Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready Read Free Book Online

intensity what sort of man was capable of seeing a woman like that.
    “Look at this,” she said, turning the book toward Jeanne.
    Jeanne’s head tilted slowly. “Wow.”
    “I told you. It’s by Peter Lely.”
    “Was he her lover?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. Look at the way she looks at him. I mean, jeez. It’s like they just …”
    Cam nodded. “Uh-huh.”
    “Her eyes, that smile.”
    “And let’s not forget that breast. Amazing, isn’t it?”
    “But what sort of woman …”
    “Peels the papaya? Yeah, I don’t know. A damned at-ease one, I guess.” Cam opened the book and began to page through it. “Holy moly. There’s more.”
    Jeanne squeezed in next to her. Lely’s women didn’t al have a breast on display, though a decent—indecent?—

    proportion of them did. But every one of them beheld their portraitist with the same worldly, self-assured, half-lidded gaze.
    “Did he do all of them?”
    “Probably,” Cam said. Painters general y considered themselves the absolute center not only of their own universe, but everyone else’s as wel . She had to admit, though, this was a little like thinking-women’s porn—being adored from across the room by a man, master at his art, who saw you, fat or thin, beautiful or plain, as the most stunning, empowered, attractive woman on Earth.
    “He’s Jake Ryan,” Cam said.
    “Pardon?”
    “Jake Ryan, the hero of Sixteen Candles . The man who fal s for Samantha Baker even though she isn’t cheerleader beautiful. Lely is the man who loves the woman posing for him for what’s on the inside.”
    Jeanne flipped a page and found a woman with both breasts on display. “That’s what’s on the inside?”
    “But look at her. Look at the way he sees her. And look at the way she looks at him in return.” Cam felt her breath quicken. Her eyes met Jeanne’s.
    Jeanne said, “I’m gettin’ a little—”
    “Yeah, me too.”
    But that had always been Cam’s problem with artists.
    That is, until she found Jacket not deep in his latest reaping, as he’d told her that night on the phone, but deep in Cam’s jewelry designer. That’s when Cam decided she wasn’t ever going to be painter-stupid again. If men in bars had beer goggles, women who fel for artists looked at the world through a magnifying ass, a special lens you could only buy in New York or West End gal eries that made egomaniacs look like geniuses.
    For a moment, neither woman said anything, then Jeanne pul ed her eyes away from the book and regarded Cam closely. “So what’s it like posing for a portrait?”
    Cam flushed. “How the heck would I know?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you lived with a guy who paints portraits for four years? I mean, even with your boobs laid out like oranges in Lucite cages, it’s got to be kinda flattering.”
    Cam felt the pins of embarrassment prickle her face.
    Jacket’s pieces had always been done without a model. He claimed they were amalgams of many women he’d known, and he did them from memory. Thus, she had ended four rol er-coaster years of happiness, hot sex and knock-down, drag-out fights with not so much as a sketch on a napkin to show that she had inspired anything in his work.
    “No,” she said. “Jacket doesn’t use models. His work isn’t about people in particular. It’s about both the objectification of subjects in art and the rising of the human spirit against it.” She’d repeated this phrase so often in her life, she felt like she had it tattooed on her forehead.
    “Real y?”
    “Yes.”
    Cam returned with the book to her desk. She flipped by two more pages, but the self-portrait that dominated the third made her stop. Where Rembrandt’s self-portraits projected impishness and Van Dyck’s a quiet self-confidence, Lely had chosen to portray himself as both knowing and seeking, as if his life’s experiences had left him slightly adrift. His hair, luxurious and auburn, framed his face in loose curls that