Thomas's Muse: A Quidell Brothers Novella

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Ah, the ever-present ghost haunting a lot of women. I wrap my fingers around her hand, holding gently. She looks down at our clasped fingers, our touching palms, and sighs again.

  “My brother’s ex was fucked up. You are not fucked up. You just need to figure out a few things.”

  She nods, still looking at our hands. “Will you drive me home?”

  “Of course.” I’ll do more than drive her home. I’ll do everything I can for her.

  8

  Samantha

  Tom digs around behind the seat of his clean-but-older truck. It’s flame red and looks like it’s had work done to it and I wonder if it’s an old firefighter’s vehicle.

  I stare at his ass. It’s magnificently framed by his black slacks and I can’t help myself. I’d be staring at it even if I hadn’t drunk two glasses of wine on an empty stomach and had a frank talk with him about sex.

  Sometimes my mouth just blabs.

  “Ah!” Tom pulls his head out and stands up tall, a cardboard tube in his hand. “Here it is.” He hands me the tube.

  It looks just like the one he handed me at the beginning of the week, when we first met, and for a second I wonder if it’s more mock-ups.

  He must have read my mind because he chuckles. “No logos. I promise.”

  I pop off the top. Inside, there’s a single rolled up sheet of paper and I finger it carefully, making sure I don’t damage it.

  It unrolls as I pull it out.

  I’m looking at myself. Me, with a backpack over my shoulders and my hair longer, and in a ponytail. Like I used to wear it, when I was still at the University.

  That day, the day of my fantasy, when I was looking at him, he was looking at me. And he drew a picture. Of me.

  “I found it last night.” He’s grinning like a kid again, and his happiness reasserts itself when he points at the drawing. “I did this my first semester. It’s you. I’m positive.”

  It’s stunning. The emotions he captured sing off the paper: I’m tentative and unsure. There’s desire in my eyes, but it’s not to be. And there’s a sadness to the lines, as if he, too, wanted a connection, but also decided it wasn’t to be.

  “I don’t know what to say.” In my hands right now is a real, physical manifestation of what, for me all these past four years, had been nothing but a dream. A desire I could never make real. “This is beyond beautiful.”

  For a moment, long ago, I had been Tom’s muse.

  “I’d like to draw a new one.”

  I look up at his handsome face and his tousled hair. He still wants me to be his muse? Even after I did my damnedest to scare him off?

  My answer popped out of my mouth before all the embarrassment—all the fucked-up-edness—can cut it off. “When?” Not Why? or Really? I ask when.

  Somewhere in my brain, I understand what I want. Damn it, I need to own it.

  Something about his stance changes. He feels closer all of a sudden, as if we’re touching. Like I just passed a test for him.

  Because I want this. I want to be his muse. I want to give to him across all his senses.

  Hunger overtakes his face and his eyes darken for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is low and deep. “Now.”

  “Now?”

  Tom nods. He’s got a look of determination about him and I realize this is as much about him not letting me run off to my loft-cave as it is about wanting to draw my picture.

  Maybe more.

  “But it’s night.”

  “Candles, then.”

  “Right now?” Why am I waffling? I want this. But maybe I don’t deserve it.

  Tom takes my hand, his grip firm but polite, and my body responds before I can think. Again. I’m tingling. Up my arm from where he holds my fingers. Down my belly to between my legs. Into my neck and up across the back of my mouth.

  I suck in my breath and my breasts thrust out. My lip curls in and I bite down.

  He pulls me around his truck and opens the passenger side. “Up you go. We’ll get take-out and you will eat low mein out of a box while you sit for me in the candlelight.”

  My heel slips on the running board but Tom has me. He keeps me from falling, his hand on my ass.

  He’s cupping my backside, his fingers splayed, like he knows how to give me the right kind of spanking. I must have shivered because he let go.

  “Buckle in, my lovely Sammie,” he purrs, the wonder of his baritone flowing over me. When I settle in, he’s walking around the front of the truck, but his eyes are on me.

