The Reluctant Nude (2 page)

“Are there any other points you would like me to disappoint you on?” he asked.

“I’m not sure.”

He laughed and his smile made Fallon wonder with disquiet if he wasn’t the sexiest man she’d ever seen this close up.

“Make no mistake,” Max said, “this is a very intimate process. And I don’t need your fiancé’s money, incidentally. If you do not want to do this, you’ll find the door is unlocked.”

“No—I want to do this. It’s very, very important.”

“To your fiancé?”

Fallon wished he’d stop using that word. She sat up straight and returned his stare. “No. To me.”

Max clapped his hands on his knees and stood. “All right then, Miss Frost. Let’s get started.”

Max watched his guest shift in her seat, hemorrhaging anxiety.

“What do you need me to do?” she asked.

“Are you prepared to take your clothes off today?” He caught her flinch from the question. She flinched from
him,
he suspected. Good. If she was going to change her mind, the sooner the better for both of them.

“Um…”

“I didn’t think so. How about down to a T-shirt, at least? Give me some sense of your body.” He studied her with his head cocked, doing his best impression of lechery.

“I’ve got a tank top on…but I’d like to keep my pants on, if that’s okay.”

“That will do.” Max stood and began gathering tools for the sitting—an easel and a second chair. He grabbed his leather tool belt from the workbench and strapped it around his hips. In place of drills and wrenches, it held pencils and carving tools. Fallon eyed it as though she feared he might draw a pistol on her.

“Feel free to use the loo.” He aimed a finger in the direction of the one enclosed space in the whole studio. She seemed eager to accept the offer, and Max bet she wanted more than a mere layer of clothing between them as a barrier.

He turned to the cat as the door closed.

“Oscar,” he hissed. It ran to him and he gathered it into his arms and pointed it toward the bathroom. “What do you think, eh? Do you think she’ll last the day?” Max half-hoped so. The money was
obscene.
Three months lost on this commission would earn him enough to fund four years’ worth of the projects he’d rather be consumed with, maybe longer. Four years of complete freedom from commercial work… But something about the deal smelled unmistakably sour.

“She is more than just shy,” he said to the cat. “She wants this just a
fraction
more than she hates the idea of it.” She’d hate the process too, Max could tell already. “It would be a kindness to drive her away now.” The cat purred its agreement and Max pressed his lips between its ears. “I won’t blame you if you stay away for a while.” He dropped it gently to the floor as he heard the water run.

Fallon emerged, face pale. She took her cardigan off and tucked it into her bag and approached.

“Is this okay?” she asked, sitting again on the folding chair. She had on a cotton camisole that revealed her long arms and neck, a slender waist leading down to a far more voluptuous lower half.

Max scrutinized her openly, trying to gauge how rude he could appear without risking cruelty. Trying to give her every chance to change her mind.

“That will do. For now.” He poked around in the compartments of his tool belt and selected a soft charcoal stick.

“Should I…pose?”

“You may do as you wish. I just want to get a preliminary look at you.”

She crossed her legs and clasped her hands on top of her knees, focusing her eyes out the front windows.

“Your hair,” Max said, starting to sketch.

“What about my hair?”

“That is going to be a fantastic challenge.”

She touched a hand to the mess of auburn curls brushing her shoulders. “Sorry.”

“No no, that’s a good thing. I love a challenge.” Max smiled at the easel, where his hand was struggling to capture his first impressions. The sketch felt as rigid and labored as its subject’s affected calm.

Fallon cleared her throat. “How close to my fiancé’s picture is the statue actually going to be?”

Max caught her stumble on the F-word again, as though she’d hit a piece of gristle.

“I cannot tell you, yet. I will get to know you very well in the next couple of weeks.”
If you make it that long.
“Hopefully by then I will have a posture in mind. He will not be disappointed, even though it will not be his ridiculous
vision.
That photo…” He shook his head. “All it tells me is that he wants something
sexual.
I don’t do butcher-block sex. I do sensuality, like I said. Some people can’t see the distinction. If your fiancé is as simple a man as I suspect, I promise you it will have the same effect.”

Fallon cringed but said nothing.

Max smiled deeply and met her eyes. “You do not defend your beloved’s taste?”

“I wasn’t pleased with that photo, either.”

