Where am I?
CHAPTER TWO
Paris 1889
The Artist
I can’t paint, I can’t move. Alors, I can’t believe what I saw. A moment ago I swear the night was slashed open by a strange light and I saw a redhead stripped naked, teasing me, flirting with me, her bare shoulders swaying and dipping provocatively.
I continue to stare into the gauzy-thin darkness veiling a corner of the room, a rapturous chill shooting up the side of my face, then wiggling down my spine and meeting head-on with the slow burn pulsating in my groin. Ready to explode. No. I must be going mad. Delirious. What occurred stunned me, like lightning flashing through my body.
Exhaling slowly, blinking, trying to ease the strange headache that came upon him—brought on by too much absinthe, or so he wanted to believe—he regained control of himself. Barely. He tapped the tip of his cane against his leg, keeping time to a strange rhythm in his soul only he could feel. He gripped his cane tighter, trying to hold on to the moment. How was such a thing possible? No candle or lamp illuminated the corner where he’d seen the redhead, no moonlight drizzled through the open window. He’d heard no one enter through the thick wooden door. The only sound in his ears was a soft whisper.
“I’d make you fall in love with me,” she said, taunting him. A sensual giggle escaped her tinted lips, no pretense of innocence shading the moaning sounds coming from her throat. Then she slumped to the floor, the life gone from her, like the morning sunlight dissipating over the stacks of hay in the wheat fields, leaving behind only deep shadows. Cold. Lonely.
He moaned.
Tonight, working in his studio, he had the unnerving feeling someone had been watching him. Lusting after him. Undressing him. He grinned. It was the redhead. A familiar tingling inside him made him squirm with frenzied energy as if thousands of carmine-red lips, wet lips, her lips, kissed and sucked the long shaft of his penis. Up and down, circling around it with her tongue.
A spasm of anticipation within him caused his hard cock to press against his tight pants. He was excited, stimulated by this redhead. He felt his penis bulging and swollen with a great need he couldn’t conceal.
But first he must find out if she was real.
Paul Borquet approached the dark corner with fear in his heart. Fear of discovering she was but an illusion. What else could she be? The whisper he’d heard in his ear came from a long way off, fading so slowly, like the long sigh of a young girl as she peaked during her first sexual climax.
He drew in a long, deep breath.
The beautiful girl lay on the floor, not moving. She was flesh and blood.
And she was nude. The pale sheen of her skin enchanted him, her face bewitched him, her breasts thrust forward with one hand lying lightly between her thighs, as if daring him to peek and savor her pussy. Her slim hips, long legs, all delighted his artist eye with a sensual harmony so perfect he could do nothing but stare at her.
Strangely, as if in the grip of an unseen hand, he couldn’t concentrate on anything but the redhead. Not the model waiting for him in the small studio upstairs, not his unfinished drawing, not his need for more absinthe. He’d raced down to the study to indulge his thirst for the green liqueur when a sudden lightning shower drew him to this room. Then he’d seen her.
And nothing else mattered.
He breathed in deeply, and the shadow of her erotic perfume descended over him, holding him in a sensual moment so real his hand shook when he felt for a pulse on the side of her neck. His dark blue eyes widened. Yes, blood beat in her veins, but her skin was hot, as if a fiery flame danced over her body without burning it. He couldn’t stop himself from reaching out to touch her face, her lips. Her breasts. The desire to twist the pointed nubs of her breasts with his eager fingers heated his groin. He yearned to lick them with his red-hot tongue, then nibble on them. He moaned, wishing he could bury his face in her creamy white flesh and smell the aroma of her female sex. Sweet and pungent. Erotic.
He must paint her. He must.
He closed his eyes in ecstatic torture. Touching the beautiful redhead raised him out of his deep depressive mood. He had been melancholy earlier, sitting silent and withdrawn in his studio, his head sunken to his chest, his hair hanging in his face as he drank absinthe. Night after night he sat, condemning the art world for not recognizing his genius.
In the late afternoon he had roused himself out of his drunken stupor and gone to the Louvre to study the works of Delacroix, Poussin and the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. It provided him with the perfect release when the headaches and dreams crowded his brain with such pain he could no longer hold his brush steady.
Then he had come to his small studio in the Marais district in the town home of la comtesse, his one-time mistress, and prepared his paints, but nothing happened. Nothing. His creative urges were stalled. He could no longer reach into the most remote parts of his mind and explore the vast universe of his imagination, that mystique of sensation he knew he could achieve, allowing him to put his feelings into art. Yet he wouldn’t give up. Couldn’t.
He drew in his breath, a sudden longing for the smell of paint under his nose and the sound of short, quick brushstrokes whispering in his ears. With a haunting clarity, he conjured up in his mind a dazzling painting of this redhead, already seeing his bold colors on canvas. Red. Blue. Yellow. Shocking colors, passionate colors. Colors that lived, that captured the moment.
His heart raced faster, a thin veil descending over his sense of reasoning, the veil of madness that was often a companion to his art. Always striving to sell just enough of his work to buy more paints, while at the same time he struggled to express a feeling, a thought, a human need in his painting.
Could not hope be expressed by a star in the heavens? The hunger of a soul looking for love by the brilliance of a sunset? The beauty of all women by the luminous eyes of one woman?
He was certain the redhead was that woman.
How had she come to him? She was here in the room with him, this seductive creature of the night. And if so, she must be skilled in black magic and a follower of the occult. He exulted in the idea she would be a fitting partner to join him in his ongoing journey of mystic and sexual exploration into the Paris underworld of hedonism and excess, where women danced naked, titillating the madly decadent men.
He called it his cirque érotique, where beautiful, young mesdemoiselles rode from room to room in sumptuous private mansions on bicycles sans pantaloons, naked below the waist, giving the gentlemen an exquisite view of their nude buttocks; or where women offered themselves as love slaves, willingly partaking of strong intoxicants to increase their pleasure as they did their masters’ bidding; or where they engaged in salacious threesomes, making certain the gentleman always had twice the fun.
He embraced this world, watching women performing and arousing, seducing and being seduced. A world where there was magic in every kiss and every kiss was magic, a world he found strangely evocative and compelling.
The world of the Black Arts.
The girl moaned. She was stirring.
“Oooh…” She crossed her arm over her chest, her hand pushing together the luscious swell of her breasts. He gasped. The sight of her white flesh delighted his eye, but his mind told him to cover her, lest she catch a chill. He was acquainted with the wardrobe of the mistress of the house in an intimate manner, so it didn’t take him long to retrieve a long, hooded red velvet cloak from the garderobe. He placed the cloak over the girl’s nude body, then picked her up in his arms, reveling in the lightness of her slim body when—
—her other hand opened and the object she’d been holding dropped onto the carpeted floor.
His throat tightened. No, it couldn’t be. But it was. His small statue of the Egyptian god Min. Had the girl sneaked into the town house to steal it? What other treasures did she seek? Jewels? Gold