Forbidden or For Bedding?

She felt strangely disconcerted.

And it annoyed her.

She would have felt even more disconcerted, and certainly more annoyed, had she realised that behind her Guy de Rochemont had disengaged himself from Carla Crespi and was looking after Alexa’s departing figure as she threaded her way across the room.

His eyes were very slightly narrowed and their expression was speculative. With just a hint—the barest hint—of amusement in their long-lashed emerald-green depths.

Imogen was, predictably, cock-a-hoop at Alexa’s triumph. Not that Alexa saw it in that light at all—not even when Imogen disclosed the fee she had negotiated, which was considerably higher than Alexa had yet commanded.

‘Didn’t I tell you you’ll be made after this?’ Imogen demanded. ‘You’ll be able to name your own price, however stratospheric. It’s all fashion—you know that!’

‘Thank you,’ Alexa said dryly. ‘And there was I thinking it was my talent.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Imogen. ‘But brilliant artists are ten a penny and starving in their garrets surrounded by their masterpieces. Look, Alexa, art is a market, remember? And you have to work the market, that’s all. Stick with me and one day you’ll be worth squillions—and so will I!’

But Alexa only shook her head lightly, and forebore to discuss a subject they would never see eye to eye on. Nor did she discuss her latest client, even though Imogen was ruthless in trying to squeeze every last detail out of her.

‘Look, he’s just what you said he was, all right? A jaw-droppingly fantastic-looking male, rich as Croesus. So what? What’s that got to do with me? I’m painting him, that’s all. He’ll turn up late to sittings, cancel more than he makes, and somehow or other I’ll get the portrait delivered, get my fee paid, and that will be an end of it. He’s having the portrait done for his mother, and presumably it will hang in her boudoir, or the ancestral hall, or one of them. I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’ll never see it again and that will be that.’

‘Mmm,’ said Imogen, ignoring the latter half of Alexa’s pronouncement and rolling her eyeballs dreamily. ‘All those one-on-ones with him. All that up-close-and-personal as he poses for you. All that—’

‘All that cool, composed professional distance,’ completed Alexa brusquely.

‘Oh, come on, Alexa,’ her friend cried exasperatedly. ‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t swoon if he made a pass at you. Of course you would—even you! Mind you…’ Her eyes targeted Alexa critically. ‘Dressed like that you won’t get the chance!’

Precisely, thought Alexa silently. And anyway, not only was a man who had Carla Crespi panting for him never going to look twice at any other female, but—and this was the biggest but in the box—the only thing she was remotely interested in Guy de Rochemont for was whether she could successfully paint him.

The prospect was starting to trouble her. Up till now her main challenge had been not to make her sitters too aware of their physical limitations. With Guy de Rochement it was a different ballgame. She found she was going over the problem in her head, calling his face into her mind’s eye and wondering how she should tackle it. Wondering whether she could catch the full jaw-dropping quality of the man.

Will I be able to do him justice?

Doubts assailed her right from the start. As she had predicted, he missed the first sitting and was ninety minutes late for the next one. Yet when he did arrive his manner was brisk and businesslike, and apart from taking three mobile calls in succession, in as many languages, he let Alexa make her first preliminary sketches without interruption.

‘May I see?’ he said at the end, and his tone of voice told Alexa that this was not a request, despite the phrasing. Silently she handed across her sketchbook, watching his face as he flicked through her afternoon’s work.

Pencil and charcoal were good media for him, she’d realised. They somehow managed to distil him down to his essence. Beginning full-on with oils would make his looks unreal, she feared. No one would believe a man could look that breathtaking. People would think she’d flattered him shamelessly.

But it was impossible to flatter Guy de Rochemont, she knew. The extraordinary visual impact he’d had on her at her first encounter with him had not lessened an iota. When he’d walked into her studio earlier that afternoon she’d found, to her annoyance—and to quite another emotion she refused to call anything but her artistic instinct—that her gaze was, yet again, completely riveted to him. She simply could not tear her eyes away. She just wanted to drink him in, absorb every feature, every line.

When his mobile had rung, and with only the most cursory ‘excuse me’ he’d launched into French so fast and idiomatic it was impossible for her to follow a single word, she had actually welcomed the opportunity to resume her scrutiny of him. Unconsciously she’d found herself reaching for her sketchbook and pencil.

Now, as he flicked through her labours’ fruits, she was watching him again. He definitely, she thought, had the gift of not showing his reaction. Whether he approved of what she’d done or not, she had no idea. Not that his disapproval would have bothered her in the least.

