She’d never lived like this. Without a schedule. Slaves to direct. Servants to supervise. Cousins to chaperone. Calls to make. Breakfast at sunrise when she was a child and a bride. Then as an adult, only in the dining room between seven and nine. Corsets, chemises, petticoats to don and always the damned bustle to tackle. Tea was had once a day in America or often in England when someone called. Sometimes even at eleven. Luncheon was as formal as dinner. Clothes were changed three, four, five times a day. Gloves for this. Shoes for that. Hats, hair pins. Jewelry. Stockings.

But here in Andre’s atelier none of that prevailed. Rules were gone. Banned.

“I like you without your stays,” he said one evening as he stripped her of her day gown. “The bones marred your flesh. You are too perfect, mon amour. Those ugly things are meant to change what needs no changing.”

She sighed as he nibbled on her throat and sent mad shivers down her spine. “If you tell that to Monsieur Worth and Madame Rousseau, they would lose half their income.”

“They deserve it. Transforming a woman into a creature in a cage? It’s what they do. Why? When this—” He kissed her nipples, each in turn, and had her hanging deliciously limp in his embrace. “This is perfection.”

He carried her to their bed. His hands skimming her ribs and her hip, he let his mouth follow. And when he was inside her, and she arched up to feel the full power of his possession, he said, “I want the world to view what a glory you are when you make love to me.”

She undulated, the luscious girth of him inside her, caressing her.

“Say you’ll let me.”

She cupped his handsome face and tipped up her hips. “Yes, anything. Just make love to me.”

The next morning after Nanette had left them to their peaches and cream and baguette, Andre tore off a piece of bread and asked the question again. “I’m not sure you heard me, mon amour.”

She noticed how he was calling her that lately. Since she’d accepted his invitation to live here with him this month, she’d become his ‘love’. The words thrilled her to the bone. Though she could reciprocate, she did not and felt guilty. Why, escaped her. Or rather, she pushed the question aside. Her examination of that could wait. Must. After all, had she not told herself that she dared not love? Dared not give herself completely into someone else’s power ever again? Especially a lover who could use her love of him to bend her to his will.

“Did you? Hear me?”

She chewed her bread and nodded. “Yes. Given your…ah…position inside me last night at that moment, I was not certain if your remark was politesse or romantic chivalry.”

“I assure you, Madame, it was neither. I appreciate the female form. But yours?”

She tossed her loose blonde curls over her shoulder. “Oui, Monsieur le duc? What of mine?”

He threw down his bread and a heated but whispered curse escaped his lips. In a thrice, he was up and around the trestle table in the kitchen, took her wrist, and led her off to the far bedroom where he shut the door with a thud. “Let me show you.”

He proceeded to remove every stitch of clothing she wore and turned her unceremoniously to the cheval glass. Behind her, he stood with his blue eyes blazing hotter by the moment with desire. She demurred, noting how her nakedness cooled her skin and his attentions heated her blood and her belly.

“Look at yourself.”

She raised her eyes slowly.

“Examine the proportions of your head, your neck.”

She followed his instructions.

“Put up your hand to your face, palm to chin, middle finger to the top of your forehead. Good. Now put your palm to your forearm, elbow to wrist.”

She’d never realized that her hand was as long as her forearm. Or her face.

“Now put your forearm to the length of your thigh. Yes. And again to your lower leg.”

“I never saw such proportions existed.”

“In you they do. Now sit there in the chair.”

She primly took a seat.

“Lift your foot and place your foot to your forearm.”

She smiled at him.

“Most humans are proportional in at least three aspects. You have them all. Now stand up. Come here.” He beckoned her with his fingers to stand again before him and face the mirror.

A blush rushed from her chest to her cheeks.

He put his whole hand, fingers splayed, gently against the curve of her throat to her shoulder. Against her ear, he said, “Now look at your breasts.”

She did. Why not? She’d looked at men in their nakedness, their bare pain, hysteria. She’d glimpsed them lax from morphine or screaming to have more of it, eaten up with terror of a saw. She’d watched them bleed. Held their hands while their last breath slipped between their lips. She’d seen their muscled arms, their lean ribs, their thighs. Yes, their bare groins. She’d understood how one muscle interplayed with another. Shrapnel and bullets and bombs did not discriminate, showed no discretion for etiquette or propriety. This was God’s perfect creation, the complex symphony of blood and muscles, nerves and brain. She had sketched men, women, children, her family, and Andre, over and over. She’d viewed them as personalities. She’d failed to experience them at their primal form. Failed to understand them inside out. She’d become a much better artist if she were able to render them as physical entities, similar to each other in form, dissimilar in small details how they moved—and how they acted.

She confronted the example that stood before her in the glass. To draw others, did she not need to know herself first and best?

Of course, she did.

She was her first best model. She had to portray herself well before she attempted to perfect others.

