Photo Slave (The Art of Domination #2) (2 page)

I shifted the folder to
one side, safeguarding it snugly under my arm, so I could wave my free hand and
shake a finger at her. “Like I’m going to wait around for my baby sister to
check her messages while some rake of a photographer is turning those dark blue
eyes and that pretty boy smirk on her to get her to pose as his little bondage
pin-up.”

The Gallic blood my
half-sister shared with me granted her the same flare for drama and gesture, so
we practically looked like we were signing for the deaf as we kept walking
mid-argument. She snorted through her model-straight nose at me. “So, as usual,
you tear through the situation like a force of nature to save poor
addle-brained Baby Sister before she gets a taste for the artist’s life that,
if I recall, you lived pretty hard for a couple of years yourself.”

My shoe soles ground
sharply against the pavement as I stopped and turned on Cheri. “That was a
disaster! I was flunking out of college because I thought there wasn’t anything
anyone could teach me that I couldn’t learn better from living in a derelict
warehouse and
making art
with a bunch
of pretentious poseurs. I was sleeping all day and painting or partying all
night and drunk all the time. And you know how that turned out, and not just
for me. Darcie—.”

“I know,” Cheri said,
cutting me off, but she immediately pushed out a hard sigh and softened her
voice to a much more reasonable timbre. “I know, and that’s the problem, Iva.
You went from being this untamed free spirit—.”

“You mean a loose
cannon without consideration or respect for the way I was making myself look,
the way I was embarrassing the family, or the possibility that my choices were
going to hurt people I loved.”

“Right,” Cheri said in
a matter-of-fact tone that sounded like I’d just agreed with her on some major
point. “From that to charging in now with your super heroine cape to save me
without consideration or respect for my right to make my own decisions.”

“Mistakes,” I corrected
her.

“My mistakes to make
and learn from.” She stepped up over me, hands on hips. It was seven kinds of
wrong that my younger sister should be taller than I was, especially at a time
like this. “Or not,” she added almost threateningly. The blonde tugged gently
at the folder pinched under my arm, but I wouldn’t give it up. “Looks like you
reserve that right for yourself.”

“It wasn’t like that,”
I insisted again.

“Of course not. I mean,
who likes pretty boy smirks and deep green eyes?”

“They’re blue,” I told
her, before I saw that glint in her light eyes and bit my lip.

Grinning, she said,
“You noticed.”

Nonplussed, I shot
Cheri a deadpan glower as we started walking again, pace moderated by our spent
tempers and the abrupt introduction of private sisterly humor. “Please, Cheri,
who could miss that? The man’s got gorgeous eyes, okay? I’d have to be dead not
to see that.”

“Glad to see the
reports of your death by boredom and typing have been somewhat exaggerated,”
she quipped, and I found it challenging to be mad at her when she had the style
to paraphrase Mark Twain.

“God, and that chest,”
Cheri added with the mischievous wiggle of one sandy brow. “All smooth and with
that heavy cross he wears. And the way he rolls those hips when he walks. Men
can talk all they want about women swinging their asses, but that man prowls.”

I growled through my
locked jaw as I listened to my sister gush. “Enough with the chest and the hips
and the ass and the prowl—.” This time, I cut myself off, because I could feel
my stomach and my sex beginning to tighten with memory and need. “Can we stop
talking about Nolan Beal already? The man is a professional rogue. He might
take some pictures on the side, but he’s making his living by selling his image
to that cult of personality he’s got surrounding him.” Even I realized at this
point that a pronounced bitterness had seeped into my end of the conversation,
and I didn’t need Cheri peering at me all suspicious and quizzical to clue me
in to that fact. So I satisfied myself with adding simply, “The man is
exploitive at best, and at worst….”

