The Reluctant Nude

by Meg Maguire

  “I’m not comfortable at all. Is that okay?”

  Max smiled, eyes crinkling. “Oh, yes, be as uncomfortable as you like. How silly of me. Why don’t you just come and stand for me, like you are now.” He beckoned her with a come-hither finger.

  She nodded again and approached, stopping a few paces from the table and clasping her hands in front of her navel, as if waiting at a teacher’s behest.

  “Turn around,” Max said with a twirling gesture.

  Fallon shuffled in place and focused her attention out over the green hills to the sea. She wondered if she was doomed to still be naked when the postman eventually dropped off the mail at this remarkably window-laden residence.

  Max addressed her back. “I am glad you’ve decided to cooperate.”

  “It’s worth it,” she said evenly. “It’s worth the discomfort. If that poor girl is brave enough to do it with everything she’s been through, I’ve got no excuse.”

  “Well, that’s certainly an improvement.”

  Fallon glanced at him over her shoulder. “Did you know she’s like half in love with you?”

  “I did not know such a thing,” he said, sounding disinterested.

  “Well, she is. And she’s thinking about not going to college so she can stay here.”

  “That is a very stupid thing to do.”

  Fallon spun back around, putting her fists to her hips but feeling silly doing so with her clothes off. “You have to say something to her, when she comes by here, next. You have to tell her to go. Don’t just offer her a ticket home. You need to scare her off.”

  “How is that my job?” Max scraped dried clay off the table with a wooden blade.

  Fallon’s blood came to a rolling boil. “It’s not your job. But it’s what a decent person would do, if they knew they could keep someone from making a big mistake.”

  He met her stare. “Is it also my job to tell you not to be here, to not compromise whatever it is you clearly are? Why does the onus fall on me to tell people the mistakes they’re making?”

  “It’s different with her. You asked her to come here, and she’s enamored of you, though God knows why,” Fallon added acidly. “She’s seventeen. She needs you to scare her off. You’re the only person who’s got the influence to change her mind.”

  Max sighed and thrust his hand out impatiently. “Fine. Give me your phone.”

  Fallon was taken aback by his sudden surrender. She suspected he was more annoyed by her argument than morally swayed but she grabbed her cell from her bag and handed it over. Max rifled on a shelf for a scrap of paper and went outside. Fallon crossed her arms carefully over her breasts and stared out the back windows for a couple of minutes, feeling ridiculous.

  Max came back in with a furrowed brow and handed Fallon her now-dusty phone.

  “What did she say?”

  “She is not happy. She called you a very nasty name.”

  Fallon’s jaw dropped. “Me?”

  “Oh, yes. Seventeen-year-old girls are a mystery to me, but I suspect you are the other woman, as they say.”

  She rolled her eyes. “God, you try and do the right thing…”

  “There is no reasoning with teenagers,” Max said, smug. “You see why I mind my own business?”

  “Well, is she going, then?”

  “Yes, I believe so. She said she would come by later for the last of the money I owe her.”

  “Good. That’s what matters.”

  “Let’s do some work now, yes?”

  “Yes, let’s,” she shot back. She put the phone away and took her place before him.

  “Turn around again, please. Thank you.” Max’s voice took on the far-off quality of a distracted man. Fallon felt his eyes on her skin, her back, her butt. She listened to the rhythmic sound of the clay being turned, of tools being selected and put away. The sun warmed her front, her breasts and belly and legs, the languid eddies of stone particles in the streaming light calming her. She surrendered her awareness to their dance. Quite without meaning to, Fallon relaxed.

  “You have extraordinary proportions,” Max announced a few minutes later.

  Fallon fell back down to earth with a psychic thump. She glanced at her hips and thighs, whose voluptuousness had no business associating with her far tinier top half. “Yeah, I know. My body’s a mess.”

  She heard the slap of clay landing unceremoniously on wood then Max’s footsteps approaching. When he rounded and stopped directly in front of her, inches separating their faces, a look of unmistakable anger burned in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong with your body?” he demanded.

