by Amy Andrews
“Was it being born?” She pulled her gaze from his abs to his eyes. “Did you have to stick your hand up inside and drag it out? I saw that on a documentary once and couldn’t believe how messy it was. And how calm the mother was. I mean, I’m not sure I’d be okay to just stand there while someone stuck their entire arm up my hoo-ha, right?”
She hesitated for a moment like she’d done the first day they’d met, like she wasn’t sure this was a topic for polite conversation. But her mouth had already committed, so she jutted her chin and went for it.
“I know it has to be done and, let’s face it, a calf is much bigger than a man’s arm—”
Her gaze dropped to his arms via the scar, his chest, and his belly button. She was looking at him like pie again. Annie’s pecan pie with melted butter. Sweet and savory all at once. An orgasm for the tongue.
Not tofu. Plain, tasteless, orgasmless Tofu.
“Even yours,” she continued, forcing her gaze back to his face, and it took Grady a moment to pick up the thread of her ramblings. She shuddered. “But no thank you. I mean, seriously, females of all species really do get a raw deal. I bet you if the males had to push out disproportionately bigger babies through the passage provided for the process, they’d have invented some kind of handy zipper system a long time ago. Some dude would have patented the bejesus out of it.”
She stopped abruptly, snapping her lips closed as if her mouth had finally received the frantic shut the fuck up messages from her brain. Her cheeks looked pink, but then so did her nose, so it was probably just the nippy December weather.
Grady stared at her, not only at the amount of words she’d spoken but at the content of her monologue. “We…” He spoke because it felt like his turn, but he didn’t even know what to do about cows with zippers. “We don’t calve in winter.”
“Oh, right.” She nodded briskly, her cheeks definitely growing pinker now. “That makes sense. Who wants to be cold and in pain, right?”
She gave a funny little half smile that ended quickly and awkwardly. Then they just stood and stared at each other for several beats longer than was normal or even comfortable, their warm breaths misting into the air.
Tucking her hands into the pockets of her red coat, she said, “I hope it’s okay to have a look around?”
Grady gave a brief, terse nod. “Just don’t go too far or go near the animals.” Last thing he needed was to rescue some damn fool city slicker who’d wandered off and gotten herself lost.
She nodded absently as her gaze drifted again, licking over his chest, lingering on the scar. He should be freezing, half naked in a room that was little more than an icebox, but with her looking at him like she was trying to commit every line and chest hair to memory, he only felt hot.
Really fucking hot. Melted butter on pecan pie hot.
“I hope—” Her voice sounded a little uneven, and she cleared her throat. “I hope my music hasn’t been disturbing you the last few days.”
He wasn’t sure why she was making small talk—although it was preferable to incessant observations about cow hoo-has and zippers. Nor was he sure why he was standing ramrod straight in front of her, thinking about pie when he should be grabbing the spare shirt he kept in the cupboard above the washbasin and getting decent.
But up had been down since the moment she’d arrived.
“It’s fine,” he dismissed. It hadn’t been the music that had been disturbing him, that was for sure.
She nodded again, glancing around the room briefly before settling her eyes back on his chest. “Well…I guess I’ll…” She didn’t finish the sentence as her gaze once again zeroed in on the scar, and her lips rolled together in contemplation. “Do you mind—?” She stepped forward and raised her hand tentatively.
When he didn’t move because he was paralyzed by the realization she was actually going to touch him, she became bolder, stepping in closer again as her fingers made contact. She was so close now, he could smell her. Coffee and snickerdoodles? And something sharp, maybe chemical. Paint, he supposed.
“Is it a bullet wound?”
Grady flinched as she touched the scar, her fingers like icicles as they sunk into the small indentation. He closed his eyes as heat bloomed from the center, spreading like a ripple, burning like a furnace down the length of his body.
Blood pulsed hard and thick, everywhere. Damn it, she might as well be wrapping that cold hand around the throbbing hardness pressing into the zipper of his fly. It was probably forty degrees in this concrete box, but it felt like a sauna, and it was an easy 120 inside his boxers.
He swallowed. “It’s from…shrapnel.”
He had no idea why he wasn’t stepping back. He should step back. He should have said, Yes, I do mind, told her it was none of her business. He should be finding a shirt.
Find a fucking shirt, idiot.
“Did it hurt?”
Surprised by the question, he glanced down to find the bulky knit of her hat a whisker away from brushing the underside of his chin. “Like a bastard.”
She looked up and they were close—her mouth was close—her fingers a balm to the old wound that still made his shoulder ache on cold winter mornings. His heart thumped like a jungle drum and god almighty, it was hot enough in here to grow bananas.
“Was it bad? Did you bleed a lot?”
His throat was dry as the concrete beneath his feet. “It bled some.” Then, finally getting his shit together, he took a step back, and her hand slid away.
If his distancing bothered her, she didn’t show it, just simply said, “Thank you for your service.”
Grady didn’t know what to say. He never knew what to say to this standard platitude. He appreciated the sentiment, but he’d just been doing his job. So he nodded, his pulse reverberating like a dinner gong in his ears, as she slowly backed out of the room and disappeared from sight.
