Page 49 of Silver-Tongued Devil
“What?” She’d jumped up and was pulling the robe more tightly around her.
He came to sit on the couch, holding the framed piece in front of him. He was still frowning, too. She sat down again, because she couldn’t think what else to do. Snatch her shell away from him and make her escape?
Customer meeting,she told herself.Professional.“You’re under no obligation.” She heard the stiffness in her voice, but that was all right, too. “You asked me to show it to you, and I am. I’m aware that it’s experimental, a different direction for me.”
He frowned at her some more, and then his expression cleared. “You think I don’t like it. I like it. I want it. If you’ve shown it to somebody else, I’ll outbid him. I’m just saying… how did you get the idea? No shells like this in Idaho, and none in Oregon, either.”
“Oh. No.” Once again, she was off balance. “I just… it was the flowers, I guess. First. And there are some shells in Oregon, even if they’re not conches. I have a few in my workshop, in a jar. I was looking at them, studying them, close up, sort of… unfocusing. Seeing the roughness outside, the edges, then all that smoothness, you know, inside, where they’re polished like that. And I wanted to show that. The contrast. Different from a flower.”
She looked at the piece, which Blake was still holding up, and couldn’t help that same sense ofrightnessthat had driven her as soon as she’d started working on it. Now, she tried to explain it better to Blake. He could see the fluttering edges, the deepening pink, the gorgeous, secret shine, but he couldn’t know this. “As soon as I started,” she told him haltingly, “it was there. That happens sometimes. My brain doesn’t even seem to be telling my hands, or it’s not the neat front part of my brain, the part that plans. It’s the messy, dark, unorganized back part, and it wants what it wants. The shell’s right. It might not be right to sell, but it’s right for me.”
That wasn’t flirtation in his eyes now. It was intensity, a nearly ferocious need to connect, to understand. She understood it in the same way she’d seen her conch. From someplace deeper than her conscious mind.
“I want it,” he said. “And not just because it’s the sexiest damn piece of art I’ve ever seen. It’s a piece of your soul. And I want it.”
Her scalp prickled, and the fine hair on her arms rose. The shudder came from someplace deep inside, and he sat there and watched it happen.
“How much?” he asked.
“Ah…” Her mouth was dry, and she took another heady sip of wine, which didn’t do anything to still the electricity that was sending sharp little shocks straight to her core like some kind of devilish sex toy. She tried to think through it, but it wasn’t easy. “A thousand dollars.” She’d thought of asking more. She’d chickened out. Thisdidn’thave a million tiny pieces. It was good, but it hadn’t been complex, not once she’d gotten it right.
Blake sighed. “Now, darlin’, we had a talk about this. This isn’t some pattern you found in a book. Come on. Give me a price that lets me know what I’ve got here, what it ought to be worth to me and how I ought to treat it. Give me a price that tells me it’s precious.”
She was losing herself in his intensity, his focus. “Fifteen… hundred,” she whispered.
“Now say it like you mean it. Like you know it.”
She took a deep breath. “Fifteen hundred.”
A slow grin spread over his face. “That’s what I’m talking about, baby. That’s telling me you mean it.” He stood up and carried the glass across the room, where he set it against the wall. “Going to put this bad girl in my bathroom for me tomorrow?”
“Oh, so this one’s a girl, huh?” she said, trying to rally. She went to take another sip of wine, then realized it was gone.
He saw it too, because he came back to the couch and filled her glass again, then topped up his own. “Yeah. My eagle’s male all the way, but that shell? That’s sure-enough a beautiful woman. All the secret spaces of her, the ones she’s holding back until she knows you’re worth showing them to.”
“I think you might be reading between the lines there,” she said, trying with all her might to keep some dryness in her tone.
His mouth curved in a smile, and he sat down again, not seeming in any hurry to get anything going. “I might be,” he said, “or could be I’m getting to know you a little bit. And that isn’t easy, because you’re all sorts of things.”
“What sorts of things?” She shouldn’t ask, but what woman would have been able to resist an opening like that?
“Oh, let’s see. Smart, and she doesn’t know it. Creative, though that’s not a good enough word, and she doesn’t quite believe in it yet. Loyal. Honest. Brave. How’s that?”
“I sound like the Boy Scout Oath, is how that is. I thought this was going to be some sexy list that was going to send me into your arms. So much for that. Same old story. The woman who’ll gut your fish for you. I have bigger hands than any man I’ve ever dated, and I could probably have beat most of them at arm wrestling, too.”
She didn’t look down at his feet. They were bigger than hers. Alotbigger. She was turning into some sort of foot fetishist, the way she kept looking at his bare feet. It was that high arch, those long toes.
Definitely a foot fetishist.
“I noticed Evan doesn’t seem to mind,” he said.
She blinked.What?Evan? “That’s because he knows he’d win.”
He put up his hand, palm out. “Let’s see.”
She put her right hand up to meet his left. Their palms touched, and it was an effort not to jump.
And, yes. His hand had to be two inches bigger than hers. Big palms. Long fingers.
