Artistic License

by Elle Pierson

  Mick suddenly looked equally uncomfortable. He shifted as if to rise.

  Despite having wished him gone from the opening cough, Sophy found herself rushing into speech. “Um, did you come all the way here just to return my sketchbook? Because it was really nice of you, but…”

  They were both staring at the hand she’d instinctively flung out as if to catch hold of his own. Hastily, Sophy withdrew it, and tucked it under the bedcovers for good measure. She was obviously going into belated psychiatric shock.

  “Hell.” Mick sounded disgusted, but his derision was evidently self-directed so she didn’t bother to take offense. “No. I was going to leave that for you at the hotel reception, but I wanted to have a word with you about your witness statement.”

  Oh. Well, that – ought to be reassuring. She supposed.

  The impersonal security guard was back. The more approachable side of his personality was probably receiving a stern, silent lecture on correct conduct with bedridden witnesses.

  “Was it really a bomb?” Sophy asked, just as another voice shrieked in atonal horror, “Oh my God, you would not believe the size of his – ”

  She almost had another asthma attack on the spot. Hastily, she snatched up the remote and turned off the forgotten TV. And proceeded to will away the heat in her cheeks through sheer Jedi mind power.

  Mick cleared his throat and earned her eternal gratitude by merely continuing, “It was a minimal-impact explosive device, yes.”

  So, in normal-people terms, a bomb.

  “Thanks to your information, we were able to locate the device and bring in an expert team to diffuse the situation. The subject of your sketch was identified as Maria Harper, the wife of the man we apprehended at the scene, William Darvie. She was arrested late this afternoon.”

  “Do you know why they did it?” Sophy asked, taking that in.

  Mick made a non-committal noise in the back of his throat. “I don’t have all the information as to motive as yet. I understand that the couple have a past connection to an early and unsuccessful Ryland business venture. To a certain extent, the whys and wherefores are not our concern. Once we’ve ascertained that the suspects are not likely to be a future threat to Ryland Curry, the matter will rest in the hands of the New Zealand police. At the moment, both Darvie and Harper are in custody, and they seem to have acted without accomplices.”

  “So they, what, lost money on a Ryland investment, sulked about it for years, and then decided to blow up the travelling contents of William Ryland’s living room?”

  He shrugged and adjusted his chair to avoid taking a hit of late sunshine directly in the eyes. “People do insane shit for inadequate reasons all the time.”

  Which, when she thought about it, ought to be adopted as the official tagline of the Ministry of Justice. It said it all, and did so with style.

  Her oddly light-hearted mood took a nosedive when he went on, “You’ll probably be called to testify in court, since you can positively identify Harper and place her at the scene.” Mick paused at the look on her face. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  Yes.

  “No,” said Sophy firmly. She wasn’t a complete weakling, for God’s sake. Every minute of evidence to the contrary on this particular day. “It won’t.”

  Mick reached out and briefly squeezed her free hand, igniting a thread of memory from the last minutes in the hotel. She resisted the compulsion to squeeze back. “It won’t be a big deal.” His voice was calm and reassuring, the competent, practiced tones of a man used to dealing with outbursts of panic and stress. “Nothing like the dramatic courtroom scenes you see on TV. It’ll be dull as hell, and you’ll spend most of the time in a waiting room. Take your sketchbook.”

  He gave her a flashing grin, a proper smile, teeth and everything, and God, yes, there were dimples. Plural.

  She placed sole and entire blame on those dimples for the loss of her remaining wits.

  “Do you think… Would you possibly… Would you please sit for me?”

  The impulsive question echoed into an appalled silence.

  It was a moment before Mick’s intellect, floundering under the siege of his hormones, managed to register and decode the stammering request. Sit for her, as in model for another sketch.

  She was so damn pretty that he almost regretted his immediate reaction of, “Hell, no.”

  Fortunately, she looked as horrified by the prospect as he felt. For a woman of few words, she seemed to have little to no control over the ones that did make the journey from that quick brain to the unsuspecting world.

