When I pull back, her hands come up and twist into my shirt. I let her hold on for a beat. Brush my thumb over her cheekbone.
“Be brave for me.” Daphne nods. Hummingbird, I think. Quick. Flighty. Delicate. “Go over to your canvas and take off all your clothes.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Daphne
The only easy thing is the walk to the easel. I’ve walked up to a canvas a million times in my life. Except this one has a spotlight. The spotlight reflects in Emerson’s huge windows. I won’t be able to see the ocean like this. I’ll have to paint it by memory.
I’ll have to paint it with my pulse beating in my ears and all of my skin flushed with heat.
I’ve imagined this moment every day since Emerson first asked me to come with him. I never imagined I’d be brave enough to do this. Or reckless enough to do this. I never imagined I would feel this much guilt.
Or desire.
Except when I get to the canvas, and find myself under that light, I can’t do it.
Emerson is opening drawers, moving around the room, gathering things. And I’m frozen. I try to get my bearings. There’s a little table near the easel, narrow and tall, and a stool. I haven’t moved at all when he slides a palette onto the table. Lays out three brushes.
“Choose,” he says.
I force myself to look at him. He has a portable case of paints open in his hands, and it’s momentarily distracting enough to ground me. White. Black. Different blues. I pull them out and try not to think. Emerson takes the case away while I put paint onto the palette. It’s made for oil paints. Wooden and solid and traditional.
This is the least traditional painting I’ve ever done.
I set it back down.
Emerson moves behind me and skims his hand over my elbow. He did this that night in the gallery, too. I remember it. It calms me. I don’t know how he knows to do this. To move his hand slowly up my arm to the side of my neck.
“Are you embarrassed?”
I’ve never been naked in front of a man before, and now I’m in an actual spotlight, reflected in the window. “Yes.”
His hand moves down. Slides under my sweater. Works into the fabric of my leggings. I stop breathing. His fingers move gently between my legs.
“The little painter likes a bit of shame,” he comments. Emerson pulls his hand away. “But you’re testing my patience.”
Warning edges his tone, and my heart pounds. He’s eaten me before. I can be brave for him. I can do this.
Emerson steps back as I pull my sweater over my head, and then my tank top. At first I think it’s to give me space.
Then I see him in the reflection.
He’s a shadow at the edge of the light but his eyes gleam. He’s looking at me the way he looked at my paintings in the gallery.
I should be indignant, that he’s seeing me as an object right now.
I’m not indignant.
I’m simultaneously ashamed and hot for it.
Leggings next. The socks I wore underneath.
Emerson moves back in as I’m wriggling out of my panties, out of breath, my cheeks burning. When I straighten up he puts his hand on my elbow again. I already know this touch. I know how he’ll run it up my arm, to my shoulder, to the side of my neck—
He makes a collar of his hand, and I can’t breathe. I can’t move. His grip is more commanding than it was in the gallery, and I’m wearing far less clothing. With his other hand, he makes soothing strokes down my arm.
“One more,” he says.
I lift shaking hands to take off my bra and drop it to the floor. He’s closer now. His expensive clothes brush against my back. He’s hard underneath those clothes. Every part of him is hard—abs, chest, cock.
“Such a good little painter,” he murmurs into my ear. “Now pick up your paints.”
I have to bend to do it. The motion pushes my ass against him. He doesn’t give at all. He wants to do this. I’m on fire with shame, and with this heat between my legs, and with his hand on my throat. I have a brush in my hand, though I don’t remember choosing one. I have the paint.
“Deep water,” Emerson says. “Paint how it feels right now.” He moves me around to the front of the stool by the throat and tugs me onto it. I have to step back and up, but I make it. And then I’m painfully aware of how naked I am.
Protests rise to my tongue and drown in his touch. I normally start with a sketch. But his hand across my airway, his other hand playing at my hip, the hard stool under soft flesh, oh my god—it’s all so much that I don’t know how to sketch.
The moment hangs.
And I understand.
He’s going to be still—he won’t touch me, won’t take this further until I paint.
Blue goes onto the brush.
The moment I touch it to the canvas, his hands move. One stays firm on my throat while the other presses flat on my belly and rises to circle my nipples with a fingertip. I paint the suggestion of a wave, way up near the top of the canvas. Add black near the bottom. I hardly have any control over my brushwork. I don’t know how I’m supposed to, when Emerson’s touching me. Goose bumps chase after every trace of my skin. It’s like I’m being outlined. It’s like he’s finding my edges.
I want him to find another place.
But I don’t have the words to beg him for it. I’m concentrating too hard on painting. I’m trying to ignore the fact of my body’s responses. Not because it doesn’t feel good, but because it feels so good that I’m losing my composure. I’m in the middle of filling in a swath of roiling blue when I discover myself rocking on the edge of the stool, my thighs spread for him without Emerson having to say a word.
He notices at the same time I do—or maybe he’s waited for me to notice first.
Slowly, tortuously, he runs his hand down to my thigh. All the way to my knee. He skims his fingers back up. I open for him even more, making furious swipes with the brush.
He avoids the wet, aching place I want him to touch and a frustrated noise escapes me.
Emerson laughs. He smells so good, like an icy wind with a core of warmth, a hint of something spicy and male. His laugh is delighted.
It’s almost cruel.
He rolls one of my nipples between his thumb and forefinger. Pleasure feels like the roots of a plant, driving deep into the ground in thin tendrils. It reaches down the length of my body. I want him to touch me. I want him to make me come. And he is touching me, but not where I need.
Layers of paint go onto the canvas. The water is so choppy it looks like it’s going to explode into my face. Arousal drips down the inside of my thigh. Oh, Jesus. On instinct I try to close my legs, to hide it from him, but Emerson’s hand blocks me. He yanks my thighs back open and squeezes at my throat. A bolt of real fear flashes through me. He must feel it, because he wraps his other arm around me and holds me still.
“Shh,” he says into my ear. “Just paint.”
He will not touch my clit.
He won’t do it.
Frustration heats and boils over. Emerson’s big, strong hand is everywhere but where I need it to be, and look at me, look at me. I’m a naked woman perched on a painting stool with her legs spread wide, practically begging, and he is giving me nothing.