Model Release (The Art of Domination #1) (8 page)

“Right, okay, clear the
set,” Beal abruptly growled.

That was the end. It
was over. I was done. With a choking sigh of relief that hardly softened the
ache of tension in my chest, I darted up from my kneeling position on the
loveseat and made for the dressing room and the comfort of my sweats.

The photographer caught
my arm as I tried to pass him, caught it and didn’t let go. “Not you, Iva.”

“What do you—?”

Rilla cut my question
off with a huff and a dramatic wave of gestures. “Clear the set? Clear the
set!” she carped. The model tugged at the neckline of the blue satin robe she
was wearing, which she had tied down in a deep V that made it clear she wasn’t wearing
more than panties underneath it, if that. “We weren’t finished. I’ve been
waiting all night.”

“Less than two hours,
Rilla,” the photographer corrected her, without letting go of my arm despite my
sporadic bouts of unobtrusive squirming. “You’ve been waiting less than two
hours.”

“Didn’t you say you
wanted more shots?” she demanded.

“No,
you
said you wanted to do a few more
shots with Finn.”

The woman folded her
arms across her chest, one hip cocked, bottom lip pinched and plumped out in an
angry pout. “So you don’t want me to pose for you anymore?”

“Not tonight, Rilla. I
don’t need—.”

“You don’t need me?”

Even I could see where
this was going. Beal was going to have to give me Cheri’s model release,
wouldn’t have mine, and was about to see Rilla storm out in a cyclone of wrath
and ego.

I felt the photographer
shift—his posture, his breathing, his carriage, even his grip though I still
couldn’t break free of him. “Rilla, you’re not listening to what I’m saying.”
And he was saying it in a suddenly much smoother, honeyed voice that
inexplicably made me want to slap him.

Beal dragged me with
him as he walked to one of the long battered tables. He grabbed a glass of
pungent wine,
strong
by the smell of
it, and held it out for her. We all waited as she glared and then stared at the
glass before finally taking it.

As Rilla drank, Beal
said, “I had a particular job in mind for you tonight, Rilla. For you and
Stan.”

“Really?” the assistant
asked in the moment before he caught on and nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

Disciplining the
grimace that had started to break out over his handsome face, Nolan
concentrated again on Rilla. “I need to stir up a lot more buzz about the event
at The Odyssey.”

“So you need me?” Rilla
asked, licking wine from her now smiling lips. She had started twisting her
shoulders and hips back and forth so slightly, like the sexualized wiggle of a
woman pretending girlishness to get what she wanted. I wanted to gag. Would
Beal have noticed if I gnawed my arm off? Or his hand?

Nolan nodded. “What
better way to provoke interest than to give people a taste of what they can see
at the show?”

The model’s face lit
with a conniving glee. “So?”

“So you’re going to
borrow—
I said borrow, Rilla
—that
black leather Dolce &
Gabbana
gown, and Stan is
going to drive you in my car—.”

Her eyes flared. “The
Aston Martin?”

“Yes, the Aston,” Beal
answered through what sounded like a smile pulled taut over clenched teeth.
“You two are going to hit all the most exclusive clubs in town. I’m sure that
dress on you will get you past any line. But….”

“But?” she asked,
almost breathless with excitement now, wine glass drained.

“You have to keep in
mind what this show is about,” he cautioned her. “Amor Noir. Dark sexy, Rilla.
Dangerous sexy. And power. Play it off for the crowd the way you do for the
camera.”

She nodded as she
handed the wineglass back to the photographer who had just manipulated the
living hell out of her with the sheer force of that hedonistic personality. So
nicely done that I couldn’t help abruptly appreciating the skill it took to run
this dog and
ponygirl
show. It was an observation
that now begged the question: how much of Nolan Beal was Nolan Beal and how
much was the art of performance?

“I can do that,” Rilla
promised confidently. “I can charm them, entrance them. They all see the show,
and it’s a big success. And your magazine and designer clients see all the
excitement….”

