Dance Away with Me - Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page 0,50
on an H-frame easel. With a fat pencil, he began drawing with broad, aggressive strokes. Nothing secretive or contained. No pages ripped off and crumpled on the floor.
She lay against the arm of the couch, her blouse half off, legs crooked along the couch cushions. One sock on, one sock missing, gazing toward him. Watching him.
The candles sputtered. Burned lower. His free hand went to his own shirt. The studio was cool, but he unbuttoned the top buttons. Perspiration glimmered at the nape of his neck as his pencil attacked the paper.
As the minutes ticked away, she grew more and more aroused. She wanted to pull off her blouse, strip away her bra. Get rid of her jeans, her underpants. But she would do none of that. If he wanted more of her, he would have to take it for himself. She wouldn’t make it easy for him. Not the way she’d done for Trav.
Always the seducer. Never the seduced.
The light was dim, but not so dim that she couldn’t see he was hard. She kept waiting for him to destroy what he’d created. For him to step from behind the easel and come to her. But his drawing arm kept moving. A curve. A slash. A dance. Pop and lock. Quick step, break step. Adagio, allegro.
She wouldn’t make the first move. Not again. In this new chapter of her life—however chaotic it was—she’d never again be the sexual beggar. She needed to be desired—to be wanted as much as she wanted him.
Work for it. You have to work for it.
A lock of hair had fallen over his forehead, but he was too absorbed in his task to notice. He existed in perfect, tortured union with pencil and paper. She was watching a genius struggle with his work.
And that’s when she understood.
He had a hard-on, all right. A hard-on for his art. For creation. Not for her. She was a means to an end. The great artist attempting to use her to break through whatever was holding him back. This seduction wasn’t carnal. It was only about his work.
She dropped her feet to the floor. The candle flames shuddered. He looked up at her and blinked, as if he’d been very far away.
She stepped between the candles and left him alone in the studio.
* * *
Ian dropped his pencil and shoved his thumbs against his eye sockets. He didn’t know exactly how he’d fucked up; he only knew he had. Despite mustering every ounce of his willpower to keep himself in check, he’d somehow offended her.
Tess Hartsong wasn’t a woman you could take against a wall. But he’d wanted to. His every base instinct urged him to do exactly that.
Which would have made him a complete bastard. He was guilty of a lot of things, but riding roughshod over women wasn’t one of them. And hadn’t he proven that by walking away from the sight of Tess stretched out on the couch? By going to his easel?
He finally let himself look at what he’d done. An intricate detail of her bare foot. A delicate sketch of her shoulder. The curve of her neck.
It was crap. The worst kind of formulaic, sentimental crap.
He ripped the paper from the easel. This wasn’t what he did! He created huge, bold pieces. He cut giant stencils with X-Acto knives. Shaped his murals with acids and bleach, nozzles and rollers. He worked big, with no room for the old and refined, the musty and mundane.
He went to the window and threw it open to cool off. He’d come here looking for reinvention—a new path that would let him breathe fresh life into his work. But all he’d done was exactly nothing. First, it was Bianca, and now it was Tess. One distraction after another.
The candles sputtered in the draft from the window. Tess’s fierceness and determination, that sarcastic mouth, the strength she didn’t seem to know she possessed . . . All of it distracted him, and now here he was, producing bullshit greeting card art. He was a cliché. An artist who had to live a selfish life. Picasso might have been able to whip up masterpieces with all those wives and mistresses in his life, but Ian was cut from a different cloth. If he wanted to work through whatever was blocking him, he had to keep his emotions and his sex drive locked up. That’s the way it had always been. The way it would always be.