“But no words in defense of his character?”

She frowned. “I’m not an argumentative person.”

Max suspected it was one of the most bald-faced lies he’d ever been fed. “I find that difficult to believe.”

Fallon changed topics as though veering to avoid careening off a cliff. “The woman who left when I got here—she’s very beautiful.”

“Yes.” He paused his sketching to stare thoughtfully into the middle distance. “She has the most extraordinary scar.”

Fallon’s brow bunched. “I see.”

They fell silent for a long time. Max worked feverishly, trying to catch all the little details of his model before his opinions gelled and he lost objectivity. It was a relief to give himself over to the process. Fallon probably didn’t realize he was as uncomfortable with this partnership as she so clearly was.

After an hour or so she adjusted, leaning forward and crossing her arms atop her knees, hands dangling.

Max grinned. “Oh yes. That is so you.” The charcoal scratched enthusiastically across the pad, a connection finally sparking.

“How can you tell if something is ‘me’ so soon?”

“You do sadness very well.”

She seemed to consider her defeatist body position. “I’m not sad.”

“This pose begs to differ,” he said, feeling energized. “You wear malaise like a silk gown.”

Fallon narrowed her eyes, looking fed up with him.
Excellent.

“What is it you do for money, Miss Frost? Or shall I guess?”

She shifted in her chair. “You can guess, if you want. Although I can’t imagine what conclusions you’ve managed to draw, two hours into knowing me.”

“You’re tan.” Max scanned the uneven tone of her arms and neck and the tops of her breasts. “But not from a swimsuit. From a T-shirt. Sometimes a tank top. You work outdoors. With saltwater.”

“Why on earth do you think that?” Her tone told him he was right.

“Your hair…it has the look of the ocean about it. And you smell like the sea.”

“I haven’t been to a beach in weeks. And doesn’t everything here smell like the sea?”

He ignored her question. “Profession-wise, you do something that no one appreciates.”

“Excuse
me?”

“You strike me as rather combative. I think maybe you have a job that goes unlauded. Something to do with biology,” Max said, divining his impressions from her no-nonsense style of dress and the air of practicality and curiosity that surrounded her. A hundred tiny clues that spoke volumes. “I think you do something that you love very much, and also I think that you would much rather be doing it now, instead of being trapped here in this dusty studio with me.”

“That’s true.” She seemed glad of an invitation to slight him.

“And I think you will be very difficult to work with.” Max smiled to himself.

“Oh
do
you?”

“May I call you Fallon?” he asked primly, sketching again.

“Fine.”

“Fallon,” he said, and he felt them shiver in tandem from the intimacy with which the word left his lips. “I question your motives for being here. Or rather, I fail to find any.”

“I have my reasons.”

“They are not in alignment with those of the man who has commissioned me.”

“You disapprove of the kind of patron my fiancé is. Is that it?”

Max shrugged. “Even the most distasteful patron will eventually die. It is not the patrons I hold to a high standard.”

Her eyes narrowed again. “I see.”

“Would you like to know something, Miss Frost? Fallon?” He held her gaze, caught there against his will for a long moment. “I do not believe you have a fiancé at all.”

She fidgeted with the hair elastic on her wrist, face blank, eyes cold and steady. Too steady. “Oh?”

“Certainly not one you care about.”

“Why do you say that?”

He cleared his throat and crossed his arms over his chest. “Because I’m asking you to pose for your lover, and you’re giving me a woman who looks like she’s waiting for a pap smear.”

Fallon blushed deeply. “Well, if this job’s not to your liking, why are you agreeing to it? You said you don’t need the money.”

“Have you ever been given seven hundred thousand dollars, Miss Frost?”

She froze, all the pink draining from her cheeks. “No.”

“Then you will just have to trust me when I say it makes life a hell of a lot more pleasant.”

“Fine,” she said, icy. “And you know, incidentally, maybe it’s
you
I’m not comfortable with. Ever think of that?”

He smiled. “This is no more for me than a photograph is for the camera that captures it. It’s the man on the other side that you have a problem with. I think maybe, you and I, we feel the same way about this man. Your fiancé. I think maybe we’ll both do as we’re told if the price is right.”

She held the pose but her tone turned deadly. “You watch yourself.”

