McGillivray's Mistress Read online

  “So,” he said, determinedly businesslike, “you got the clay?”

  He knew she had. His brother Hugh had said so last night.

  “What the hell does Fiona Dunbar need with a hundred pounds of clay?” Hugh had demanded when they’d been drinking beers at the Grouper.

  Lachlan had nearly spat his own beer across the room. “A hundred pounds?” Good God.

  Hugh had nodded, then shaken his head. “Wouldn’t tell me what it was for. Our little Fiona is getting mysterious in her old age.”

  Thank God she hadn’t, was all Lachlan had been able to think. “Maybe she’s going to make pots.”

  “Maybe.” But Hugh hadn’t looked convinced. “What would you do with a hundred pounds of clay?” he’d asked Lily, the barmaid.

  Lily grinned. “Make me a man.”

  Then Lachlan had choked on his beer.

  “Why not?” Lily had said with a shrug. “Better than the real ones be livin’ ’round here.”

  “I’ve got the clay,” Fiona told him now. “It’s upstairs in my studio.” She turned and briskly led the way.

  Lachlan had been up these stairs as a teenager when he’d come home with Paul and Mike. They’d shared the bedroom at the back of the house under the eaves. Fiona’s, he remembered, had been the tiny one across from the bathroom. And their parents’ had been the wide room that sat above the living room and overlooked the harbor.

  Lachlan imagined that Fiona would have moved in there and that she’d have turned her bedroom or the boys’ into the studio. So he was surprised when she went straight to the large room that had been her parents’.

  “I work in here,” she said, opening the door. Then she stopped abruptly and nodded toward a door across the hall. “That’s the bathroom. You can change in there.”

  She said the words so fast he almost missed them. And while he was still digesting them, she turned swiftly and vanished into her studio. The door banged shut after her.

  Just like that.

  Lachlan stood where he was and heard her words echo in his head.

  You can change in there.

  Change into what?

  Nothing.

  The moment of truth.

  His pound of flesh. Literally.

  Lachlan sucked in a slow careful breath. He stared at the closed studio door. Beyond it he heard the clatter of something being dropped, followed by Fiona’s mutter of consternation.

  The next breath came a little easier. If he was nervous, he reassured himself, so was Fiona.

  Small consolation, though, he thought as he shut himself in the bathroom and fumbled to unbutton his shirt.

  She wasn’t going to be bare-assed in a matter of minutes.

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, Fiona’s sainted dead mother used to say, for you will surely get it.

  The warning hadn’t had any urgency because Fiona had never been in danger of getting anything she’d wished for—until today. Now she stood in a stark white panic in the middle of her studio and wondered if it would help to breathe into a paper bag.

  She hadn’t believed he would come!

  Her hands shook. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! She jammed them into the pockets of her shorts, curled them into fists and willed them to be still.

  How in God’s name was she going to sculpt Lachlan McGillivray in the nude?

  Whether he was naked or not, in the final analysis, had nothing to do with this. It was the sculpting that was the issue.

  She’d make a complete fool of herself! She’d never sculpted anything—other than a few lumpy pelicans—in her life!

  She didn’t know how!

  Had never been taught!

  “You must do a thing before you know how, in order to know how after you have done it.” She remembered her sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Cash, telling them that. “Plato said that.”

  Good old Plato.

  “No time like the present,” her father always said with great good cheer whenever he’d encouraged his children to tackle some monumental task.

  Good old Dad.

  “Yes, well…” Fiona muttered, twisting her fingers together in anguish, because all at once the present was now!

  “You,” she said aloud to both Plato and her father, “have a lot to answer for.”

  As did her own big mouth.

  She set the armature on to the modeling stand she’d begged Paul to build for her. Her fingers trembled as she fitted a paper cone over it on which to begin.

  Charlatan! Imposter!

  Stop!

