Forbidden or For Bedding? (4 page)

He was speaking, and she cut short her futile cogitations.

‘Well, Ms Harcourt, I think we have reached the end of our necessary exchange, don't you?'

Guy de Rochemont was holding his hand out to her. She made herself take it, ignoring the cool of his touch and dropping it again the moment social convention permitted.

‘Quite,' she agreed crisply. She picked up her bag, ready to turn and leave.

‘So,' Guy de Rochemont continued, ‘I will have my PA phone your representative and arrange my first sitting—should it prove possible within the restraints of our respective diaries.' He paused a moment. Just the fraction of a moment. ‘I trust that meets with your approval, Ms Harcourt?'

Was that amusement in his voice again? A deliberate blandness in his gaze? Alexa found her lips pressing together as her thoughts underwent a sudden and complete rearrangement.

‘Yes—thank you,' she answered, and her voice, she was glad to hear, was as crisp as ever.

‘Good,' said her latest client, as if the word closed the transaction. And then, as if Alexa had just ceased to exist, he looked past her. His expression changed. ‘Guy! Darling!'

A woman sailed up to him, ignoring Alexa's presence as if she were invisible. A cloud of heavy scent surrounded the woman even as her slender braceleted arms came
around Guy de Rochemont to envelop him. Alexa caught an impression of tightly sheathed black silk, long lush black hair, and a tanned complexion. Moreover, the woman's features were definitely familiar. Who was she? Oh, yes, Carla Crespi—that was it. An Italian
femme fatale
film actress who specialised in sultry roles. Alexa hadn't seen any of her films, as they weren't to her taste, but it would have been hard not to have heard of the woman at all.

She turned to go. It was par for the course that a male of Guy de Rochemont's calibre would have a woman like that in tow. Someone high-profile, high-maintenance, who would, above all, adorn him. A trophy woman for an alpha-plus male.

She heard the woman launch into a stream of rapid Italian, pitched too loud for private conversation and therefore, Alexa assumed, designed for public consumption—drawing attention to herself, to the man she was with. Tucking her handbag firmly under her arm, Alexa left her to it and departed.

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.