Blank Canvas-epub (3 page)

“You think you need a man to be happy?”

She shook her head. “No. Not at all.” She’d heard the same argument from her girlfriends for months. They were full of well-meaning advice, telling her to take time for herself, enjoy life on her own. Hell, she was pretty sure half the married ones were jealous of her single state, wishing for their own freedom.

“I don’t have to be in a relationship to feel good about myself. I got knocked down a peg when Marcus left and I’ve been trying to find my balance since then. I’m still a bit wobbly, but I’m getting there. Being in love has nothing to do with that.”

Caliph looked like he might argue, but she cut him off.

“I’ve spent the last year living on my own. Can I do it? Yeah, sure. I just don’t want to. I loved being married and I looked forward to growing old with someone. It’s not something I need, Caliph. It’s just something I want. A man to talk to about my day, to eat dinner with, to fight over the remote with. His side of the bed, my side. Twice the laundry and dishes. Sharing the bills, splitting dessert in a restaurant. The good and the bad. I miss it.”

He smiled at her. “You might be the first person on earth to actually make marriage sound good to me.”

She laughed. “So you’re really not a fan of marriage at all?”

He shrugged. “Not sure I’ve ever considered it one way or the other. I’ve always been pretty happy with my status quo.”

Jennifer felt a twinge of envy. She hadn’t enjoyed much about her life for the past year. No, it was more than that. If she was being honest, she’d been just as miserable and bored in her marriage to Marcus as her ex had been with her. Only she’d been too afraid—or was it lazy?—to do anything about it.

“Well, I’m certainly not looking to get married again right away. That’s a plan for some distant future. For now, I’m hoping to find a way to shed some of my inhibitions and have fun. I started the year vowing I would go wild. Unfortunately, I sort of suck at it.”

Caliph tilted his head and studied her face. He had a way of looking at her that made her feel like he could see straight through her. “Think of it like this, Jen. You’re a blank canvas. Beautiful, clean, white. The colors are all there inside you. You just need to set them free.”

She swallowed heavily as she glanced at her shoulder. She couldn’t see the pretty shades of her tattoo yet, but she knew they were there.

Today she’d taken the first step and grabbed a new beginning. The heaviness that had weighed her down for so long lifted and a spark of joy flared.

Colors.

Set free.

Yeah.

Caliph leaned back and admired his work. After Jennifer explained the daisy, their conversation slowly faded away as he lost himself in the art. He’d taken his time with this tat, putting special care into every single line. The design was simple, honest, elegant. It reminded him of the woman lying in front of him, the beauty who was going to wear his art for the rest of her life.

He was always flattered, even a little humbled, by the people who put so much faith in his abilities that they allowed him to draw on their skin with permanent ink. It was a gift countless clients had given him even though he’d never admitted such to them.

Jennifer was different from the usual Midnight Ink clientele. She didn’t want the tattoo to hide past scars. Many people—male and female—used body art to conceal terrible wounds, physical and emotional. Caliph understood their reasons, felt their pain, and always prayed his art would somehow help them find peace again.

Neither was she trying to draw attention to herself, to appear tough or in-your-face or cool, which, sadly, seemed to be the reason for getting a tat amongst a lot of the younger clients. Caliph suspected Jennifer spent most of her time trying to blend into the background. Which meant her trip to his chair had taken a great deal of courage on her part.

No. Jennifer wasn’t trying to hide from her pain or make a big flashy statement. Instead she was incorporating her past failures into the picture, including them as a part of the canvas in an effort to make her stronger, smarter.

He thought about her ex-husband. He had the insane urge to find the asshole and beat him to a pulp for the way he’d damaged Jennifer’s self-esteem. It was clear she was a compassionate woman and it pissed him off to see her feeling badly about herself. While she put up a tough front, pain still lingered in her eyes. Her trusting nature as well as her faith in herself had been shaken. Hard.

“You like jazz?” he asked.

She grinned. “Isn’t that sort of a prerequisite for living in New Orleans?”

Caliph chuckled. “I know plenty of people who hate it. Tasteless bastards. You ever heard of the Jazz Parlor?”