  A miserable pink tinge was seeping up her rounded cheekbones, sliding under a sparse smattering of pinpoint freckles. Strands of dark, stick-straight brown hair escaped a long ponytail to catch on the corners of her glasses, the lenses of which did nothing to disguise a pair of mortified brown eyes.

  When he’d first noticed her in the exhibition hall, before the asthma attack and his unprecedented panic, he’d placed her in her late teens, a fact that seemed to be substantiated by her nose jewellery and obvious student status. However, when he’d contacted the kid detective in charge of the case and intimidated him into an update on her health, he’d discovered that Sophy was twenty-four. Still young. He had a decade on her. She lived locally and was enrolled as a postgraduate student at the art school.

  And she was beautiful in a wholly feminine way that was acres apart from the overt brash sexiness he was used to encountering in female colleagues and business associates. These days, the latter posed considerably less temptation than a cold beer and a good night’s sleep. Sophy, on the other hand…

  He shifted in his seat.

  The last time a woman had made him feel that his tongue was too big for his mouth, and he couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands, he’d still had some of his milk teeth.

  He realised she was watching him with the agony of a wounded dog waiting to be put of its misery. Searching the depths of his limited supply of tact, he was about to counter with a more polite refusal when she pulled a restless arm from beneath the quilt, and he saw the mottled bruising around her elbow. In his mind’s eye, he saw her fall, a fact he’d barely assimilated at the moment of impact, all his attention then on the dickhead about to pop smoke in an art gallery.

  Despite the doubts harboured by his nearest and dearest, he didn’t particularly enjoy using force against anyone. He certainly never employed it against a woman. It was the first time he had ever put a bruise on a woman in a violent situation. Looking at the marks standing out against Sophy’s pale skin, he felt a physical response in his gag reflex.

  And, propelled by guilt and momentary nausea, he lost his fucking mind.

  “When would you want me to sit?”

  It wasn’t like he would be walking around sans pants, Sophy reminded herself the following morning, as she got out of Lisa’s car and waved the other girl off.

  And there was no need to speculate on what that might look like, either.

  He would be shirtless for a couple of short sketch sessions. He was doing her a favour, for reasons she hadn’t quite gathered but for the sake of her new sculpture piece had chosen not to question. She had been drawing from fully nude life models since she was fifteen, and she enjoyed a…well, a sporadic but perfectly adequate sex life when the opportunity arose. There was absolutely no reason why she should be mortified by even the vocal combination of the words “Mick” and “partial nudity”.

  She was in such trouble.

  She paused on the crooked paving stones that bisected their front garden, and shuffled her sketchbook to the opposite arm to free up her key hand. The January sun was already a tingling heat on the backs of her upper arms, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning. Another scorcher of a day ahead. Glorious.

  Unlocking the front door, she pushed it open. Jeeves, her black-and-white Spoodle, immediately came running, his sadly mauled toy squirrel clutched between his teeth. Bending to rub his ears and his back,
she made a token swipe to take it away. Fake attempts at toy theft always went down well. He growled happily in the back of his throat and dropped down on his haunches, tail wagging.

  She herded dog and squirrel back through the narrow, carpeted hall to the living room. They liked to call it “open plan”, but it was really a throwback to fifties architecture. The kitchen had been so small they’d had to divide the living space to build a new one. Throwing the sketchbook and her bag down on the kitchen counter, she dropped onto the smaller couch, an incredibly uncomfortable brocade relic from Melissa’s student flatting days.

  Jeeves abandoned his destruction of the squirrel, jumped up beside her, and leaned.

  “Honeys, I’m home,” Sophy said, and yawned hugely.

  From the plushy depths of the better sofa, Melissa smiled at her. They’d bought it a year ago, and had to eat vegemite sandwiches for dinner for two weeks to pay off the layby. Dark times.

  “The heroine of the hour returns,” Melissa teased. “How are you feeling?”

