The model scanned the room, his gaze searching corners high and low. Arden got the impression he wasn’t interested in the crown molding. “Now?” the model asked.
Micah nodded. In two seconds the model tugged the zipper of his bike jersey free and shrugged out of it. Arden’s first impression was of skin stretched over muscles, revealing veins, tendons, ligaments, flat planes of muscle. The cargo shorts hung low on his hipbones, held up by God-only-knew-what force of nature because the man didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body, but was absolutely covered in tattoos. Ink curled up both arms to the shoulder, but the first thing Arden could distinguish in the swirl of color was a sword, the hilt spreading over his collarbone, the blade arrowing down his pectoral, ribs, and hip to end just above his thigh. The second thing was a dragon, prowling restlessly over his other shoulder. The third thing was an oddly bare spot just over his left pectoral, a patch of skin remarkable for its lack of ink.
Micah turned to the circled easels. “This is Seth. Seth, this is Libby, Betsy, Arden, and Sally,” he said, pointing to each woman in turn.
Seth paused in the act of unzipping his cargo shorts to give them a short nod, then, with absolutely no ceremony or coyness, hooked his thumbs in his shorts and boxers, and pushed them to his ankles. In one movement he stepped out of them, kicked them behind the platform, and he was up onto the blanket-draped box. Hands on his hips, weight on one hip, he looked at Micah. “Say when.”
“Now’s good,” Micah said, and moved from the center of the circle to the outer edge. “We’ll open with fifteen-second poses. Big movements, not details. Warm up your arm, and your brain,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready, ladies,” he said gently.
Arden blinked. Stared. Came back to her senses. Ducked her head behind her easel, and slid Betsy a look, only to find her best friend gaping. Flat-out gaping, which was worth savoring. Very little took Betsy by surprise, and the sheer shock on her face almost made the last week worthwhile. Clearly Micah hadn’t vetted his choice of model with Betsy.
This wasn’t happening. This kind of person didn’t show up to model for a private drawing class hosted in a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. Classes like this hired dancers of either sex, slender, supple, waxed, capable of holding languid, elegant poses while beginning artists struggled to capture the way fingertips dented the air, the slope of a thigh into negative space. Seth was almost too much to look at.
She’d done this before, taken drawing classes at boarding school and in college before her business-and-math course load edged out electives. The fact that she hadn’t drawn anything in nearly a decade didn’t make her a novice, just rusty, so there was no reason for her heart to pound. She picked up her pencil and glanced back at Seth. Still tattooed. Still naked. His sparse body hair thickened at his navel and groin, and his genitals hung heavy between thighs bulging with muscle. His skin darkened abruptly just above his knees, then lightened just as abruptly at his ankle. A tan from riding a bike in the city’s sunny summer, delineated by the shorts and socks.
Color heated her cheeks, a stupid, schoolgirl reaction. She’d seen naked men before, slept with them, gone to strip clubs and hired dancers for bachelorette parties, so this shouldn’t have caused a blush. Libby wasn’t blushing. Betsy wasn’t blushing. Arden couldn’t see Sally, but Sally was a pathologist; it was unlikely anything about the human body made her blush. But Arden’s body was on high alert after the incident in the cab, calling blood to the surface more quickly, triggering that rush of goose bumps when he passed her.
The hushed scrape of pencil against paper pricked at Arden’s awareness. To her right and left, Betsy and Libby were drawing, pencils held between first and middle fingers, arms moving in sweeping arcs, capturing broad shoulders, jutting elbows, long, thickly muscled legs.
Seth’s gaze caught hers, his green eyes even more shocking without the light rendering them translucent. One eyebrow lifted ever so slightly. Breaking the fourth wall, she thought hysterically. Things like this worked because everyone pretended one of the people in the room wasn’t stark naked. On display.
“Change.”
Without batting an eyelash, Seth dropped into a pose Arden recognized from yoga class. Warrior one. Knee bent, leg extended behind him, arms held up straight by his ears.
Micah stopped at her easel and smiled at her. “Big gestures,” he repeated. “Just loosen up your arm and hand. That’s all.”
She went for the obvious, the stretch of his hands from fingertips to fingertips, a long, slender oval, then the line of his spine from the crown of his head to the sharp swell of buttocks, angling down to his foot.
“Change.”
Flip her paper and leave the bent leg behind. Warrior two. He’d either taken yoga, maybe to combat hours hunched over a bike, the constant jarring of flying over the city streets, potholes, cracks, debris, curbs, or knew someone who had. A girlfriend, perhaps.