to move, only to glare.
Her expression shuttered. But finally she shoved the sketch pad back into the drawer and shrugged. “Fine. No sketches.”
Lachlan breathed again. He shifted back into a reasonable semblance of his earlier pose, the “comfortable” one. “This okay?” Got a good view of everything?
Fiona flicked a glance his way. “Yes. Um, sure.” She gave him a vague fleeting smile. “I’ll…just get started.”
“Do that,” Lachlan said grimly. And he shut his eyes and thought of Antarctica.
OH HELP.
Oh help, oh help, oh help.
It was the only mantra Fiona could think of, a prayer of desperation to a God who couldn’t be blamed for thinking she deserved everything that was happening to her.
Here she was, with the most gorgeous naked man in the world standing just a foot away from her, and she could look, not touch. And, by the way, she was supposed to make a sculpture that would do justice to his body.
Impossible. There was no way. Fiona knew that.
But she had to do something. She couldn’t just throw up her hands now and say, I was only kidding. This is all a mistake. I can’t sculpt.
However true it might be, she couldn’t say it.
Not to Lachlan McGillivray.
Because she had dared him—and he had accepted her challenge. Had met her challenge. And in doing so he had turned the challenge around on her.
Fiona wet her lips and raised her eyes to look at him—and couldn’t look away again.
He had his eyes closed, thank God, which made it easier to look. But looking just made her want more. She wanted to move closer, to walk around him, to reach out and touch.
A desperate sound choked in the back of her throat.
Lachlan’s eyes snapped open. “What?” he demanded.
Dumbly Fiona shook her head. “N-nothing. Nothing at all!”
She ducked her head and grabbed the slab of clay and began shaping it around the paper cone that she’d put on the armature Paul had made for her. Determinedly she focused on it. She pressed it and wrapped it and smoothed it into something vaguely resembling a torso. Yes, like that. Not bad. It was a start. She took more clay and began to shape his legs.
They weren’t going to be full-length legs.
The one book she had on clay sculpture, which she had studied in desperation last night in case he actually turned up, contained a step-by-step guide to sculpting a torso from midthigh on up. Obviously the author didn’t think beginners ought to get bogged down in knees and feet.
“Stick to the basics,” he’d written. “Focus on the essentials.”
Fiona’s gaze flicked up to focus on Lachlan’s “essentials.”
The tiny desperate noise threatened to choke her again. She hadn’t seen a lot of naked men in her life. She’d cared for her father, of course, during his illness. But she didn’t need to be Michelangelo to see that there was little resemblance between her ill, emaciated father and Lachlan McGillivray in his prime.
At thirty-five, Lachlan McGillivray was broad-shouldered and lean-hipped, all planes and angles and hard ropy muscles and tanned hair-roughened skin.
Mostly tanned skin, anyway.
So he didn’t sunbathe in the nude? Somehow that surprised her.
Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about him! she commanded herself. Focus on the form. Concentrate.
But focusing on the form didn’t help. It brought her right back to the man. It was like telling herself not to think about pink elephants. Especially when the pink elephant in question was standing barely ten feet away.
So she looked. She couldn’t help but look.
And as she did so, her fingers began to move.
Almost instinctively they worked the clay. She formed his thighs, pressing and shaping, pinching and smoothing. Then she moved on, creating the rough lines of his torso, his shoulders, his spine, his buttocks. Heaven help her, yes, even those!
God, he was glorious. She’d seen him on the soccer pitch, his movements quick and graceful, strong and fierce. And as she worked, her fingers seemed to give form and life to a body that could move like that. As she worked, pushing and pulling and coiling the clay, the fever in her brain seemed to ease. Her emotions quieted.
Yes, she thought. Oh, yes. From her eyes to her hands, everything seemed to flow. It was amazing, really, the feeling of the man taking shape beneath her fingers. It was completely different from anything she’d felt before.
Her cutout metal sculptures had always exuded energy. Inherent in the tension of the metal there was a sense of movement, a thrust that came from the flow