  She faltered, intimidated by his proximity and tone. “It’s all… It doesn’t match.” She clasped her hands tighter and avoided his stare, mortified.

  “Match?”

  “My butt and my legs belong to some other body.”

  “They clearly belong right where they are.” Max took a step back to fold his arms and scrutinize her further. He didn’t look pervy as she’d feared, or even critical. He looked impressed.

  “Your body is quite extraordinary,” he repeated, as if closing a debate he’d grown tired of. “I will be very happy to render it. Even without any scars,” he added, his smirk designed to show he’d understood Fallon’s earlier contempt perfectly.

  “Well. Good.” She prayed he’d stop staring at her.

  Max’s eyes caught hers then, making her feel more exposed than they had perusing her naked body. He smiled and they crinkled faintly at the edges, half-kind, half-mischievous. From this close, Fallon thought she could smell his scent even after the bath, and the image of his raw, tight body flashed across her mind. He left her to return to his study.

  Max wedged the stoneware for far longer than was necessary. Before him, bathed in the steadily strengthening daylight, he could sense Fallon tensing and relaxing in uneven intervals. Her backlit outline glowed like citrine.

  Before she’d said that—that slight against her own body—he’d been grudging about this arrangement. Before that statement he’d been willing to take this commission if only for the challenge of working with this uncooperative woman. The money was amazing. The fun of unnerving someone as cold as the aptly named Miss Frost was a bonus. But now… He narrowed his eyes at her, still turning the clay.

  “Did you know,” he said to her back, breaking a long silence. “I have studied dozens, perhaps hundreds of people, all examples of the utterly imperfect. The damaged.”

  “Oh?” She didn’t turn and her voice sounded tight.

  “Yes. Erin, and many others. Amputees, burn victims. People bearing every physical anomaly I have been able to track down. Bodies that have suffered tremendous amounts of loss. And pain, and humiliation, and self-hatred. Some wear it proudly, others, not as much.”

  “I see.”

  “But the ones who are still ashamed, still stinging from the wounds of their imperfection,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “It is in these people’s honor that I long quite potently to grab you by the shoulders and shake you.”

  She turned her head halfway. “Pardon me?”

  “I think you have a hell of a nerve, Fallon Frost.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting—”

  “No matter.” He cut her off, making his voice intentionally sanctimonious. “I am making a choice to forgive your callousness. We will not speak of it anymore. However, if you utter another criticism about your wholly satisfactory body in my presence again you may consider yourself dismissed.”

  His hands began recording her contours. That long torso, the exaggerated flare of her body at the hip. Gorgeous. Infuriating, but gorgeous.

  Fallon remained silent and Max didn’t suspect for a second that she was pleased.

  “Hold your hair up for me,” he said, and Fallon obediently piled her curls on top of her head and secured them with an elastic. That rusty shade of brown—iron oxide. He studied her long neck, sloped but strong shoulders. He beckoned her to turn. Small, perfect breast
s, miniscule waist, soft belly. Botticelli would have killed for such a model.

  “I thought you were only doing a bust.” Fallon pointed at the clay between Max’s hands.

  His eyes were fixed on her, fingers recording her contours from the mid-thigh up.

  “Your body is too much fun to waste focusing on just the head and shoulders.” His thumbs raised the ridges of her hips from the mound.

  “Fun?”

  “Oh, yes.” He met her eyes and smiled. He liked the way her pale irises seemed to grow even wider when he stared. She was easy to unnerve, this one. “When you are eating, and there is one part of the meal you like better than the rest, do you eat it first or save it for last?”

  “Save it.”

  “Well, not me.” He released her eyes. Against his fingers, he could begin to feel her—that essential race in his pulse that signaled he’d found a tiny foothold, a connection, an entrance into the core of this woman. Hers was one of vulnerability, not openness, but it would do. For now.