  She dug out a great lump of clay, thumped it on the work table and began desperately to knead it, press it, curl it, desperate to give her hands something to do.

  It felt far different from the hard metal and shells she usually worked with. The clay was cool and damp under her fingers. It was pliable, responsive. Alive. Vital.

  But nowhere near as alive and vital as the very naked man who that very moment strode into the room!

  CHAPTER THREE

  “RIGHT,” Fiona said with the briskness of his college soccer coach on the first day of practice. She indicated a small homemade carpeted platform raised about a foot off the ground on the other side of the room. “You need to stand on here.”

  Lachlan stared at it. It was one thing to make a dramatic entrance. It was another to have to walk across the whole damn room.

  Fiona smiled at him expectantly, just as if he weren’t standing there completely starkers. God, but she had to be enjoying this!

  “The platform?” Fiona said helpfully, as if he needed directions.

  Lachlan’s jaw tightened. Fine, let her have her moment of glee. He had nothing to be ashamed of!

  Still, feeling totally exposed—which was exactly what he was—Lachlan did his best to look nonchalant, as if he paraded around naked all the time.

  An early-morning breeze lifted the pale-blue curtains, blowing across his heated flesh, and wafting between his very bare thighs. It should have cooled him, settled him, calmed him.

  Not quite.

  He’d spent the past five minutes in Fiona’s bathroom telling himself this was no big deal. It wasn’t as if he’d never been naked in front of a woman before.

  But they’d always been naked, too. And wanting him.

  Fiona wasn’t naked. And she didn’t want him.

  He just wished she did.

  And thinking that was a really bad idea, because the very notion of Fiona Dunbar naked and desiring him nearly undid all his previous focusing on icebergs and multiplication tables and trying to do the square root of 842 in his head.

  “That’s right,” she said and nudged the platform with her calf. “Come on up and get comfortable.”

  Get comfortable? He almost laughed as he crossed the room toward her.

  But as he approached, Fiona moved across to her worktable where she had some metal gizmo sticking up out of a piece of wood. There was a slab of clay lying beside it. And she turned her attention to studiously laying scrapers and wires out on the table. As she did so, he felt slightly more at ease and stepped on to the platform.

  It moved under his feet and he nearly lost his balance. “Cripes!”

  “Oh, sorry.” Fiona glanced up. “I should have warned you. Paul made it so it would turn. That way, as I work, neither of us has to move.”

  “I see.” He was beginning to. And he wasn’t liking what he saw. “Did you, er, tell Paul…what you were, um, going to do with it?” He could just imagine what Paul would have to say—forever—about that!

  “Not specifically.”

  “Thank God for that,” Lachlan muttered, steadying himself as the platform did another quarter turn again. Just what he needed—to be turned in a circle so Fiona could ogle him from every angle. Irritably he shifted from one foot to the other. “How am I supposed to stand?”

  Fiona looked up. It was the first time she’d actually stared straight at him, scrutinized him—full-on—since he’d come into the room.

  He went perfectly s
till—and wished he had some place to put his hands.

  Her eyes roved slowly and consideringly over him. He didn’t move, except to clench his fists, grind his teeth, think of icebergs.

  “Take your time,” he muttered, feeling his whole body begin to burn.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just hurry up. I haven’t got all day.”

  “Sorry. I’ve never done this before.”

  “Neither have I,” he told her impatiently. “It’s not rocket science, though.”

  “Fine. Just stand like that,” Fiona said “Or maybe you could shift your weight a little to the right.”

  Lachlan shifted, trying to look at her, to see what she wanted, and not to look at her, because she was too damned attractive, at the same time.

  “Not so much.” She started to cross the room toward him.

  Christ! She wasn’t going to touch him, was she?

  “Just tell me,” Lachlan said through his teeth. Icicles. Polar bears. Penguins walking single file and jumping into the Arctic Sea.

  Abruptly Fiona stopped. “It’s all right. You’re, um, fine.”