He smiled deeper and licked his lips. “No matter. This is only the first day. I will figure you out soon enough.”

“Why do you even
need
to?” she asked, pissed.

“Have you seen my work?”

She nodded. “Pictures of it, yes.”

“Well, perhaps it is time you met some of your contemporaries in person.”

Chapter Two

Fallon exited through the studio’s rear door into a small vegetable garden. Beyond it lay a long expanse of yard, wild with tall grass and wind-twisted trees. The smell of saltwater and tomato plants yanked at her, trying to pull her into some indeterminate memory.

Scattered around the immediate area were a dozen marble casualties, busts and full-sized figures, all broken. She approached the closest one, a nude woman, a bit overweight, her elbows out, hands clasped behind her head. A great hunk of white stone was missing from her ribs to her knee—cracked off along a fault—but she looked positively
living.
Fallon felt sure the ample flesh was actually quivering, certain that if she touched the rendered skin it would be as warm as her own.
Warmer.
Eerie. Beautiful but unnerving. Much like Max Emery.

“What do you think?”

Fallon nearly yelped, not realizing he’d followed her outside. She caught her breath. “It’s very…”

“Disturbing?” he offered, sidling up to her and staring at the sculpture.

“No, not that bad.”

He nodded, tucking his hands in his back pockets. “That is good. I don’t like when people say that. But they do.”

“It’s a little disconcerting. It feels very…real.”

“Thank you. You can touch it, if you want to.”

“I’d rather hold a mirror under her nose.” Fallon leaned in for a final look, swallowed uneasily and went inside. She wanted to be away from Max, from his energy and his unnatural talent. She stole a closer look at the framed photograph in the kitchen as she passed, the one he’d touched his fingers to. A beautiful, twenty-something woman smiled warmly at the camera. Judging from the photo quality it had been taken in the seventies, and judging from the eyes she could be no one aside from his mother. Max Emery, World-Renowned Classical Sculptor and Momma’s Boy. With that curious thought furrowing her brow, Fallon returned to where she’d been posing.

Max followed and scooted a chair near to hers. He propped an open sketchbook on his forearm, holding a thick pencil in his charcoal-smeared fingers. Fallon noticed a tattoo, simple black lines along one of his pronounced triceps. She couldn’t make out the design.

“So,” he said. “You see now that what I do is something slightly more than a stone snapshot of a person, yes?”

“I do.”

“Good. Because right now, you’re less lively and real to me than any of those hunks of rock out there.” He caught her sour look and fixed her with an oddly predatory glance. “But don’t worry. We’ve only just begun.”

“I’ll do my best.” Fallon knew anybody could catch how half-assed this promise sounded.

“I’m going to do some studies of your face.” He began to draw. “Move as you wish. Grab something to read, if you like.” He nodded to a card table housing a teetering pile of periodicals.

The magazine on top had a French title and its cover boasted a macro image of what looked like either bacteria or psychedelic art. Fallon rifled through the stack until she found the comics and puzzle section of an outdated newspaper.

“Can I borrow something to write with?” She held the pages up to show Max the crossword.

He nodded and fished a pencil out of his tool belt for her.

“Thanks.” Oh good, a
Times
puzzle. Fallon happily poured all her attention into it. Or nearly all—she couldn’t get the feeling of Max’s eyes off her skin. It was as tangible as fingertips grazing her body.

“I am no good at those,” Max said a few minutes later, his hand still flying across the pad.

“Crosswords?”

He shook his head. “There is too much pop culture. I am no good with celebrities.”

“Me neither. Or opera,” she added, glad of a normal conversation with this abnormal man. “They always throw in an opera question. Or like a fort from a war in the fifteenth century.”

He smiled. “I have been in the
Times
puzzle.”

Fallon couldn’t tell if he was bragging or not. “Well, that’s an honor, I suppose.”

He made a dismissive sputtering noise with his lips that caught her off-guard in its playfulness. “It was many years ago when I still lived in New York. I am sure I’m a dream crossword answer. Obscure. And ‘M.L. Emery’ is a very nice collection of very obedient letters.”

“Do you remember what the clue was? Your clue?”

“You have quite extraordinary eyes,” Max announced suddenly, and Fallon couldn’t help but raise them to meet his.

“Thanks.”