  I feel like I’m on that desk in the library, the one in my fantasy. But this time, it’s twenty-three-year-old Tom bending over me with his breath tickling my nipples and his palm rubbing me just so.

  When he gets into the truck, he slams the door and I jolt back into the here and now. Shit, I think. I’m going to fuck him tonight. It’s going to happen.

  I want to crawl onto his lap as much as I want to run away.

  “You will be my first guest.” He starts the truck but he’s looking at me with his gorgeous eyes and I can’t read his face.

  How is this going to help me feel less fucked up? A sane woman would say next weekend, let me move out first.

  But I’d waffle about that, too. Why, I don’t know. It’s not Rick I want anymore.

  9

  Thomas

  Sammie stands in the center of my living room, her back to me and her smooth little ass tight and her heels together like she’s trying to keep her pussy clenched. Fucking her right now, on the floor between my easel and balcony door, would be as easy as taking those five strides across the room. But I walk into the kitchen instead, though the walking is uncomfortable, and drop dinner on the counter.

  I can wait. I will wait. She’s not going to leave here thinking I’m no different from her dumbass soon-to-be ex-boyfriend.

  “Your curtains are open.” She says it in a dreamy voice, as if seeing the outside world makes her happy.

  I dig around for forks. I have to do something to distract myself. Damn, she’s beautiful. “I like the sun.” Glancing over, I see the last of the sunset play along the lines of her body. She’s silhouetted in golds and reds, her black and gray patterned skirt curving around her hips and her hand, holding a bottle of water, at her side.

  Her lovely hair is up in a loose ponytail. Little wisps frame the line of her perfect jaw when she looks over her shoulder. “I like it, too.”

  No more of that boyfriend. She makes a decision tonight. Then I clean out her stuff from that apartment. If I need to take her to her friend Andy’s, so be it. But she deserves better than what she’s letting herself have.

  “Is the floor okay?” I point at my work table and shrug. Six or seven drawings lay scattered over the top and I don’t want to move them. “I have a system.”

  Sammie laughs, pulled, it seems, from her dreaminess. “Men with systems are always better.”

  I didn’t think I’d want her to stay more than I do right now, but I can’t let her go. Not without a good reason. I hand her a box of takeout.

  She stares at it for a second. Winking, she pulls off her heels and drops to the floor, both her legs off to one side so she can sit like a lady. Patting the floor, she reaches for me.

  Me. Not the food. My hand.

  I almost drop the food and roll on top of her. Almost rip open her blouse and lay kisses over her chest while growling some vague words declaring my possession. Because for a flittering moment, those primal needs surface above my civilized caution and the lower parts of my brain—and the lower part of my body—all scream my woman.

  Jealousy flicks into my vision and for a split second I see some manscaped douchebag model-boy pawing at her chest and forcing her down on him.

  I blink. I’m still standing, still holding the low mein. She’s looking me up and down—at my face and my chest and my crotch. My boxer-briefs can only keep my cock under so much control.

  I grin sheepishly and drop down next to her, handing over her meal. She t
akes it, looking away again, over her shoulder and out the window. “You don’t seem like a candles kind of guy.”

  Her skirt hikes an inch or two up her legs when she sets down her food. The top of one thigh-high stocking peeks out.

  She says something. “What?” I ask.

  Her gaze moves from the moon to the easel. “You said candlelight. Will you be able to see well enough to draw?”

  The sun’s gone and the full glory of the evening moon scatters across her hand. She dances her fingers across the carpet. Rustling drifts in from outside—the wind has picked up. A cloud rolls through the sky and for a second my living room drops into shadow.

  I don’t say anything. I stand instead and she watches me as I rise, her lovely face turning up. She looks hungry, but not for the food next to her. She looks like she wants to escape.

  I need to capture her state on paper. I need for her to understand that I see it when I look at her, and that I’m here for her. She has a choice.

  “Don’t move,” I say. She blinks, but follows my command, staying perfectly still as I walk to the linen closet in the hallway. Dan sent a box of pillar candles, old ones his ex left. I think he wanted them out of his house.