  Was she blushing? He hoped so. She deserved to be.

  She backed hastily toward her worktable again. “And you’re comfortable that way?”

  Oh, yeah. “Just super.”

  If she recognized sarcasm when she heard it, she gave no indication. She reached into the drawer in her worktable and pulled out a pad of paper.

  Lachlan frowned. “What’s that for?”

  “I need to make sketches.”

  “The hell you do.” Modeling naked was bad enough. He wasn’t having sketches floating around! “No sketches,” he said flatly.

  “But—”

  “Sculpting. You said sculpting. Not sketching.” He glared at her. “So sculpt.”

  Fiona opened her mouth as if she might argue. Then her gaze slid from his eyes all the way down his taut hard body—and back up again.

  Lachlan steeled himself not to move, only to glare.

  Her expression shuttered. But finally she shoved the sketch pad back into the drawer and shrugged. “Fine. No sketches.”

  Lachlan breathed again. He shifted back into a reasonable semblance of his earlier pose, the “comfortable” one. “This okay?” Got a good view of everything?

  Fiona flicked a glance his way. “Yes. Um, sure.” She gave him a vague fleeting smile. “I’ll…just get started.”

  “Do that,” Lachlan said grimly. And he shut his eyes and thought of Antarctica.

  OH HELP.

  Oh help, oh help, oh help.

  It was the only mantra Fiona could think of, a prayer of desperation to a God who couldn’t be blamed for thinking she deserved everything that was happening to her.

  Here she was, with the most gorgeous naked man in the world standing just a foot away from her, and she could look, not touch. And, by the way, she was supposed to make a sculpture that would do justice to his body.

  Impossible. There was no way. Fiona knew that.

  But she had to do something. She couldn’t just throw up her hands now and say, I was only kidding. This is all a mistake. I can’t sculpt.

  However true it might be, she couldn’t say it.

  Not to Lachlan McGillivray.

  Because she had dared him—and he had accepted her challenge. Had met her challenge. And in doing so he had turned the challenge around on her.

  Fiona wet her lips and raised her eyes to look at him—and couldn’t look away again.

  He had his eyes closed, thank God, which made it easier to look. But looking just made her want more. She wanted to move closer, to walk around him, to reach out and touch.

  A desperate sound choked in the back of her throat.

  Lachlan’s eyes snapped open. “What?” he demanded.

  Dumbly Fiona shook her head. “N-nothing. Nothing at all!”

  She ducked her head and grabbed the slab of clay and began shaping it around the paper cone that she’d put on the armature Paul had made for her. Determinedly she focused on it. She pressed it and wrapped it and smoothed it into something vaguely resembling a torso. Yes, like that. Not bad. It was a start. She took more clay and began to shape his legs.

  They weren’t going to be full-length legs.

  The one book she had on clay sculpture, which she had studied in desperation last night in case he actually turned up, contained a step-by-step guide to sculpting a torso from midthigh on up. Obviously the author didn’t think beginners ought to get bogged down in knees and feet.

  “Stick to the basics,” he’d written. “Focus on the essentials.”

  Fiona’s gaze flicked up to focus on Lachlan’s “essentials.”

  The tiny desperate noise threatened to choke her again. She hadn’t seen a lot of naked men in her life. She’d cared for her father, of course, during his illness. But she didn’t need to be Michelangelo to see that there was little resemblance between her ill, emaciated father and Lachlan McGillivray in his prime.

  At thirty-five, Lachlan McGillivray was broad-shouldered and lean-hipped, all planes and angles and hard ropy muscles and tanned hair-roughened skin.

  Mostly tanned skin, anyway.

  So he didn’t sunbathe in the nude? Somehow that surprised her.

  Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about him! she commanded herself. Focus on the form. Concentrate.

  But focusing on the form didn’t help. It brought her right back to the man. It was like telling herself not to think about pink elephants. Especially when the pink elephant in question was standing barely ten feet away.

