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Chapter Three
Sophy’s hand slid rapidly across the parchment, lines webbing out and shading into familiar features. She was impatient as she blew loose charcoal from the page, eager and intent on her work. She could usually tell right from the beginning of a new piece if it was going to succeed or not and she felt the magic with this one.
It was four days since the incident, as she thought of it, and Mick had called her cell at breakfast to say that he had the morning off and could sit for a couple of hours if she was still interested. She had appreciated that he had made some effort to disguise the raging hope that she might have changed her mind in the interim.
So far he had been an ideal model, statue-still and not inclined to chatter, although the first half-hour had been a bit excruciating. Paid life models were accustomed to the process, could discard the entirety of their clothing as calmly and carelessly as the average human being would take off their gloves or coat. Roped-in amateurs usually had a few more qualms. And Sophy suspected that Mick had more than most.
For a man who had a body from the cover of a fitness magazine, he was either remarkably modest or just seriously lacking in self-esteem. His face was not, perhaps, the stuff of teen idols, but she was truly unable to see it as anything but striking. There were millions of different faces out there, features that ranged from clean-cut and symmetrical to weak-chinned and beady-eyed, but on the whole many people began to blur together. Mick was so distinctly his own person that she found it difficult to tear her eyes away from his face and keep track of what her fingers were doing.
He was starting to roll his left shoulder just a fraction, keeping the movement slow and narrow in case it distracted her focus. Sophy flicked a glance at the clock and winced.
“Sorry, it’s been almost two hours. Do you want to take a break?”
“No, I’m good.” Mick stood up and did a full stretch, rotating his neck and arms in a way that set off a chain reaction through his pectoral and abdominal muscles, like a ripple through a wave pool. Sophy hastily averted her gaze. “Keep going. You seem to be on a roll with it.”
“You’re doing great. I really appreciate this, Mick. I’ve had a concept sketch in mind for this piece for weeks, but I haven’t been able to find a suitable model anywhere.”
He seemed uncomfortable with any subject that touched on his appearance, so she didn’t elaborate. It was true, however. This work was her intended entry for the upcoming national sculpture competition and the rules were explicit that artists could not draw on their imagination but must use a life model. As Sophy literally needed an Olympian-sized figure from which to sketch and the bars and souvenir shops of Queenstown were rife with lanky tourists but distinctly lacking in body builders, she had been out of luck.
“You’re interested in Greek mythology, then?” Mick broke a long stretch of silence to ask, taking the opportunity to move as he did so. At her impatient gesture, he grinned and returned his fist to the arranged position, folded knuckles pressed to his denim-clad thigh.
She had to be fully immersed in her art before she dared to be bossy.
“Love it. I did my undergraduate degree in Business Studies at the university in Dunedin,” she said. “But I minored in Classics and those were my favourite papers. I was always fascinated by Hades and I’ve been wanting to do an Underworld sculpture for years.”
Mick’s attention seemed to have stopped at the first part of her explanation.
“Business Studies?” he repeated, and his tone would have been more applicable had she confessed to an educational background in the circus ring or strip club.
Sophy couldn’t help laughing.
“For the record, it’s going to ruin my sketch if your jawbone drops to the floor again,” she said, smudging a charcoal shadow with the side of her thumb. “And I might have taken exception to your raging scepticism if it hadn’t been the most boring three years of my life.”
“I wasn’t implying that you don’t seem particularly commerce-minded,” Mick said hastily, then paused. “No, actually, I was implying that. You don’t seem at all commerce-minded.”
“I’m not,” replied Sophy, not offended. “Sorry, could you just move your arm up a little? No, the left one. Thanks. I learned to balance accounts and spin a marketing pitch with the best of them, but it was a steep learning curve and I probably forgot half of it the moment I grabbed the degree paper. The statistics requirement was a bit of a stretch and I didn’t enjoy all the group work. I still have nightmares about the words “class participation”. In art history and Classics lectures, you can just sit in the back of a dark room and look at beautiful pictures, you know.”
She grinned at him and it belatedly occurred to her that they were getting on very well. Her shyness of him was breaking down into familiar friend status at a more rapid pace than she’d ever experienced. She just genuinely liked him.
“So why didn’t you major in Humanities? It’s obviously where your interests lie.” Mick obeyed her silent gesture and turned his head to the left, giving her an excellent view of that wonderful profile. He probably wished he had half as much nose, but Sophy thought it gave him a sort of…Caesar vibe. The tendons flexed in his immense shoulders and biceps, right down through the ropy cords of his forearms.
She had never found excessive muscles that attractive in the past, unlike Melissa who watched every televised rugby game for reasons that had nothing to do with the score or team pride. If she’d thought about it, Sophy would have assumed that such physiques were entirely dependent on a man spending a narcissistic amount of time with a weights machine and a protein shake. But although Mick was clearly fit in a way that made her asthma threaten a pre-emptive wheeze at the thought, when she looked at his bone structure and the size of his hands and feet there was also an obvious genetic element in play. She wondered what his dad looked like and if he had any brothers.
Realising that she had been ignoring his question for several long minutes of ogling, Sophy flushed and said quickly, “It was my single attempt at practicality and forward-planning. I knew that I would probably be involved in my parents’ business at some stage, you see. They own the Cheesery on the Silver Leigh vineyard near Gibbston and I’ve worked there on and off since I was fifteen. I’m the only child and Dad really wants me to have a role, so…”
“Is that what you want? Or just what he wants?” There was an oddly serious undercurrent to the question and Sophy looked up at him in surprise.
“Oh, it’s not a sob story. I’m not going to be forced to give up my art and report to the warehouse in chains. They’ll hire a manager when they retire, but it’s important to them that there’s at least a nominal family presence. I don’t mind. It’s beautiful on the vineyard and I quite like working on the production side. The process that goes into making the cheese is really creative. It’s fascinating.” She smiled. “And I’m in clover for free brie and camembert for life. Comes in handy when you’re still trying to budget like a student. Stone and marble sculpture isn’t a cheap medium.”
Without altering the angle of his head, Mick’s eyes flicked to the waiting block of Oamaru stone in the corner.
“I hadn’t initially realised this was going to be a three-dimensional project,” he said, still not sounding overly enthusiastic about it, although after an initial wince he had borne the news with stoic martyrdom. “Do you prefer sculpture to sketching?”
Sophy looked ruefully down at her messy hands.
“I suppose they both have their ups and downs. I suspect that if I want to make a living as a practicing artist, though, I’ll get more paper commissions than stone. I think the days of consistent employment as a monumental sculptor went out with the industrial revolution. I already sell quite a lot of charcoal portraits through online craft marketplaces. Combined with my wages from the bar, it’s enough to live on as long as I don’t develop a taste for fast cars and poker games.”
“Imminent danger there?” Mick asked lightly, those dimples winking out like stars making a brief appearance from behind a cloud.