Beal finished her
thought. “And they all want
that
model
in their clothes, on their pages, and on their catwalks.”

As Rilla fluttered off
to change, Finn stepped forward. “But not me, Nolan? You know I modeled in New
York.”

“You’re already a
fixture at all the clubs, Finn. That would amount to overexposure. I’d rather
keep you a closely guarded secret until the gallery show opens. That way
everyone sees the photos and stands there gaping and asking, ‘Isn’t that…?’ And
then you step forward and remind them why you were one of the highest paid men
in the industry.”

“I like the way you
think,” Finn said, then leaned in confidentially close. Still hauled up against
Beal’s body, I couldn’t help being included in the conversation as Garvey
added, “Even if that was a line of bullshit to get rid of Rilla without a
scene.”

Nolan nodded. “I don’t
know what you mean. Now beat it, and drop Viv off on your way.”

“Pizza,” the teen
barked as she appeared from far back in the studio and its obstacle course of
makeup tables, workbenches, and sleek black photo equipment. She had a ratty
backpack slung over one shoulder and a skateboard tucked under the opposite
arm.

Beal dragged two
twenty-dollar bills from his jeans pocket and slipped them to Finn. “Get her
two at the place up the street. Her little brothers won’t have had dinner,
either.”

No dinner yet at ten at
night, I noted. That suggested a home life that supported or just didn’t care
about a teenager staying out with a bunch of strange people doing things way
past her age range and bedtime. It also suggested a soft spot in Nolan Beal I
found equally out of place. I didn’t want to care about all these personal, private
details. They were not part of my life. Not my concern. But I couldn’t stop
wondering about them either.

Lucky for me—
she thought sardonically
—that Beal gave
me something else to think about as he dismissed the makeup artist, Jenna.
“Leave your small travel kit, will you, babe?” he asked with a friendly peck on
her cheek once she had hefted up two huge utility boxes of cosmetic gear.

She glanced knowingly
at me. “Have fun with it.”

Then I was alone with
Nolan Beal, who finally turned to face me. I might have insisted we were done
now and there was no
fun
to be had,
but he released his grip on me with disarming care. The shadow of what might
have been concern flittered across his face when we both saw the red band of
irritated skin on my arm where his hand had held me a little too tightly for a
little too long.

“Now that all these
distractions have been dismissed,” he said, “I’d like to do this right. What do
you say, Miss Moreau?”

I
would
have been well within my rights, even as vague as our verbal
agreement was, to claim I’d fulfilled my end of the deal. I
could
have demanded Cheri’s model
release then and there. I
should
have
gotten out of that studio while the getting was good.

But Beal had piqued my
curiosity tonight with the way he’d played Rilla and with his concern for Viv.
And he was so oddly polite with his request that I stay, when I would have
expected manipulation and seduction and domineering insistence.

“All right,” I agreed.
“But only for an hour more. What should I do?”

One brow twitched
wickedly over those gleaming blue-black eyes. “Choose a safeword?”

Safeword, a term I knew
from a few too many racy romance novels and old friends who dabbled. Edgy sex
went hand-in-hand with the artist’s taste for anything alternative or
counterculture. And, my god, the things I’d seen in painter’s lofts and gallery
shows and nightclub bathrooms.

Instead of slapping the
degenerate bastard and storming off, I burst out into laughter. My immediate
sense that he had at least partially intended the humor, as he hid his own
chuckling behind a well-contained smile, warmed me with sudden gratitude far
out of proportion to the joke or the effort. He had inadvertently reminded me
that my wild child days had also included a fair number of ridiculously
implausible and delightfully memorable situations, providing the first moment
of real levity I had felt all day. A moment orchestrated by and owed to Nolan
Beal. I wavered in my distaste for the man, my distrust.