  “And tell us,” said the lazy sprawl of lean muscle and impish grin at her side. Dale held up the morning paper. “Is it true that you single-handedly took on five masked assailants before succumbing to a grand mal seizure? Because considering that the closest I’ve seen you come to mortal combat is when that bee went down your dress at Christmas, I’m impressed. Truly.”

  Sophy yanked the cushion from behind her back, threw it at Dale’s head, and lifted a brow at Melissa. “I thought you got rid of this pest months ago,” she said, grinning.

  “He can’t resist me,” her cousin replied, deadpan. She picked up the discarded cushion and smoothed it. Melissa lived by the gospel of the pick up, smooth, straighten, dust, wipe and polish. Sophy lived by a system of scrawled post-it notes to remind her to change the sheets and clean the bathroom once a week. She usually remembered to do the washing when she woke up and couldn’t find any clean underwear. They had so far managed to live together for four years without homicidal impulses on either side.

  “I do feel her fatal fascination,” Dale agreed. “Or my radiator is shot and I need a lift to work.” He frowned. “Seriously, though, Soph, you are okay?”

  “Seriously, I’m fine,” Sophy returned. “It sucks when it gets that bad, but it was more embarrassing than anything.”

  “I don’t know,” said Melissa lightly, picking up her coffee mug. “I saw the footage on the news when I got home from the hospital last night. The hot security guy must have been a bit of a consolation.”

  Sophy choked on the finger of toast she’d just snitched from her cousin’s plate. “What?” she managed around a cough, licking a smear of margarine from her thumb. Jeeves leaned closer.

  “The sandy-haired cutie who looked like Tom Hiddleston.” Melissa made a noise of approval. “I totally would.”

  “Ex-boyfriend. Right here,” Dale said dryly, and both women ignored him.

  “Oh. Right.” Sophy forced a smile. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Casting around quickly for a new subject, she noticed that her cousin’s wavy blonde hair had gained four or five pink streaks since she’d left the hospital the previous evening. “Nice to see you managed to dye your hair in your crushing anxiety,” she said, snorting.

  “Hey, I needed a distraction. Were you all right getting a lift home with Lisa this morning? I could have come and got you.”

  “No, it was fine. Lisa lives out by the medical centre anyway and she was heading in for a class at nine.” Sophy stole the last finger of toast. “Is there any more bread? I’m starving.”

  “I did the shop yesterday while you were collapsing your way into the headlines. Your artery-clogging loaf of white is in the pantry. Enjoy your premature death at sixty.” Melissa shoved Dale’s hand away from her coffee mug, and rose to her feet. “Didn’t they feed you at the hospital?” she asked as she took the empty plate to the dishwasher.

  “Oh.” Sophy thought back to the night before. She remembered Mick Hollister’s expression when he’d got up to leave and had finally noticed the contents of her dinner tray. The quiche had not improved after sitting around for two hours. He’d handed her the sack of Thai food without a word, and vanished from the room with that characteristic purposeful stride before she could protest. It had been her favourite: chicken stir-fry with cashew nuts, in quantities that could feed a small family. “No, they did.” She shook her head. “But breakfast was at about six o’clock this morning. It was two Weet-bix, and they forgot the milk.”

  Melissa and Dale departed for the tourist bureau where they worked, with a flurry of arm touches and orders to spend the morning in bed. Sophy, who until that moment had fully intended to pack up her stuff and head straight to campus to start prepping her new piece, suddenly felt exhausted in the wake of the extroverts.

  Walking wearily into her bedroom, she scooped up yesterday’s discarded clothing options, flung them over her desk chair, pushed a dog-eared Harry Potter book out of her way, and flopped down on the bed. The sun shone red against her closed eyelids. She always got the sun in the morning; Melissa’s room trapped it in the afternoon.

  She opened her eyes and enjoyed the sensation of coming home after the long, sterile night in the hospital. She had always loved this room. The house belonged to her aunt and uncle, who had since moved to a large modern homestead ten minutes down the road by Lake Hayes. When she and Melissa had been growing up, and before they’d started boarding school at thirteen in Dunedin, the nearest city, she had spent the afternoons at her cousin’s home while her parents were at work. This had then been the spare room. They’d taken it over with toys and forts, and lip-synched to the latest pop songs, secure in the perks of being only children with no brothers on hand to witness the humiliation.