  “What are your tattoos?” Fallon asked a short while later. This was a different voice than Max had grown accustomed to in the past twenty-four hours—more demanding and less inhibited. This woman ought to get her clothes off and boss people around more often.

  He abandoned the clay to peel his shirt off. He turned dutifully, letting Fallon see the black lines that graced the right-hand side of his torso. Skeletal anatomy, the outlines of bones tracing his humerus, shoulder joint, collarbone, the backs of his ribs and his vertebrae from the middle of his back to his neck. Tiny script lettering labeled each with its Latin name.

  “Wow.” He couldn’t interpret Fallon’s tone. “Is that from Gray’s?”

  He turned. “Biologist,” he teased. “I prefer Vesalius. But it is from nothing in particular.”

  She nodded, looking thoughtful and, for once, not intimidated. “That’s cool.”

  “Thank you.” He dropped her gaze to return to his work. Midday was approaching and he didn’t bother replacing his shirt. It seemed to make her edgy anyhow, which was fine by Max.

  “Why bones?” she asked.

  He decided he rather enjoyed the sound of her voice. Lush and full and almost aggressively feminine, like her lips. Like the bottom half of her fascinating figure. He’d almost forgotten what an undamaged woman looked like, it had been so long since he’d sculpted one. He hoped Fallon might prove more interesting than her unmarred body suggested.

  “Why bones? My trade is in surfaces,” he explained, fingers working. “My fascination is with the hidden. The internal.”

  He stopped his study to approach, watching the look of predictable uneasiness tensing her face. But she didn’t step back even as he drew close.

  He rapped a knuckle softly on her temple. “And not just bone and muscle.”

  Her cheeks and neck flushed bright pink, round eyes darting between each of his.

  He narrowed his gaze and gave her a conspiratorial smirk. “I’m going to chip away and uncover your secrets,” he whispered.

  Fallon swallowed and looked away, and he knew he’d pushed her as far as he could without scaring her outright. He returned to his work feeling extremely satisfied.

  Fallon spent the remainder of the session trying to recover the relative comfort and friendliness she’d found earlier, albeit briefly. It was no use.

  She was happy for Max to assume it was his comment about uncovering her supposed secrets that had thrown her, but in truth it had been his closeness. His body, tight and lean and no doubt powerful, was a distraction from several paces away. Up close—close enough almost to feel his breath in her hair—it had been a shock. She wished he’d order her to turn around again, or at least put his damn shirt back on. It nearly made her adopt his obsession with the internal, watching the sinuous muscles of his stomach and chest and arms flexing with each skillful movement of his fingers against the clay. She didn’t like it one bit.

  Max had tanned skin, darkest on his arms and neck and face but none of it, save a tiny strip just above his jeans, so pale that Fallon imagined his working shirtless was a new phenomenon. She wondered if—or perhaps more realistically how often—his professional relationships overlapped with carnal ones. It was a difficult question not to ponder. He oozed sex the way other men oozed privilege or rage. It clung to him like moss. Like sweat.

  “I think it is lunchtime,” he announced finally, unbuckling his tool belt and stretching his arms. He slipped his undershirt back on and sauntered to the kitchen area.

  Fallon’s own clothes felt strange against her skin after three hours’ nakedness.

  “How are you liking it here? In Nova Scotia?” Max assembled cold rotini and shrimp and vegetables into bowls, sounding as though he’d forgotten how angry she’d made him earlier.

  “I haven’t had a chance to explore yet,” she said, willing to engage. “But I like Pettiplaise. It’s amazing to be on the coast, but have it be so quiet and open. Where I’m from, every last square inch of this place would be somebody’s beachfront property. It’s nicer here.”

  “Indeed. It is a pleasant town.”

  “It must be handy that everyone speaks French,” Fallon added. Most of the people in the little seaside village addressed her first as “mademoiselle” before switching dutifully to “miss” once they caught her hesitation.

  Max laughed. “I suspect I understand Acadian about as well as you do. Do you speak regular French?”

  “I took it in high school but I’ve forgotten most of it now.”