“What would you call that color?”

“Um, gray.”

“Cerulean,” he corrected. “Not the blue. One coat of green cerulean over white stoneware.”

“You’ve lost me. Is this pottery?”

“Your eyes,” Max continued, “are the color of a two-inch-thick pane of tempered glass.”

Fallon couldn’t decide if this was poetry or evidence of some vague mental affliction. “Greenish gray,” she amended, trying to be agreeable.

“Indeed. Look up at the skylights,” he ordered and she complied. “With that lovely dark ring. And so clear. Your eyes make me wish I worked in color, Miss Frost.”

“Well. Thanks.” She lowered her gaze back to the crossword, blinking away the spots in her vision. She wondered if he was hitting on her in his own strange way. She wondered why it was she didn’t disapprove.

“And I do adore your crow’s feet,” he said, eyes on his work. “How old are you?”

Fallon tensed, trying very hard not to find this last comment insulting. She wasn’t bothered by this first flirtation with aging but the flippant way he’d pointed it out threw her off-balance. “Twenty-nine.” She felt every last day of it at this instant.

He nodded.

“How old are
you?”

“Thirty-three.”

“Ah.” Her eyebrows rose as she pondered again how a man so relatively young could command such lucrative commissions. She had some research to do on Max Emery, clearly.

“And when is your birthday?” he demanded.

“October ninth.”

He broke into a grin. “So you shall be here for your historic thirtieth birthday, then?” he said, glowing. “I could let you have the day off, of course.”

“I don’t have anything special planned. Yet,” she added, an escape clause.

“Well, perhaps your misogynist of a supposed fiancé could spare you for that day,” Max said loftily. Before Fallon could react to his shamelessness he added, “I do love birthdays.”

Her fingers clenched the newspaper with a rustle as she made a concerted effort to not rise to the bait. “Oh?”

“Ah, yes. Birthdays are fantastic. If you are here I’ll make you supper, how is that?”

“Fine.” She decided then to most definitely take that day off. Fascinating or not, this man was a provocateur, and tactless. Unapologetically so. Like a good many people she routinely bumped heads with. Like the man who’d sent her here.

Max set his pad aside and stood, peeling off his T-shirt—it was late August and the midday sun still asserted the season. Underneath he wore a sleeveless white undershirt and under that lay an impressive landscape of a torso. Fallon swallowed, registering the heat of the studio.

He took up his study again and she couldn’t resist watching those arms. Definitely not the beefy type, though what bulk Max did carry was pure muscle. He had shoulders that made Fallon bite her lip, and she was not the lip-biting sort. A pair of thin lanyards hung around his neck, one suspending a small silver disc, the other an antique key, both obscuring the tattooed lines tracing one half of his collarbone. Just above the neck of his undershirt Fallon could see a fine spray of hair, equally black.

She needed more conversation to draw her attention away from these unsettling observations. “So…”

“Yes?” He looked up but only to eyeball some feature or other before recording it on his pad.

“How long have you lived on Cape Breton?”

“Eh…eight years, now.”

“It’s a beautiful piece of property. I didn’t see a car.”

“No, I never learned how to drive. And I never plan to.”

“Oh.”

“And you came here on foot?” he asked. “I did not hear any engines.”

She nodded.

“I am very glad you do not have a car.”

“Well, I have one back in New York,” she admitted.

“City?”

“Not quite. A little farther up the coast.”

“Good. I hate New York City.” His tone was light and conversational.

Fallon rankled. “Perhaps the feeling is mutual.”

“Oh, it is. Where will you be staying while you are on Cape Breton?”

“Here in Pettiplaise, I guess. My stuff’s at a little bed and breakfast.”

“No no, get yourself a cottage,” Max said. “They are so cheap this time of year. And who can stand eating with strangers every morning? Rent a cottage and you can have your own kitchen. Your own bathroom. You can tell friends to visit you. Your fiancé, so that I may meet him.”

“Um, maybe.”

“Yes, get a cottage,” Max said again, enlivened. “We will be neighbors. One day soon, we will take a walk. We will find you a nice one. I like my prisoners to feel comfortable,” he added with a devilish smirk.

“Fine, I’ll take a look.”

