an understatement, even if he never said anything directly. He seemed to be on some kind of timeline now -- one he had no intention of communicating to her.

Hallie rolled onto her back and stared up at the blank ceiling. A strand of hair fell across her cheek and eye and she blew it away. Slowly she turned to look back at the easel and the canvases around the room. The prepped but otherwise blank canvas she had started yesterday bothered her the most, particularly with Aaron’s unvoiced deadline.

She rolled into a sitting position. “Damn men.”

She stood quickly, hands on hips, fingers strumming along her pelvis.

“Damn, damn, damn men.” Looking around the floor next to the couch, she found a pair of low-heeled mules. She put them on and then stood there, arms around her chest, gaze flicking between the commissioned piece and the studio door.

It was closing in on two in the afternoon. Aaron would be in his office, which was just as closed to her as her studio was to him. Neither of them seemed capable of getting any work done in the other’s presence.

She marched to the door and flung it open. She wasn’t going to wait until evening to talk to him. By the time night rolled around, any conversation she started ended with her on her back and moaning.

She strode down the main hall, past the library, her steps as fast as she could make them with the heels of the mules slapping against her foot. Aaron had a sixth sense about when she was approaching his office. He’d never told her flat out that she wasn’t welcome to visit him there. But he always managed to meet her just outside the room with the door closed.

Not today.

She closed the last few feet to the door and turned the knob without knocking. Just inside the threshold, she froze. He was sitting at his desk, its surface clear but for a few small pieces of sculpture. There was no computer, no printer -- no indication whatsoever that there was work going on in the office. He was just sitting there, staring back at her.

“Have you finished, then?”

It didn’t matter that he’d kept his tone casual. The question annoyed her. She took another step into the room, her gaze narrowing in the low light. “I’m hardly here to tell you I’m done. The remaining detail work sure as hell takes more than the six hours since I left our bed this morning.”

“Then why are you here?”

All right, now he was getting a tone. Not quite peeved, but hurried. She looked away from him, her gaze falling on the stone wall to the right of his desk. Drawing a sharp breath, she moved to the wall and put her hand on the carving in the center. It was smooth as glass, but the room was too dark to pick out the details.

“Is this all one cut?”

“Yes.” He had moved from behind the desk and was standing beside her, his hand on her elbow.

She didn’t budge. “Turn a light on.”

He moved back to his desk, opened a drawer and the room’s recessed lights brightened. She took a few steps back. The carving was monstrously huge, its theme playing off that of the Carracci painting with the three-headed dog. She smiled, wondering how she’d fallen in lust with the Armani version of a Goth Boi.

“Obsidian?”

“Yes, from Lipari.”

She returned to stand in front of it, her hands exploring the contours of the dog’s heads. All three had their teeth bared, the fangs razor sharp. It was amazing -- the size of the stone, the workmanship. And he’d kept her from it by keeping her out of his office.

Glancing over her shoulder, she frowned at him, but he just lifted his brows, as if to repeat his earlier question.

“I’m here to tell you that if you think you’re stamping a deadline on the commission all of a sudden, you can eat it.”

He had moved closer to her again and she flounced away, her gaze in search of the room’s next extraordinary curiosity. She noticed it a second later on a table at the opposite end of the room. She approached the piece and kneeled in front of the table to study it. A cast iron set of scales, the plates held a black feather on one side and a carved heart on the other. Only, somehow, the carved stone balanced equal to the feather. She lifted each plate separately and tested their weight.

“How does it work?”

“Magic.”

Hallie responded with a hiss. She had researched enough about Aaron before their first meeting to know he had a truckload of patents to his name across more than one branch of science, although most were in engineering and mining processes. She lifted the carved heart off the scales and the plate holding the feather slowly lowered. “C’mon. How do you get it to balance? I’m not going to run out and file a competing patent or anything.”

He had followed her over to the table and he took the heart from her. “It doesn’t always balance.”

Aaron put the heart back on the scales, its plate sinking as it should. “It depends on the heart.”

She pointed at the heart at last weighing heavier than the feather. “Oh, and whose heart is that?”

“A thirty-six-year-old investment banker on the upper east side of Manhattan. He overdosed on ecstasy this morning while sexing up the family’s nineteen-year-old au pair.”

“Ooo-kay. You’re kinda cute when you’re being weird.” She gave him a side glance and asked, “And my heart?”

He put his finger on the plate holding the feather and slowly pushed it down so that the feather balanced heavier than the heart. When he took his finger away, the plates remained in place.

“Nice trick.” She turned to him and studied his expression. She put her hand on his chest. He was an odd one -- not as eccentric as some millionaires she’d read about, but he certainly had a taste for the darker side of existence as long as it was beautiful and mysterious, like the scales or the obsidian Cerberus.

She gently tapped his chest. “And yours?”

He shook his head, his gaze darkening. “I’m all out of magic for the day, Hallie.”

He turned, his steps quickly taking him to his office door.

Shit. He had to be headed for her studio now that she’d invaded his office. She followed after him, trying to read the set of his shoulders, the way he held his hands close to his hips despite the long strides. His mood seemed to have done a one-eighty after her last question. Not that she was sure -- a month in his bed and the only sure thing she could read was his passion.

“You can’t put a timeline on creativity,” she reminded him as his hand came down on the door handle to her studio. “And…”

She trailed off as he entered the room and turned a slow semi-circle.

“I suspected as much.”

“I’d be painting other pieces at my home studio.”

Approaching the piece Hallie had finished that afternoon, Aaron gave her a side glance. “And your point is, what?”

