Seductive Secrecy (Shadows series)

S
EDUCTIVE

S
ECRECY

M
ARNI
M
ANN

Seattle, WA 2013

COPYRIGHT 2013 MARNI MANN

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Cover Design by Greg Simanson

Edited by Steven Luna

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

PRINT ISBN 978-1-62015-172-3

EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-268-3

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Because I never could have done this without either of you, Heather Ludviksson and

Steven Luna, this book is dedicated to you.

Where there is love,

there is no darkness.

AS THE ELEVATOR CLIMBED TO THE TOP FLOOR,
I leaned against the back wall and tried to relax each of my muscles in sequence. My feet were sore from grinding into the pavement when I’d rushed back to my building in my three-inch stilettos, so I shifted my weight between them, giving my toes a rest from the pointy tips
and thin heels. I breathed deeply; the air that filled my lungs needed
to invigorate me. My meeting with Gareth, a collector who’d
commissioned my art, had lasted longer than the hour I had scheduled for him and it drained every pulse of energy from my body. I had a long night of painting ahead of me. I couldn’t let the dull vibration of the elevator bring me any closer to sleep.

Gareth had recently purchased a penthouse in the financial district and wanted a piece for the main wall in his living room. He’d explained to me that he was single, a ladies man with a taste for submissive women. Not only did he want the canvas to explore those characteristics, he also wanted it to set the tone for his entire apartment. He wanted my painting to establish a mood; then, his interior designer would begin furnishing using the colors I had chosen. Because his place was naked, unpainted and unfurnished, I had to find my own inspiration.

Ordinarily, I would have sketched a few samples and reviewed them with the buyer. But Gareth wanted to help me brainstorm. We sat on the light wood floor in the middle of his living room as he described to me the things he found arousing: latex, thighs, sharp nails, the way a woman smelled after sex. With a piece of chalk and stencil paper—my tools for planning and plotting—I drew a woman
who didn’t stare forward from the canvas, but tilted her head
slightly to the side and gazed off into the distance. She would never look
directly into her master’s eyes…during my time at the mansion,
there were men who wouldn’t allow me to look directly into theirs. Her thin torso was clad in black latex and her hair was lifted high in a sleek ponytail, the strands long enough for him to wrap around his fist several times and pull tight. Leather straps belted and bound her wrists like the shackles had done to mine; her gloved knuckles pressed into her hips, her legs were spread wide, enhancing her slim thighs and the V where they met. Ebony lipstick glossed her mouth; she wanted her kisses to be as dark as shadow…and that was exactly where she wanted to leave them.

I had one week to complete it. I hoped to get a substantial piece of it finished tonight.

The elevator came to a halt and the door opened to the studio. My eyes scanned the vast, familiar space. A single light shone down from an industrial-style bulb hanging in the center of the room, glowing over the easel and canvas standing beneath it. Cameron’s new piece was due in a few days, and he’d been working on it non-stop. I’d expected him to be in front of his canvas, paint splattered on his fingers and handprints on his worn jeans. But the space was vacant. He wasn’t refilling his palette in the front of the room; I didn’t see him in the kitchen, either. I shifted several paces to the right to see past the easel entirely. A smile crossed my lips once I noticed his feet dangling over the arm of the couch. His face rested against the pillow.

He was finally asleep.

He had spent the last two days in our studio, adding to and reworking the acrylic on his canvas. He wasn’t happy with the hues; he wanted them deeper, stronger, more resonant. He couldn’t get this particular abstract to flow, to run into a fluid story of color. I knew what that kind of creative block felt like; it was similar to being on the verge of having an orgasm shoot through my entire body, only to have it disrupted by the phone or a doorbell and losing the
feeling completely. I wanted the release; I craved it—my fingers
clawed for it, even. But the build-up was gone and I wasn’t able to bring my body back to that place. There was nothing I could do to help him; he had to work through the obstruction himself, and that was exactly what he’d been doing. The long hours, the endless pots of coffee and the missed meals must have finally caught up with him.

Cameron’s body reclined over the entire length of the couch.
One arm was bent over his bare stomach; the other hung to the floor. A hint of light from the overhead bulb trickled to this section of the room and gently spread over his cheek, and the curves of his chest. It brightened the words
It’s Always Darkest Before The Dawn
tattooed over his collarbone, and the long, leafless branches of ink wrapped around his shoulders, from the tree that covered his whole back. The glow and the shadows mingled on his face, emphasizing his caramel skin and the ease of his expression.

Every part of me yearned to feel his lips against mine, to take in his tongue and give him my own. I wanted my face to rest idle in the center of his, where the light met the dim, but I forced myself back. He needed sleep. But the hunger in me remained. My fingers twitched as a different need began to spread through my body.

I had hurried back to the studio so I could paint Gareth’s piece while the ideas were still fresh, grabbing tubes of acrylics stored in the back of the room. But as I squeezed dollops of paint onto my palette, I realized they were shades inspired by Cameron and his body, not the concept Gareth and I had created.

Standing at the easel that now faced in Cameron’s direction, I mixed bronze and Naples yellow with a palette knife and loaded the tip of my brush. The outline of his body appeared on the canvas, and then the shape of the couch underneath it. After several loose, open strokes, my focus shifted to his hand and the way it hung to the floor. His knuckles rested on the wooden planks; his fingers were balancing him and bearing some of his weight. It wasn’t only
his
weight they held.

They’d also held mine.

I dropped the brush and grabbed a clean one, dipping it into ivory black and dragging it toward a puddle of titanium white. I
beat both together. Once the dark silver was forged, I painted the
floor under the outline I had drawn. It was mirrored…just like the
floor
of the mansion had been, made of small shards that were glued
together by a thick polyurethane. But a hole appeared where
Cameron’s hand had landed. The pieces of glass had broken, veining out from the center like a spider web.

The glass hadn’t simply shattered. Cameron’s fist had smashed
it.

Cameron…my dawn.
He had broken through the darkness—
my
darkness—and pulled me from its depths. I wasn’t necessarily
standing under the sun yet, or even beneath a mostly-clear sky strewn with clouds, but I was
here
and he was one of the reasons for that.

A gust of cold air burst through my body, tightening every
muscle and clenching my lungs. The feeling was always the same, and it only came when I thought of
that
place…when the memories were thicker than the lessons I had learned by leaving there.

I set both brushes in a jar of water, leaving
The Mirror
as I
walked across the hall to the apartment. I wedged my jacket into the closet and placed my bag on the floor under the table in the foyer. Then I moved through the kitchen, my hands yanking at my sweater, lifting it over my head and releasing it once I got to the entryway of the bedroom. I peeled off my black skinny jeans until I reached my knee-high boots and dropped both along with my pants in front of the bathroom sinks. My panties and bra fell from me before I stepped into the shower and turned on the water.