Photo Slave (The Art of Domination #2) (4 page)

As that very
impulsiveness was part and parcel of the professional package that made up
Nolan Beal, I didn’t imagine anyone would really mind me giving them something
else to talk about when the next dinner party conversation turned gossipy. Thus
relieved of the most tedious observances normally required of polite society, I
merely took the crinkled paper and Iva Moreau both in hand before I descended
the staircase to the third floor of the nightclub. She should have considered
herself lucky, even not knowing the specifics of what she was tempting me to do
to her. Plenty of my
play partners
had gotten much worse for much less than showing up dressed like that and
making accusations about how I did business—in front of gallery owners I needed
as my supporters at a time when both my client list and my line of detractors
were growing exponentially.

Iva started to speak,
but I pushed her backward against the balcony’s shiny railing and took her face
in one hand. I didn’t have to grip her forcefully or roughly, just lay my
fingertips along her cheek, thumb tracing the angle of her jaw. Her skin was
already warm and heating quickly, even as her breathing slowed and her gaze
went soft, almost unfocused. Did I have that effect on her? The thought churned
a wave of pride in my chest.

Of course I’d already
noted what method best stayed Iva’s wrath and stilled her anxiety, what brought
out the obedient submissive in her. Handling her delicately when she expected
force and severity melted the woman, a trait I found unexpectedly calming to me
as well, even while it aroused me. Then turning rough and demanding with her
just when most women would have said they wanted tenderness and soft whispers,
in those most intimate moments…. That suited both our tastes just fine.

Not that I had spent
far too much time over the past three days picturing Iva Moreau’s reactions to
having her panties ripped off, to being thrown down on the couch, to being made
to present herself and put my cock inside her before I’d give her the fucking
we had both wanted. Not that I had repeatedly entertained regret that I hadn’t
preserved more than the initial moments of abandon on film. And not that I
should have been considering all this now, as I read and reread the signature
and date on the mangled model release I held with the hand I wasn’t already
using to rein in the passionate Frenchwoman. Hell no. That wouldn’t have been
like me at all. I would have chastised myself for forgetting the names of my
liaisons ten minutes after they’d left if I normally bothered to learn them in
the first place. Yet I had no problem remembering Iva Moreau in minute and
intimate detail.

I still chalked my
fascination with Brown Eyes up to curiosity, to her periodic failure (thus far)
to sink down to my low expectations, and to the air of unpredictability
apparently inherent in the women in her family. Unpredictability. Yeah. I could
just as easily have said volatility. Instability. Contrary nature. Like Cheri
and this release, wherever it had come from.

Lingering stiff and
still against my hand, against all the points where our bodies brushed as I
kept my hold on Iva, kept her waiting, the woman returned my regard with quiet
impudence. It was in the jut of her jaw and the pinch of her luscious mouth.
The LEDs inside the crystal chandeliers kept changing from warm shades of amber
and vermillion to icy topaz blue and sea green tones, backlighting the sandy
waves of her hair and lending her an otherworldly and unobtainable allure. It
was difficult to concentrate on dealing with her provocations and her insolence
when she looked like a dark angel in a wet dream.

Iva finally gathered in
a slow deep breath and used it to say, “You lied.”

I stopped staring at
Iva to look at her, really look at her, as I shook my head. “I didn’t.”

“You led me to believe
that handing over Cheri’s release ended her work with you and prevented any
possibility of you using her photos for your exhibition. Maybe that wasn’t
explicit, but it was perfectly reasonable to assume we were both getting what
we wanted.”
Not just you,
she was
saying without having to spit out the words.

Letting my thumb slide
across Iva’s chin, which trembled so slightly with nerves or maybe the strain
of not striking me, I deliberately played with that pulse beating erratically
at her bare throat. “At worst that would have been a lie of omission.”

“A rather refined sense
of technicality for so blunt a man,” she bit.