  A couple are sweet smelling. A few, spicy. One smells like vanilla and I pull it out when I set the candles down next to my work table.

  Sammie watches me, her hand still splayed in the moonbeam, her face in shadow. Bending down and kissing her would be the easiest thing in the world. Tasting those perfect lips. Flicking my tongue against hers. But I back away toward the kitchen for a lighter and plates for the candles.

  The apartment drops into twilight when I turn off the kitchen light. Only the silver glow of the moon frames Sammie where she sits on the floor, her long legs to the side. I set a candle next to the easel. The lighter bursts on, a little sun in our night, and the candle sputters alive. A new glow brightens Sammie from the front, a warm wash of light and vanilla.

  “It smells nice.” She sits up a little, obviously uncomfortable leaning to the side because of her skirt.

  I pull two pillows and a throw off my chair. Leaning toward her, I catch the tiny hint of wine still left on her breath. But mostly I hear the small hitch in her breath and the whiffing of her blouse’s fabric against her bra.

  The first pillow I tuck under her arm. The second, behind her back. The throw, I bunch up under her hip.

  “Thank you,” she whispers, and lays down, rolling against the pillow behind her and stretching out along the throw on the floor. Her breasts thrust up. She sighs softly, her eyes closing for a second, then reopening to look up at the moon now dappling her face.

  Her fingers wiggle. Her hips sway. And I swear she’s having a tiny orgasm right now, right in front of me.

  I want to rub against her. I want to pull those legs apart and nip her skin along the top of those stockings. I want to pump into her fast and hard and make her come more times in one night than that dick ex of hers has the entire time they’ve been together.

  But it’s not my choice when he becomes her ex. It’s hers. And she might tease—consciously or not, I’m not sure—but she’s going to say it to me. She’s going to tell me explicitly what she wants.

  And she’s going to want me.

  “Take out the ponytail.” I’m growling. I swear to God I sound like some animal. When I get between those thighs I will be an animal.

  She lifts her head and a small wicked smile curls up her lips, but she doesn’t say a word. Her fingers smooth up her side and pull free her hair. It cascades over her shoulders, over the throw, and into the moonbeam. When she lays her head down again, her fingers stay next to her lips.

  “You are killing me.” It comes out even deeper than before. I can barely talk. But I somehow manage to pull my pad down from the easel and my pastels from my case.

  The moon casts silver from behind and the candle golden orange from the front. She’s bathed in contradiction and I need to capture it as much as I need to capture her. The candlelight flickers over her skin, over her flimsy blouse, and I see the outline of her bra underneath as it curves around her full breasts. Her nipples must be hard little nubs under it, but I can’t see.

  If I ran my hand over each breast, first the left, then the right, squeezing, I’d find those rock hard nipples. Flick them each with my tongue. Make her scream my name.

  I drop onto the floor and prop the pad against the easel’s leg. Sammie watches me, calm and almost dozing. We don’t speak.

  I draw.

  10

  Samantha

  Tom settles into brilliant intensity and I’m hypnotized. He sits three feet away behind his paper but I feel his gaze on me, assessing, reading, wanting. He moves his hands to draw an arc and I feel his fingertips on my skin. My need for him lifts away with his artist’s touch, but it doesn’t leave. It floats above my hip like a ghost waiting to be given permission.

  He tilts his head and my frozen soul lifts up as well. I feel the ice that’s been locking me into one place hover now just outside my mind. Like it’s a separate thing that’s been too close for me to see. But Tom draws a line, makes a sweep of color, and pulls it to his paper, giving the phantom a visible shape.

  I’ve been, I think, a mirror to Rick, reflecting back his physical attraction to himself. He banks it, lives it, sells it, but it’s flat and thin.

  But when Tom watches me, I can tell he sees the dimensions he wants to lay down on his page—and, from the brilliant hard-on outlined in his pants, to touch. He’s not flat. Or thin. And I want, more than anything right now, to get rid of my phantoms. To let in this living man.

