Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

He wondered what it would be like to be the man who engendered such a look of desire. He wondered what it would be like to loosen that hair and let it slip through his fingers. He wondered at the fine fire of a woman that had such intoxicating heedlessness in her. But most of al he wondered why any painter, even the most brick-headed picket-post scrub, had not taken the opportunity to paint his lover, even once. Painting one’s lover was the most exquisite act of lovemaking. Not just in the carnal sense, though it was that and more, but in the giving of love, the elevation of one’s partner above al others.

It had hurt her, he knew, to admit this portrait was her first. He wished he had not made such an assumption, let alone voiced it, but now that he knew, it pleased him deeply that he would be the one to show her this joy.

Peter had painted Ursula many times. His favorite was a painting in which she appears four times, once unclothed and with her back to him as a classical goddess, once in the maternal guise of a Madonna, once as the rich wife of a painter, and final y, with her breasts bared and looking straight at him, as the woman who had turned his bed into an inferno of pleasure and his heart into a wil ing supplicant.

His eyes returned to the chaise and the woman, eyes closed, who lay there.

She wasn’t Ursula. The carmine hair did not make her so, nor did the unfettered tongue, though he would be lying if he did not admit both captured his attention. No, this woman was unto herself. A proud, spirited woman, perhaps from a background like his, who had used her wits to insert herself into his diary, who had not hesitated to save his skin with the king, and who had now al owed him to witness her most private imaginings. It was a most provocative act—

most provocative—and even if he could not be the man fil ing her head, to have witnessed the stripping bare of her desires was an aphrodisiac, in this case a very potent one.

He gazed at the tightly quilted flesh of her nipples, and his brush, once abstracted, stopped entirely. God, he ached with desire, something he had not felt in so long. If he weren’t so pained, he would laugh at the comedy of it.

Lustful at last, but for a woman who could never be his.

He tried to turn his mind to the painting, even going so far as to consciously draw the sable down the canvas, but he could not.

He wanted to take those wild summer berries in his mouth and hear the noise she’d make, and suckle those glistening fingers to taste the melon there. He wondered if that hair would wrap like silk around his fingers, if he could draw a ringlet across that peaked, pinched flesh.

The last vision flooded his head, and he was overcome.

He couldn’t stop himself. He would command what he saw for his painting even if he could not command it for his bed.

Her eyes flew open as he drew near. Was she fearful?

Modest? He no longer cared. If her fiancé could provoke so much wanton desire in a woman, he would have no objection to enjoying her exactly as Peter wanted to portray her. He pul ed a pin from the mass of curls, and she gasped, which made the ache in his bel y redouble. He caught the tendrils as they dropped and fanned them over her skin, cinnamon on porcelain, and where the ringlet caught her nipple, cinnamon on cinnamon. It was al he could do to keep from taking that silk-wrapped flesh and teasing it until she opened her legs to him.

But he held himself in check. Slowly the burn receded, replaced by a tingling in his fingers. Now that he had her exactly as he’d imagined her, he wanted to paint.

He took a deep breath, stepped to the easel and realized that for the first time in years Ursula was miles from his thoughts.

18

Cam