“That would be a fair
statement,” I agreed, “were I in the least guilty of your charge. But I did no
such thing. I didn’t even tell Cheri about our agreement, though I admit to
mentioning you’d been at my studio—hard to explain otherwise why I was asking
her for your cell number. You really should have left that for me, by the way,
so you have to take some of the heat on that count. Stan was just supposed to
let Cheri know I wasn’t going to need her for the rest of her shoots. It’s
possible he said more than he should have. Sometimes my assistant can be a bit
clueless.” And sometimes he was just a troublemaker. I was in no position to
pass judgment on that count.

“Too cowardly to tell
her yourself?” Iva scoffed, voice low, soft brown eyes peering coolly at me. I
liked that shade of rich chocolate brown better when it was melted and
glistening with desire, teary from the kind of climax that only sudden,
jarring, intense sex wrung out of a woman. Out of a submissive at her most
vulnerable.

Down,
Beal
.
The jeans were getting snug again in all the most important but uncomfortable
places.

“No, not cowardly, Miss
Moreau, just busy and tired. I’ve been on location about fifteen hours a day
for the last two days, then all morning and afternoon today while I wrapped a
shoot for a StyleWeb feature.”

Iva had started
squirming, but a firmer hold on her sculpted cheek got her attention, made her
behave. And reminded me what a Hellenistic beauty looked and
felt
like. After Zelina, there was an
awful lot of bittersweet subtext under that memory.

“So you’re saying you
weren’t around, hadn’t seen Cheri, and didn’t know about the new model
release?” Iva asked, the pout to her lush lips and the flatness of her tone
suggesting great doubt in my word—for reasons that would have been justified in
many cases, just not this one. “You didn’t tell Cheri to sign another release
form to get around our agreement?”

She assumed I’d tell,
not ask. One of us didn’t know Cheri very well.

“I didn’t. Most likely,
Stan told her more than he should have and she didn’t like the idea that you
rescued her when she didn’t feel like she needed saving.”

“Hm, yeah,” Iva said,
nonplussed and glaring now. “Stan must have given her the photos of me as
well.”

I reared back,
possessiveness flaring despite me dropping my hand from Iva’s cheek to make a
fist against my thigh. “No one has those photos but me.” And that damn well
better have been the truth. I had developed them myself in my own studio
darkroom before tucking them away in my desk until I could get Iva to relent
and sign a model release in her name. Until then, they remained private, for me
alone. I realized now that what I hadn’t done, hadn’t thought necessary, was
lock that desk drawer. A mistake?

“Cheri dropped a file
filled with them on my desk today at work,” Iva told me. “The photocopy of the
new model release that she tucked in under the pile was a last little ‘and
don’t do it again’ jab at me.”

It took me a few
seconds of staring at Iva to be certain she wasn’t bluffing, wasn’t trying to
guilt me into some concession. I reminded myself that everyone was running some
kind of game, if not on strangers, if not on coworkers and friends and family,
then on themselves. Just now, I didn’t see the advantage to Iva to lie to me.
So it was possible my carelessness truly had resulted in not just a security
slip that was bad for business but a violation of the trust between Dominant
and submissive. No matter that Iva was not my submissive in any official sense,
with no agreement either verbal or written yet to set our rules and boundaries.
It was going to take me some time and hard thought to figure out how I was
going to make that up to her without actually saying I was sorry. I hadn’t apologized—flippant
and blatantly insincere exceptions notwithstanding—to anyone for anything in
about twenty years, not since I was ten and had figured out what the word
hypocrisy meant from a wealth of real life examples.

The closest I could
come to contrition without a lot of preparation and even more Cruzan was a
plain, truthful admission. “I don’t get anything out of embarrassing you, Iva,
especially since I haven’t yet convinced you to sign a release and keep
modeling for me.”

The last part came out
of my mouth as a surprise to both of us, Iva’s eyes flaring, me using all of my
powers of concentration to fight down the disturbingly sheepish grin of a
hormonal schoolboy with his first crush. Iva wasn’t my first crush or a crush
at all. Not my first play partner or the first woman I’d seen as a challenge to
thaw out and bed. She was just the first I wanted to see again, for more than
professional reasons. For the challenge. Yes, I wanted Iva to keep modeling for
me… and to keep spreading her legs for me. I wanted to hear her saying my
name—like a curse, like a plea—in her most defenseless and honest moment, when
she came.

