Model Release (The Art of Domination #1) (4 page)

Two sisters, I thought
Cheri had mentioned in the few weeks I’d been working with her. And a
grandfather from southern France but living now in a townhouse here in the
States where he’d raised two sons before being widowed, and where the girls
could watch out for him in the absence of their parents. Of course, I couldn’t
encapsulate all that—all the late night conversations with Cheri over fast food
and good wine—in a single word, but using her proper first name instead of her
nickname still made my guest sway back on those heels a half inch. I liked it
when I took Miss Modesty off guard. A couple of times now I’d seen her anxious
frown dissolve just long enough to reveal that wide-eyed, soft-lipped moment of
vulnerability, as she had to pause to reassess the situation… and me.

This time she took a
literal step back, and a dusky pink flush flared across those classically
perfect cheekbones with a blossom of color that was part disarmed surprise and
part wrath rising to a slow boil. I suspected this was not a woman who liked
having her preconceived ideas disproven. Yet instead of writing her off right
now as a breed of hypocrite I’d already met, an old argument, a book I’d
skimmed and disliked and cast into a corner, I found myself curious about why
an obviously full-bodied, hot-blooded woman had chosen to wear this particular
mask. With so many others to choose from—like mine, for instance—why so often
the mask of pallid decorum?

Maybe
that
was the reason I put up with
Rilla’s tantrums and diva-like unreliability, why I hired the half-starved
neighborhood skate rats in anarchist t-shirts to run errands for me, and why I
kept working with a girl as sweet and open and
alive
as Cheri despite my hesitation to expose her to the
demoralizing aspects of the fashion and art worlds. At least their masks were
different from the pseudo-moral ball-busters and emasculating bitches driving
carpool and looking down their oh-so-straight noses from mid-management desks
while pretending they didn’t get off on making everyone else feel small and
dirty.

I was still trying to
figure out why I was bothering with Brown Eyes when she lifted her chin and
repeated her question, “What do you want with my sister?”

“Sister,” I mused.
“You’d be… Dorothy?”

“Darcie,” she corrected
me, voice rising in distress, brow dipping. At the mistake or at how close I’d
come to being right? At the obvious proof of my camaraderie with Cheri? “No,
I’m Iva.”

I couldn’t stop the
little twitch that curled one end of my lips. “Pretty name,” I said and cut off
the urge to smile by taking up the Cruzan bottle for another swig before
setting it back down again with a careless thud. I had wanted the quip to sound
caustic or at least drolly apathetic, but it came out completely sincere. It
was a slip I chalked up to too long a night, too much alcohol, and a damn nice
ass in those modest gray slacks.

“Thanks,” she said in a
wary mutter that affected precisely the insincerity I’d failed to conjure.
Brown Eyes—
Iva
—continued to watch me
steadily, with something I couldn’t read just under the surface of her guarded
expression. She sighed, perhaps at my diversionary and frustrating
pleasantries, before trying another tactic. “You always kill a bottle of rum
before lunch?”

A fan of temperance,
was she? Yet another way I was destined to get under her skin. But I shook my
head no. “I usually save it for after dinner. This isn’t the start of the day
for me; it’s the end of a very long night. I have about an hour’s worth of
shooting left to do with all that staff I’m paying for downstairs, so I do
appreciate you getting to the point.”

“Cheri—.”

“I have an opening soon
at The Odyssey Modern Gallery. Cheri is modeling for me, to help me round out
my exhibition.” Iva held up a newspaper with one hand and turned it so I could
see the photograph of Cheri I was using for press releases and promotional
material. “Yes, that’s one of my shots… and hers. She’s great to work with, a
very expressive model, if you were wonder—.”

“She’s nineteen years
old,” Iva announced with a rush of breath and urgency. Her hand gripped the
paper harder as she spoke, squeezing a crackle of complaint out of it.

“Excuse me?”

Iva took a step toward
me, her eyes darkening. “Did you know Cheri is only nineteen years old? That
means she’s got no idea how photographs like this, how this
lifestyle
, could follow her around in
future.”

And
you do
? I had to wonder. There was something apparent in
Iva’s tone now—a note of authority… experience. Despite feeling a knee-jerk
annoyance and defensiveness at her contemptuous references toward my work, I
also felt an abrupt flare of curiosity that bordered on outright hunger. I
wanted
to know the story behind her
reaction, and there wasn’t much I wanted for these days. The unexpected urge
scratched at the back of my mind like an itch, like a sliver working against a
nerve deep under the skin.

“I thought the
photographs were rather tasteful,” I commented casually despite the fact that I
felt the back of my jaw and the muscles of my stomach tightening at the implication
that I was doing something unseemly with Cheri, or to Cheri.

But what was more
unseemly than the underside of desire and shame, self-worth, power,
pseudo-morality, all intersecting in this thing we called sex? That wasn’t what
Iva meant, though, was it? She was scoffing at the work, the exploration, and
the lifestyle
I indulged in during the
process.

Hearing my own voice
constrict and sour with bitterness, I said, “Well, maybe I could understand
your concern there. Not everyone is cut out for the artistic life. Not enough
limitations for some. Freedom can be scary.”

This produced a
definite flare of ire in Iva, obvious in the narrowing of her eyes and the set
of her jaw and the way she crumpled that newspaper in one fist. I had swung out
in the dark but apparently been successful in lobbing the insult back at her.
Iva’s anger brought her one step closer, the heels of her shoes sounding
sharply on the wooden floor.

“The freedom to party
all night with kids drunk off rum and Jack Daniels and high off whatever’s in
that candy bowl downstairs? In the name of art?” Iva asked.