She opened her mouth then quickly shut it. She didn’t have a point and sure as hell didn’t want to be back in her home studio -- or her old bedroom. She was the most productive she’d been since her mother had passed. Even with the freakishly invisible staff, the accommodations were amazing, and the entertainment…

That was to die for.

“No point,” she admitted.

He put his hand near the canvas, his fingertips a few centimeters from the top layer of paint. “Dry?”

She nodded. “Acrylics.”

His touch light, he outlined the painting’s foreground. “How do you know what it looks like?”

She frowned. “Google images. You stocked the room with a Mac Pro.”

He shook his head, his eyes flicking to her again before he bent down for a closer look at the oyster shell. “You didn’t see one that looked like this.”

He was right. She had looked at resource photos online but all the shells were too razor-edged or spiky along their lips. She’d made the edges as softly rolling curves, just like --

She tried to shake the image out of her head. The image of the oyster shell that could have held Aaron’s black pearl was meant to be dark, not sensuous. But the instant his fingertip had touched the canvas, the picture was transformed.

His face an inch from the canvas, he murmured something like, “Closer than I thought.”

“What?”

His head snapped back, his blue gaze narrowing. “I didn’t say anything.”

The hell you didn’t
ran through her head but she only shrugged.

Aaron turned to the next canvas and Hallie thought she detected a slight jerk.

“Hired hands,” she offered. It was something of a self-portrait -- her sitting in front of a vanity mirror while disembodied, skeletal hands ran a brush through her hair, placed heavy baroque rings on her fingers and applied mascara to her lashes. While she had stopped teasing him about his invisible staff, the painting played on that theme, only the skeleton hands were freakier than the voices over the intercom, or their owners, who always managed to show up and clean the room when she had just left it.

Not looking at the other images, Aaron walked to the couch and sat down with his hands in front of his face. Hallie joined him on the couch, her fingertips gently resting on the back of his neck. She curled her other hand around his biceps and waited for him to stop hiding.

It was confusing as hell. His main collection was full of life, including the four canvases he’d already bought from her. But his room, the dark corners of the house, his office -- all of the truly personal spaces were filled with somber, foreboding pieces. The pieces in front of him were nothing like her usual work, but she had thought he would like them.

“Aaron, what’s wrong?”

He lifted his head from his hands, his gaze going back to the paintings. “You need to finish the commi --” Staring at the blank canvas, he stopped and pointed. “And that one?”

That one she didn’t want to talk about.

He looked around the studio again, his gaze seeming to unerringly track the progression of her themes. “You were going to paint your mother?”

Lying in Aaron’s arms one night, Hallie had told him about the cancer, the surgery followed by months of chemo, and then the last few days when her mother had demanded to be released from the hospital so she could die at home.

“That first visit to the doctor…” Hallie stopped and brushed a tear from her cheek. “I showed up at the house to start her portrait to find that she couldn’t even get out of bed.”

She brushed a second tear away and then slammed her fist on her knee. “I had twenty fucking months --”

Aaron wrapped his arms around her. Cradling her head against his chest, he stroked her hair and shushed her. “Do your mother’s portrait first. There’s still time for the commission.”

“I can’t see her like she was, only what the chemo turned her into.” She pushed him away and wrapped her arms around herself. “I just don’t know how.”

“I do.” Aaron’s voice was firm, and so was his touch at her shoulders. He pushed Hallie down onto the cushions until she was prone on her back.

Leaving her on the couch, he walked over to the cart next to the easel. Facing away from her, he stripped, leaving his clothes folded on her stool. He opened the cart’s top tray and pulled something out, his hand tucked slightly behind him as he returned to Hallie.

It was maybe six feet from the easel to the couch, but watching him walk back, sunlight from the window behind her playing over his powerful body, relaxed her. With his deep tan, he looked like he’d been cast in bronze, his muscles perfectly sculpted by a master. Except for his cock -- a master sculptor would have left that small and flaccid. Aaron looked like a real Titan in every respect, with his broad shoulders, ripped abs and corded arms and thighs balanced by the centerpiece of his erection. Watching it bob toward her, she loosened her arms, ready to reach out to him, to curl her fingers around the thick rod and pull it to her mouth.

He caught her hands with just one of his, his strong fingers trapping her wrists in an iron grip. He pushed her arms back onto her chest and then covered her with his body. That quickly, he had immobilized her.

His face had lost its usual playfulness. It seemed replaced by a casual menace. Feeling it, she tried to free her hands, but he had them locked tightly between their bodies.

He nuzzled her cheek. “You’re afraid that you’re going to die like your mother. That’s why you can’t hold any part of her clearly in your mind. You’re afraid of the surgery.” Metal flashed as he brought his other hand between their lower bodies. “It’s why you hid your sensuality for so long -- afraid the doctors would come along with their scalpels and take it away.”

She could feel the back of his hand against her thighs, up under the skirt, and then there was the sound of fabric shearing.

Boxcutters. He’s got the boxcutters
.

He ran the handle along her panties, following the line of her clit. “It’s never been your mother’s death you were afraid of…”

Still holding the boxcutters, he slid his hand inside her underwear. The back of his finger stroked her pussy while the blade slashed through the silk with heart-stopping precision and speed.

When she couldn’t free her hands, Hallie grew still. “Aaron, I’m not ready to let you --”

He pulled his head back, his gaze sharper than she’d ever seen it. “Let me?” Shifting his weight, he made her twist at the waist until her arms were jammed against the sofa’s backrest. He managed, despite her squirming, to get his hand up under her blouse and the tight line of her bra. Again, cutting the bra and top from the inside out, he repeated, “Let me?”

Freeing a leg, she brought her heel down on his calf, but he didn’t flinch.