She raised an eyebrow. "You heard me the first time:'
What a woman she was. "Three days' he said, and for the first time something other than utter confidence swam in the depths of her gray eyes.
"Three days," she finally repeated. "Of what?"
He reached around her and pulled out the band that held back her hair. The buzzing moved up his neck, into his skull as his fingers found the perfect curve of her cranium.
She stood perfectly still, letting his fingers linger a little too long on the nape of her neck, allowing him to rearrange her hair around her shoulders. He brushed the overly long bangs away from her eyes and took her in.
Everything in the room but her face and those lips and the slant of her cheekbones was lost to him. "I'm going to paint you."
Her tongue came out again, licking at the corner of her mouth, but this time Sam knew it wasn't practiced. It wasn't planned. It was instinct.
''I'm all yours."
"In the nude' he added, upping the ante, making sure they were clear, that everything was on the table. "I wouldn't have it any other way' she replied, and he found that his breath had been taken away. He turned his back on her and grabbed his brushes. "We'll start now' It wasn't a question. He couldn't let her leave.
"Of course' she said, and he didn't have to look at her to see her satisfaction.
Too bad he couldn't take her up on her offer. Already he could imagine how good it would feel to slip inside her pu**y, slick against his heat, tight against his thick shaft.
But there would be other sexy women to share his bed. He wasn't willing to lose the creative spark that had hit him the moment she'd knocked on his gallery door.
TWO
VAANESSA FOLLOWED SAM OUT the back door, already wet, ready to take whatever he was giving. From what she could tell in baggy jeans he looked to pack quite a punch. God, was e glad that she'd gone on that spontaneous run. There was nothing she'd rather do than pose naked for this sexy painter. Except screw his brains out, of course.
She was absolutely positive that the woman in the painting she was going to buy-or barter for, she supposed-had been his lover. He was good. She already knew that from the quick glance she'd given the paintings on the surrounding walls of his gallery as she'd followed him out the back door. But nobody was that good.
The sensuality that dripped from the canvas came from a deep i and personal knowledge of his model's body.
Of her heart.
Vanessa simply couldn't wait for him to start familiarizing , himself with her own dips and curves. Particularly the hollow between her thighs. She'd been with plenty of suits, a rock singer or two, but never a painter. And he looked to be about as yummy as they came. Hard and rough and artsy.
No wonder so many society women were patrons of the arts.
The bigger the check, the hotter the sex.
Making a mental note to ask Carrie about the ins and outs of the art world on Saturday, she followed her painter down a short alley. She was surprised to find that it opened up into a small, private vineyard. At the end of August, it was only a month or two from the crush, and the purple grapes hung heavy on the vines. She could smell their sweetness as they caught the final rays of sunlight.
A small red barn stood in the middle of the vines, and she watched as he slid open a large wooden door and disappeared inside. Moments later he reappeared with a pad of paper, a green plastic chair, and a thick white painter's tarp. He put the chair down outside the barn door, the pad of paper and pencil on top of it, then walked back to where she was standing. He threw the tarp down beneath a row of vines and stood back to check his setup.
"Is that where you want me?" she asked, deliberately choosing her words to let him know that he could definitely have her. Right now, please.
He'd been devouring her with his eyes from the moment she'd set foot inside his gallery. It was clear what he felt went far beyond mere artistic inspiration.
He shifted his glance from the tarp to her face. She found herself blushing beneath the heat of his gaze. Would wonders never cease? She never blushed. As a teenager she'd possessed an inner poise, a selfconfidence that had set her apart from her peers. But this man, this painter with his burning green gaze, had the power to make her blush.
Hot damn. What else could he do? She couldn't wait to find out. "I'm Sam Marshall' he said, not answering her question, knowing as well as she did that the answer was obvious. Of course he wanted her to pose on the tarp, why else would he have laid it there?
Two could play that game, she thought. "I'm Vanessa' she said f,;as she kicked off her running shoes, then slipped her thumbs into the top edge of her white running shorts. She held his gaze as she slowly slid the shorts past her tiny white lace panties, down her thighs. She bent over slightly at the waist and lifted one leg off the ground, slipping a foot out, then the next. Her shorts dangled from one French-tipped nail. "Vanessa Collins."
His lip twitched and she thought he was going to grin. Instead he strolled over to the plastic chair and sat down, looking far too relaxed for Vanessa's liking. Bored, even.
"If you'd be more comfortable posing in your bra and panties, "that's fine." He opened up his sketch pad, then his eyes returned to her. "For now."
Everything in Vanessa ached to prove to Sam that she was going to be the best nude model he'd ever had. Better than the bitch hanging in the window, that was for sure. (Vanessa was still going hang the painting in her office, of course.)
She was going to be his every fantasy come to life.
And then he was going to make all her fantasies come true.
SAM KNEW HE LOOKED LOOSE and relaxed sitting in the chair waiting for Vanessa to take off her clothes. It was something every painter learned early on in art school. At eighteen, when faced with his first hot nude model, it had been difficult to keep his hard-on a secret. But that was nearly twenty years ago, and he'd painted his fair share of hot babes since then.
Today, however, he should have been an actor, not a painter.
Because Vanessa was driving him crazy. He wanted to toss his sketch pad into the bushes and drive into her without so much as a kiss. She'd be ready, he already knew that. He knew it with every word that came out of her sexy, dirty mouth. He knew it with every flash of her gray eyes as they raked up and down his body, always pausing at his rapidly growing c()ck.
Where the hell had his self-control gone?
She stood before him in white, wispy panties and a jog bra, and Sam's fingers itched to do a hell of a lot more than capture her image in black and white. He wanted to explore her slim hips with the palms of his hands, to run his tongue into the indentation behind her knees, to taste the salt of her tanned skin. Oh, shit, while he'd been salivating over her, she'd gone and crossed her hands across her chest and was pulling her jog bra up her rib cage. Past the soft mounds of flesh at the base of her br**sts. Past the perfect circles of her areolas, a shade all her own, not a dusty rose after all. More like the color her cheeks had turned when she'd blushed earlier, standing in the late afternoon sun in his small Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard. She pulled her top past the hollow of her collarbones, over her head, and when it was gone, her hair fell in waves around her shoulders, the wispy ends brushing the tips of her ni**les. His mouth went dry as he stared at her br**sts. Did he actually think he could paint this woman? Already, he knew his hands would be shaking with lust when he tried to start drawing.