The Reluctant Nude (5 page)

“I see.”

“But the ones who are still ashamed, still stinging from the wounds of their imperfection,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “It is in these people’s honor that I long quite potently to grab you by the shoulders and shake you.”

She turned her head halfway. “Pardon me?”

“I think you have a hell of a nerve, Fallon Frost.”

“I wasn’t suggesting—”

“No matter.” He cut her off, making his voice intentionally sanctimonious. “I am making a choice to forgive your callousness. We will not speak of it anymore. However, if you utter another criticism about your wholly satisfactory body in my presence again you may consider yourself dismissed.”

His hands began recording her contours. That long torso, the exaggerated flare of her body at the hip. Gorgeous. Infuriating, but gorgeous.

Fallon remained silent and Max didn’t suspect for a second that she was pleased.

“Hold your hair up for me,” he said, and Fallon obediently piled her curls on top of her head and secured them with an elastic. That rusty shade of brown—iron oxide. He studied her long neck, sloped but strong shoulders. He beckoned her to turn. Small, perfect breasts, miniscule waist, soft belly. Botticelli would have killed for such a model.

“I thought you were only doing a bust.” Fallon pointed at the clay between Max’s hands.

His eyes were fixed on her, fingers recording her contours from the mid-thigh up.

“Your body is too much fun to waste focusing on just the head and shoulders.” His thumbs raised the ridges of her hips from the mound.

“Fun?”

“Oh, yes.” He met her eyes and smiled. He liked the way her pale irises seemed to grow even wider when he stared. She was easy to unnerve, this one. “When you are eating, and there is one part of the meal you like better than the rest, do you eat it first or save it for last?”

“Save it.”

“Well, not me.” He released her eyes. Against his fingers, he could begin to feel her—that essential race in his pulse that signaled he’d found a tiny foothold, a connection, an entrance into the core of this woman. Hers was one of vulnerability, not openness, but it would do. For now.

“What are your tattoos?” Fallon asked a short while later. This was a different voice than Max had grown accustomed to in the past twenty-four hours—more demanding and less inhibited. This woman ought to get her clothes off and boss people around more often.

He abandoned the clay to peel his shirt off. He turned dutifully, letting Fallon see the black lines that graced the right-hand side of his torso. Skeletal anatomy, the outlines of bones tracing his humerus, shoulder joint, collarbone, the backs of his ribs and his vertebrae from the middle of his back to his neck. Tiny script lettering labeled each with its Latin name.

“Wow.” He couldn’t interpret Fallon’s tone. “Is that from
Gray’s
?
”

He turned. “Biologist,” he teased. “I prefer Vesalius. But it is from nothing in particular.”

She nodded, looking thoughtful and, for once, not intimidated. “That’s cool.”

“Thank you.” He dropped her gaze to return to his work. Midday was approaching and he didn’t bother replacing his shirt. It seemed to make her edgy anyhow, which was fine by Max.

“Why bones?” she asked.

He decided he rather enjoyed the sound of her voice. Lush and full and almost
aggressively
feminine, like her lips. Like the bottom half of her fascinating figure. He’d almost forgotten what an undamaged woman looked like, it had been so long since he’d sculpted one. He hoped Fallon might prove more interesting than her unmarred body suggested.

“Why bones? My trade is in surfaces,” he explained, fingers working. “My
fascination
is with the hidden. The internal.”

He stopped his study to approach, watching the look of predictable uneasiness tensing her face. But she didn’t step back even as he drew close.

He rapped a knuckle softly on her temple. “And not just bone and muscle.”

Her cheeks and neck flushed bright pink, round eyes darting between each of his.

He narrowed his gaze and gave her a conspiratorial smirk. “I’m going to chip away and uncover your secrets,” he whispered.

Fallon swallowed and looked away, and he knew he’d pushed her as far as he could without scaring her outright. He returned to his work feeling extremely satisfied.

Fallon spent the remainder of the session trying to recover the relative comfort and friendliness she’d found earlier, albeit briefly. It was no use.