Reaching for the sink, Grady gripped the curved edge in both his hands and hunched over, dropping his head down between his shoulder blades and taking some deep steadying breaths.
January could not come soon enough.
…
Suzanne returned immediately to the cottage, her heart thumping as she tore off her hat and scarf and jacket with shaking hands. She had to paint Joshua Grady. She needed to paint him. No more of the landscapes she’d been trying and failing to paint the last three days. They’d been an exercise in frustration, so dull and lifeless, and she’d stopped and started so many canvases, it was demoralizing. She was beginning to think her mother had been right about original art not being Suzanne’s strength.
But now… All she could think about, could see, was Grady stripped naked to the chest, an old shrapnel wound marring the taut perfection of his skin. He was a solid, silent presence in her head, beckoning her without even lifting a finger, both mirage and real all at once, and her muse was fully aroused.
Christ, she’d been totally deluded thinking she could control her, thinking she was in charge and not her muse. It was laughable that she’d ever believed she was at the helm of this creative imperative when she was actually at her mercy. The sight of Grady had been like rocket fuel to a muse that had been trying valiantly to take flight for the last three days.
Sweet, sweet Jesus, her muse was riding the kind of high people usually took drugs to achieve.
Suzanne crossed to the easel, putting up a brand-new five-foot canvas. Joshua Grady deserved a life-size canvas. Impatiently, she organized paints in the kind of frenzy that hampered productivity rather than enhancing it, but eventually she was ready to go. She just needed music.
Country music. It could be nothing else. Which was a problem because Suzanne St. Michelle did not own any country. Thankfully, the internet behaved, and she found a public playlist dedicated to country rock and she turned it up, the music amplified through her Bluetooth speaker. The roar of an opening guitar riff filled the co
ttage with a dirty kind of earthiness that reminded her exactly of Grady, and as a band called Rascal Flatts belted out about life being a highway, she made her first brushstroke against the canvas.
Suzanne didn’t put away her brushes until one in the morning. She hit stop on the music, and it cut out as abruptly as it had started, leaving her alone in the stark silence of a rural Colorado night. She couldn’t believe she’d painted all day. Suzanne had always just put her brush down as soon as the light faded and stopped for the day, easily separating from her work.
Even these past three days with her creativity running amok, she’d been able to stop.
She never got this way. Like a real artist. She knew people who did—her mother always sculpted obsessively when she was working on a piece—and she had friends who talked about the phenomenon, but she’d never experienced it firsthand.
Until today. Today she’d been possessed.
Her eyes were gritty, she was thirsty and hungry—she’d only eaten some Oreos dunked in milk all day—and she desperately needed to pee. Her jeans and knit top were streaked with paint, as were her hands and her hair and no doubt also her face. And now that the fervor had ebbed, she became aware of the chill inside the cottage, having not turned on the heating.
Her feet were sore, her legs ached, her temple throbbed, and there was a mild cramp in her wrist and an annoying twinge in her lower back. She was cold and hungry and aching. Put succinctly, she was abso-freaking-lutely wrecked. The kind of deep-down weary that invaded her bone marrow.
But she was exhilarated.
Her pulse was flying, and she was breathing hard as her gaze roamed over the canvas, over her first original work since college more than a decade ago. Her hands trembled a little at the thought. She’d done it. She’d really done it.
And it wasn’t flat or lifeless. Joshua Grady glowered from the large canvas in all his glory, his eyes blazing with the same intensity of the day they’d met when he’d accused her of plotting to trap him into marriage.
Or whatever ridiculousness had been in his mind at the time.
The way she’d captured that look, that flare of hell no in his expression, sang to her. It was as if she was back outside with him, watching it happen all over again, and she shivered.
She breathed in and out with measured breaths as her bleary eyes roved over the intricate details of his face.
It could have been him, standing there, staring at her.
Or his head anyway. The body wasn’t his. Her muse, inspired by the mudroom, had demanded she paint him as she’d found him—half-naked. But Suzanne had flat-out refused. As inspiring as she’d found Grady stripped to the waist, it didn’t feel right to paint him any kind of naked. He had to be clothed. But her muse was a determined little vixen, and they’d waged an internal war for hours as Suzanne had worked.
In the end, Suzanne had been so damn mad with that persistent little voice, she’d deliberately attached Grady’s head to Michelangelo’s David—the big marble dude with the tiny weenie in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.
She wanted naked? She could have naked.
And Suzanne had painted enough replicas of the statue over the last decade to make it an easy job. She’d been faithful to the statue, too, much to her muse’s chagrin. Except for one addition—a knot of raised scar tissue just under the right collarbone.
Suzanne’s breath went all funny remembering that moment. Remembering how still Grady had been, his face impassive as her fingers had explored the soft ragged pucker of the wound. Remembering how she’d been compelled to map it, to know its dimensions, its depths, and its boundaries.
Her pulse had skipped madly at her wrist and temples and washed through her ears at her daring. She’d felt jittery and short of breath, and her hand had shaken a little, but she’d not been able to stop the impulse. She’d half expected him to spring away at her tentative touch, but he hadn’t. Not at first anyway. He’d just stood and let her explore, heat pouring off him despite the arctic feel of his skin.