The curves of her breasts were subtle, her nipples smooth, pink and hard. His gaze excited her. His praise dissuaded her from the erotic influence of his presence.

She put her hands beneath her breasts, lifting their weight, marking the change in shape from moons to spheres. Stepping to one side, she marked her profile and the outline of her form. She arched up and noted the lift, the extension of her back, her buttocks, her legs. How the muscles rippled and coordinated, how they synchronized.

She faced front once more, extended her arms. The cords of her own muscles lent shape to her arms, her shoulders. The shape of her breasts changed then too.

She dragged the chair before the mirror. Seated, she was a different form. Leaning forward, twisting to one side and the other, she moved in a fluid dance, as unpremeditated as anyone who walked the streets outside.

The sun hung low on the horizon when she barged through the door of the atelier.

Her hand to the door latch, she paused and stared at Andre. Carré was not to be seen. Not Nanette either. In anticipation that the two would still be here, she’d had presence of mind to throw on her clothes before she ran through the house up to the studio.

Andre sat at his worktable, the block of Carrara directly in his sight, his little glasses perched on his nose. He worked with a soft clay figure. His fingers deftly modeling the dark clay, he shaped the figure of a woman. She stood arching to the sky, lithe, nude, less than half as tall as Marianne. It was the first time she’d seen him at his work and she had no wish to disturb him. He was lost in his work, pinching here, smoothing there, taking a small knife and removing a bit of clay in another point. The woman seemed to emerge from the clay, stretching out to reach the sky…or perhaps even her lover. Marianne padded to the table, attempting no sound, but he had sensed her and turned to stare at her with unseeing eyes. Still flowing in the act of his own creation, he blinked. His vision cleared and he regarded her with an arched brow.

She rested her cheek on his shoulder. “Merci beaucoup for the instruction, mon cher.”

He regarded her with satisfaction.

“I’m pleased to see you at your own work.” The woman had long flowing hair, like her own. High cheek bones, like her own. Uplifted breasts. Her own. A flat belly, lean hips. She’d never carried a child. “Does she have a name?”

“‘Dawn’. At this point, I would say that is her name. But she is only clay. Malleable. Tomorrow wax. Melting. Next month, perhaps, bronze. Forged to an altered form. Who knows if we will still like her once I take her from the marble?”

Of whom do we speak, Andre? “Could she change that much?”

“What one hopes to achieve can change with time and circumstance. Oui, she can change. Utterly transform and what we would have called one thing may well be the opposite.”

She nodded. He was so wise.

The tempo of their lives together changed.

As avid as she’d been to be Andre’s lover, the complement to the rapture of that became the obsession she felt to her art. She sketched, one after another, but on a moment’s inspiration, a stab of erotic need, she’d go to him and kiss him, taste him, touch him.

As if one passion fed the other, she seemed always hungry, greedy in fact, to caress his perfect body. And with each delightful encounter, she starved for more of him—and more need to refine her art to do him justice in her work. She had no visits or notes from the agent, Montand, and she concluded there would be none. Perhaps the man had been too kind or purposely so to honor his relationship with Andre. Perhaps no one wanted an amateur’s sketch of the famous sculptor. They would much prefer a piece of his art. She justified her disappointment on the sale of the sketch, by understanding that she had a long way to go to become an artist whose works showed emotion or the essence of the human condition. That was fine. She was in no hurry. She was with Andre and the experience was so revolutionary, so intense, so heart-rending, she wished to savor each moment. Commit it to memory.

He asked her to model for him. The clay figure of Dawn was inadequate, he said, to the reality of who she was. Yes, he told her, Dawn was intended to be she. But he needed to see her naked as his subject to perfect the figure.

Would she do that for him? Allow him to view her, touch her, understand her every muscle, her every movement as a living breathing entity?

Yes, of course she would. She welcomed the risqué freedom of it. She had her own time to work, to leave him, and this new adventure of baring herself to him for his own purposes appealed to her as an artist. Dispassionate for hours as she stood at his command.

And when he dismissed her, ended his work session, she would take his hand and lead him to their bed, strip him and offer up the rest of herself to him. He would bless her with his mouth and hands and delight her with his reverent body and his heavy cock. She sought to return the favor and one night, inspired, driven to display how she adored him, she took him in her mouth and paid homage to him until he broke away and possessed her.

Later, as he clasped her close, he asked her if she had enjoyed her erotic foray. She had very much, she was unashamed to say.

“May I explore you in the same way?” he asked her, his bright eyes heavy with lust. “You did not comment when I did so last week.”

“Please love me however you wish,” she said with all her heart.

The next night, he had kissed her to distraction and spread her thighs wide. There he played for many torturous minutes while she whimpered and moaned her approval of his ministrations. When he finally came inside her, she climaxed immediately, violently. He put his fingers to her intimate flesh and she burst apart again, a star exploding. She clung to him for long minutes afterward.

