Free The Convent Rose (The Roses) by Lynn Shurr

Eve back to her side of the room. “I don’t know what to paint next—unless Bodey would pose for me.”
    “Clothes on or off, darlin’?” Bodey said automatically. “Eve owes me a portrait.”
    “From the waist up only!” Eve protested as Bodey started to strip off his shirt. “Leave the shirt on.”
    “Whatever you want, honey.” Bodey took a seat on a stool.
    “Wait, do you have a hat. You need a hat.”
    “Got my lucky hat in the truck.”
    Bodey retrieved it. The hat was black and battered and had a dented silver concha band around the crown. “Always won when I wore this hat,” he reminisced. “Damn good hat.”
    “I think I remember that hat,” Eve said.
    “Like I said, my lucky hat. I always wore it when I had something hard to do.”
    “That old, holey T-shirt isn’t working for me, Eve. Please, can’t he take it off?” Renee whined.
    “Fine. Take off the shirt, Bodey, if it doesn’t bother you.”
    Well aware that he was trim and hard-muscled, Bodey took off the T-shirt so slowly his act would have done credit to a Bourbon Street stripper. He tossed it in a corner like a rag and slouched on the stool. He turned his pretty side toward Eve, but she motioned for him to turn the other way where a long, pink scar slashed through his tan across the ribs and around his back. A bull named Yellow Thunder had gored him during the dismount after he rode out the clock. Stitched up and bandaged tight, he’d completed the competition, come in first, too. He told the women that story as they worked. It wasn’t bragging because it was God’s own truth. About the time Bodey’s back started to bother him, Eve said they had to clean up so she could make her class at the Academy.
    Bodey shrugged into his T-shirt and casually strolled around to take a look at the canvases. Renee had nearly completed her version. Bodey barely recognized himself. He knew he was well-muscled through the shoulders and chest, but she’d drawn a cowboy on steroids with bulging biceps and six-pack abs. Renee had taken the artistic liberty of portraying his jeans as unzipped nearly down to his crotch—as if he were some Abercrombie and Fitch model. All his scars had vanished. Bodey guessed she flattered him. He’d had more than his fair share of women and had no problem strutting around naked in front of them, but to show him like that in paint somehow made this cowboy uncomfortable.
    Bodey moved on to view Eve’s canvas. She had scrubbed in his figure but given most of her time to the face. His stance, his scars, his eyes, though very blue, seemed to say here sat a man sore and weary, looking for a light in the window and a warm bed where he could rest. Did Eve see him like that?—a worn-out man with no one waiting at home. Who would want to marry a man like that? Who would even have sex with this guy?
    Renee came up beside him. “Well, Eve doesn’t do portraits very often. I think mine is better. Help me get my things to the car, will you, Bodey?”
    Bodey picked up her picture of the buttocks gingerly by the edge and hefted her rather heavy wooden box of art supplies while Renee carried her still very wet cowboy canvas carefully out to a black Lexus.
    “Maybe we could do a private session at your place or mine to finish this up,” Renee invited with her hand on Bodey’s arm.
    This close, he could tell the green eyes came from colored contacts. The darker roots of her hair showed around the crown of her head, hence that trip to the hairdresser she’d mentioned. As she pressed against him, her breasts felt harder than he remembered. Was there anything real left of Renee Niles?
    Eve watched the old friends and lovers standing so close together. What a fool she had been doing that stretching routine for Bodey Landrum’s benefit. Leave it to her to come up with such a feeble attempt at being seductive. For a short while, she’d begun to believe he was very attracted to her. The kiss at the fireworks, the arm he had kept