Page 55 of Hot Greek Summer

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

She was naked.

He rubbed his hand over the two-day stubble on his jaw. ‘You’ve taken your clothes off again.’

‘Yes.’

She leaned her shoulder against the door frame and crossed her arms lightly beneath her breasts. Frankly, it didn’t help him at all.

‘I want you to draw me again,’ she said. ‘I want to feel like the woman on the easel in there.’

‘Winnie,’ he murmured, walking towards her. God, she was too lovely. His artist’s eye saw a study of curves and slopes, and his body reacted to her as a man.

‘Don’t say no,’ she said, watching his face. ‘Tell me how to pose for you. Draw me again.’ He noticed how tightly her fingers dug into her upper arms, giving her away even though she was trying so hard to look relaxed. ‘Please?’

‘Don’t you already know?’ he said, refusing to drop his eyes from hers as he crossed the room, even though there was just a couple of feet between them now and he could practically feel the heat from her skin. ‘Youareher, Winnie. You don’t need me or anyone else to validate you.’ He took a step closer, within touching distance. ‘I’m sorry if I made you feel manipulated. I didn’t mean for you to feel that way.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I want what you have, Jesse. I want to feel free, to be bohemian and liberated from the complications and strings of conventional romance.’

The light of hope in her eyes lasered into all of his dark corners, a main beam sweeping through his body, finding his secrets, exposing him for the fraud he was. He’d been a fully paid-up member of the ‘fake it till you make it’ brigade, so much so that he’d believed his own hype. He’d sold Winnie a pup, and now here she was fully invested, out on a limb and exposed, and here he was feeling like a con-artist selling snake oil.

He was close enough to smell the summer scent of sun cream on her skin, her only protection against him. It was nowhere near enough. If she knew the truth, she’d wear chainmail.

‘I can’t,’ he said. His fingers ached to trace the criss-cross of pale strap marks in the gold-dust of her shoulders.

‘Yes, you can.’ She backed into the room behind her and perched on the desk. ‘Like this?’ She moved from the desk to the chair, leaning back so her hair trailed down and her breasts rose up.

‘Not like that. Christ, Winnie.’ He dragged his hands down his face. This was torture.

‘How then? Tell me.’

She wasn’t going to let this go. He could tell her to put her clothes back on, of course, but he knew her well enough now to know that it would wound her fragile pride, probably enough to send her running and keep her away. She’d taken too many knocks already from Needledick; he wasn’t prepared to be the next fool who hurt her.

But to do as she asked compromised him in ways he hadn’t imagined possible the first time he’d asked her to let her draw him. In trying to bring her into the sunlight, he’d inadvertently opened up wounds so deep in his own chest that he constantly expected to look down and find his shirt soaked in blood. He was sweating at night, fighting nightmares in his sleep, and his work rate was taking the hit. He’d worked on only one sculpture over the last weeks, and it wasn’t even close to the commission he was supposed to be working on for a gallery in Chicago.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK.’

Her shoulders relaxed as she sat forward in her chair and rested her head in her cupped hands, elbows on the desk. Behind her on the easel, he could see his drawing of her perched on the rock outside. She surrounded him, and she didn’t realise it but she was threatening to engulf him.

‘If we’re going to do this, I want you to choose your own pose.’

He left the room and slowly gathered the things he needed. Sketchbook. Pencils. His sanity. Swallowing hard, he headed back into the room.

‘Is this OK?’

Winnie had tried out the desk, and then the office chair, and eventually she’d decided that if he wanted her to pose herself, then she was going to throw caution to the wind. She wasn’t going to hide or pose in a strategic way to minimise exposure. The whole point of this was supposed to be liberation, after all.

Jesse had paused in the doorway, and she turned her eyes to him as she waited for his verdict.

‘You have no idea how much I’d love to sculpt you exactly like that.’

His dark eyes travelled across the length of her reclining body, taking in the way she’d draped herself sideways over the armchair, head thrown back, one arm outstretched behind her, her legs tossed carelessly over the other arm as if she were completely relaxed after a long soak in the bath. She’d angled her body slightly into the room, hiding nothing from his gaze or his pencil.

He laid his things down on the desk, came to her and touched her outstretched hand.

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