If he doesn’t like what I produce, he can sack me, she thought, with a defiance she had never applied to her other clients.

But then never had she had a client like Guy de Rochemont.

As the sittings proceeded, intermittently and interrupted, as she knew they would—because his diary could alter drastically from day to day as with all such high-flyers who relied on others to accommodate themselves around them—she realised with what at first was nothing more than mild irritation that he started to disturb her. And it disturbed her that he disturbed her.

Even more that it was starting to show.

Oh, not to him. To him she was still able to keep entirely distanced during the sittings, to maintain a brisk, almost taciturn demeanour which, thankfully, mirrored his. He would usually arrive with a PA or an aide, with whom he more often than not maintained a flow of rapid conversation in a language Alexa did not understand, while the PA or aide took dictation or notes. Sometimes he took phone calls, or made them, and once he nodded a cursory apology to her when a second aide arrived with a laptop which he handed to his boss to peruse. After he had done so, Guy snapped it shut and resumed his pose again. Alexa coped with it all, and said nothing. She preferred not to speak to him. Preferred to keep any exchange to the barest functional minimum.

Yet it didn’t help. Not in the slightest.

Guy de Rochemont still disturbed her in ways that she just did not want to think about.

Unfortunately, Imogen did. Worse—she revelled in it!

‘Of course he’s getting to you!’ she trilled triumphantly. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t snap when you say his name, or when I do. It’s a sure sign.’ She gave a gusty sigh. ‘It’s all totally theoretical, alas. He’s all over Carla Crespi. She’s preening herself rotten about it. Puts the pair of them in front of every camera she can find. Or buy. Even with your looks—if you bothered to do anything to show them off—you couldn’t compete with her.’

Alexa tightened her jaw and refused to rise to the bait.

Besides, she had bigger problems than Imogen winding her up.

The portrait wasn’t working.

It had taken her a while to realise it. At first she’d thought it was going well—the initial sketches had worked, the simple line drawing being ideal for catching the angled planes of that incredible face—but as she started to paint in oil, it didn’t happen. At first she thought it was the medium, that oil was not the best for such a face. Then, after a while, it started to dawn on her, with a deep chill inside her, that the problem was not the medium. It was her.

I can’t catch him. I can’t get him down. I can’t get the essence of him!

She took to staring, long after he had gone, at her efforts. She could feel frustration welling up in her. More than frustration.

Why can’t I make this work? Why? What’s going wrong?

But she got no answer. She tried at one point to make a fresh start, on fresh canvas, working from the initial sketches all alone at night in her studio. But her second attempt failed too. She stared, and glared, and then with dawning realisation knew that, however hard she tried, it was simply not going to work. She could not paint Guy de Rochemont.

Not from life, not from sketches, not from memory.

Nor from dreams.

Because that was the most disturbing thing of all. She’d started to dream about him. Dream of painting him. Disturbing, restless dreams that left her with a feeling of frustration and discomfort. At first she had told herself it was nothing more than her brain’s natural attempt to come up with a solution that her waking mind and conscious artistry could not achieve. That dreaming of painting Guy de Rochement was simply a means to work through the inexplicable block she was suffering from.

But then, after the third time she’d dreamt of him, and woken herself from sleep with a jolt at the realisation that yet again he’d intruded into the privacy of her mind, she knew she’d have to throw in the towel and admit defeat.

It galled her, though—badly. It went against the grain to give up on a commission. She’d never done it before, and it was totally unprofessional. But it was also unprofessional to turn in substandard work. That broke every rule in her book. So, like it or not—and she didn’t—she had no option. She was going to have to admit she couldn’t do the portrait, and that was that.

Even so, it took time—and a lot of agonising—to bring herself to the point where she knew she would have to inform Guy de Rochemont of her decision. When to do it? And how? Wait until he turned up—eventually—for his next sitting, and then apologise in front of whichever of his staff were there with him that day? Or, worse, ask him for a word in private and then tell him? One cowardly part of her thought to let Imogen do it—after all, Imogen was her agent. But if there was one thing Alexa knew for sure, it was that Imogen would refuse to let her throw in the towel. No, she would just have to bite the bullet and do it herself, face to face. And it wasn’t fair on the man to make him turn up for a sitting he scarcely had time for anyway and then tell him she was resigning the commission.

So she phoned his office instead.

The PA—whose manner had not improved—told her snootily that Mr de Rochemont was out of the country, and an appointment to see him was highly unlikely before the date of the next sitting. So Alexa was surprised when the PA rang back later, to tell her that it would be convenient for Guy to see Alexa in a week’s time, at six in the evening. Alexa wanted to say that the time would not be in the least convenient for her, but forebore. This had to be done, and she wanted it over with.

