Arm Candy by Jill Kargman Read Free Book Online Page B

an hour of painting, and with Eden’s heated gaze alone raising the temperature, they were both even more flirtatious than before. Eden’s back was arched, her brow cunning. Otto unbuttoned his shirt a bit.
    “Is it hot in here?” he asked.
    Without a word, Eden sexily swung her legs over the edge of the chaise. She got up and casually walked over to his easel and faced him. She took the paintbrush out of his hand and chucked it on the floor, red paint from its wet bristles staining the wood. He was clearly stunned: He was used to sexual hunts with beautiful women, but usually he was the predator, not the prey. Eden stepped toward him and pressed her naked body onto his clothed one and kissed him forcefully. Otto shuddered, then molded into her grasp, feverishly returning her kiss. As the great artist breathed and sighed, Eden recognized the texture under her fingertips. She’d known it from the first guy she made out with at a spin-the-bottle party in seventh grade: putty.
    Eden and Otto stumbled against the large white wall behind him as she put a smooth, young leg around him. He turned her around and he kissed her against the wall as she slowly moved her hand downward. The normally in-charge Rembrandt was positively enslaved. His hands shook, and he felt his heartbeat in every pore of his skin. He needed to be inside her. It was the sexual equivalent of a gulp of oxygen after being forced underwater. If he didn’t fuck her that instant, he would die.
    He lived.
    And sadly, that first time Eden and Otto had mad sex on the floor of his studio, the red paint from his hands smearing her breasts and waist, poor Wes, her love of nearly a year and a half, didn’t even enter her mind, not so much as a cameo in her unfolding, color-splattered, libidinous drama. As Otto flipped her over on all fours, Eden had flipped a mental switch. She ravaged Otto, knowing she had her talons in and she would not let go—she would be riding this celebrity train to the finish line, never looking back.
    Just as Otto gasped in climax and screamed Eden’s name, the word echoing in the cavernous loft, her fate was sealed. She had made it: Not only was she in Oz as she had once dreamed, but she was in the arms of the Wizard.
    Va-Va-Voom! Artist Clyde and New Muse Take City by Storm
    Get a Room! Famed painter Otto Clyde kicked up some paint at an exclusive party at the Plaza Hotel on Wednesday night as he engaged in Tonsil Hockey with a mysterious model. Awed onlookers gazed in amazement as the frisky pair pawed each other in a PDA-palooza. “They couldn’t keep their hands off each other!” marveled one reveler. “I thought he was going to eat her face off.”
    Said another in the crowd of chronic-heartbreaker Clyde, who has been linked to Debbie Harry in the early ’80s, plus models Cheryl Tiegs and Tatjana Patitz , “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Not so, says a source close to the artist, whose last show sold out opening night, fetching seven-figure price tags: “He’s smitten. He wants her to have his baby. He’s obsessed with her.” Clearly, so was everyone in attendance; the crowd couldn’t take their eyes off the doe-eyed vixen, whose first name was rumored to be Eden . “She’s the hottest girl I’ve ever seen,” said art collector Thor Quackenbush . “She’s pretty much as perfect as it gets.”

10
    The first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
    —Robert Southey
     
     
     
    F ifteen years later.
    In a sea of black-clad, tattooed, faux-’hawk-sporting Sprockets, Eden and Otto clinked wineglasses in a cavernous white gallery on West Twenty-ninth Street. Steps from where tranny hookers with wigs and protuberant Adam’s apples had tottered on six-inch red patent stilettos only a decade back, the NoChelSoHell (North of Chelsea, South of Hell’s Kitchen) rectangle was now not only un-scary (b-bye to countless taxi garages, heroin dealers, and canine-sized rodentia) but actually borderline posh .