Free Model Release (The Art of Domination #1) by Erika Masten

staying out with a bunch of strange people doing things way
past her age range and bedtime. It also suggested a soft spot in Nolan Beal I
found equally out of place. I didn’t want to care about all these personal, private
details. They were not part of my life. Not my concern. But I couldn’t stop
wondering about them either.
    Lucky for me— she thought sardonically —that Beal gave
me something else to think about as he dismissed the makeup artist, Jenna.
“Leave your small travel kit, will you, babe?” he asked with a friendly peck on
her cheek once she had hefted up two huge utility boxes of cosmetic gear.
    She glanced knowingly
at me. “Have fun with it.”
    Then I was alone with
Nolan Beal, who finally turned to face me. I might have insisted we were done
now and there was no fun to be had,
but he released his grip on me with disarming care. The shadow of what might
have been concern flittered across his face when we both saw the red band of
irritated skin on my arm where his hand had held me a little too tightly for a
little too long.
    “Now that all these
distractions have been dismissed,” he said, “I’d like to do this right. What do
you say, Miss Moreau?”
    I would have been well within my rights, even as vague as our verbal
agreement was, to claim I’d fulfilled my end of the deal. I could have demanded Cheri’s model
release then and there. I should have
gotten out of that studio while the getting was good.
    But Beal had piqued my
curiosity tonight with the way he’d played Rilla and with his concern for Viv.
And he was so oddly polite with his request that I stay, when I would have
expected manipulation and seduction and domineering insistence.
    “All right,” I agreed.
“But only for an hour more. What should I do?”
    One brow twitched
wickedly over those gleaming blue-black eyes. “Choose a safeword?”
    Safeword, a term I knew
from a few too many racy romance novels and old friends who dabbled. Edgy sex
went hand-in-hand with the artist’s taste for anything alternative or
counterculture. And, my god, the things I’d seen in painter’s lofts and gallery
shows and nightclub bathrooms.
    Instead of slapping the
degenerate bastard and storming off, I burst out into laughter. My immediate
sense that he had at least partially intended the humor, as he hid his own
chuckling behind a well-contained smile, warmed me with sudden gratitude far
out of proportion to the joke or the effort. He had inadvertently reminded me
that my wild child days had also included a fair number of ridiculously
implausible and delightfully memorable situations, providing the first moment
of real levity I had felt all day. A moment orchestrated by and owed to Nolan
Beal. I wavered in my distaste for the man, my distrust.
    That quickly, that
simply, I found myself in the makeup chair in front of a mirror the size of the
average picture window with a half glass of wine for me on the counter amid an array of lipsticks and eye shadows
and glittery accessories that would have thrilled the little girl in any woman.
And Nolan Beal, of all people, was peering hard into my face while applying
dramatic false lashes over the smoky eyes he’d chosen for me.
    “You do makeup really
well,” I murmured, very conscious of his nearness. I was basically speaking
into his face, against his stylishly scruffy cheek. And I was starting to crave
oranges soaked in rum and dusted with cinnamon.
    “Hair, too,” he added.
“When I started out, I had to save money, so I learned to do a passable job of
everything myself.” I might have asked for details, but he reared back a few
inches then, staring at my mouth. “You have a Monroe,” he said, his eyes
focusing on the piercing above my lip.
    Blushing furiously,
nerves dancing, I admitted, “I try to cover that with makeup. They don’t really
approve of anything more edgy than pierced ears in the office.”
    Beal was still studying
the little mark, which felt ten times the size with him