Life Class

by Scarlet Blackwell

  Opportunity knocks once in a lifetime…

  Harley Hayes is always looking for a new challenge to stretch his artistic vision. The subject of his first foray into nudes is a vision, indeed: Ryan Morgan. With each sitting, Harley finds it harder to ignore the fact he’s falling head over heels for the straight-arrow model.

  Their first kiss confirms that Ryan feels the heat, too—for about five seconds. Then he pushes Harley away and bolts.

  Ryan is less than proud of some of the things he’s done to survive his hand-to-mouth existence. Including model for a gay magazine—and accept money from his female clients in exchange for “extra favors”. The memory of Harley’s kiss still rattles the foundation of his sexuality even now, six months later.

  When they run into each other at a gallery opening, nothing has changed. The sparks flare brighter than ever, driving Harley to make an offer he desperately hopes Ryan won’t refuse. And Ryan is just desperate enough to say yes…

  Warning: Contains scenes of m/m intimacy; hot sex on a kitchen table and a man with a body to die for.

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  They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

  577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520

  Macon GA 31201

  Life Class

  Copyright © 2010 by Scarlet Blackwell

  ISBN: 978-1-60504-970-0

  Edited by Linda Ingmanson

  Cover by Mandy M. Roth

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: March 2010

  www.samhainpublishing.com

  Life Class

  Scarlet Blackwell

  Dedication

  To J.R., my slash partner in crime, for unflinching encouragement from the start.

  Chapter One

  Men in suits and women in ostentatious jewelry choked the gallery. Knots of people stood under artfully lit paintings, debating their merits furiously. Waiters carried trays of pink champagne and caviar entrees. Thousands of dollars worth of art were bargained on while soft music rose over the chatter, and Ryan Morgan drifted already, his attention not so much on the canvases displayed on the walls, but on the lavish buffet table at the back of the room.

  The pockets of his jacket were deep, and he aimed to get two meals out of this, one eaten here and the other smuggled out to be eaten tomorrow. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t getting paid for being on the arm of a flighty, blonde socialite, but the money he earned tonight would have to pay his electricity bill tomorrow before he got cut off. And summer in Orange County without air-con wasn’t funny.

  He’d survived on a candy bar and two large oranges all day so far, and his stomach growled. The first swallows of champagne went straight to his head. His current dire financial circumstances weren’t going toward keeping the sculpted body on which he prided himself. Not when he couldn’t afford to eat.

  He lingered behind Anna Smith, the lady who’d offered to pay for his company that night, his bored gaze flitting over the paintings and back to the buffet table. Something caught his attention, and he turned to look. Two women, their heads together and whispering; one of them pointed not-so-discreetly at him. He frowned, not recognizing them. Maybe his fame as a life model and sometime-whore was spreading and they wanted to hire him.

  He dutifully followed Anna along the row of paintings, seeing a man nudge his female companion and gesture at Ryan. He frowned again before Anna stopped so suddenly in front of him that he almost ran into her. She muttered under her breath, “Oh, my God.”

  Ryan’s gaze flickered to the wall above her head. Frankly, he could take or leave art, especially the pretentious crap being peddled tonight, even though he’d enjoyed drawing and painting at school, but…

  He froze on the spot as he stared up at the canvas.

  In large landscape, a man reclined naked on a bed of red satin, face down with eyes lowered. Long lashes shadowed his cheeks, and dark hair was cropped close to his head. The hills and valleys of his muscular body were drawn with lavish attention to detail, the pert swell of his buttocks a thing of startling beauty after the perfect dip of his spine.

  His pale skin was painted in the creamiest tones with a stark, black tattoo marked there between his broad, powerful shoulders.

  It was this tattoo which identified the subject to Ryan, for he was looking at himself. But the lifelike resemblance had clearly struck many people in the room, because there was a hullabaloo of excitement now, women pressing his arm, asking his name.

  Ryan stepped back, horrified, gaze not needing to stray to the bottom right of the canvas for the artist’s signature. He remembered only too well sitting for this picture some six months ago, a picture he hadn’t expected to be made public in such a fashion.

  He turned around, cheeks burning with humiliation, intent on fleeing, and there, standing at the back of the room with eyes fixed on him, was the artist himself, Harley Hayes.

  There was a heartbeat of shocked recognition between them and then anger became the dominant emotion in Ryan’s confused and indignant brain. He put his empty glass down with a clatter on a nearby table before he stalked across the room.

  Harley had finished the painting long ago, and it had remained covered and untouched in his studio for months as he drowned in pain over Ryan Morgan. He’d never expected to see his model again this way, not after so long, and he stood his ground with his fists clenched as Ryan approached. He couldn’t help but be intimidated by the other man.

  Harley was a few inches shorter than Ryan’s six-feet-three, his body lean and subtly toned as opposed to Ryan’s all-out muscle, but it was Harley’s face people didn’t forget.