When she turned up at the London headquarters of Rochemont-Lorenz, she was kept waiting in Reception for a good half an hour—not a surprise—and then finally taken up in a bronze-lined lift to the executive floor, some twenty storeys above Reception. Her feet sank into carpet an inch thick, and thence she went through huge mahogany double doors into the chairman’s suite.

The setting sun was streaming in through plate glass windows.

Guy de Rochemont got to his feet from behind a desk that was the size of a car and about a tennis court’s length from the entrance doors, and came forward.

‘Ms Harcourt…’

His voice was smooth, his suit so immaculate that it clung to his lean, elegant body like a glove.

And yet again Alexa found herself gazing at him. Drinking him in. Feeling that incredible breathless rushing in her veins as she watched him cross the deep carpet, his gait lithe, purposeful, like a soft footed leopard.

Prince of the pride…

Thoughts, reactions, tumbled through her head as he came up to her.

This is his natural environment. Here in this penthouse, overlooking the City. With money and power and wealth and privilege. An ivory tower remote from the world. Where he reigns supreme, alone.

He had come right up to her, his long-fingered hand extended. Automatically she took it, wishing she did not have to, did not have to feel the cool strength in his brief social grip before he let her go.

He looked at her, studying her face a moment with a flicker of his eyes. The familiar thought stuttered through her brain.

Green eyes—as rich as emeralds…And lashes, those ridiculously long lashes, and that veiling I can’t see through…

‘Is there a problem?’

She stared. How had he known? She’d said nothing—nothing at all—of the problems she was having. She scarcely spoke to him during sittings, and thank heavens he had never asked to see her progress—not once she’d started on the oils. Nor had he made any comment at all on the initial pen-and-ink sketches. She’d been glad. She hadn’t wanted his comment—hadn’t wanted anything to do with him, if truth be told. She had been relieved that he wanted no conversation with her, that he was basically using her studio as an extension of his office. His preoccupation with his work meant she could study him, paint him in full concentration. Hiding completely the fact that she was utterly failing to capture his likeness—his essence—in a portrait.

For a moment she was stymied by his directness. Then, with a stiffening of her back, she answered, moving slightly away from him to increase the distance between them. It felt more comfortable that way.

‘I’m afraid so,’ she said. Her voice was stiff, but she couldn’t help it. She was just about to tell a rich and influential client whose portrait was, as Imogen never failed to remind her, the gateway to unprecedented commercial success, that she was incapable of fulfilling the commission.

He raised a slightly, enquiring eyebrow, but said nothing. His eyes still had that veiling over them.

How’s he going to take this? Finding out all that priceless time of his has been wasted, that there’s nothing to show for it, and never will be? He’s going to be livid!

For the first time she felt apprehensive—not because she was going to have to admit artistic failure, but because it was dawning on her that Guy de Rochemont could ruin her career. All he had to do was say that she was unreliable…

She took a deep breath. She owed him the truth, and could not put it off any longer. He was clearly waiting for her explanation. So she gave it.

‘I can’t paint you.’

His expression did not change. He merely paused, for a sliver of time so brief she hardly noticed, then said, his eyes resting on her, ‘Why is that?’

‘Because I can’t,’ said Alexa. She sounded an idiot, but couldn’t help it. Couldn’t explain. She took a breath, her voice sounding more clipped than politeness required. ‘I can’t paint you. I’ve tried and I’ve tried, and it’s just not working. I’m extremely sorry but I have to resign the commission. I mustn’t waste any more of your time.’

She waited for his reaction. It would not be pleasant—and who could blame him? His time was invaluable, and she’d wasted a great deal of it. She felt her shoulders squaring in preparation.

But his reaction was completely not what she had steeled herself for. He merely walked back to his desk, gestured to the huge leather executive chair slightly to one side of it, and then lowered himself down into his even huger chair behind the desk.

‘Artist’s block,’ he said dismissively. ‘N’inquietez vous.’

Alexa could only stare.

‘No,’ she repeated, ‘I really can’t paint you. I’m extremely sorry.’

He smiled—a brief, social smile that barely indented his mouth. ‘Pas de tout. Please—won’t you sit down? May I offer you some coffee? A drink, perhaps, as the sun has very nearly set?’

She didn’t move. ‘Mr de Rochemont, I really have to emphasise that I have no choice but to resign the commission. I can’t paint you. It’s impossible! Just impossible!’