  So she looked. She couldn’t help but look.

  And as she did so, her fingers began to move.

  Almost instinctively they worked the clay. She formed his thighs, pressing and shaping, pinching and smoothing. Then she moved on, creating the rough lines of his torso, his shoulders, his spine, his buttocks. Heaven help her, yes, even those!

  God, he was glorious. She’d seen him on the soccer pitch, his movements quick and graceful, strong and fierce. And as she worked, her fingers seemed to give form and life to a body that could move like that. As she worked, pushing and pulling and coiling the clay, the fever in her brain seemed to ease. Her emotions quieted.

  Yes, she thought. Oh, yes. From her eyes to her hands, everything seemed to flow. It was amazing, really, the feeling of the man taking shape beneath her fingers. It was completely different from anything she’d felt before.

  Her cutout metal sculptures had always exuded energy. Inherent in the tension of the metal there was a sense of movement, a thrust that came from the flow of curve and line, a springiness that came from their form. They were the essence of action. They surfed, they fished, they swam, they danced.

  Clay breathed.

  It had substance, beyond its essence. It had solidity, strength and power. And as she worked it, as the sculpture began to take shape beneath her hands, Fiona began to understand how all those creation myths could say that humanity was created from the earth.

  Now, as her sculpture came to life beneath her hands, she believed.

  TIME WAS RELATIVE.

  It flew—just like the cliché said it did—when you were having fun.

  It moved with the speed of a glacier when you were standing stock-still and totally starkers under the scrutiny of the world’s most irritating woman—a woman who unfortunately made your body sit up and take notice.

  When they began, his body seemed intent on doing exactly that. So Lachlan thought all his coldest thoughts. He ran through polar bears and penguins, igloos and ice caps. He multiplied numbers and factored fractions and declined every German noun he knew.

  And all the while he did it, he gritted his teeth and stared out the window or shut his eyes and waited for the session to be over.

  She’d had her fun. She’d got an eyeful. He hoped she was satisfied.

  He shifted slightly, irritably, and wished he had his watch on. His position might have been “comfo
rtable” to start with. But even the easiest pose got wearying if you were stuck in it. He could hear her thumping and slapping the clay. How the hell long was she going to work?

  He opened his eyes at last and ventured a quick glance Fiona’s way, expecting to encounter a satisfied smirk.

  But while she was staring straight at him, she didn’t seem to be seeing him at all. Not the part he expected her to be focusing on, anyway. Her head was tipped to one side and she was scowling intently as her fingers stroked and shaped.

  What she was stroking and shaping didn’t look very promising to him—like the bottom half of some gangly loopy figure with a couple of iron prongs stuck in its butt. Maybe he was going to turn into a Picasso sculpture.

  Whatever he was going to turn into, Fiona was totally focused on what she was doing. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth as she worked on the slope of his shoulder. She was joining something that might be an arm, scowling at it, then glancing at him, then back at the clay.

  Intrigued by her focus and her intensity, Lachlan kept watching her.

  Turnabout was fair play after all. No reason why she should get to do all the staring. And seeing Fiona Dunbar so serious, so focused on her work was something he hadn’t expected at all.

  “When did you start sculpting?” he asked abruptly.

  She jerked at the sound of his voice and dropped the piece she’d been attempting to attach. Fumbling for it, she spared him only a brief glance as she began reattaching it. “I haven’t. Much.”

  “Of course you have. The stuff in Carin’s shop… The thing on the beach?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve always done that.”

  “Did you take art in school?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “They didn’t offer it,” she said irritably. “You know that.”

  “Here, I know. But after high school—”

  “There wasn’t any after,” she said flatly. She focused on the sculpture, a line between her brows as she concentrated, and he thought she might not say any more. But finally she went on. “I thought about going to art school,” she admitted at last. “But it wasn’t that easy. We didn’t have enough money to pay my way.”