I opened my mouth wider, maybe to protest or to beg, but his lips captured mine in a sweet open mouth kiss. Two fingers trailed down my cheek and rested against my fluttering pulse.
“Come for me,” he ordered softly as he pulled away.
And I did, in an explosion of sensation so deep that every muscle in my body contracted hard, so hard that I thought I was seizing. A scream ripped from my throat and my legs scissored, trapping my hand between my thighs.
When I finally came down enough to open my eyes and release my hand, he was gone. The only sign of him was
the empty tumbler on the bedside table and the feel of his control and desire still lingering in my spent muscles. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the tears come before I was even aware I was crying.
I’d wanted some kind of closure, fantasized about a sexual ‘farewell’ and now that I’d had one, wrung from his voice and my hand, I felt despair deeper than any I had known before. Sinclair may have been in my life, a friend now, at least, but knowing I would never have his heart had never been so clear to me.
Chapter Seven.
“Really?”
I laughed loudly but the lunch hour traffic on the busy terrace of the restaurant drowned out my lack of class. “Yes, really.”
“I don’t think I understand this.” Mama’s beautiful almond shaped eyes squinted at me, a habit she had when English confounded her. “Si vuole dipingere le persone aver fatto sesso?”
Cosima too was squinting, a thinner, younger look-alike. “No, Mama, it’s Giselle.”
I frowned at my family as they all nodded in agreement. They must be wrong they thought, because sweet innocent Giselle would never do anything morally ambiguous and definitely not something so crude.
“I’m serious.” I took a deep breath and slid my damp palms nervously over the soft jersey fabric of my dress. “I want to do a series depicting private sexual moments, a study of individual sexuality.”
Elena blinked at me owlishly before laughing. I took a second to notice how light it was, tinkling like glass wind chimes. I almost winced at the comparison to my own brassy chuckle from a few minutes ago.
“You can’t be serious? Who would even want to pose for you like that?”
I cleared my throat because this was part of the pitch that I really needed to nail. “I was hoping you would, for starters.”
The second of shocked silence made me fidget. I reached out for my wine glass, almost tipped it over in my haste and slipped my sweating palm back within the other.
“I can’t believe you are asking your own family to pose nude for you.” Elena’s pretty feature scrunched up in horror.
The shame I constantly felt in her presence threatened to overwhelm me but I swallowed back the bile and forced myself to breath.
“It’s art, Elena, not porn for fuck’s sake,” Sebastian snapped at her before turning to me with an arrogant grin. “How do you want me? I can give you a few phone numbers if you’d like a woman’s opinion.”
His wink made me snort but Elena shook her head. “You are so crass.”
“Which one of us is the more American, then, Elena? The crass one or the prude?”
He had a good point, but I covered my smile behind my hand.
“I’d be happy to do it,” Cosima said softly. “But you might not like what you get.”
I frowned at her. “You model swimsuits and lingerie, Cosi. Honestly, I didn’t think this would be a tough sell for you.”
She lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “It is still enough clothing to cover secrets, no?”
“You don’t want me. This body is old.”
I turned sideways to face my beautiful Mama. Caprice Lombardi was the kind of woman you dreamed up for an Italian centerfold; lushly curved under swathes of silky olive toned skin gently creased like pleats at the corners of her light brown eyes, with hair too long for a woman her age in America but exactly right for an Italian, older but everlastingly sexy. She tugged at the end of her thick black braid now and stared at me with worried eyes, as if she was letting me down for not being younger or prettier.
“You’ve been in America too long, Mama,” Sebastian scolded, reaching across the table to take her hands. “A beautiful older woman is a delicacy.”
Elena snorted softly and received a glare from both of the twins but otherwise the remark went uncontested. It reminded me what Elena had said when I had first arrived, about Sebastian’s affair with an older married woman. I resolved to ask him more about it but he had been so busy since I’d arrived that I had barely seen him.