  Harley knew it had been said that more than one straight man had turned gay on first sight of him. He couldn’t walk into a room without every person there staring at him. His face was exquisite, like an angel in human form. His lips were full and pink, his nose small and button-like. A pair of startling, amber-colored eyes fringed with lush lashes peered out from behind an untidy fringe of glossy, dark brown hair. This hair was cut close to his neck and fell over his eyes in a manner which might seem carefully calculated to others, but was not. Harley didn’t tend to think too closely about the effect he had on other people. He had, however, had six months to think about the effect he’d had on Ryan Morgan, and his heart hammered against his ribcage as the other approached with menace on his face.

  “I want to speak to you right now.” Ryan moved past him and glared back, making it clear that if Harley didn’t follow him, he would be dragging Harley after him by the scruff of his neck. Harley glanced around the room, seeing just how many friends and acquaintances had witnessed this, before he followed Ryan quickly through a door marked Staff Only.

  In the narrow, dimly lit corridor, Ryan looked almost incandescent with rage. “What the hell are you playing at?” he yelled as the door swung closed. “When I sat for that picture, you never said you’d be putting my bare ass up in a fucking gallery for the whole world to stare at!”

  Harley regarded him coolly. He made his tone deliberately supercilious, trying to mask his unease. “I sell my paintings, Ryan, it’s how I make a living, I didn’t pay for your services for nothing and, exhibitionist that you
are, I thought you’d jump at the chance of people drooling over your body.”

  Ryan grabbed Harley by the shoulder and slammed him into the wall, holding him there, their faces close. “You paid me to take my clothes off for you and you alone,” he hissed. “I didn’t give you permission to show my ass to frustrated housewives.”

  Harley’s lip curled in barely concealed scorn. “You really don’t have a shred of humility, do you? What did I ever see in you?”

  Ryan looked embarrassed. Maybe he’d been hoping this entire unfortunate encounter would pass without mention of that. Of the fact that the sittings for the portrait had come to an abrupt end after Harley had made a pass at Ryan.

  The original point of the fight had clearly been lost, because Harley could see those memories warring within Ryan before he turned on his heel and fled through the fire exit.

  Harley went back out to his exhibition with his shoulder burning from the grasp of Ryan’s fingers and his stomach leaden with misery. A gaggle of people gathered under his canvas of Ryan, surrounding his manager, Nathan, seeming to be in a bidding war no doubt brought on by seeing the exquisite model in the flesh. Harley couldn’t have wished for better publicity than Ryan turning up that night, but he could have wished for a better ending to him and Ryan.

  Not that there’d ever been a him and Ryan, at least not beyond the kiss he would never forget as long as he lived.

  Ryan made it back to his tiny apartment and found the electric off. The man below him played his TV too loud as Ryan sat there in the dark and brooded. All because of Harley, he’d left without Anna paying him and without any food. All because of Harley, he was remembering being kissed by a man six months ago and allowing it to happen. But this memory had never left his mind; not really. He just pretended to himself that it had.

  He groaned, lying down on his bed and closing his eyes, the taste of champagne bitter in his mouth, the artist’s beautiful face behind his eyelids. Damn him to hell.

  Chapter Two

  “How do you want me?” Ryan had asked him that first day in Harley’s studio at the top of his house, and Harley wanted to groan and utter the truth right then—on top of me, my legs around you—having spent the last twenty-four hours possessed by the image of this man since they had met.

  Word had got around in his circles about the new model on the scene and his perfect body. Harley usually painted landscapes and wanted to branch out into nudes, not least because he’d caught sight of Ryan at a gallery a few weeks previously, their eyes meeting across the room, Harley bewitched by what he saw.

  Ryan came with a ready-made reputation, too, as someone who was willing to stay after the sitting was done for the right price and the right woman. Such rumors didn’t concern Harley, even if he wondered if Ryan extended his hospitality to men.

  The first meeting suggested otherwise. Harley’s gaydar wasn’t alarming as he tracked Ryan down to the beach and observed the model covertly for a good few minutes before he moved in. Ryan lay on a towel under the shade of an umbrella, reading a book, a black tribal tattoo stark against his powerful shoulders, his back rippling with muscle. Harley went over, ducked under the umbrella on one knee, introduced himself and said he’d seen him previously at a gallery and one of his friends had told him Ryan was a model and directed him this way.

  Ryan had been friendly, shaking his hand, asking him to sit, turning over to sit up so Harley saw the hard curve of his pecs, his flat, ridged stomach and the unmistakable heavy swing of cock and balls in his flimsy swimming shorts as he shifted on the towel.

  Harley had swallowed nervously, glad he wore sunglasses as his treacherous eyes roamed the other man’s majestic body and his jeans became tight. Ryan was perhaps thirty, with cropped black hair and eyes the color of sapphires or a stormy ocean. Harley didn’t know what was more attractive, his face or his body, but he did know he’d never seen anyone like Ryan in his life. Anyone he’d wanted to instantly possess. The other’s sheer physical beauty hit him in the stomach like a fist, and there on that beach, as he gave Ryan his address and he agreed to come the next day, Harley was smitten.

  Now, with Ryan in his studio, standing before him, asking him what he wanted, Harley started to stammer, realizing he hadn’t actually agreed with the model for him to pose naked and suddenly afraid he would refuse. He knew Ryan did pose naked, but as far as he knew, it was only for women. He might feel threatened or even angry at being asked to do so by a man.