“Why?” she asked me.

“Why?”

“Why do you want me to
keep modeling for you? Why did you ask me to do it in the first place?”

A breathy chuckle rushed
out through my nose. “You don’t know you’re a beautiful—”

She cut me off with a
tsk and a fierce frown. “Enough bullshit, Beal. You can’t swing a half empty
bottle of whiskey in your studio without beaning a woman—or a man, for that
matter—so stunning that they’d make the average person hyperventilate. So why
me?”

There was a plaintive
note to Iva’s voice that made it sound as though she was asking not why I’d
favored her but why I’d injured her. My curiosity flared again but softer this
time, less like I wanted the thrill of prying out her secret lust and more like
I wanted to coax out her private hurts.

“Because of the way you
sound when you ask questions like that, Iva.”

“What’s that supposed
to mean?” she asked, that plump bottom lip pushed out just a bit, tempting me
to suck and nip and lick the rosy flesh. Would she relent, relax enough to
return the attention? Would she let her tongue slide against mine as she had
that night on set?

“It means that the
Moreau women are never who I expect them to be. I’m still figuring you out. You
and Cheri.”

The mention of her
sister cast a shadow over Iva’s expression, visible even in the colored light
of the club. “Stan said Cheri was supposed to be here with you. Yet she didn’t
tell you about the release? She didn’t mention the photos of me at all? Didn’t
ask about them?”

I nodded past Iva
toward the dance floor two levels below us, to the disturbingly attractive
couple Cheri and Finn made as they writhed against one another using the music
as an excuse. “She barely notices me when he’s around,” I explained to Iva as
she twisted to look over her shoulder.

Yet another look I
couldn’t quite read flitted along Iva’s brow, smoothing out the furrows in
favor of…. Surprise, was it? I could have sworn she almost smiled.

“Relieved you didn’t
find me corrupting your little sister?” I asked. Not that Finn couldn’t take
care of that himself.

Whereas I was a
hedonist at heart, Finn was just plain debauched, and with years of dedicated
practice. Being on his own at sixteen in New York City making damn near the
kind of money the equivalent female model would have commanded, Finn Garvey had
tried everything proper people weren’t supposed to enjoy and had liked all of
it well enough to make a habit of it. Partying and overexposure had surely
imploded his career, but the abrupt fall had also probably saved his life.

Like Rilla, Finn was
counting on me, I suspected, to help him regain the fame and money that enabled
his addiction to public adoration. His backup plans were acting classes and an
emo band establishing a following on the local club circuit, with Finn as lead
singer, of course.

Now that I thought
about it, maybe I should have stepped in between Finn and Cheri before he did
any of the things Iva suspected of me.

When Iva didn’t answer
my prodding question, I couldn’t resist goading, “Have you been feeling a
little jealous? Would you rather I concentrate on corrupting Cheri’s older
sister?”

She didn’t turn back to
me, so I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right when she said, “It wouldn’t take
much.” I was certain she shivered, and it wasn’t cold in Haute.

This tightened my gut
and loosened my clenched fist, and I used my fingertips under Iva’s chin to
gently swing her head to face me. I wanted to make sure she was watching as I
tore Cheri’s newest model release to small pieces and tossed it over the
balcony rail like so much confetti.

For a long surreal
minute, Iva watched the paper snow float down over the oblivious crowd. “And
what,” she asked cautiously, “am I supposed to make of that?”

“A peace offering. An
act of good faith and bad intentions, but ones I come by honestly. I want you
to keep modeling for me, Iva Moreau. That strange love-hate fascination you
obviously have with my work? Oh, don’t bother denying it, Brown Eyes. It makes
you an intriguing subject to explore.” Then I watched Iva’s expression very
carefully as I added, “And I’m going to help you explore something as well—that
affinity you have for sexual submission.”