She leaned toward me
almost imperceptibly, perhaps unconsciously. That vanilla, peach, and cashmere
combination assailed me again, draining a bit of my will to keep offending her,
to keep confronting her assumptions until I hammered a crack in that smooth
plastic veneer of hers. The façade was fracturing already under the pressure of
her anger, almost affording me a view of what she hid beneath it.

With a careful balance
of calm glibness, I responded, “There’s candy in the candy bowl and pizza in
the pizza boxes. I’m the only one who drinks while working.” I paused a
half-second before enunciating, “Because I’m the one who can handle it. Lots of
practice.”

Get
it, little girl? You’re not playing with some clean-cut, stand-up desk jockey
in a popped-collar polo and khakis anymore.

I gestured with a nod
toward the door, toward the studio and everything going on there. “Everyone
else has to wait until I’m done with them and then only if they’re of age. My
hedonistic reputation is based on
my
behavior, not theirs, though I can’t say I’m a good influence.” I let one
corner of my mouth twist in a mirthless smile. “I wouldn’t want to be.”

Her response, stated
flatly, was, “You’re done with Cheri. Her photos aren’t going to be in your
exhibition.”

“Oh, but they are. I
assure you I have Cheri’s full support, as well as her signed model release.
That’s a—.”

“I know what a model
release is,” she snipped.

And I believed she did.
Again, the question was how would she know? Why would she know?

Iva looked ready to
cuss a blue streak at me just as Stan stepped into the room. He snapped the
door shut behind him, heedless of the noise he made and the tension building in
the air, and waved his hand nonchalantly to convey that all was well in the
studio. His appearance dampened the blistering rebuke I was about to receive;
the sensuous, pouty purse to Iva’s mouth made it apparent she was biting the
inside of her lip. Then the way he stood rocking forward and back on the heels
of his shiny black shoes, hands stuffed into his pockets, while he watched us
obliviously and whistled softly under his breath… all finally extinguished the
woman’s burning need to scold me raw right down to the bone.

After looking daggers
and death at me for almost half a minute, reckoned by the beats of music
thumping through the floor, Iva let out her breath. Her shoulders loosened and
sank, and her expression softened. All of which instantly put me on my guard.
Behind her, Stan smirked as I suspected he also saw her tack and try to circle
her problem—me—from a new direction. He wasn’t nearly as clueless as he liked
to appear.

“What do you want for
it?” she asked in a resigned, reasonable mutter.

I bit before taking a
moment to think. “For what?”

Iva hissed out her
irritation in a slow, thick breath through her nose and teeth. “What do you
want in exchange for Cheri’s model release?”

For the first time in
what might have been years, I was speechless and for a few seconds even
breathless.
What do you want
, in this
context, was like asking a child in a sweets shop how much candy he would like.
All of it. Everything. Was she crazy, posing that question to a man like me?
More to the point, though, was she serious?

I wanted to say—started
to say—there was no way to convince me to give up that release and the rights
it gave me to use the photos I’d taken of Cheri for any and all artistic and
commercial purposes. Then I realized I was humming and
hahing
and scratching the back of my head, where I had figuratively felt that itch of
burning curiosity over Iva’s history with
the
lifestyle
, over all those references to not thinking and bad choices and
being nineteen.

While I tried to figure
out why I’d suddenly lost my voice and apparently my mind for even considering
a real answer to Miss Iva Moreau’s question, my gaze took stock of her again.
Something about her held my attention, the way the first jaw-
droppingly
beautiful model I’d ever seen had. The way
owning my first camera had. The way staging my first photo shoot, my career in
a make or break moment, had held all my focus and energy. How was I going to
attack the task ahead of me? How was I going to use it to express my own
creativity in a way that would make other people take notice and embrace my message?
How was I going to make it my own?

When I finally spoke,
it was a low mutter roughed around the edges by the depth and darkness and
desire of my private thoughts. “You are in a very uncomfortable position,
aren’t you, Iva Moreau?”

When she didn’t respond
with more than a distrustful glare, I came up from my relaxed position on the
desk and took the few steps between us. Almost whispering, I said, “You come
into my studio, a chaotic and noisy place. You don’t know a soul or what to
expect. Then there’s the music and the color and the costumes.”

I tilted my head and
leaned near, as she watched me so closely, watched my every motion, breath,
expression with those eyes growing wider and wider. It was almost as intimate
as if she’d opened her legs for me, as the air about us seemed to thicken,
pulses beating against the skin at our throats.

“The shutter snap and
the shock of the flash,” I murmured into her ear, voice soft but deep, blatant
in my seduction. She only reared away when the warmth of my breath steamed over
the sensitive skin along the curve of her ear, and then she retreated only a
fraction of an inch, enough to stare sidelong at me. “The energy of people
mulling and posing, anxious and scared and eager and hopeful. Will the shoot be
any good, they wonder. Will they look glamorous? Turn this way or arch that
way? Who’s going to see these photos? People they know? People they don’t know,
and what will strangers think of them? Who will all those people imagine them
to be? What if it’s all too overwhelming? What if they get in front of the
camera and freeze?” Her eyelids had dipped low over the glistening brown
pupils, as my voice lulled her. “
Will
they be able to give me what I want
?”

She blinked several
times, coming awake from her daze as the subtext of the conversation hit,
penetrating her thoughts, penetrating her body at gut-level and from the
juncture of those curvy thighs. If my aim was true, anyway. She’d have been
realizing right about now how loaded a question she had asked me—never should
have asked me.

Then I brought my head
back to tilt it the other way and look Iva Moreau squarely in the face. “You
want to be mad at me. You want to berate me for the way you think I’m harming
someone you care about. But your blood is coursing in the same rhythm as the
music now, and you can’t tear your eyes or your imagination away from all the
clothes and the beautiful people with their bodies oiled or powdered or cinched
into tight corsets for display. You’re fascinated by the very thing you want to
keep your sister from experiencing.”