Read Online ColorMeBad by Olivia Waite - Free Book Online Page B

way again.
    “Thank you,” said Hecuba then shivered again.
    Mildly alarmed, John pulled her into his lap.
    She wriggled closer and made a sound—such a sound!—in the
back of her throat. It was just the sort of pleased, pleasured groan a
water-veined nymph might have made when clasped by the warm-blooded arms of a
living mortal man. The sound threw caution and art right out of John’s head and
replaced them with memories of sweet-scented flesh and tangled limbs.
    “There’s a fire downstairs,” he blurted.
    Hecuba’s eyes widened.
    “In my bedroom,” John clarified. “For you.”
    Hecuba blinked—and just as John realized how he’d sounded,
she started to shake with helpless, wrenching laughter. “It’s a boon for
humanity that you are a painter and not a poet,” she chortled.
    The trembling motion of her body while she laughed proved to
be the final straw for John’s perishing self-control. He plunged one hand into
her still-damp hair and brushed his mouth against her cheek.
    Hecuba went still. John teased his way to the hollow below
her ear, flicking his tongue out occasionally to catch droplets as they passed
across her skin. “It’s always water with you,” he said. “First the rain and now
this.” She hummed and tilted her head to the side, offering him more. He kissed
along the line of her neck and startled a gasp from her with a gentle scrape of
his teeth. Meanwhile his hands spread across the width of her back, slipping
beneath the blanket to rest against the steel in her spine.
    “Tell me, Jones,” he murmured, “do you still mean to have
me?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    He smiled and pulled her up. “Let me show you the way.”

Chapter Six
     
    She retrieved her lost shirt while he extinguished all but
one of the candles. It was a meager light but it guided them well enough down
the main stairs. They moved softly to make certain none of the household were
stirring. Her hand in his had warmed now, a bold and possessive pressure as he
led her along a carpeted hallway and opened the door of his bedchamber.
    He pulled the door shut with a click, extinguished the
candle, walked to the hearth and stirred the waiting flames into a blaze. When
he finally turned around, Hecuba was bending close to the wall to examine part
of the pattern of the wallpaper, an expression of wonder on her face. The
draping blanket and her leaning posture made her look like a mysterious old
woman from a fairy tale, the kind who helps the virtuous and curses the cruel.
    “How old were you when you did this?” she whispered.
    John smiled as she scrutinized the outline of a
knight-errant mounted on a white horse that his younger self had repainted with
zebra stripes. “I was just turned twelve,” he said, “and I stole my sister’s
paints to do it. My mother was livid but my father merely laughed and said he
would find someone to give me lessons. ‘If you’re going to do the thing, you
may as well do it properly,’ he said.”
    Hecuba smiled at a housecat he’d turned into a tiger lurking
beside a tulip that had sprouted two pink ankles to become the tumultuous
upflung skirts of a tumbling lady. Her eyes briefly met John’s, warm and
conspiratorial. “You do the thing very properly indeed,” she said.
    She was the daughter of a painter—a genius—and with a nasty
jolt John realized that he didn’t know whether she was attracted to him more
for his work or for himself. He’d put so much of himself into his art that he
had never really thought to make the distinction before. Not until Hecuba Jones
had come along and split him in two. Now the gentle movement of her fingers
over that tin-plate hero made jealousy bubble up within his heart, a slimy
tentacled monster in the deep.
    But judging by how she’d stared at Hylas, he had certain
aesthetic advantages, if he were brave enough to employ them.
    With deliberate, unhurried hands, John unbuttoned his cuffs
and pulled the charcoal- and paint-stained shirt over