She could hear her voice rising, and it dismayed her. She wanted to get out of here, but how could she? Guy de Rochemont was still indicating that she should come and sit down, and without knowing why she found that that was exactly what she was doing. She sat, almost with a bump, clutching her handbag.

‘I can’t paint you,’ she said again.

His eyes were resting on her with that familiar veiled regard that she could not read in the slightest. ‘Very well. If that is your decision I respect it entirely. Now, tell me, Ms Harcourt, do you have an engagement this evening?’

Alexa stared. What had that got to do with anything?

He took her silence for negation. ‘Then I wonder,’ he went on, his eyes never leaving her face, ‘if it would be agreeable to you to be my guest this evening. I feel sure the event would be of interest to you. It is the private opening of the forthcoming exhibition on Revolution and Romanticism: Art in the Napoleonic Period. Rochemont-Lorenz has the privilege of being one of the key sponsors.’

Alexa went on staring. Then she said the first coherent thing that came into her head. ‘I’m not dressed for the evening.’

Once more Guy de Rochemont gave a brief social smile.

‘Pas de probleme,’ he said.

And it wasn’t.

There was, Alexa discovered over the course of the next hour, absolutely no problem at all in transforming her from someone who was wearing the same dull grey blouse and skirt that she’d worn the first time she’d encountered her client to someone who—courtesy of the use of the facilities of a penthouse apartment that seemed to form a substantial portion of the executive floor, plus a stylist who appeared out of nowhere with two sidekicks, hairdresser and make-up artist, and a portable wardrobe of eveningwear—looked astoundingly, shockingly different.

When she emerged, one hectic, extraordinary hour later, and walked into the executive floor reception area, Guy de Rochemont looked up from where he’d been talking on the phone at the deserted secretarial desk and said only one thing to her.

His eyes—those green, inscrutable eyes—rested on her for only a brief moment. He took in the slender figure in raw silk—burnt sienna, with a high neckline but bare arms—her hair in a crown around her head and her face in full make-up, with eyes as deep as oceans.

Then he walked forward, stopped just in front of her.

‘At last.’

That was all he said.

And he didn’t mean how long she’d kept him waiting.

Satisfaction ran through Guy as he surveyed the woman in front of him. He had had more than ample time to peruse her attributes during his sittings, and Alexa Harcourt in evening attire was all that he wanted her to be.

Superbe.

The single adjective formed in his mind, and he plucked it from the list of many that he could apply to her and considered it. Yes, superbe…

Nothing less would do as a description. He had known from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her that once he’d disposed of the prim schoolteacher image she so amusingly put forward he would reveal for his delectation a beauty well worth his attention. And so it had proved.

His eyes rested on her appreciatively. Yes, superbe indeed. Tall, graceful, slender, with that classic English chic—so understated, yet so powerfully alluring for that very reason—she was exactly what he wanted her to be. A wisp of a smile played at his lips as he called to mind the muted, self-effacing persona she had presented up to this point. At first he had assumed it was a ploy, for women went to vast efforts to engage his interest, and she would not have been the first to attempt a pose of indifference to him. But as the sittings had continued he had come to the conclusion—surprising, but for that very reason enticing—that Alexa Harcourt was not courting his interest.

Not, of course, that she was not all too aware of him. That had been evident to him from the first, and it had come to be a source of amusement to him, adding a rare piquancy to his pursuit—a pursuit which he had taken considerable enjoyment in extending for far longer than he customarily did when it came to the women he selected for his relaxation. But he had found that it was fort amusant to sit, posed like a prince in his Renaissance palace, while his portrait was captured for posterity—or in his case for his fond maman—and let his eyes play over her sculpted features. He found pleasure in this casual scrutiny, while she assiduously endeavoured to ignore his regard.

But not without revealing by her very assiduity just how responsive she was increasingly becoming to his presence.

His eyes veiled momentarily. That increasing responsiveness was evidently, the reason why she had come here to make her dramatic announcement that she could not continue with making his portrait. Again, at first for a few moments he had assumed she had done so merely to put to the test whether he was or was not interested in her. But then he had realised, with a sense of relief as well as satisfaction, that his reading of her was unchanged—she was quite genuine in her determination to abandon his portrait.

It was an excellent sign! Excellent that she was not attempting to be intrigant, but even more excellent that she was having such problems with the task of capturing his likeness. Because the reason for that was obvious—he was no longer nothing more than a client to her. And most essential of all, her inability to capture his likeness betokened her increasing frustration at her own attraction to him. She could not paint him…because she could only desire him.

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