Chipping away at her resistance, one touch at a time…
Fallon Frost’s late foster mother had done so much to heal the wounds of her damaged childhood. So when a lecherous developer plans to bulldoze her old home to make room for a strip mall, the practical, ordered life Fallon has built for herself is threatened.
Then he makes a twisted proposal. He’ll leave the land alone if she poses nude for a sculpture that’ll end up in his collection. Seeing no other choice, she heads for Nova Scotia—only to find something totally unexpected. A sexy, hot-blooded, infuriating sculptor.
Guarded, sexually detached Fallon is a challenge Max Emery can’t wait to tackle. Yet with each tap of his chisel, he uncovers a woman who rekindles a dream he thought lost. Home, family…love. And the closer he gets to her core, the harder it becomes to accept that he’s carving her naked body for another man’s eyes.
As progress on the sculpture almost grinds to a halt, their fragile fantasy world collapses under the weight of reality. Threatening Fallon’s one chance to save her foster mother’s land…and any chance she and Max have to find love.
Fallon halted so abruptly her sneakers kicked up two clouds of dust, making it feel as if she’d arrived early for a shoot-out in the Wild West. She gawked at the studio fifty yards farther down the long, gravel drive. It was a saltbox-style house, or had been—less a house now than a solarium. As she approached, Fallon found she could peer clear through the front windows to the backyard, as though it had been gutted of its rooms. Gutted and given more facelifts than an aging D-list celebrity. Dozens of mismatched windows had been installed, so many that the roof looked to be held up more by glass than by walls.
Perfect. She might as well strip and ride naked on a float through the town center for all the privacy this place offered.
“It’s worth it,” she whispered, forcing herself to believe the words. “Do it for Gloria.” She conjured her aunt’s smiling face. She conjured the memory of every kind thing Gloria had ever done for her, and she steeled herself.
She mounted the front steps and studied the little brass door plaque a moment.
M.L. Emery, Malcontent
And world-renowned classical sculptor, or so she’d been told. Fallon had been picturing a grandfatherly sort of figure…eccentric but benign. Preferably warm and charming, though she was in no position to be choosy.
The fist clenching her tote bag prickled, begging for circulation. With an almighty exhalation, Fallon put her finger to the doorbell and gave it a push, hearing the chime through the open windows.
“A moment,” came the shouted reply.
She shifted uneasily on the doorstep. Above her the wind folded and refolded a Canadian flag with aggressive snaps. It was late summer in Nova Scotia, and the breeze coming off the ocean felt icy and unwelcoming, like a warning. She glanced beyond the rolling green hills to the craggy cliffs, the dark blue of the Atlantic crashing at their feet.
Another curt shout. “Yes, come in.”
She took a breath and pulled the screen door open, surprised to walk in not on the sculptor himself but two models—an elegant young woman and a striking man. The man was just zipping up the woman’s dress and Fallon hoped she hadn’t interrupted a tryst.
“May I help you?” the male model asked in a difficult-to-pinpoint accent, snapping his dark eyes to Fallon’s.
“I’m looking for the artist. Mr. Emery.”
“What do you want that bastard for?” He handed the young woman her purse from the floor.
“I have an appointment. Could you tell him Fallon Frost is here? If he’s in.”
His eyebrows rose with curiosity or realization, and he addressed the young woman with a hand on her lower back. “Excellent work today. I will call you.”
She nodded and smiled, and they exchanged double cheek kisses before she exited with a polite nod to Fallon.
“He’s in.” The man wiped a hand on his filthy pants and extended it.
Fallon shook it, understanding with a small start. “You’re M.L. Emery?”
His hand was warm and strong, coated in a dusty film. “Max is fine.”
Fallon’s insides did a somersault. This man was not what she’d been expecting. Not even remotely. Max Emery was too young, for starters. And he looked more like a rock star destined for a sensationally tragic and premature death than a classical sculptor. He stood six feet tall or close to it, slender but not skinny, with unruly black hair long enough to tuck behind his ears. Clay dust and paint coated his jeans, and he wore an untucked black T-shirt, also filthy. His muscular arms belied something beyond an artistic vocation. A laborer’s arms, Fallon thought, and swallowed.
“I apologize that I forgot your appointment,” he said. “I don’t usually have appointments.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“No matter. Refresh my memory, Miss Frost. Soon to be Mrs…?”
“Forrester,” she lied, stomach turning. Dear God, what a disgusting thought. The only thing that nauseated her more than that face-saving fib was her real motive for being here.
“And your fiancé didn’t come with you today?”