  Slowly, carefully, I unbutton my blouse. If Tom is willing to look beyond my surface to find what’s below the mirror, I’ll show him. I’ll open up.

  I hear his pastels scrape across the paper. The candle flickers and the scent of vanilla fills the air, and Tom’s gaze wraps his strong will around my body. Tom yanks away the sheen I’ve been using since college to reflect back to the men I want to bed what they want to see.

  Somehow, it became my cover. I could have as much sex as my body wanted but I never showed my partners me. Mostly, they didn’t want to see me, anyway. They just wanted their cocks sucked.

  But Tom wants me. He wants to see. I don’t think he wants a relationship with someone who hides from him, and with each fill of gold or blue on his paper he’s demanding I tell him the truth.

  His hand stops for a moment as he watches me undo my blouse, but he doesn’t set down his work.

  I know why. He’s not seeing me yet. That mirror is still there, and I’m still behind it. I feel it, drifting over my skin. It’s cold, frosty. And I need to shed it.

  Slowly, I arch my back and slip off the blouse. A groan rolls from his throat, a deeply male vibration. His fingers set down the pastel and without looking at his paper he flips it over to a fresh page.

  He’s taking in the curve of my back and the line of my legs. His gaze stops at my hip and he tilts his head again, his eyes piercing, but he doesn’t ask me to take off my skirt. He only watches.

  I unhook the button and undo the zipper, easing the fabric down my legs. It rubs against my stockings, sounding much like his charcoal against the page.

  I want him against me. I want to see the hard muscles of his thighs. To feel the v of his abs. I want to know if he keeps his chest smooth or if I’ll rub my face against hair. Will he whisper when we make love? Will he make the small sounds that drive me crazy?

  He’s beautiful, my Tom. He sits, one leg propped up, leaning toward his paper, a charcoal in his hand. A smudge marks his cheek where he rubbed his face. I want to lick it, to feel with my tongue what this wonderful man does with his hands.

  I smell the hot scent of the candle and its flickering heat, but it’s Tom’s focus that reddens my skin. He holds me without touching even as I release the skirt from around my hips. The tops of my stockings grip my thighs and I’m suddenly very aware of their tight hold.

&n
bsp; It should be Tom holding my thighs. Tom widening my legs. Tom staring down with all the intensity I see in his eyes right now.

  I could crawl across the floor. Pinch the zipper of his trousers between my thumb and finger and release what’s waiting for me. How smooth is he? Is he velvet, like in my fantasy? Is he thick and hard enough to make me scream? Will I swirl my tongue around the head of his cock and hear his groans?

  Can I make him crazy enough to thrust into my mouth even though he’s a gentleman?

  “Sammie.”

  I blink, pulled from my revelry, and I realize my hand is between my thighs. I’m stroking myself, thinking about the gorgeous man in front of me. About his beautiful eyes and his wonderful hair I want to tangle my fingers into. About his chest and arms, so large they cover me completely. About his dexterous fingers and the joy they promise.

  My mind knows what’s possible and my fingers are determined to give me a touch, a taste.

  “Sammie, look at me.”

  The candle’s light flickers over his arm, his shoulders. His white dress shirt—his work shirt—glows. The leather cord around his neck stands out as a deep line. I want to lick it, to take it away. Nothing should mar this man’s skin.

  He sets the pad against the easel without turning it. I can’t see what he’s drawn and I think he wants it that way. For now.

  “Talk to me.” Tom wipes his smudged fingers on a cloth from the easel.

  No words have passed between us for so long I feel mute. The moon’s silver slices across my bare shoulder, into the glow of the candle, and I shiver. I’m stuck between two places—between the cold out there and the warm hardness in here.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking. Please.” He’s still rock hard. All this time he’s been drawing me and I’ve been stripping for him, he’s been straining the seams of his trousers. He hasn’t touched. Hasn’t slipped his fingers into the cup of my bra and plied my breasts, his hot breath on my neck.

  “You haven’t touched me.” I’m spread before him with only the deep red lace of my bra and panties between me and his strong hands. Between me and his cock.