The next morning, he was not in their bed when she awakened. Pulling on her robe, she rounded the screen and there he stood, his back to her, at his table. She walked over, kissed his shoulder and peered at his work. There she was outlined in grey pencil splayed upon his paper, her head thrown back, reminiscent of Dawn, but more erotic, more enraptured, her legs wide, her frilly folds spread open. He dipped his brush in a watercolor of palest human pink and washed her flesh in the moment of her ecstasy. Her rosy mouth parted, her fingers to her lips, her body glistened with the searing moisture of her desire. That he had seen her like that filled her with awe. That he could duplicate her like that astonished her. How she admired his talent. The artist. How she admired him. The man.

As if he feared she’d disappear from his sight, he began to reach for her four, five times a day. His appetite for her was insatiable. He made love to her against a wall, on a chair. She came, ready, willing, needing him as fervently as he did her. He had only to smile at her with that wicked gleam in his eye or put two fingers to her breast and she dissolved in a sea of sensuality. To make love to him during the day was delicious. In the evenings, upon retiring, and then again later in black magic moments, they would reach out, each to the other, and consume all they had to give. Every nerve in her body sang with romantic use. Every thought was of him or her work. Intense and fulfilling, this life could not last.

She knew it. And fought the mourning. That would come soon enough.

But she grew restless.

One evening after they’d made love on his bed, she was unable to sleep. She rushed out into the humid night air. Naked in the high-walled garden, she whirled about. She could dance here and no one would say she couldn’t. The stars shown down on her and she marveled that she’d never been so truly happy.

Oh, as a child, yes, her days had passed in the cocoon of her parents’ fond regard. Their prolonged illnesses and the beginning of the war had severed her from her childhood serenity. When they had decided to have her marry—“for her protection” her father said—she had no ability to object. The boundaries to the North were cut. Her parents were too ill to travel and attempt to run the battle lines. Communicating with her mother’s brother, Killian Hanniford, was as impossible as crossing the lines to take her to him. They’d married her to Frederick, twenty years her senior, a widower, wealthy with a fine plantation, slaves—and in need of wife and heir. Within the space of six days, she changed from a young girl with loving parents to an orphan, then wife to a man who took her to his arms and his bed with a brutal indifference. His regard for her person was as the vessel of his release, the means of his progeny. That she was the object of his desire repulsed her. But she’d borne with him and his attentions. Within seven months, he went off to war. His duty, he called it. Her reprieve, she named it.

No wonder—she halted to stare at the inky satin sky above her—no wonder she’d drawn people without the divinity they possessed. All these years, she’d drawn and perfected her love of the human body, but had not attempted to portray the glory of emotions beneath the skin.

She whirled to run in and tell Andre.

But there he stood in the doorway, the moonlight limning his classically chiseled body, his dark robe framing his firm torso and his well-hewn thighs. “You love the night.”

“I love this night.” I love you.

He opened his arms.

And she, resisting tears at her silent confession, went to him and accepted his embrace. He smelled of the wine they’d shared over supper—and his own distinctive fragrances. Soap, lime, the masculine scents he used in his baths enveloped her. He smelled of chalk too. How that was, since he washed the dust away each day in his tub, she could not say.

He dropped a kiss to her hair and spread his robe to wrap the lengths around her. “I don’t want you to take ill.”

She shook back her hair to smile up at him. “I’ve hardly ever been sick.”

He cuddled her close, her breasts rubbing against the wall of his chest. “Stay well.”

Portending as that did the time when she would leave him, she turned the subject. “I want to go to the square tomorrow and take my pens and easel.”

“Ah. Courageous. I am pleased to hear it.”

She kissed the place above his heart. “You can work in peace.”

He tightened his grip. “What do you mean? I work in peace with you here.”

She bit her lower lip. “I worry I am a distraction.”

He leered at her, a charming devil. “I am tempted to rest inside you each minute of every day.”

She blushed and pressed her face into his chest.

He pulled back, his gaze—lit by the stars and moon—dropped down her naked form. “Truly, my dear woman, you are no distraction. You are more inspiration.”

That she took as more compliment than substance. He still had not shown her his drawings for his marble. She had not coaxed him either. Some habits were sacred and she would not offend him. “I want you to be as productive as you have made me.”

“I am.”

“But I see no progress.”

“Ma cherie, marble does not give up its secrets easily. Or for me it does not. I think on it many days, months if necessary, before I take up a hammer.”

“I want you to work.” Her tone struck her as the harping wife who urges her man to the fields. “You have the commission for the City and Montand thinks you are delaying.”

“I’m not and he’s wrong.”

“Have you a theme for it yet?”

“I do. And I don’t mind if you go to the square without me.” He cupped her derriere and hoisted her so that his cock drove high inside her. “Only promise to always return to me.”