“No.”
Behind heavy black stubble, his mouth twitched—amused or offended, it was tough to pinpoint which. “Your fiancé is investing a great deal of money in this. Doesn’t he want a say in the piece?”
“He gave me a photo. To give you an idea of what he wants.” Fallon could feel herself blushing already.
Max Emery frowned outright. His eyes narrowed and his lips pursed in a lopsided scowl.
“Is that not…sufficient?” Fallon asked.
He ran a hand through his messy hair. “The money he’s offering can compensate. But I’m not impressed.”
Fallon decided it was the accent of a Frenchman who’d learned English in Great Britain. An accent that couldn’t help its own contemptuousness.
“Sorry,” she said again.
Max flapped a hand designed to dismiss her worries. “No matter. May I make you a coffee?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
Fallon watched him stroll to the far side of the cottage to a huge, industrial sink. He had a lazy way of moving that made it seem as though he’d just rolled out of a bed full of satisfied women. A photograph hung on the wall beside the cupboards, and he paused to kiss two fingers and press them to the frame as he passed.
The studio matched its denizen: dusty and a bit off. The walls that would have created individual rooms had been reduced to support beams, lending the house a cavernous, cathedral quality. What had formerly been an attic had been half-removed and converted to a loft, reached by the spiral staircase winding up from the center of the floor. Fallon saw a bed there, positioned under one of many skylights, a mess of sheets and blankets heaped on it. The other half of the studio, from which the attic had been entirely removed, was bathed in light from the proliferation of mismatched windows. Mullioned and louvered, some modern and some less so, they looked to have been scavenged from buildings of any and all types and relocated here, to this sunny patchwork of a residence. Fallon spotted an old, clawfooted enamel bathtub parked immodestly below a tall window in the rear of the house and felt her eyebrows rise.
A kettle wailed.
Max poured steaming water into a French press and grabbed a wooden folding chair from beside the stove. He approached Fallon and snapped it open, setting it at her side.
“Thank you.”
“Sugar?” he asked.
“No. Cream, if you have it.”
“No cream. Black coffee and red wine are normally the sacraments of this house,” he said, as if reciting a proverb. “But you may bring some next time, if you like.”
“Okay.” Fallon sat, clasping her hands, pretending to be entranced by the view through the front windows. In her periphery, Max crossed his arms over his chest, scrutinizing. She met his stare. He seemed to study her with detachment, as if she were some interesting object that he couldn’t quite identify.
“You’re not what I was picturing,” he said slowly.
Before she could echo these sentiments, he turned and walked back to the stove.
A minute later Fallon accepted a chipped mug filled with coffee so black she felt jittery just looking at it. Max dragged a stepladder over and perched on the second step, wrapping an arm around his knees.
He blew the steam off his cup. “So. Do you have this photo of the pose your fiancé is envisioning?” His baritone voice was smooth and rough at the same time, like cement.
“Yes.” Dread gurgled in Fallon’s stomach as she rooted through her canvas tote and withdrew the magazine clipping.
Max took it and studied it and frowned so deeply it bordered on disgust. “This is a joke.”
“No, it’s what he wants.” Fallon agreed that the photo was risqué, a pin-up to say the least, but she hadn’t expected this strong a reaction. She’d seen Max Emery’s work online—nudes, almost without exception.
“You wouldn’t be caught dead in this position,” he said, still staring at it.
Fallon rankled. As if this man knew the first thing about her. “It’s what he’s asking for.”
“Your fiancé set his price, Miss Frost, but not my terms.”
Her throat tightened. “It’s very important he’s happy with it.”
Max ran the tip of his tongue over the edge of his mouth. Balancing his cup on his knee, he pinched the corners of the clipping and ripped it cleanly in two. “I’m not a pornographer.”
Fallon watched with mounting panic as the torn paper fluttered to the floor. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to suggest that—”
“Your fiancé will be happy with the piece,” Max interrupted. “If he has seen my work, he knows what I do. Sensual. Not obscene.”
“I’m sure. It’s just that he’s very particular.” A soft thud scattered Fallon’s thoughts as a cat dropped from the loft onto a tall cabinet, then to the floor. It strolled across the dusty hardwood with an errant push against Max’s shins. He ran a palm down its back, leaving a faint white print on its black fur.
“What’s your cat’s name?” Fallon asked, desperate for a change of topic.
“It is not my cat.”
“Oh. Well, what’s the cat’s name?”
He caught her eyes with his penetrating ones and held them for a long moment, then blinked, nonplussed. “It’s a cat.”