That quickly, that
simply, I found myself in the makeup chair in front of a mirror the size of the
average picture window with a
half
glass of wine for me on the counter amid an array of lipsticks and eye shadows
and glittery accessories that would have thrilled the little girl in any woman.
And Nolan Beal, of all people, was peering hard into my face while applying
dramatic false lashes over the smoky eyes he’d chosen for me.

“You do makeup really
well,” I murmured, very conscious of his nearness. I was basically speaking
into his face, against his stylishly scruffy cheek. And I was starting to crave
oranges soaked in rum and dusted with cinnamon.

“Hair, too,” he added.
“When I started out, I had to save money, so I learned to do a passable job of
everything myself.” I might have asked for details, but he reared back a few
inches then, staring at my mouth. “You have a Monroe,” he said, his eyes
focusing on the piercing above my lip.

Blushing furiously,
nerves dancing, I admitted, “I try to cover that with makeup. They don’t really
approve of anything more edgy than pierced ears in the office.”

Beal was still studying
the little mark, which felt ten times the size with him staring, even if a
half-formed grin had appeared on his face. “I bet you still have the stud,
though, don’t you?”

Several of them. “Why?”
I asked cautiously.

“In your purse?”

The man was lucky I
didn’t leap out of that chair with the chills. I didn’t want to know how he’d
guessed that about me. Yes, there was one in a little plastic case in a zipper
pocket. I had kept it there, in the old days, for those spur of the moment
nights at the club—a tiny gleaming crystal that was hardly noticeable unless
someone got very
very
close. No doubt I should have taken it out by now, stopped carrying it around,
gotten rid of it. Keeping the stud was like an alcoholic shoving that last
bottle of booze to the back of the cabinet instead of pouring it down the sink
or the smoker who kept one last pack in the closet in the pocket of an old
coat, just in case an irresistible moment of self-destructiveness arose.

“Give me a minute,”
Beal said. “Wait here.” Wait here… feeling unbearably exposed by this little
snippet of my prior incarnation as a wild girl, resurfacing now, as I sat
immersed in this dangerously familiar experience.

When the photographer
returned, facing me in the mirror, he was holding up a hanger and a
breathtakingly beautiful—and expensive—designer gown. The shimmer of silver
undertones tempered the lavender color, with a deep V neckline playing off the
slit up the front from the hem. I could barely keep myself from touching it,
caressing it, the silk gleaming like liquid in moonlight.

“Found it where I
thought I would, hidden behind a few others in Rilla’s dressing room.” And we
shared a smile and a breathy chuckle over that. “Put it on,” he urged. “With the
stud.”

I felt myself flush
from breasts to scalp at the suggestion.
With
the stud
…. In the dressing table mirror, my reflection glowed pink despite
my olive skin. Could Beal, implausible psychic or just keen observer of his
fellow man, possibly understand what he was asking me to do? Who he was asking
me to be, if only for an hour? She was a wild child, a whirling dervish of
insatiable appetites, always looking for the next experience, the next thrill.
And it seemed, no matter how hard I tried to forget her, she was always there
just under the surface.

In the dressing room, I
put on the gown and the crystal stud like a Marilyn Monroe beauty mark just
above one corner of my lips, and I stared at myself. Which Iva was I now? This
Iva was wearing lavender stilettos with metallic silver heels instead of
loafers or modest pumps. Instead of my hair being tied back in a neat ponytail
or hanging smooth with a ton of conditioner to tame the curls, it hovered along
my shoulders and upper back in a cloud of soft waves, just a touch unruly,
uncontrolled. I smelled less like the ink of office markers that usually
stained my fingertips than of exotic skin lotions and hair serums, and of
orange and cinnamon and rum from proximity to a particular man.

The dress he had chosen
for me complemented my fair gold skin but also brought out unexpectedly
flattering pink undertones. And there was a lot of that skin to see. The gown
plunged more elegantly than brazenly, but it still showed more breast than I’d
have dared in public, at least these days. And the slit up the front flashed
glimpses of bare leg all the way along my thighs, up to and including a
suggestion of cream-colored silky panties if I moved too carelessly.