“In the French Quarter?”

“Yeah. There’s a guy playing there Friday night, Jeremy ‘Trombone’ Lionel.”

“Let me guess. He plays the trombone.”

Caliph rolled his eyes. “He’s one of the best I’ve ever heard. You wanna go?”

“With you?” Jennifer winced as soon as the question passed her lips. It was an endearing expression that he was starting to become accustomed to. Her mouth seemed to kick in before her brain at times, treating him to her real thoughts. It was refreshing, nice. With Jennifer, you got what you saw. That wasn’t true of most women and he found he preferred the unfiltered view.

“Sassy is coming and my brother, Justin, too. So you don’t have to worry about me putting the moves on you.” For a second he thought he saw a flash of disappointment in her pretty blue eyes. The look encouraged him to add, “Much.”

Her smile reflected pure, genuine happiness and Caliph struggled to catch his breath. Something strange stirred in his gut. It was like he’d been sucker punched, but he didn’t feel like hitting back.

“I’d love to go. Thank you for the invitation. Should I just meet you here? Friday night?”

He nodded slowly, pleased by her quick response. She didn’t employ any of those female games where she had to pretend to think about it so as not to appear too anxious. Jennifer didn’t even try to hide the fact she was excited. “Yeah. Eight o’clock work for you?”

“Yep. It sure does.” She was still lying on the table, though he’d put the tattoo gun down, his work finished. She bit her lower lip nervously. “Can I look at it now?”

Caliph had been purposely stalling. Not that he thought the tattoo looked bad. In his opinion, it was some of his best work. Knowing what the flower represented to Jennifer had encouraged him to enhance the original drawing, making sure the image would allow her to find that strength and love she was seeking.

“Of course you can.” He placed a firm hand on her arm, not mistaking the slight shudder his touch provoked. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt her tremble under his fingers. At first, he’d blamed it on fear—he was used to women’s frightened responses to him, he was no pretty boy and he knew it—but Jennifer’s trusting eyes and flushed face made him wonder if her response was based on something far different.

His stomach clenched again and this time he recognized the cause. Lust. Pure. Unbridled. His cock thickened slightly despite his attempts to will it away with deep, steadying breaths.

Jennifer sat up slowly, hastily tugging up her tube top. Her modesty was cute. It made Caliph want to peel her clothing away slowly, revealing one creamy inch of skin at a time. Her body was sumptuous, though he suspected she probably considered herself fat. Society had done a real number on women with curves in the last fifty years, trying to convince them that stick figures were desirable. Fuck that. As far as he was concerned, Jennifer’s generous hourglass was the standard for true feminine beauty.

She followed as he led her to the large mirror hanging against the back wall. He placed a handheld mirror in her hands, watching nervously as she studied the reflection.

“You didn’t bleed very much. I have an A and D ointment here that I’ll put on before I cover it. Sassy has flyers on her desk that will give you instructions for aftercare. I want you to follow them to the letter.” Caliph stuck his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and forced himself to stop rambling. Her silence made him nervous. Christ. He never got this worked up over a client’s reaction to a tat. According to Shep, he had more than his fair share of cockiness when it came to his work. Unfortunately that confidence was on shaky ground at the moment.

Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. “Jen?”

She looked at him—that was when he noticed the tears in her eyes. Oh hell, did she hate it? He’d seen clients cry before, overwhelmed by their first tattoo. But he couldn’t stand the thought that maybe she was genuinely upset.

He took the mirror from her and placed it on the counter, then he grasped her hands and gave them a squeeze. “Aw, hell, honey. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “No. Don’t be. It’s just—”

“You were nervous about the tat. Second-guessing your decision. I should have told you to go home and sleep on it.”

“No.” Her grip on his hands tightened. “I love it.”

He studied her face, trying to decide if she was lying just to assuage his guilty conscience. As always, he saw nothing but honesty in her gaze. “You do?”

She gave him a wobbly smile, her tears overflowing. “Oh my God, yes. It’s even better than I imagined. It’s perfect.”

Caliph rubbed his jaw, relief suffusing him. “Damn, girl. You scared the shit out of me.”