Cheri’s pouty mouth—Dad
had always marveled that she had lips like rose petals—crooked into a smile at
one corner with whatever she was thinking as she stared off across the grassy
quad. “At worst, he’s damaged like the rest of us, Iva. He’s a publicity hound
who’s more about his brand than the designer’s, but he’s also really good at
what he does.
And
he has given a lot
of young no-name models their first break. Did you know he launched Zelina
Nagy?”

“The Zelina? The
supermodel?” Why did the idea make me queasy? Ah, yes, because a man who had
worked with GQ Magazine’s Sexiest Woman Alive had also seen me naked. Partially
naked. The embarrassing parts.

Oblivious to my nausea
and the blush so bright and so hot I
felt
it radiating from my cheeks, Cheri nodded. “He used her in a shoot for Agent
Provocateur lingerie, then got her covers for W and French Vogue in her first
year, and her career was off like a fireworks show.”

“Must have meant lots
of money for him,” I grumbled. “All that rum and leather can’t be cheap.”

“It costs plenty to
feed everyone, too. Don’t forget that most of us models are starving college
students and waitresses still hanging around trying to be discovered. And those
skater kids he has running errands and moving equipment around? Most of them
are living on the street or spending as much time there as possible to avoid
abusive druggie parents. More often than not, he’s got two or three of them
sleeping on the floor and the couches in his studio. He says they’re cheap
security and it keeps them from breaking in and stealing from him, but that’s
all about preserving the bastard image he likes to project. That’s just Nolan.”

A bastard and a saint.
Again, I didn’t want to know this, these… humanizing details.

“Sounds like you know
him pretty well.” The bitter edge had crept back into my voice.

Every time I heard
Cheri use Beal’s first name, I bristled. He wanted to be called Nolan during
sex—not Beal or even the standard Dom ‘sir’. And he insisted on it when he made
a woman climax. When he had made me climax. It occurred to me he might have
been sleeping with Cheri, and the idea made me feel… sad, sunken,
less
when it should have just made me
mad.

My sister shrugged
noncommittally, which had me itching to shake her, shake out the specifics of
whatever relationship she had with Beal. “He’s just Nolan,” she said
unhelpfully. “He has damage that needs to be healed.” My mouth dropped open instantly
to argue that Cheri wasn’t some cross between Florence Nightingale and Sigmund
Freud, that a nineteen-year-old girl didn’t need to make it her business to
heal a man like Nolan Beal. Before I could say so, she broadsided me with,
“Just like you.”

I blinked a few times,
hard. “Me?”

Cheri was nodding
again, with complete confidence in her annoying assertion. “So you wouldn’t
feel so guilty about costing Darcie her job teaching with Ogilvie Academy. Was
that the name, Ogilvie? Whatever. The prep school. If you’d stop feeling so
guilty about that then maybe you wouldn’t feel like you had to be the family
protector and run our lives for us.”

I lost a few heartbeats
to that blunt statement. “You… you think I…?” I stammered. “That’s not what
I’m….” I had to stop myself, to swallow my racing breath before steeling myself
and insisting, “I just don’t want to see you limiting your future opportunities
with choices you are making at nineteen. Photographs like these come back to
haunt people. Employers and even friends and family, they make value judgments
about you over the partying and the eccentric people and how… how sexualized it
all seems.” I knew that firsthand. “If this is about money while you’re getting
through school, I’m sure I can get you on at least part-time as an office
assistant.”

“Right,” Cheri said
gently, and I should have known from her tone that she was about to say
something else I didn’t want to hear. “So I can make a little money for kissing
Mitsy’s ass and bending over for pervert profs like Todd Ackerman.”

Which effectively ended
the conversation.

I had done this to
myself, I thought all day, and I was still thinking it when I got home and shut
myself into my cute little insipidly tidy condo with its pastel furniture and
shabby chic curtains—all of which I had let the saleslady at the store select
because she seemed a hell of a lot more… more Martha Stewart / Brooks Brothers
graciously fashionable than I could pull off.