She was happy for Max to assume it was his comment about uncovering her supposed secrets that had thrown her, but in truth it had been his closeness. His body, tight and lean and no doubt powerful, was a distraction from several paces away. Up close—close enough almost to feel his breath in her hair—it had been a shock. She wished he’d order her to turn around again, or at least put his damn shirt back on. It nearly made her adopt his obsession with the internal, watching the sinuous muscles of his stomach and chest and arms flexing with each skillful movement of his fingers against the clay. She didn’t like it one bit.

Max had tanned skin, darkest on his arms and neck and face but none of it, save a tiny strip just above his jeans, so pale that Fallon imagined his working shirtless was a new phenomenon. She wondered if—or perhaps more realistically how often—his professional relationships overlapped with carnal ones. It was a difficult question
not
to ponder. He oozed sex the way other men oozed privilege or rage. It clung to him like moss. Like sweat.

“I think it is lunchtime,” he announced finally, unbuckling his tool belt and stretching his arms. He slipped his undershirt back on and sauntered to the kitchen area.

Fallon’s own clothes felt strange against her skin after three hours’ nakedness.

“How are you liking it here? In Nova Scotia?” Max assembled cold rotini and shrimp and vegetables into bowls, sounding as though he’d forgotten how angry she’d made him earlier.

“I haven’t had a chance to explore yet,” she said, willing to engage. “But I like Pettiplaise. It’s amazing to be on the coast, but have it be so quiet and open. Where I’m from, every last square inch of this place would be somebody’s beachfront property. It’s nicer here.”

“Indeed. It is a pleasant town.”

“It must be handy that everyone speaks French,” Fallon added. Most of the people in the little seaside village addressed her first as “mademoiselle” before switching dutifully to “miss” once they caught her hesitation.

Max laughed. “I suspect I understand Acadian about as well as you do. Do you speak regular French?”

“I took it in high school but I’ve forgotten most of it now.”

“Do you know what Pettiplaise means?” He handed her a helping of pasta and a predictably large glass of wine.

“Um, not really. Little pleasure?” she guessed, dredging her memory for fragments of French II. “Little place?”

He shook his head.
“Petites plaies,”
he said with careful enunciation. “Another Acadian mangling. ‘Little wounds.’ For the scars the coal mining left on the mountains.” He sat and pointed his fork out the windows toward the black streaks that marred the hills in the distance.

“Ah.” Fallon looked him in the eye pointedly. “How apropos.”

He smiled, that grin making his striking face turn patently seductive. “Yes, I suppose.” He abandoned the conversation in favor of the food.

When he ate, Max had a habit of resting his elbows casually on the table and leaning forward. He held his fork upside down and the way his lips slid each bite of food from the tines struck Fallon as downright obscene. After several minutes of this culinary striptease, he set his bowl aside and took a deep draught of wine.

“So,” he said upon swallowing. “You live in New York?”

“Yes. I own a house there with my best friend. A little ranch house.”

“On the water?”

“Ha—no way. I can walk there but Metro waterfront is insanely overpriced.”

“It’s not so expensive here.” He refilled her glass and Fallon wondered why she allowed it.

“No, probably not,” she said.

“Did you grow up in New York?”

“I grew up all over the region. Connecticut mostly. Not the ritzy part, but on the coast.”

“Why New York, then?” He leaned back as if he expected this interrogation to go on for quite some time.

“Well, as you guessed, I studied biology. In New York. I’m a conservationist, half-time, and an environmental advocate, half-time.” She moved her food around in its bowl. “The Hudson and Long Island Sound need my help more than a lot of other places. I probably couldn’t make a living doing what I do unless I was near a big city, with big problems. It was there or Boston, and my friend wanted to go in on a mortgage with me, and her job’s there. Plus it meant I was near my aunt. It made sense.”

“I see. And this friend—this is not some code word for lover?”

Fallon laughed, almost spilling her wine. “No, just my best friend. She’s quite happy with her boyfriend, thanks.”

“All right. I am going to ask you for this friend’s phone number.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because if something happens to you, I can call her,” Max said, sounding very much as if this wasn’t the real reason.

“I guess. But don’t think for a minute I believe that. You don’t even seem to own a phone.”