  “Do you know what Pettiplaise means?” He handed her a helping of pasta and a predictably large glass of wine.

  “Um, not really. Little pleasure?” she guessed, dredging her memory for fragments of French II. “Little place?”

  He shook his head. “Petites plaies,” he said with careful enunciation. “Another Acadian mangling. ‘Little wounds.’ For the scars the coal mining left on the mountains.” He sat and pointed his fork out the windows toward the black streaks that marred the hills in the distance.

  “Ah.” Fallon looked him in the eye pointedly. “How apropos.”

  He smiled, that grin making his striking face turn patently seductive. “Yes, I suppose.” He abandoned the conversation in favor of the food.

  When he ate, Max had a habit of resting his elbows casually on the table and leaning forward. He held his fork upside down and the way his lips slid each bite of food from the tines struck Fallon as downright obscene. After several minutes of this culinary striptease, he set his bowl aside and took a deep draught of wine.

  “So,” he said upon swallowing. “You live in New York?”

  “Yes. I own a house there with my best friend. A little ranch house.”

  “On the water?”

  “Ha—no way. I can walk there but Metro waterfront is insanely overpriced.”

  “It’s not so expensive here.” He refilled her glass and Fallon wondered why she allowed it.

  “No, probably not,” she said.

  “Did you grow up in New York?”

  “I grew up all over the region. Connecticut mostly. Not the ritzy part, but on the coast.”

  “Why New York, then?” He leaned back as if he expected this interrogation to go on for quite some time.

  “Well, as you guessed, I studied biology. In New York. I’m a conservationist, half-time, and an environmental advocate, half-time.” She moved her food around in its bowl. “The Hudson and Long Island Sound need my help more than a lot of other places. I probably couldn’t make a living doing what I do unless I was near a big city, with big problems. It was there or Boston, and my friend wanted to go in on a mortgage with me, and her job’s there. Plus it meant I was near my aunt. It made sense.”

  “I see. And this friend—this is not some code word for lover?”

  Fallon laughed, almost spilling her wine. “No, just my best friend. She’s quite happy with her boyfriend, thanks.”

  “All right. I am going to ask you for this friend�
�s phone number.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because if something happens to you, I can call her,” Max said, sounding very much as if this wasn’t the real reason.

  “I guess. But don’t think for a minute I believe that. You don’t even seem to own a phone.”

  Max found a pen and pad and weaseled the digits out of her.

  “Why are you here, then?” Fallon took a drink, staring at him over the glass, succumbing to that familiar, alcohol-fueled sensation of boldness. “Why didn’t you go back to France, after you stopped being…famous, or whatever?”

  He made a face, looking as though he’d never considered this before. “France would be too painful. I think here is as close as I can get to that, without all the bad memories. It’s quiet here. People leave me alone for the most part. Canada is a very fine country, ice-hockey obsessions aside, and Cape Breton is an excellent place to be a has-been. There is very little pretension.”

  Fallon smirked, trying to decide if she still found Max Emery pretentious or not. It was becoming less cut-and-dried than she’d originally suspected.

  “Why is France so painful?” She drummed her fingernails against her glass, not bothering to hide her curiosity.

  “My childhood ended very suddenly, and very dramatically. When I left the village I grew up in, it changed. Because of me. I went back and everything was different. Strange. And I lost both my parents by the time I was twenty-five. It’s not home anymore.”

  “No brothers or sisters?”

  Max shook his head. “My grandmother still lived there until she passed away five years ago.” He crossed himself in an absent way.

  “That sounds very sad,” Fallon said.

  He tweaked one corner of his mouth like a shrug. “There are many stories in the world sadder than mine. I’m fortunate, you know, that I have made enough money to live this way.”

  Fallon stared, taking him in. It was true—he was a free man. She couldn’t think of another person she’d met who wasn’t beholden to a bank or a spouse or a career path, to some stressful notion of how their life was expected to unfurl. She most certainly couldn’t think of anyone who could freely take or leave hundreds of thousands of dollars.