Seeing that wound had made her hot and cold all over. The implications had rocked her to the core. What if it had been lower or to the left side of his chest? Or higher, getting his neck? Or his head? What if it had sliced through a vessel or ricocheted off bone?
She had to breathe in and out deeply and slowly to quash the spurt of anxiety.
Forcing her thoughts back to the painting—to her baby—she assessed it critically. For damn sure it wasn’t art. Her mother would not be impressed. Simone St. Michelle had very definite ideas about what constituted art and what did not, and she’d waste no time pointing out that Suzanne’s portrait was more…caricature than anything else.
But none of that mattered right now because, to Suzanne, this portrait was 100 percent Grady and very, very real.
And with the joy of that accomplishment swelling in her chest, she flicked out the lights, padded to her bedroom, stripped out of her paint-stained clothes, and collapsed on her unmade bed, burrowing her chilled body beneath the down duvet and falling headlong into sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
If Suzanne thought she was one and done with committing Joshua Grady to canvas and that she’d be able to move on to something else, she was sorely mistaken.
She’d woken with the same dire urge to paint thrumming in her blood and propelling her out of bed, but she’d had zero intention of painting Grady again. He and that epic battle with her muse were yesterday, and she was keen to move on.
But with Brooks and Dunn blaring from the speaker, it didn’t take her long to realize it was Grady’s eyes emerging from the canvas again. What the hell? No.
No. No. No.
But her muse giggled with excitement. She freaking giggled. And she had her way.
It was a strange conundrum. Suzanne feeling compelled to paint Grady again by her little internal dictator but not liking it, not one bit, pushing back as much as she could within the confines of the compulsion. Because it was impossible to have a career painting only this damn rancher, and she would not paint him without clothes no matter how much her muse begged.
By the time she was done, it had been another long day, pushing into the night as the music pumped around the cottage. Her body ached again, and her eyes felt like peeled grapes, but this portrait was even better than the last. Her chest expanded painfully as her gaze flowed over the granite stillness of Grady’s expression. Yesterday’s image had been the fiery Grady, annoyed at her presence. Today’s was the gruff, tight-lipped cowboy.
The rancher.
Just to teach that interfering little hussy of hers a lesson, she’d attached Grady’s head to a reproduction of Vitruvian Man—the iconic Leonardo da Vinci drawing of a naked man in two superimposed positions inside a circle. Grady’s surly, silent expression and the shrapnel wound were perfect for the deep, dead-eyed stare of Leonardo’s four-armed, four-legged man.
Not to mention probably being a little more accurate in the junk department.
But still, she sent a tiny prayer to the heavens for the gods of artistic pursuit to forgive her for both today’s and yesterday’s transgressions against art; then she cleaned up the paints and herself before heading to her bed and oblivion.
…
On the third morning, Suzanne was determined not to paint Grady. No matter how much it itched beneath her skin and her muse demanded it. She’d been determined to try her hand at the landscape outside her window again, and those first brushstrokes had been encouraging. But without her even knowing it, the strong ridge of his throat took form and shape before her and she was halfway done with his face before she’d even realized it was him.
Man…she was pissed now.
But Suzanne had the last laugh, flipping her muse off by placing Grady’s head on a Botticelli-style cherub flying through a blue sky and puffy clouds, a bow and arrow poised to strike. The body was all cute an
d soft, in stark contrast to the hard planes and angles of the adult face and the brutality of that shrapnel scar. She’d even gone overboard and painted the slightest uptilt to his beautiful lips.
If her muse insisted on this repetitive farce, then two could play that game.
The next day, Suzanne didn’t even try to resist the wild internal urgings to yet again paint the man whose face she was coming to know intimately. She just prayed at some stage that cold, hard bitch inside her would be satisfied, and then they could both move on. Until then, she’d continue waving the middle finger at her by refusing to succumb to her muse’s pleadings to paint Grady’s body.
So it was a no-brainer to turn back to Michelangelo, capturing the superlative magnificence of what was, by all accounts, his most famous fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—The Creation of Adam. Suzanne was thrilled at how she’d nailed both the expression on Grady’s face and the detailed musculature of Adam’s reclining body as she replicated on canvas one half of probably the most iconic art image in the world—the touching of two outstretched fingers.
Except for the addition of that wound just below the midpoint of the right clavicle, it was an exact replica.
Adam but not Adam. Grady. And it was perfect.
The day after, Joshua Grady’s face got the Atlas treatment. The second-century Roman marble version currently residing in a museum in Naples—not the one standing outside the Rockefeller center.
Because, in this bizarre protracted arm wrestle with her muse, why the freak not?
She didn’t do the flowing old-man beard, but the head was all Grady. Grady from the mudroom, his face rigidly impassive as he’d stood there and endured her touch just as Atlas endured his burden, knees bent, back bowed by the weight of it all.
When she was done, she congratulated herself on her choice, the stoicism of Atlas an appropriate match for Rancher Surly. And then there was Grady’s scar, faithfully replicated as she’d done on all the others. It was a fascinating piece of anatomical precision that made the paintings feel more personal.