Max found a pen and pad and weaseled the digits out of her.

“Why are
you
here, then?” Fallon took a drink, staring at him over the glass, succumbing to that familiar, alcohol-fueled sensation of boldness. “Why didn’t you go back to France, after you stopped being…famous, or whatever?”

He made a face, looking as though he’d never considered this before. “France would be too painful. I think here is as close as I can get to that, without all the bad memories. It’s quiet here. People leave me alone for the most part. Canada is a very fine country, ice-hockey obsessions aside, and Cape Breton is an excellent place to be a has-been. There is very little pretension.”

Fallon smirked, trying to decide if she still found Max Emery pretentious or not. It was becoming less cut-and-dried than she’d originally suspected.

“Why is France so painful?” She drummed her fingernails against her glass, not bothering to hide her curiosity.

“My childhood ended very suddenly, and very dramatically. When I left the village I grew up in, it changed. Because of me. I went back and everything was different. Strange. And I lost both my parents by the time I was twenty-five. It’s not home anymore.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

Max shook his head. “My grandmother still lived there until she passed away five years ago.” He crossed himself in an absent way.

“That sounds very sad,” Fallon said.

He tweaked one corner of his mouth like a shrug. “There are many stories in the world sadder than mine. I’m fortunate, you know, that I have made enough money to live this way.”

Fallon stared, taking him in. It was true—he was a free man. She couldn’t think of another person she’d met who wasn’t beholden to a bank or a spouse or a career path, to some stressful notion of how their life was expected to unfurl. She most certainly couldn’t think of
anyone
who could freely take or leave hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Max went on, echoing her thoughts. “Many people are much sadder, because they spend their lives making money for other people, doing things they hate. In places they hate, with husbands and wives they hate. I’m lucky. I get paid to do something that to me is as essential a part of living as eating or sleeping.”

Or screwing,
Fallon added to herself, the addendum seeming inherent from the way he stared at her. As if to punctuate the close of this topic, Max took their empty glasses and bowls to the sink. In the wake of the relative intimacy of the conversation, Fallon suddenly dreaded taking her clothes off again.

“Should I keep doing what I was doing before?” she stalled, picking nonexistent lint off a sleeve.

He shook his head. “I think we should go outside. I want to study you by the ocean. I think that is more your habitat, yes?”

“Are you going to make me get naked in public? There’s a lot of boats out there.”

He laughed, the sadness seeming to leave him. “Of course not. I’m difficult, not cruel, you know.”

She nodded, deciding this was probably true.

Max breathed in the smells of the pines and the sea as he and Fallon waded side by side through the overgrown grass of his back lawn, descending the wooden steps that wound down to the strip of coarse sand beyond the rocks. He’d brought a pad and a pair of charcoal pencils but set them aside on a driftwood log. He held his palm out to indicate Fallon should sit down on the beach. He joined her, already thinking this was a very good idea, feeling grateful the sand flies were gone for the season. Feeling grateful in general.

“What am I doing?” Fallon asked, pulling strands of wind-whipped hair from her mouth.

“Whatever you like.” He crossed his arms over his knees expectantly, increasingly curious to see how this woman dealt with his demands.

“Right.” She unlaced her shoes and stripped off her socks, rolling up her pant legs and digging her toes into the sand.

Max followed suit beside her. “Tell me about your childhood,” he said, staring across the inlet to the opposite shore then off into the endless Atlantic.

“I’d rather not. I don’t know you that well.”

“Well, tell me about something else, then. Tell me what you would be doing if you did not have to be here with me.”

“I’m here by choice,” she corrected him carefully. “And right now? It’s Saturday. I guess I’d probably be making a casserole or something for dinner, listening to PJ Harvey in my kitchen. Returning phone calls, waiting to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer.” She smiled, seeming to miss such things.

Max studied her eyes in the white light of the overcast sky, so clear they unsettled him. “And what would you be doing for these three months that I’m keeping you away from your kitchen and your laundry?”

She shrugged. “Work, mostly. Probably a couple trips into the city with friends. Not a whole lot.”