Fallon’s civility was fraying. Everything about this meeting was going even worse than she’d feared, and she could barely recognize herself this far out of her element. Where had the assertive and capable woman she knew herself to be at work and home gone to? She felt abandoned. And stranded.
She studied the man opposite her, trying to make sense of him. His irises were as near-black as the coffee he was sipping. He couldn’t be more than thirty-five, though his eyes seemed older. They were dark, utterly—dark lashes and brows and faintly darker skin and fine lines edging them—making him look as though he hadn’t slept in weeks. Fallon had a disturbing desire for them to snap back to hers. It was a troubling urge, a temptation, that fourth glass of wine at a lousy office party that always seems like a good idea at the time.
She thought of the woman who’d just left, all youth and grace and poise. She glanced down at her worn-out gray corduroys and yellow canvas sneakers, feeling like the antithesis of a French artist’s model. But then again, this was Cape Breton, not Paris. Besides, her clothing was most certainly not this man’s concern.
She cleared her throat. “Can we talk about the process? He’s very eager to know when the piece will be done.”
Max turned to stare pointedly at her, as if trying to guess what Fallon looked like beneath her clothes. And seeming as though he could. “Three months,” he concluded. “Barring geological tragedy.”
“All right.”
“Two weeks for studies and ten for the marble.” He ran a hand over his stubbly chin. “I trust your beloved can live without you for that long?”
Fallon started. “How much of that time do I actually need to be here for?”
“Every moment.”
“Whoa—what? Why?”
“Because that is how I work.”
“Three months?” she asked, awestruck. “How many days a week?”
“Every day.”
“All day?”
He looked thoughtful. “Perhaps six hours a day. Ten o’clock to four. Peak sun. But I’m flexible.”
“It doesn’t sound like you are.” Fallon’s temper flared, just as it always did when she was faced with pushy, self-important men.
“If you’re unhappy with my terms I suggest you find a different sculptor, miss.”
“No,” she said, diminished. “It has to be you. He insisted.”
Max made a face that unequivocally asked, And you’re arguing with me why?
“But I need to be here all that time?”
Max sighed. “Do you have a work conflict?”
“I might.”
“Then allow me to be indiscreet,” he said. “Your fiancé has offered me seven hundred thousand for this commission.”
Fallon gritted her teeth to keep her jaw from dropping.
“American dollars. If he can toss that much away on a statue, I trust he can keep you afloat during an unpaid leave from your job, no?”
“You don’t understand—”
“I am sure I don’t,” he interrupted. “But I’m an artist, Miss Frost, not a doctor. I have no moral obligation to perform for you. If this is actually important, you will agree to my terms. They’re non-negotiable. Not because I cannot change them, but because I won’t. Do you see?”
“Why do I need to be here so much, though? It seems excessive.”
“It is all very dull and nonsensical, I’m afraid.” Max sounded as if he himself were bored by it. “I need your…energy, here with me. That is the best way I can explain it. You do not have to hold a pose every moment you’re here, but you do need to be here.”
“I was hoping you could take photos.” Fallon’s face warmed at the mere idea. “And work from those?”
He smiled, a glorified twitch of his lips. “I think you’ll agree you have three dimensions.”
“Well, could you…”
“Could I what?”
“Could you use another woman’s body? I’d pay you for the model’s time. I wanted to ask about that, anyway.”
Max’s eyes lit up. “What is wrong with yours?” He looked extremely eager to hear the answer.
“Nothing. I just…I’d prefer not to be naked in front of you.”
Another twitchy grin. “I very much doubt your fiancé is paying me a small fortune to play Frankenstein. Surely he wants your body, yes?”
Fallon bit her lip. “That he does.”
“Then you’ve got your answer.”
The cat jumped into Max’s lap.
Fallon saw the coffee in her mug quivering from her shaky grip and set it on the floor. Her host stroked the cat languidly—a Bond villain, complete with accent. She felt a powerful urge to run. In one corner a pair of eight-foot-tall hunks of white marble stood sentinel on wheeled dollies, looking as if they might stop her if she tried to make a break for it.
She wondered distractedly if Max lived here or if the bed and the kitchen trappings were just conveniences. Or if that bed was designed for dalliances with young models. She glanced at his hands. A couple of thick silver rings but none on that symbolic finger. He caught her scrutiny and returned it, staring pointedly at her own bare, third finger. He set the cat and then his empty mug on the ground and caught her again with those magnetic eyes.
“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.”
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[5 of 5 Stars!]