  In the fundamentals, the bedroom hadn’t changed much. The wallpaper was still a pink floral nightmare better suited to an elderly spinster’s nightgown, and the lightshade was a fantastically fringed homage to the seventies. Her current student budget didn’t lend itself to extensive renovation, although she and Melissa had been in total agreement that a splurge was necessary when it came to the brown shagpile carpet.

  “It’s like somebody skinned Chewbacca,” Melissa had said with a shudder.

  Sophy shoved a pillow behind her head and glanced at the bedside clock, wondering if she could fit in a decent nap before she had to be on campus for lunch. A warm furry presence appeared at her back, drooly chin resting on the curve of her waist, tail beating the bedspread with rhythmic thumps. Tucking her hand under her cheek, she closed her eyes again and began to drift.

  She managed not to think about a pair of kind grey eyes for an entire six minutes.

  Chapter Three

  Sophy’s hand slid rapidly across the parchment, lines webbing out and shading into familiar features. She was impatient as she blew loose charcoal from the page, eager and intent on her work. She could usually tell right from the beginning of a new piece if it was going to succeed or not, and she felt the magic with this one.

  It was four days since the incident, as she thought of it. Mick had called her cell at breakfast to say that he had the morning off and could sit for a couple of hours if she was still interested. She had appreciated that he had made some effort to disguise the raging hope she might have changed her mind in the interim.

  So far, he had been an ideal model, sitting quietly and statue-still, although the first half-hour had been a bit excruciating. Paid life models were accustomed to the process, could discard the entirety of their clothing as calmly and carelessly as the average human being would take off their gloves or coat. Roped-in amateurs usually had a few more qualms. And Sophy suspected that Mick had more than most.

  For a man who had a body from the cover of a fitness magazine, he was either amazingly modest or just seriously lacking in self-esteem. His face wasn’t the stuff of magazine covers, but she was truly unable to see it as anything but striking. There were millions of different faces out there, features that
ranged from clean-cut and symmetrical to weak-chinned and beady-eyed, but on the whole, most people began to blur together. Mick was so distinctly his own person that she found it difficult to tear her eyes away from his face and keep track of what her fingers were doing.

  He was starting to roll his left shoulder a little, keeping the movement slow and narrow in case it distracted her focus. Sophy flicked a glance at the clock and winced. “Sorry, it’s been almost two hours. Do you want to take a break?”

  “No, I’m good.” Mick stood up and did a full stretch, rotating his neck and arms in a way that set off a chain reaction through his pectoral and abdominal muscles, like a ripple through a wave pool. Sophy hastily averted her gaze. “Keep going. You seem to be on a roll with it.”

  “You’re doing great. I really appreciate this, Mick. I’ve had a concept sketch in mind for this piece for weeks, but I haven’t been able to find a suitable model anywhere.”

  He seemed uncomfortable with any subject that touched on his appearance, so she didn’t elaborate. It was true, however. This work was her intended entry for the upcoming national sculpture competition, and the rules were explicit that artists could not draw on their imagination but must use a life model. As Sophy literally needed an Olympian-sized figure from which to sketch, she had been out of luck. The bars and souvenir shops of Queenstown were heavy on lanky tourists and light on body builders.

  “You’re interested in Greek mythology, then?” Mick broke a long stretch of silence to ask, taking the opportunity to move again as he did so. At her impatient gesture, he grinned and returned his fist to the arranged position, folded knuckles pressed to his denim-clad thigh.

  She had to be fully immersed in her art before she dared to be bossy.

  “Love it. I did my undergraduate degree in Business Studies at the university in Dunedin,” she said. “But I minored in Classics, and those were my favourite papers. I always liked Hades, and I’ve been wanting to do an Underworld sculpture for years.”