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Her face responded, blanketed with relief.
True Kitchen was just as Jake had promised: really good, clean food. They enjoyed a meal and talked about Rakell’s upcoming trip to Paris. Jake asked about what the photo shoots entailed. She’d said it was a higher-end Parisian brand, Le Fruit Defendu, explaining that they’d come out with a new line calledLeather and Lacethat was off-the-charts expensive. She twirled some spaghetti squash on her fork, taking a bigger bite than she intended.
“So Leather and Lace, I like the name,” he said. “Will there be other models? I mean, is it for catalogues or a website? Just trying to get a picture,” he explained, his tone relaxed as he probed gently for more information.
She put up a finger, pointing to her mouth, finishing her bite of food, then took a quick drink of sparkling water before answering his three questions in one—a classic Jake-stylequestion, she thought. “Actually, I’ve been asked to be the new ‘Leather and Lace’ model for this design.” She made quotation marks in the air as she spoke. “Basically, the body and face of this new line, so some of the more neutral pictures will be in catalogues and on their website, but there will be others…” She hesitated, noticing him intently watching her from across the table.
“Others?” he asked, taking a bite of his fig chicken flatbread, his eyes questioning, an open curiosity in his tone.
She backfilled, “This is my biggest modeling contract so far, even bigger thanSports Illuminated. Actually, that’s probably why they’ve asked me to be the model spokesperson. So, this line is rather…” She searched for the right words. “But no more so than theSports Illuminatedpictures…actually, I’ll probably be a little more covered.” She noticed she was rambling.
He took a swig of his beer. “Okay, so rather…what? You didn’t finish…”
She stabbed at the squash. “I guess suggestive, erotic, I mean…actually, I’m not sure what I mean…but the more suggestive ones will appear in magazines, billboards in Europe, and I’m doing a couple of commercial videos for the line.” She lifted her eyes to his face, not sure what to expect. She feared that he would view this information through the lens of the news that she’d been an escort.
He took another drink of his beer, purposely swallowing any potential unease. He could tell she was nervous, by her halting speech and the way her eyes were searching him. He wanted to ask, ‘How suggestive?’ thinking about how she’d used the worderotic, but instead, he forced a controlled smile to his face. “Sounds like an amazing opportunity and a lot of exposure.” Shoot, he hadn’t meant to use that word. “I mean a lot of publicity.”
He sounded unnatural, measured to her.
“Yes, that’s what Ana said too, my agent…The line is sort ofbondage light, like leather meets lace,” she explained, taking another sip of sparkling water, not sure how much to tell him. “The commercial shoots will include me and a male actor,” she blurted out.
Fuck,he thought.Did she just throw that out into the air, like an unnoticed ball, hoping I wasn’t going to see it?
“Oh?” His eyebrows instinctively went up, catching his own expression, then softening it. Pushing the flatbread away, he worked to control his reaction. “Do you want to try this? It’s really good.”
“No, I’ll steer clear of it, but after this shoot, we might need to come back here. So many good things on the menu.”
Of course, the woman he loved was going to be dressed in bondage lingerie in a TV ad with some dude. Of course, that was totally something he should have expected. He’d dated a few models and had usually had the attitude that he didn’t care—he was the one fucking them so who cared who saw their bodies? He had seen himself as the lucky one, but at the end of the day, he hadn’t cared about them the way he cared about her…and they hadn’t beenescortseither.
He leaned back in his chair, trying not to ask his next question. In the end, he was unable to hold back, so he tried to sound casual. “So will he touch you in the commercial? I mean…I know Europeans, especially the French, are a little more open in commercials than we are, so just wondering…”
“No, he’ll just be in the shadows of the room while I stand in front of a mirror in the ‘outfit’ admiring myself.” She laughed nervously. “I think it will be good training for being in front of the camera for movies, and I’ve seen the two outfits they’ve narrowed it down to…” She smiled at him, wanting to ease the stiffness that had crept into their conversation. “Neither of them are as indecent as theSports Illuminatedcover.”
He laughed. “It was a great shot, but they could have doubled the suede-looking material on the swimsuit and still left little to the imagination. You looked insane in that picture. The way they blew your hair out into what looked like a white lion’s mane was incredible.”
She stood, rolling her eyes. “That hair…it was so heavy and long. It was everywhere—so glad to have cut it off.” She touched the tips of her hair, that was now a few inches past her shoulders. “This I can manage, but hair down to my ass I can’t handle,” she said as they walked to his truck.
“Yep, I remember it getting in the way.” He smiled, opening the truck door.
She smiled back, remembering that day.
“Can I tell you something about that shoot, something personal?” Her tone was low, a confessional air to her voice as if she was a young innocent girl about to say something torrid.
His heart skipped, not sure how much more confessing he could take. “Sure, of course,” he lied, his tone neutral as his eyes glanced over to her. She was looking out the window, her face slightly turned away from him.
“Jake, it’s about theSports Illuminatedphoto, the one that’s on the cover. I know you saw it, but did you really look at it? I mean…” She trailed off, turning slightly, taking him in. He felt her eyes on him and turned to face her, catching her serious gaze.
With his eyes back on the road, he asked, “Do you mean did I stare at it for hours and memorize every detail of it?” The visual scrolled into his brain: Rakell on a large rock near what looked like a lagoon, jungle vegetation surrounding the water and a waterfall in the background. He’d only registered that the third time he had stared at it, finally noticing the surroundings. He had spent hours looking at her in the tiny mocha-colored bikini that looked to be suede, the soft leather fringe dripping from herbreasts, her nipples poking the material, making him think it had been really cold that day. Her legs had been stretched into a split, creating a V-shape with her crotch kissing the rock below, while her thumbs hooked into the sides of the bikini bottom as if in moments, she’d shimmy the scant material down, exposing her pussy. When he’d examined the photo, studying the exact spot where her sex covered in thin fabric touched the rocks, he could have sworn that the material looked a little darker at the apex of her crotch, almost wet.
Yet it was the look on her face that inflamed his cock as he stroked it, staring at the picture way too many times. Her head was back slightly, chin up, white-blond hair swirling around, her eyes captured mid-flutter as if they had just opened. Her mouth was parted slightly with full lips that seemed like they were naturally protruding. The image brought to mind her beautiful mouth just after she’d lost herself in an orgasm, lax and unable to move. He’d known that washisimage of her, his personal image, and he loved that he had that for himself—until he found out that other men had paid to have that same image, his image.
Gathering himself, he tried to sound playful. “The answer to that would be yes, yes, I have looked at it a lot.” He kept his eyes on the road, leaving out the fact that he had jacked off to that picture earlier, just before picking her up, so he wouldn’t be crazed over dinner.
A small laugh escaped her mouth as she kept her eyes forward. “Did you notice how big, how hard my nipples were?”
“Yep, noticed that.” His tone was impassive, but he felt the jerk between his legs.Jesus, where is this going?he wondered as he glanced at her, seeing her staring out as if she was somewhere else.
“There are tricks you learn when modeling lingerie or swimsuits to get your nipples erect when that’s what the photographer wants. I mean simple things like pinching them,twisting hard right before the suit goes on, sometimes even ice. The trick is to keep them hard. It’s not so easy for some models, but anyway, I didn’t have to do any of that,” she said, still looking out the window, the street lights a blur.
