Eva pushed away the thoughts competing in her mind. Trying to buy time to process the moment, she focused on a stack of large canvases propped on the floor beneath the window. The collection of paintings had been done in rich shades of dark blues and grays, and the images at the center of each were absolutely haunting, gaunt, bereft characters. They were nothing at all like the charismatic, carefree man who had brought her here. Rather, they were people who all exemplified some dreadfully sad tale, and Eva could feel the human tragedy in each of them.
Eva knew nothing about art. But she knew what moved her. These were powerful images, all so raw, and very different from the Cubist works at the exhibition of a sort she was told he, too, painted. Her body reacted to the drama in these before her mind could. What did it mean that he could create in two such different styles? Was there a story? Her head throbbed with a jumble of questions and emotions and it made her feel insecure to wonder about them. Clearly there was more to Picasso than what he had allowed her so far to see.
Next in the stack of canvases was a portrait of a young, dark-haired man, clothed all in black with a glowing backdrop. His pale face, looking directly at the viewer, black eyes wide and plaintive, was rendered almost cadaverously white by the intense blue of the background. The face had a poignant sadness that drew her almost as profoundly as the women had.
“Yet like the satyr, that is me also,” Picasso said, breaking the silence between them. His tone suddenly was disarmingly tentative. She felt the vulnerability in it, which was something she certainly had not expected. “Another side of me.”
Such two starkly different sides of the same man, Eva thought—a confident young painter, handsome and sensual, and yet something far more vulnerable—as she compared the whimsically erotic sketch on the table with this self-portrait. Picasso waited patiently for Eva to react, but instead she looked away and returned her attention to the rest of the canvases against the wall. The final painting at the back of the large stack bore an image of a man’s face and head, eyes closed, painted in profile. The figure was illuminated by the stark yellow glow from a single candle. There was a bullet wound visible at his temple.
Startled, Eva glanced back at Picasso. His wry smile had disappeared, replaced by something deeper and more somber. The anguish in his wide black eyes said that he had not wanted her to see this painting. Perhaps he had forgotten it was there.
“Who was he?” she asked cautiously.
“His name was Carlos Casagemas. We came to Paris together from Barcelona. He was my best friend...before he committed suicide,” Picasso replied grimly as he approached her. He changed the subject by putting his hands firmly on her upper arms and clamping them tightly.
There was tremendous force in his grip. He was holding on to her with possession now, and his face was full of a brooding sensuality. Eva could no longer think as the sound of her own heart pulsing filled her ears.
Picasso released one of Eva’s arms and began to slowly unbutton her white cotton blouse as he locked his gaze onto hers again. He was nothing like the boys she had known in Vincennes. Nothing at all like Louis. He pressed the full length of his body against her then as he had done outside. He breathed softly against her neck as his warm fingertips met the skin of her bare breast. He withdrew slightly and challenged her to look away from his gaze.
“I’m not an expert but the way you are staring at me right now is not how an artist properly assesses a model. I live with enough artists around me to know that much,” she nervously murmured. Yet the words came as a weak refrain. “Was that not, after all, why you invited me here, to model for you?”
She tried desperately to press back her deepening arousal. She glanced at the bed in the alcove. When she turned back, Picasso closed the gap between them with a sudden, sensual kiss and Eva moved willingly into his embrace.
His fingers ran over the hard point of one nipple and then the other as he kissed her more deeply, filling her mouth with his tongue.
“I want to see all of you,” he said in a throaty Spanish whisper.
Was it his fame, how shatteringly attractive he was or his surprise possession of her that was most alluring? She had not fully imagined any of this an hour ago as she had stood in the actress’s dressing room. What was happening was so forbidden—surely a sin. It was certainly wrong, yet she wanted it just as much as he did. They moved together as one—still kissing, touching, bound by each other—to the little bed in the corner of the room. Their kisses grew more urgent and Eva lost sight of the paintings, of their conversation, of all rational thought. The rough need flaring through Picasso’s warm lips finally took total control of her. She felt her body open to him even before either of them were bare. She was aware of the ache for him deep inside herself as he stripped off her skirt, her stockings, her camisole and her drawers, as he caressed her body, lingering skillfully on every tingling curve and rise of flesh. Please let me be good enough for him, she desperately thought.
He released himself from her for a moment to draw off his own clothes. Then, with moonlight shining through the window on him, he paused before her, naked and unashamed.
They did not speak further. There was no need for it.
Arched over her a moment later, yet still restrained, Picasso ran his hand along her supple body with the precision of a sculptor. His fingers were an artist’s tool moving deftly along the lines and curves of her. He moved until all of her senses were wildly alive, tender and achingly sensitive. She was trembling as his fingers finally found the untouched place between her legs. As he kissed her again Eva tasted a moan of desire deep in her own throat.
In the flickering light of the oil lamp, Picasso forced Eva to lie still beneath him. With exploring kisses and languorously patient caresses, his tongue moved as his fingers had done, until desire blotted out all of her remaining sense of reason, touching her in ways she had never even known how to fantasize about.
He finally clamped his hands on her hips to mount her, and the pleasure turned to a swift sharp pain in a place deep inside her. Only then did she remember how fragile innocence was. He was rough and frenzied with his own need, unaware still, in that passionate moment, of her virginity. She tried her best to open to him as he moved, but her body resisted and she arched her back as he pressed hard into her. A moment later as he groaned into her ear, the pain disappeared and she rocked with him into oblivion, forgetting everything else in the world but this dark-eyed stranger and how he had just now changed her life forever.
“Marcelle Humbert, I tell you, you are absolutely brilliant!” Sylvette squealed dramatically after Eva tried her best to slip silently into their room early the next morning.
She was unable to think of anything but Picasso: his warmth, the way he tasted. Her skin still tingled from his caresses. Not wanting the fantasy to end, she had left Montmartre while he was still sleeping. She had gone away so swiftly before dawn because she could not have borne Picasso waking and asking her to leave. He was too famous for it to have ended otherwise.
She knew it would be better this way.
Sylvette knelt beside Eva’s bed, her eyes wide with excitement. “Mistinguett is going to do a number as a geisha, and Monsieur Oller loves the idea! She thinks you are her savior after last night. She has even invited us to lunch today before the show. Can you imagine, she wants us to meet her friends? And all of this because of your lovely little kimono. What an impression you have made at the Moulin Rouge!”
Eva thought again of how her mother had given her that kimono, and regret seized her for a moment. I’m sorry, Mama, Tata, for