She’d felt him watching her once, turned her head and their eyes had met. The jolt of chemistry shot straight down into his pants. He hadn’t reacted, made himself glance casually down at the bare desk in front of him, the anonymous indifferent stranger.
Rick lifted his head and resettled it into his hands. But his image had been planted, at very least in her subconscious. The chemical link would remain dormant in her brain until they met again and he chose to bring it to life, to work it to his advantage on this case and in his quest for Samantha’s…favors.
He grinned at the ceiling, feeling the familiar stirring in his groin when he thought of the thoroughly enjoyable work involved in readying a conquest. Seducing women was an art form, one he’d mastered over his forty-two years. But in the past year or so, the chase had gotten almost too easy. Within about ten minutes he could tell if he’d be successful or not. He’d developed a nearly unerring instinct so that he minimized rejection by avoiding women who’d be impossible to conquer. Tanya Banyon had been a totally uncharacteristic misread. But women like Samantha…seemingly invulnerable but with the gift of that chink. Those women were always the best and the sweetest to overcome, though it took careful planning and patience.
“Feeling women” he called them. The most passionate, the most adventurous. Women like Samantha, who tried to hide her strong sexuality—who probably did hide it from most people. But not from him. He could sense it in the way she walked, the graceful turn of her neck, the fullness of her mouth and the glimpse of passion in her eyes.
A mourning dove announced the hour by cooing its ghostly tune from the birdsong clock on his wall. 11:00 p.m. The bars would be full. Thinking about Samantha had made him horny. Maybe he should try to find another woman tonight. Give her Samantha’s cell number again, pretending it was his own, and tell her to call whenever she wanted him.
He pictured Samantha listening to the messages, wondering who he was, shocked, half-repelled, but definitely fascinated—maybe even turned-on. A woman like her couldn’t help but be fascinated. Who was this Johnny Orion? Why were so many women calling for more? Wouldn’t he be the perfect Man To Do?
He chuckled, got up from the couch, crossed his spacious book-filled, rug-strewn living room into the kitchen and opened the door of his state-of-the-art built-in refrigerator. Cold beer. Or perhaps a nice Beaujolais. Pâté. A baguette from Mon Pain. Strips of bright red pepper. No other women tonight. Tonight he’d sit here, get slowly stewed, maybe hack into her computer and see what else she revealed to her friends, or just think about her and how good it would be between them when he finally landed her.
“HOLD THAT.” JACK HUNTER took a step back and eyed the models critically. The tall brunette—Yvette was it?—stood stiffly, body oiled and bronzed, hair slicked down, wearing a glittering, chest-flattening thong bikini. In front of her, on a clear plastic seat that would not show up in the shoot, back pressed firmly to the tall model’s stomach, arms raised like armrests, sat another model, similarly attired. The overall effect, once the picture was done, would be of a female human piece of furniture.
Jack moved forward and carefully rearranged a wayward strand of the seated model’s hair. Vanessa he thought she was called. “Good. Hold that. No emotion. Stare straight.”
He moved behind the tripod set up with his Hasselblad camera, loaded with two-and-a-quarter-inch film and gazed down into the lens until the models became in the viewfinder what he wanted in his mind. Stiff. Wooden. Unemotional. Perfect. He pressed the shutter. Then again, jaw tight, adrenaline high.
Something about the way female bodies could be molded and manipulated to resemble household objects fascinated him. The ability to represent the inanimate with the living, to merge object and life, to cross the boundaries of function and form. This project was his baby. He didn’t need to do it. Commercial shoots gave him all the work he wanted. But photography for the sake of art instead of in homage to capitalism fed his soul in a way his regular job, no matter how satisfying, never could. The ultimate rebellion from pictures that glorified the mundane in order to seduce the consumer. Cereal as the next Messiah, cars that would change your life and social status, jewelry that would save your marriage.
This shoot was about simplicity, about something as complicated as a human being arranged into something as stark and serviceable as a chair. The contrast was irresistible.
He shot a few more frames, then adjusted the main light brighter, to make the shadows more harsh.
“Yvette.” He raised his head and frowned at the standing model. “Can you take the light out of your eyes? Make them dead. Like you’re blind, like you’re seeing nothing. Can you do that?”
The model unfocused her eyes into dull blank circles.
“Excellent. Almost done.” He bent his head back over his camera and snapped a few more shots, finished the roll and nodded. “Thanks. Good work.”
The women slumped out of their positions with sighs of relief and rolled necks and arms stiff from posing for so long.
Jack clapped his hands in brief applause. “You ladies did great. You can get dressed now. I’ll send you prints for your portfolios in a week or two.”
The women made their way to the changing area at the back of his studio to shower and dress.
Jack shut off lights, labeled his rolls of film and took them to the darkroom. Good day today. He’d nailed several shots exactly as he wanted them. The women had been even better than he hoped. He could afford professional models, but he liked finding women on his own, usually aspiring models or performers who were comfortable in front of a lens already. He gave them the pictures for their portfolios or for their amusement or egos, or whatever they wanted them for, and saved himself contracts and legal hassles.
Best of all, he could go about the project leisurely, wait until he found the right faces, the right bodies for the poses he wanted.
This shoot wrapped up his chair series. His next was even more complicated—women as dining tables. Intimate feasts for two served on a woman’s horizontal spine. Fabulous. Someday he’d do a whole dining set.
He put his Hasselblad away in the cabinet Dad had made for the studio. He was looking for a very special person for the table shoot. Someone who could project the kind of simple sincerity the picture required, to avoid a comic effect. Someone who could fill the frame without trying to—or even while trying not to. He wasn’t even sure what she would look like, only that he’d know when he found her. Something about her would spark certainty that she would photograph well and transform his internal vision into reality.
The women emerged from the bathroom, hair still damp, giggling over some joke.
He threw off the focus and tension that always accompanied his work and grinned. “You ladies interested in having a drink?”
They shot each other sidelong glances that made him feel like a dirty old man. Okay, so he was probably ten years older than they were. Not like he wanted anything more than company for a drink. His big scoring days were over. But having two visions of loveliness on his arm for the evening wasn’t exactly an ego buster. So shoot him, he was human.
“Come on. Do I look like a cradle robber?” He held his hands out in surrender which made the girls giggle. “I’ll buy you a drink to thank you for the good work you did here.”
More sidelong glances. The fluent silent communication that only the female of the species understood.
Hmm. Women didn’t usually respond to his charm as if he were a walking virus. Fine. Forget it. Not like he had anything invested in their company.
“We were thinking.” Yvette sidled up to him on one side and took his arm.
“Oh?” He looked down at her lovely face turned up impishly toward him and couldn’t help grinning. A promising sign.
“Yes.” Vanessa slid around to his other side and took his other arm. “We were thinking.”
“Thinking, huh?” Jack turned