  “Well…” he said as Ryan regarded him coolly, looking amused at his discomfiture. “I have the…” He gestured vaguely at the bed with its red satin covers, finding he couldn’t even say the word in front of him.

  “You want me to lie on the bed?”

  Harley nodded in relief and then his throat went dry as Ryan peeled off his T-shirt and kicked his battered shoes away. Oh, my God, he was stripping without being asked. The man was as proud of his body as Harley had heard, evidently not afraid to show it off to a man. Harley wondered if, when Ryan found out Harley had slept with men in the past, he would feel quite so inclined to strip for him in the future. For now, though, he retreated behind his easel and tried to pretend he wasn’t watching the most erotic striptease of his life.

  The jeans came off the pert ass and down the long, slim legs, and Harley caught a glimpse of balls as Ryan lifted each foot to take off his boxers. He strode to the bed and climbed on, and Harley saw a tantalizing snatch of dark hair and long prick before Ryan settled on his stomach.

  “Face up or face down?” Ryan asked. Harley all but gulped because he’d intended to paint his first nude man face down, but here was Ryan offering to lie on his back, displaying his goods shamelessly.

  Harley was torn between the needs of his work and the needs of his perverted mind. Maybe he could paint Ryan full-frontal afterwards, he told himself as he said, “Stay where you are,” to his own disappointment. He watched Ryan settle, legs spread a little, buttocks deliberately thrust up from the bed, dripping sexuality from every pore and sending Harley out of his mind.

  “This okay?” Ryan shifted sensually on the satin, and if the voice wasn’t coy, Harley would eat his paintbrushes right then and there. He was sure Ryan wasn’t gay. Was he just a hopeless flirt who liked his body admired by either sex? Did he know what he was doing to Harley?

  Harley nodded and took up a pencil quickly, feeling as he drew the curves of Ryan’s body that it was his hand stroking over the hills and valleys of his model.

  Harley stretched out that first sitting as long as he could. He took a couple of hours just to do a vague outline and he saw, as the sun started to dip lower in the pink-streaked sky, that Ryan was having trouble keeping his eyes open on the bed, his head lolling forward.

  Harley smiled to himself at the image. “Want to stay to dinner?” he asked, more out of a need for the man’s company than innate good manners.

  Ryan’s eyes snapped open, his head turning in surprise. He looked wary. Did he think Harley was coming onto him? Ryan’s dark blue eyes softened soon enough, though, to Harley’s relief, and he clambered unselfconsciously off the bed, muttering, “Sure,” as he reached for his boxers.

  Harley swallowed as he saw the man in full-on nudity for the first time, his flaccid cock swinging heavily against his leg, bigger in an unaroused state than some men were while hard. He tried not to look, concentrating on putting aside his pencil and covering the easel so his model didn’t see the work in progress.

  Maria, his housekeeper, served dinner on the terrace table overlooking the ocean. Harley owned an expensive beachfront property and was almost embarrassed by the way Ryan’s jaw hung open as he’d surveyed the grand entrance hall and spiral staircase, the huge airy studio, and now the garden and its perfect view across the tranquil sea.

  Usually Harley wasn’t embarrassed by his money because he’d worked hard for it since school, but then he didn’t usually have someone as evidently poor as Ryan for a guest.

  Ryan might have been clean, well
-shaved and good-smelling, but his shoes were almost falling apart and his jeans weren’t fashionably ripped at the knees, but worn through with age, his T-shirt faded and almost transparent in areas. Harley tried not to see this evidence of poverty because it made him uncomfortable.

  The dinner was pasta with garlic bread and salad, washed down with a chilled chardonnay. Ryan ate like he was starving, before he glanced toward Harley and seemed to catch himself, slowing down with a blush staining his cheeks.

  Harley smiled to himself and kept Ryan’s glass filled. Not trying to get him drunk, he told himself. I don’t have to get any man drunk.

  “So, Ryan,” he said conversationally, “tell me about yourself.”

  They had talked casually during the sitting, the conversation easy enough, but Harley found the model rather reticent, his face always seeming to wear a rather closed expression even though he was friendly enough.

  Ryan’s gaze darted to Harley’s and he paused mid-chew as though Harley had asked him if he wanted maggot surprise for dessert. In the silence which followed, he swallowed quickly and muttered, “Nothing to tell,” then picked up his wine and took a gulp.

  Harley didn’t believe that. “Do you do this full time?” he asked politely.

  Ryan’s ocean blue eyes narrowed. “What?”

  Harley was taken aback. “This. Being an artist’s model.”

  For a moment, Ryan stared at him before he looked away. “I try to do other jobs on the side,” he muttered. “It doesn’t exactly pay the bills.”

  The atmosphere seemed suddenly tense. Now Harley could surmise that Ryan took extra money off female artists to pay the bills, not because he enjoyed it. He couldn’t help but pity the poor man. Imagine having to go to bed with someone you didn’t even desire. “Have I offended you?”