Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78295 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78295 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
“You are incredible,” he says and licks his fingers clean. “Every drop, incredible.”
“Yeah, totally,” I say, catching my breath, my knees shaky. “I’m the best. I just let my kidnapper get me off. I totally rule.”
He laughs, shaking his head, and moves past me into the bathroom. The shower turns on. “I’ll get you pajamas,” he says. “Get in and get washed.”
“Can you just go? I mean, I get we just did something extremely weird and intimate, but I need some alone time to process just how mentally insane I am at the moment.”
“Whatever you want, devil girl.” He lays out cotton shorts and a tiny t-shirt on the bed. “I have an alarm set for four hours. I’ll wake you when it’s time to get back to work.”
“Right. Work.” My reality reasserts itself. I’m a prisoner. He’s forcing me to paint forgeries for him, which is a big-time crime and could land me in serious trouble if we somehow got caught. None of this is normal or remotely okay. “Four hours should be fine, I guess.”
“It’ll have to be.” He turns away. “And, Hellie?”
“Yes?”
“I like the way you kiss. And I love the way you taste. But next time, don’t cover yourself.”
With that line, he gets the fuck out of there, leaving me alone.
I lean my head up against the wall.
“Asshole,” I say, staring at the ceiling. “God, what an asshole.”
Chapter 13
Erick
I wake her exactly four hours later.
Her taste is still on my tongue. Her moans are still in my mouth. For the last four hours, I’ve been sitting alone in my office, trying to get work done, failing miserably, thinking about nothing more than Hellie. My devil girl. My gorgeous artist. Every inch of her is a masterpiece.
“Time to paint,” I whisper, gently shaking her awake.
She tries to hit me with a pillow. “Fuck you.”
“Hellie. Come on.”
“Let me sleep.”
I want nothing more in the world than to crawl under the sheets and cuddle up against her. I want that warmth, her softness. I want to plunge myself between her legs, feel her beautiful wet pussy wrapped around my cock.
I am fucked up with desire at this very moment.
“Hellie,” I say, shaking her again. This time, I catch the pillow and toss it across the room. “Back to work.”
“Fine.” She stretches, groaning like a cat. “But I hate you so much right now.”
“You loved me four hours ago.”
“I was sleep-deprived.” She glares. “I’m still sleep-deprived. I need rest if I’m going to do my best work.”
“You’re not doing your best work, only your good enough work. Get up.”
She slithers like an eel, wriggling away from me as she kicks the sheets away, and climbs off the bed. Her hair’s piled on the top of her head, messy from sleep, and she looks gorgeous in the shorts and t-shirt I gave her the night before.
“I just want to say that I’m out of bed, but I am very unhappy about it.”
“I hear you.”
“Good.” She stands, sighing. “I don’t feel like painting. Can’t I just say the muse isn’t speaking today?”
“Fuck the muse. I shot her in the skull. The muse is bleeding out. You’d better get used to working without her.”
She rolls her eyes as she stumbles into the bathroom. Once she’s ready, I walk her down to the studio. Each step seems to wake her up slightly more until she’s inside, facing her work again, the late afternoon light slanting in sideways through the window, the desert reaching out in all directions, red-brown-green.
“Fuck, I really like this room,” she says, ambling over to the canvas. She stalks around it, making little thoughtful noises, fingers on her lips.
“Well?” I stay back near the door, not wanting to invade her space. I worry that if I go fully inside, if I let myself become a part of her studio, then it’ll lose some of its magic.
And I really need that magic. She does too, even if she doesn’t understand why yet.
“It’s good,” she says at last, slumping down on her stool. “Did I really do this?”
“In a state of mindless delirium, yes.”
“Great. Get me more of that.” She picks up a brush and chews on the end, getting a little paint in her mouth. I grimace, disgusted, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “I did most of the hard stuff already. The mother’s the focus.”
“The mother?”
“Her.” She points at the woman standing up beside the sketched piano. Everything’s a ghost, except for her. “I’ll do the daughter next, then fill in the rest. The hard part is getting the light and the shadows right.” She keeps chewing on the brush end. What I would give to replace that with my—no, keep my head in the game, don’t get distracted.
“That sounds like a plan. You should get to it.”
But she’s already ignoring me, busy mixing paints, getting herself set up. I stay and watch for a little while. The world disappears when she gets in this state, and it’s incredible to witness, like a world-class athlete performing a motion they’ve done a million times to the point where the neural pathways are etched like ravines in their brains. Painting, for Hellie, looks like walking for other people. Natural, automatic, done with ease.