“When I was a child,” he said, still sketching, “I lived in a place a bit like this. In France, near the ocean. A tiny village in Brittany. Everything rundown, everyone poor. Small houses and clear air. The sea. So quiet.” He sounded far away, thinking of these things.

“It sounds very…idyllic.”

“Like everything in childhood, looking back.”

“I guess.”

He glanced up. “You do not pine for your childhood?”

“Not really. It wasn’t that amazing, to be honest.”

“I am sad to hear that.” His earnest stare held Fallon hostage. “I did not get a very long childhood, myself. Perhaps we only pine for what is taken from us.” His eyes finally released hers and he went back to his work, arm muscles twitching and flexing, distracting her.

“I, um… How long do I need to stay here today? I need to make a couple phone calls. For work,” Fallon lied, desperate for some notion of when she’d be free of this man and his unsettling ways.

“Very well…give me two more hours. I will make lunch and do a quick bust, and then you may go.”

“Oh, good.”

That lopsided smile again. “You do not like me.” He sounded pleased by the idea.

“I don’t know you, yet.”

“But you suspect that you do not like me.”

Fallon sat up straight. “I find you extremely disquieting.”

“That is good. That’s a new adjective. I have not been called that before.”

“And self-important.”

“That one, I have heard.” His hand sketched away. “Though I assure you I am of little importance.”

Fallon bit her lip, flustered.

“I do not think I like you, either,” Max said, suddenly standing. “I think you will get on my nerves very greatly.” He dropped his tool belt with a clatter.

Fallon swiveled her butt on the chair, addressing his long back as he strode to the fridge. “Oh, really? Weren’t you just eager to celebrate my birthday?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “It’s okay. I very much like having my nerves gotten upon. The people I don’t like are so much more interesting than the ones who please me.”

Fallon put her finger on why this man bothered her so much. This was a game to him. And to her it was very, very serious.

“You talk about people like they’re objects, or specimens.”

“To me,” he said, rummaging in the fridge and setting containers on the counter, “they are.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Don’t worry. I am not a sociopath.” He shut the fridge and turned to her. “But you have to understand that for my work, I dissect people. Visually. Spiritually, maybe.” He slid a knife from a block and wiggled the blade in her direction. “It is my job to open you up and see how all of your little gears work, then I put you back together in a piece of stone. And if I can’t stand you, then it will be that much more fun, you see?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, I suppose you will just have to take my word for it, then.”

Fallon rolled her eyes and held her tongue. A few minutes later Max handed her a bowl of thick-sliced mozzarella cheese and olive oil, cherry tomatoes and crushed basil from his garden.

“Thanks,” she muttered, still tender from his insensitive conversational style. She wanted to chalk it up to a cultural rift, but she’d met plenty of French people in her life and none of them were half as brusque as this one.

Max gathered utensils, shutting the drawer with a well-placed swing of his hip. He gave her a fork and a napkin and went back for a bottle of wine and a glass. He sat and poured her a healthy measure of cabernet. She accepted it with wide eyes, and he clanked the bottle against the glass and took a swig.

“À la votre.”

“Cheers,” she said dubiously and took a tiny sip.

“So, tell me more about your fiancé.” Max’s smile could only be described as wicked. He licked the red off his lips.

“Well,” Fallon began, feeling nauseous. Why had she bothered lying about that? If she’d known how galling Max Emery would turn out to be, she wouldn’t have wasted her time worrying what he might think of her. “He’s a property developer. And an art enthusiast, obviously.”

“You live together?”

“No. Not yet, I mean.”

He nodded, openly skeptical.

“You clearly don’t care for him, and you’ve never even met him.”

“I spoke to him on the phone last week, for a few minutes. He struck me as a person I would very much like to watch fall down a flight of stairs,” Max said casually. “And I daresay you do not care for him, either.”

“That’s one man’s uninformed opinion.”

“Just admit it—you don’t have a fiancé. Not that man, at least. I will not think any less of you. Quite the contrary.”

Her nostrils flared. “Fine.”

“That’s better. Was that really so hard?” He raised his eyebrows and took another drink. “So.”

“What?” Fallon demanded, at the end of her very frayed rope.

He grinned. “So, do you tell me now about this mysterious patron who is so desperate to get his hands on the next best thing to your naked body? Or will that take more than just the one bottle?”