Jennifer laughed, then picked up the mirror once more, taking even longer to admire her new look. The pleasure in her eyes warmed him.

Shep walked over to join them, studying the tat. “Nice work, Cal. That’s a beaut.”

Caliph nodded, barely acknowledging Shep’s compliment. He was more interested in watching Jennifer.

Then he heard Shep mutter something like “aw jeez, here we go” and Caliph’s attention turned back to his friend. “What?”

Shep rolled his eyes at Caliph’s confusion, then looked at Jennifer. “Congratulations. It’s a great tattoo.”

Jennifer smiled widely. “Thanks.”

Shep returned to his chair as Caliph led Jennifer back to his. Obviously Caliph hadn’t managed to mask his attraction to Jennifer from his friend. One of the dangers of working with the same people for so long. The artists in the shop spent too much damn time together. Sometimes it was nice to have such fierce friends at his back, but most of the time it was a pain in the ass. Shep was definitely going to give him shit for this, tease him about getting the hots for the quiet, conservative hotel manager.

Caliph picked up a tube of ointment and turned Jennifer away from him. As he squeezed some onto a stick, he felt her quiver and he had to resist the impulse to lean forward and place a kiss on the back of her slim neck. He spread the lotion onto her skin.

While he worked, he briefly ran through a mental list of reasons why he shouldn’t start an affair with Jennifer. 

For one thing, the pain from her divorce was present and though she had a good attitude in regards to moving on, she still had a ways to go. Besides, he wasn’t looking for a relationship and certainly didn’t want to end up hurting her like her ex had.

They were also different people. Jennifer was clearly conservative, reserved. He wasn’t sure how she’d respond to his impulsiveness, his tendency to live in the moment. Jennifer didn’t strike him as someone who’d find that an easy thing to deal with even for the short-term.

He also wasn’t sure what she’d make of their age difference—he was thirty-two to her nearly forty. While she didn’t seem hung up on the numbers, Caliph didn’t know how she’d feel about sleeping with a younger man. Then, he dismissed that thought as unimportant.

Because there was one way in which she was definitely wrong for him. She may have been married for seventeen years, but he had no doubt her adventures in the bedroom didn’t extend much beyond missionary. Compared to him, she was an innocent.

Caliph couldn’t remember the last time he’d had missionary sex. His desires ran along a much different path. He pictured taking Jennifer to the Bastille, a local sex club. He liked the idea of exposing her to that world to see if his suspicions about her sexually submissive nature were true. Her blushes and trembles when he touched her, the way her eyes lowered whenever he asked her to do something, the tiny ways she deferred to him, all combined together in such a way that had him longing to tie her to his bed and fuck her senseless.

Then he imagined Jennifer taking one look at the dark, intimidating sex club with its St. Andrew’s crosses and wooden posts with eyebolts and chains. She’d most likely scream as she ran from the room.

Or would she?

Her mention of a safe word earlier threw him. Made him wonder.

And want.

He covered her tattoo with plastic wrap, then he reached for the blouse she’d worn to the shop. He helped put it on, pleased when she turned to face him, allowing him to button it for her.

His excuses for avoiding sex with her fled the instant her pretty blue eyes met his. Jennifer may have been hurt by her ex, but the asshole’s cruelty hadn’t killed her spirit. The same desire he felt was reflected in her face. Jesus. She wanted him.

“Thanks,” she said softly when he’d fastened the last button.

He didn’t release the material. He heard Shep talking to his client, a regular, neither man paying attention to them. Sassy had returned from running errands an hour ago and was in the back room. No one else was working yet, the other artists choosing to work later shifts.

Jennifer held his gaze. “Caliph?” she whispered when the silence continued a beat too long.

“How wild do you want to go?”

She frowned, then gave him a rueful grin. “I love my tattoo more than I can say, but I’m definitely not ready for another.”

He shook his head. “That’s not what I mean.” He lowered his voice. “I’m attracted to you, Jen.”

She licked her lips, the action a perfect blend of nervousness and arousal. Caliph’s cock thickened even more.

“I want you too.” Her admission came out more air than tone, but he heard it, let the beauty of it soak deep.