It bothered me that I’d
had my emotional inventory taken by my little sister. It bothered me that she’d
read me like a book, that I was so transparent and one-dimensional. It bothered
me that people knew what was going on with Todd and… and seemed to assume that
I was meekly putting up with sexual harassment, which was not exactly the case
but also not far from it. It bothered me that any credibility I’d fooled myself
into thinking I had—thinking I’d regained after three years as Miss Prim And
Proper—fell apart this easily, this quickly and simply. It bothered me that I’d
wanted Nolan Beal, that my body still reacted to the slightest memory of this
voice and his touch, and that I’d let myself get talked into taking those damn
photographs.

And
it bothered me—
incensed me
—that Nolan
Beal had promised no one would see those photographs, right before he gave them
to Cheri! I sat achingly still and tense at my bare dining table and glared at
the folder on the polished wooden surface in front of me. How bad was it, I
ended up wondering. The camera had still been clicking away in those first few
seconds, just as things had gotten out of hand. Surely Beal wouldn’t have shown
Cheri any of
those
.

But this was Beal I was
thinking about. Why would I feel—why had I felt—even the smallest amount of
innate trust in his word? I opened the folder and feverishly shuffled through
two dozen shots, then slumped in my chair in relief when my cream panties were
the most scandalous thing showing in any of them.

The respite was
short-lived. From underneath the last photo in the pile, a single sheet of
paper peeked out, its grainy white color suggesting a poor quality photocopy. I
fished the page out from the stack and recognized the format without even
having to read it—a model release with today’s date and Cheri’s signature at
the bottom.

Beal,
you bastard
.

That was cheating. And
I was an idiot for not seeing it coming. That whole scene with his assistant,
Stan, arguing so adamantly that Beal couldn’t bargain away Cheri’s model
release because they needed her photos
so
much
and it would damage the exhibition
so
badly
not to have them…. Had it all been a set-up? Did they actually plan
out and rehearse this game with Stan as wingman whenever a new piece of tail
wandered into range? How many notches had that little song and dance put on
Beal’s Nikon?

My introduction to
Nolan Beal’s top floor studio at The Cathedral three days back, my arrival as
the righteously indignant sister threatening the wrath of the Moreau family and
demanding the restoration of Cheri’s honor, had gone off with all the power and
dignity of a limp dust rag. I was a hell of a lot more insistent, unwavering,
and plain angry when I stormed the seventh floor for a second time. Of course,
I might have owed that ironclad resolve to an utter lack this time around of
pulsing music, snapping cameras, beautiful people, or the glare of bright
commercial lights wired and winched up like exotic creatures. And to an utter
lack of Nolan Beal.

There was just Stan in
what might have been a different Hawaiian shirt, blinking at me when he opened
the black lacquered doors. I pushed past him and was halfway into the expansive
photographic studio before I realized that the assistant and a couple of
teenagers sorting through paperwork and negatives on a long work table were the
only witnesses to my glorious charge. Taken aback by plans gone awry yet again,
pausing, I wondered if any of those negatives were Cheri’s photos. Though
tempted, I dismissed the idea of sweeping up an armful of them and flinging
them out the massive pivoting windows. One was even cracked a bit despite the
winter chill, probably to vent the strong scent of photo chemicals. It was
ridiculous how much I liked the smell.

At one end of the
table, amid the shuffle of creased work orders and receipts, one piece of paper
snagged my gaze. Maybe it was the fact that she’d used the same color of ink as
the first time. Maybe it was the familiar curve to the way she started her
first name or the long tail on the ‘M’ in Moreau. I snatched the original of
Cheri’s new model release and double-checked that it bore today’s date. This
was the one, the sheet she’d used to make the photocopy I’d found in my file.

“Not yours,” Stan
admonished as he tried to reach around me to take back the release. I jerked it
away and held it behind me as I stared the assistant down, lording my two
inches of superior height over him. Four inches with my modest heels. “Iva,” he
said with the same wearily indulgent tone he’d used on Rilla when she’d tried
to interrupt my conversation with Nolan that first day.